Selected Stories

A young fellow would have certain thoughts, the Reverend Cutcheon explained. It was the way of things that a young fellow could become confused, owing to the age he was and the changes that had taken place in his body. He reminded Milton that he’d left school, that he was on the way to manhood. The journey to manhood could have a stumble or two in it, he explained, and it wasn’t without temptation. One day Milton would inherit the farm and the orchards, since Garfield had surrendered all claim to them. That was something he needed to prepare himself for. Milton’s mother was goodness itself, his father would do anything for you. If a neighbour had a broken fence while he was laid up in bed, his father would be the first to see to it. His mother had brought up four fine children, and it was God’s way that the fifth was afflicted. God’s grace could turn affliction into a gift: poor Stewart, you might say, but you only had to look at him to realize you were glad Stewart had been given life.

‘We had a great day today, Milton, we had an enjoyable day. We stood up for the people we are. That’s what you have to think of.’

In a companionable way the clergyman’s arm was placed around Milton’s shoulders. He’d put the thing neatly, the gesture suggested. He’d been taken aback but had risen to the occasion.

‘She won’t leave me alone,’ Milton said.

Just beginning to move forward, the Reverend Cutcheon halted again. His arm slipped from Milton’s shoulders. In a low voice he said:

‘She keeps bothering you in the orchards, does she?’

Milton explained. He said the woman had been agitating him all day, since the moment he awoke. It was because of that that he’d had to tell someone, because she was pressing him to.

‘Don’t tell anyone else, Milton. Don’t tell a single soul. It’s said now between the two of us and it’s safe with myself. Not even Addy will hear the like of this.’

Milton nodded. The Reverend Cutcheon said:

‘Don’t distress your mother and your father, son, with talk of a woman who was on about holiness and the saints.’ He paused, then spoke with emphasis, and quietly. ‘Your mother and father wouldn’t rest easy for the balance of their days.’ He paused again. ‘There are no better people than your mother and father, Milton.’

‘Who was St Rosa?’

Again the Reverend Cutcheon checked his desire to rejoin the men who were picnicking on the grass. Again he lowered his voice.

‘Did she ask you for money? After she touched you did she ask you for money?’

‘Money?’

‘There are women like that, boy.’

Milton knew what he meant. He and Billie Carew had many a time talked about them. You saw them on television, flamboyantly dressed on city streets. Billie Carew said they hung about railway stations, that your best bet was a railway station if you were after one. Milton’s mother, once catching a glimpse of these street-traders on the television, designated them ‘Catholic strumpets’. Billie Carew said you’d have to go careful with them in case you’d catch a disease. Milton had never heard of such women in the neighbourhood.

‘She wasn’t like that,’ he said.

‘You’d get a travelling woman going by and maybe she’d be thinking you had a coin or two on you. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Milton?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get rid of the episode. Put it out of your mind.’

‘I was only wondering about what she said in relation to a saint.’

‘It’s typical she’d say a thing like that.’

Milton hesitated. ‘I thought she wasn’t alive,’ he said.

Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie used to preach. He had preached in the towns until he was too old for it, until he began to lose the thread of what he was saying. Milton had heard him. He and Garfield and his sisters had been brought to hear Uncle Willie in his heyday, a bible clenched in his right hand, gesturing with it and quoting from it. Sometimes he spoke of what happened in Rome, facts he knew to be true: how the Pope drank himself into a stupor and had to have the sheets of his bed changed twice in a night, how the Pope’s own mother was among the women who came and went in the papal ante-rooms.

Men still preached in the towns, at street corners or anywhere that might attract a crowd, but the preachers were fewer than they had been in the heyday of Mr Leeson’s Uncle Willie because the popularity of television kept people in at nights, and because people were in more of a hurry. But during the days that followed the July celebration Milton remembered his great-uncle’s eloquence. He remembered the words he had used and the way he could bring in a quotation, and the way he was so certain. Often he had laid down that a form of cleansing was called for, that vileness could be exorcized by withering it out of existence.