Selected Stories

‘He never showed an interest in preaching.’

‘D’you know what he said to me just now in the yard?’

But Addy was still thinking about the woman her brother claimed to have conversed with. Her imagination had stuck there, on the slope of her father’s upper orchard, a Catholic woman standing among the trees.

‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Herbert Cutcheon went on. ‘He mentioned that man.’

Nonplussed all over again, Addy frowned. Dudgeon McDavie was a man who’d been found shot dead by the roadside near Loughgall. Addy remembered her father coming into the kitchen and saying they’d shot poor Dudgeon. She’d been seven at the time; Garfield had been four, Hazel a year older; Milton and Stewart hadn’t been born. ‘Did he ever do a minute’s harm?’ she remembered her father saying. ‘Did he ever so much as raise his voice?’ Her father and Dudgeon McDavie had been schooled together; they’d marched together many a time. Then Dudgeon McDavie had moved out of the neighbourhood, to take up a position as a quantity surveyor. Addy couldn’t remember ever having seen him, although from the conversation that had ensued between her mother and her father at the time of his death it was apparent that he had been to the farmhouse many a time. ‘Blew half poor Dudgeon’s skull off’: her father’s voice, leaden and grey, echoed as she remembered. ‘Poor Dudgeon’s brains all over the tarmac. ’ Her father had attended the funeral, full honours because Dudgeon McDavie had had a hand in keeping law and order, part-time in the UDR. A few weeks later two youths from Loughgall were set upon and punished, although they vehemently declared their innocence.

‘Dudgeon McDavie’s only hearsay for Milton,’ Addy pointed out, and her husband said he realized that.

Drawing up in front of the rectory, a low brick building with metal-framed windows, he said he had wondered about going in search of Mr Leeson when Milton had come out with all that in the yard. But Milton had hung about by the car, making the whole thing even more difficult.

‘Did the woman refer to Dudgeon McDavie?’ Addy asked. ‘Is that it?’

‘I don’t know if she did. To tell you the truth, Addy, you wouldn’t know where you were once Milton gets on to this stuff. For one thing, he said to me the woman wasn’t alive.’

In the rectory Addy telephoned. ‘I’ll ring you back,’ her mother said and did so twenty minutes later, when Milton was not within earshot. In the ensuing conversation what information they possessed was shared: the revelations made on the day of the July celebration, what had later been said in the kitchen and an hour ago in the yard.

‘Dudgeon McDavie,’ Mrs Leeson reported quietly to her husband as soon as she replaced the receiver. ‘The latest thing is he’s on to Herbert about Dudgeon McDavie.’

Milton rode his bicycle one Saturday afternoon to the first of the towns in which he wished to preach. In a car park two small girls, sucking sweets, listened to him. He explained about St Rosa of Viterbo. He felt he was a listener too, that his voice came from somewhere outside himself – from St Rosa, he explained to the two small girls. He heard himself saying that his sister Hazel refused to return to the province. He heard himself describing the silent village, and the drums and the flutes that brought music to it, and the suit his father wore on the day of the celebration. St Rosa could mourn Dudgeon McDavie, he explained, a Protestant man from Loughgall who’d been murdered ages ago. St Rosa could forgive the brutish soldiers and their masked adversaries, one or other of them responsible for the shattered motor-cars and shrouded bodies that came and went on the television screen. Father Mulhall had been furious, Milton said in the car park, you could see it in his eyes: he’d been furious because a Protestant boy was sitting down in his house. St Rosa of Viterbo had given him her holy kiss, he said: you could tell that Father Mulhall considered that impossible.

The following Saturday Milton cycled to another town, a little further away, and on the subsequent Saturday he preached in a third town. He did not think of it as preaching, more just telling people about his experience. It was what he had to do, he explained, and he noticed that when people began to listen they usually didn’t go away. Shoppers paused, old men out for a walk passed the time in his company, leaning against a shop window or the wall of a public lavatory. Once or twice in an afternoon someone was abusive.

On the fourth Saturday Mr Leeson and Herbert Cutcheon arrived in Mr Leeson’s Ford Granada and hustled Milton into it. No one spoke a word on the journey back.

‘Shame?’ Milton said when his mother employed the word.

‘On all of us, Milton.’