Selected Stories

A man called Con Tonan, who had lost the use of an arm in a tractor accident, worked in the garden of Ennismolach Rectory, his disablement rendering him unfit for employment as a farm labourer, which had always been the source of his livelihood. Unable to pay more than a pittance, Grattan took him on when he’d been out of work for a year. Con Tonan, still young then, knew nothing about gardening, but the six-mile bicycle journey to Ennismolach Rectory, and doing what he could to release the choked shrubs and restore the flowerbeds that had all but disappeared, gave a pattern to his day three times a week. Mrs Bradshaw, one of Grattan’s flock at Glenoe, began to come to the rectory when Con Tonan was just beginning to understand the garden. Twice a week she drove over from Glenoe in a small, old Volkswagen, a woman who was as warm-hearted as she was dutiful.

That was the household at Ennismolach, Mrs Bradshaw ill-paid also, her arrival on Tuesdays and Thursdays as much an act of charity on her part as the employment of a one-armed man was on Grattan’s. Sometimes Con Tonan brought one of his children with him, skilfully balancing the child on the crossbar of his bicycle in spite of the absence of an arm.

For twenty-eight years Con Tonan came to the rectory and then, before one winter began, he decided the journey was too much for him. ‘Arrah, I’m too old for it now,’ was all he said when he broke the news of his intentions. It was perhaps because his pension had come through, Mrs Bradshaw suggested, but Grattan knew it wasn’t. It was because Con Tonan was as old as he was, because he was tired.

Mrs Bradshaw was younger. Plump and respectable, she knew all about the greater world, delighting in its conveniences as much as she deplored its excesses. She and Grattan would sit together at the kitchen table on Tuesdays and Thursdays, exchanging the scraps of news she brought for those he had heard that morning on the radio, which she herself rarely turned on.

He sensed her fondness for him – an old man who was a legend in the neighbourhood simply because he’d been a part of it for so long – and sometimes asked her if it was ever said that he was going on beyond his time. Was it said that he was ineffective in his vocation, that he managed ineffectively what remained of his Church’s influence in the amalgamated parishes? He was always reassured. No one wanted him to go, no one wanted some bright young curate to come out from one of the towns on alternate Sundays, to breathe life into what was hardly there.

‘Mr Fitzmaurice,’ a red-cheeked, red-haired youth said, arriving at the rectory on a day in the early summer of 1997. ‘My father died.’

Grattan recognized the bicycle the boy dismounted from as the big old Rudge that had once so regularly been pedalled up and down the rectory avenue. He hadn’t seen a child of Con Tonan’s for years, since one by one they’d all become too heavy to be carried on their father’s crossbar.

‘Oh, Seamus, I’m sorry. Come in, come in.’

His one-time gardener had died of a stroke, a mercy he hadn’t lingered: the boy was articulate, slow but clear in delivering the sombre message.

‘He was speechless a day, Mr Fitzmaurice. Then that was the end of it.’ His mother had sent him over, and Grattan was touched that he’d been remembered. The funeral was on Monday.

‘I’ll be there of course, Seamus.’

He made tea and put out biscuits. He asked Seamus if he’d like a boiled egg, but Seamus said no. They talked for a while, until the tea he’d poured was cool and then drunk. Seamus was working for Kelly Bros., who were building two bungalows at Fenit Bridge.

‘Are you all right yourself, Mr Fitzmaurice?’ he enquired before he mounted the bicycle that now was his. It was serving its third generation, having passed on in the same way to his father.

‘Ah, I am, Seamus, I am.’

‘I’ll be off so.’

Mrs Bradshaw brought the same tidings the next morning. A decent, quiet man, she said, which she had not said in Con Tonan’s lifetime. A humble man, who had accepted without bitterness the tragedy that had changed his life. ‘Sure, wasn’t he happy here?’ her comment was, her tone adding one finality to another. She washed their coffee cups at the sink and stacked away the two saucers. She’d brought eggs, she said, the hens beginning to lay again.

On Monday he attended the funeral. He held back afterwards outside the big church that still seemed new, waiting his turn with the widow. He did not know her well; he could remember meeting her only once before, a long time ago.

‘He loved going over to the rectory,’ she said, and as if something in the clergyman’s expression indicated surprise she said it again, her hands grasping one of his. ‘Oh, he did, Mr Fitzmaurice, he did,’ she insisted. ‘It was a good thing in the end, he used say. If he hadn’t had the accident he wouldn’t have got to know Ennismolach Rectory. He wouldn’t have got to know yourself, sir.’