“I don’t think there’s any experience to equal saying Mass there in front of the grotto,” said Father O’Hara. “There’s something... Oh, I don’t know.” He sensed perhaps that he wasn’t getting across. “The wine with every meal, too! Gives one a new slant on life! And it’s worthwhile taking a trip over toward the coast. I’ve always thought that Basque cooking is out on its own.”

“Is that so?” said Father Conroy. How could one eat and drink with that desperate sobbing in one’s ears? But people did. They learned to live with all that naked faith. Good people, priests like Phil O’Hara! I should have learned to live with it. Damn it all, it was my job to learn to live with it!

“Oh, yes,” sighed Father O’Hara, “what they can do with fish!” And he knocked the dottle from his pipe.

They got up and began to move downhill from the high fields which they had walked in the morning. Father Conroy said, “I might, Phil. I might come.”

“One o’clock, then. Make it earlier if you like.” And so, the arrangements for Father Conroy’s last day were settled.

*

They passed sheep grazing on a slope. The bleating of the new lambs sounded deafening, as if they were penned in a room. One of the lambs had only just been born; its coat was still pink, and there was blood on its hindquarters. They stopped a few moments to watch it rise trembling to its feet. Then they passed on in silence.

The sun was dropping toward the west, and the countryside below rearranged itself in new, deeper patterns as the light slanted more shallowly across it. The colors came up like velvet brushed against the pile. Across one of the green, low-lying fields below the dog moved in a soft, red billowy roll.

“God!” said Father O’Hara, “but ’twas a powerful day!”

Near the bottom of the hill, they passed through a field in which was a rath – a mound raised by some ancient people – now overgrown with ash and hawthorn. Father Conroy remembered it well; he had helped harvest barley once in that field. Now the field showed signs of neglect; there was a deep-green boggy patch at its center, covered with clumps of gray rushes tipped with rust. Yet, one could still see the wide pathway to the rath that had never been plowed. The barley had been carefully sown to avoid the rath and the path approaching it.

The dog’s head came lolloping into sight over the tops of the rushes. Gradually she began to circle in more tightly toward the path, her friskiness gone in a sense of purpose; she came into the open, stretching herself forward in long, careful strides.

“Now, Tom!” murmured Father O’Hara.