He gave them a moment. Father Conroy looked down at his people. Si monumentum requiris, respice! What was wrong? What did the fellow mean? The old people were looking around, stiff-necked, in their respectable way, eyes bulging to left and then to right. Watch and Pray was in the front seat, fingers jerking on the rosary beads, lips pattering out the prayers. He, for one, wasn’t worried. Only the children nudged each other and stared frankly around.

How quiet they were, even the children! Yes, the children! The old people! Even as McEvilly began to speak again, Father Conroy at last got the message.

“A whole generation missing!” said McEvilly. “The generation that carries us forward, that takes a chance on the future.”

God, yes, of course! How could those old ones take a chance on anything? The slump of their shoulders! Their downcast heads! They knew what it was to take a beating. The candles for the wake were already stored at home, on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser.

Politicians, priests, public men – all blather about emigration, but this is it, going on for years, a dry rot in the floorboards underfoot. Why didn’t I notice it had gone so far? I say Mass on Sunday, turn around to preach to them; how could I have been so blind?

They were looking at McEvilly, hardly breathing, trying to see themselves as he saw them, a whole parish looking at itself for the first time. Only the small group of teen-agers by the wall shifted, raised uneasy faces to the speaker, then glanced at each other, as if afraid of what might be in each other’s minds.

“I bring you no magic formula,” the ugly voice told them. “Anything you want to do, you’ll have to find out yourselves the way to do it. All I came here for was to tell you to look at yourselves, to ask yourselves the question, am I making good use of the life God gave me? Or am I just sitting here, waiting for the life to come?”

Even Watch and Pray got that one. He stopped fingering out the prayers and stared with mouth half-open. Did he make good use of the life God gave him? Who in the parish did? As Father Conroy searched the familiar faces, he felt a spasm of pain grip his arm and shoulderblades. It folded him back, breathless, in his chair. God, he thought, what a place to get this! Here I am, on the rack before them all. He gritted his teeth and held in his pain, so well that the others on the platform did not take their eyes off the speaker to glance at him.