And what’s that? I don’t know myself. It could be that the pigs, the knitting, the beet would do very well to talk about. He looks like a man who’d know why you’d want to talk. And damn it, I’d like to know what it is that drives him, on and on, from parish to parish, meeting to meeting – what doesn’t drive me. I’m a priest the same as he is. I’ve attended to my duties, never missed a Mass, been there for confessions, for baptisms, for the last sacraments. I took trouble with my sermons, and I preached – what? Was it what I should have preached? Yes! “For the Jews ask for signs, and the Greeks look for wisdom, but we, for our part, preach a crucified Christ...” I, for my part, that’s what I preached, a crucified Christ.

And that’s enough, he thought later, as he lay in bed. It’s what I was ordained to do. The lights of a car, coming from the curate’s house, swept along the ceiling, then left the room darker than before. “‘I have nothing on my conscience, yet I am not thereby justified.’” If Saint Paul knew that he had not justified himself, why should Father Tom Conroy, parish priest of Kilbride, consider that he had?

Footsteps went past on the road, somebody walking there in the darkness, confident of his home ahead. Should I have been hired at all, he wondered. Why the hell wasn’t I left as I was, in Rosnagree, plowing in the lower field, down by the river?

*

He had been at it all day, preparing for the winter wheat, and now the evening was drawing in and he was looking ahead between the horses’ heads, wondering whether he could manage another drill before dark. He whistled to himself as he followed the plow through the damp, darkening earth. Beyond the bare hedge, the river flowed past, deep and silent. He called to the horses, and they swung around, their breasts touching the hedge. The plow lurched over the ruts of the headland. “Whoa,” he shouted, and as the horses stopped, he wiped his forehead with his sleeve and looked back up the field, still undecided whether to go on or to finish up.

Somebody was coming toward him, down the line of the last drill. He could see only the face, a white blob floating over the dark surface of the field. It startled him for a moment, not only its appearance at that twilight hour, but also the feeling that he had not, as he had thought, been alone in the field. Then, as it drew nearer, he saw with relief that it was Frank.