And at once, he was caught in the tide that flowed strongly between priest and people – what kind of tide, he wasn’t sure, but it seemed to carry him toward a dissolution, a chaos which threatened him, threatened them all. Even O’Hara seemed conscious of how close was the threat; he cleared his throat several times and tried to set his voice on a steadier course. What was it? What was wrong? It couldn’t be Conroy, that shabby old baluba of a parish priest with his boxful of spiders. It must be the twilight hour, the old church like a well-scrubbed kitchen from which the light had faded; it must be that shy, violent crowd, overstressed now with emotion that the formality of the prayers barely held in check. Whatever it was, Father Mahon found it distasteful. He was to find that peculiar distaste in all his last dealings with Father Conroy.

*

A few days after the funeral, Father Mahon took the bus out from Castlemore to see to the effects. It seemed more of a place now, a destination. The sound of the bus dwindled away, and it grew very quiet; there was only the distant, vague bleating of sheep on the hills.

The ring of a shovel on stone held him on his way past the churchyard. Between the tilted crosses and the leaning headstones, he saw a clod of earth flying in the air. He went in, through the long grass which had been trampled by the crowd on the day of the funeral. Just beyond Conroy’s grave, a man’s cap bobbed back and forth on a level with the ground.

“Evening, there!” he called.

The man looked up. He wiped a large, red face with his sleeve, drove his shovel deep down into the clay, and slowly climbed up out of the grave. Then he lifted his cap, for a moment meeting the priest’s eye. When he spoke, he seemed to be addressing the far distance, a dark blob of forest on the mountain. “’Tis hard to get the depth, Father.”

“’Tis, I suppose. You’d need some help there.”

“No, Father.”

“No?”

“I’m the digger of graves.”

“I see.” Father Mahon wasn’t used to this; Castlemore people were usually more accommodating in conversation. “I suppose it’s very rocky.”

“’Tis not, then. Not a bit rocky.” The small eyes flickered over Father Mahon’s face, then returned to rest on the mountain. “The way it is, the place was never rightly sounded.”

“Sounded? I didn’t know these places had to be...”