“Yes, Father,” the man said, “’twould be great company for ye in the nights! Wouldn’t it now?”

“No, no, ’tis worse than the drink, for a man can take a pledge against drink. Ah no, I wouldn’t stir out at all, then. Anyway” – he wheeled on them from the doorway – “isn’t it the only thing I deny myself, that and a woman to warm the bed.”

“Oho, Father.” She laughed. “’Tisn’t the women warm the beds at all. What with the amount of ironing and mending, sure himself does be turning over for his second sleep by the time I get in.”

“Oh, ye get in all right! And you stay in, like a log.” Peter planted his knife and fork firmly on the table. “Who has to get up in the middle of the night? Who, Father, but the poor man here. Yes, I have to get up to feed them and quieten them, ay, and even to...”

“Ssssh!” She clapped her hand over his month. And there, as they struggled joyously against each other, Father Conroy left them.

He had gone only a few yards up the road, in the dark, when the door opened and the woman called softly after him, “Father!”

He waited as she ran toward him.

“Father, I’d like you to say a Mass for her.”

“For whom?”

“Peter’s mother. She’s on my mind, the way the old man does be fretting after her.”

“All right,” he muttered, and reluctantly he stretched out his hand, suffering the ten-shilling note to be slipped into it.

“Good night, Father,” she whispered. “God bless you.”

He watched her run back toward the lighted doorway. Then, crushing the note in his hand, he turned toward his own dark house ahead, toward that cupboard in whose depths the note would be stored.

Behind him the door closed, confining the light and the warmth within.

Chapter 5

High Mass for the high, he thought as he slipped into his pew in the chapel of Slievenalua, Low Mass for the low. He nodded to his colleagues on either side of him as they stood up to begin the chanting of the Office for the Dead. Two guineas a skull for fourteen of us, he calculated. He shook his head sternly toward the coffin in the center of the aisle – you’re a terrible foolish man, Maurice Connolly.

He wasn’t in favor of High Masses, or indeed of any liturgical luxuries.

Dum dee dum big bass drum

Fiddle, flute, euphonium;

he would hum when confronted with any ceremony that seemed to anticipate the majesty of the Church Triumphant. What kind of Mass was said on the first holy Thursday, high or low? And what color of money changed hands afterward?