Up the road homeward, he leaned tiredly toward thoughts of bed, the bliss of sleep. It seemed a long time before he reached the gate. He turned into the deeper darkness of the drive with what seemed a slow, wheeling, laborious movement. Suddenly light exploded in his face; it filled him, stretched him upward and outward, so that his first thought was a panicky, Christ, I’m dead! Then a car door slammed somewhere ahead.

“Ah, Father!” James’s outline approached. “Isn’t this a piece of luck? I thought I’d drop in and I passing. And here you are.”

Blast you, I might have known you’d stay on, sit it out. And the shock you gave me! My legs are like water. However, he kept his voice steady and said, “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting?”

“Not at all, Father; you couldn’t have timed it better.”

“Well!” he said. Well, what? What were they to talk about? James was waiting to be invited in. Well, make him work for the invitation! “I don’t often have this pleasure, James.”

“To tell you the truth, I only dropped in to give you a message from Mikie. He wants the pony.”

“What pony?”

“Ah, now, Father, sure you discussed it with him. You wanted a trade-in, plus a little cash in hand.”

“From you, is it?” Of course, it was! Another bribe for the beloved Jimmy. “Well, he must have taken me up wrong.”

“I see. So there’s no deal!”

“No, James, no deal.” Not with you.

Well, that was that. There was no need for the invitation, after all. But James showed no sign of leaving. “I see you’re doing great work in the garden,” he said.

“You must have been here early, so.”

“No, I just saw by the headlights and I coming in that you must have been cutting down some bushes.”

“Ah, you mean the pyorrhea by the gate?”

“Yes, that’s gone.”

“And the erysipelas! Did you notice the pruritis gone too?”

“Ah, sure, I wouldn’t know the official names. I’d know what they look like, though I’m no gardener.” He looked suspiciously at Father Conroy’s deadpan face. “Not like your father. He was a great gardener. He’d know what you were talking about.”

Father Conroy shifted uneasily. He hated any reference to his father – his mother had made them so often, self-dramatizing her loss.

“He had roses,” went on James, “and the big orchard at the back. And d’you remember the sundial he brought home from an auction somewhere? He was as proud of that! ’Twas set up in the middle of the garden with a sweep of gravel all around it, like they had in the big houses. But sure, he wasn’t like a Conroy at all!”

“What d’you mean?”