Looking back, it seemed a hole in his life, that period in Castlemore. It gained him nothing, lost him nothing. His duties were as light as his stipends. My stretch in Limbo, he would joke about it, not then, but long afterward, seven years in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden.

The flicker of revolution was soon quenched. The labor organizer fled with the fighting fund, and the laborers, most of them, went back to work on the farmers’ terms. When, at last, under a new bishop, Father Conroy moved out to a country parish (everything forgiven, but with a faint shadow on his name, like the temporal punishment due to sin), he found that, where once the laborer had shared the farmer’s meals as one of the family, now he was served at a separate table, beyond a closed door. The milk and potatoes he once got in addition to his hire were now measured out and paid for by deduction from his wages. It was all taken for granted, like a custom followed for generations. Only Father Conroy seemed to remember how things had once been, and, though he never directly refused an invitation, he contrived never again to sit down to eat at a farmer’s table.

Uncle James, on the other hand, had no difficulty in forgetting what had happened. As time went on, he managed to persuade everyone with a vote to forget it too; in fact, he owed his seat in the Dáil as much to the support of the laborers as of the farmers. He offered himself to them all on election platforms, offered himself with such ferocious sincerity that it seemed as if he intended himself for public consumption. And in a sense, he did. The dignity with which he began to carry himself was that of a public sacrifice.

He learned the value of dress – a hard-brimmed hat and a long black coat, usually hanging open to disclose the waistcoat and gold watchchain. No one seeing him in this funereal attire could doubt but that politics was a respectable profession. As the community settled into its new mold, he established himself halfway between the family solicitor and the priest. He affected the heaviness of scholarship, especially when he appealed to the Gaelic past – our God-given heritage – a vast, rather gloomy hinterland which he had never had time to explore personally, but from which he had been brought certain useful souvenirs, old saws which he used in his speeches to emphasize that a good start was half the work, that order and precedence must not be ignored, and that certain promised schemes could safely be left in the hands of God.