He walked inland again, on a road that was flat and straight, with turf bogs on either side of it. His mother would have lain there like the fish-sheds girl, protesting and yet putting her arms round the man. ‘There’d be people who’d think that, all right,’ Holy Mullihan had said. ‘About how a sin would definitely contaminate them.’

On the road a shawled woman in a donkey and butt caught up with him. The woman slowed the pace of the donkey so that she could talk to him. He’d seen the donkey tied up at the pier. She’d been over to get meal for her fowls, the woman said; she lived near where the bridge was being built; it would be handy for her in the future, i knew Corny Dowley,’ she said, and Tom could tell from the way she said it that she knew who he was, that she knew Corny Dowley had killed his father. She wouldn’t give you tuppence for Dowley, she said. ‘A right eejit, that fellow.’ The woman was sorry for him, trying to be good to him, but even so she didn’t suggest he should climb up beside her on the cart.

He thought about that while she talked to him. ‘Keep well away from that fellow,’ Dorrie Deavy’s father would have said. The Deavy boys crossed the street when they saw him approaching; he’d seen them doing it. His grandmother had been going to kiss him that day, only she’d changed her mind like Mr Coyne had. Deso Furphy and Neck Daly only bothered with him because they were curious about him.

‘I never thought I’d see a bridge,’ the woman on the cart said, ‘Isn’t it a wonder what they can do?’

He agreed it was. He had never before thought of his mother like that, out in a field with her clothes half off. He’d only pretended to understand when Holy Mullihan went on about saying prayers to cleanse him. It was why all of them were keen on making him touch the holy clay.

The woman said goodbye, shaking the reins to hurry the donkey up as it turned away on to the track that led to her cottage. In the distance Tom could hear the voices of the men working at the bridge, and when it came into sight he saw that it now extended over fourteen of the iron supports. Three lorries, empty of their loads, filled the air with dust as slowly they drove away. ‘A fellow at Confession,’ was how a joke of Neck Daly’s went.’ “Father, I sinned: I rode a woman from Carrigtohill.” “Well,” says the Father, “isn’t anything better than walking?” D’you understand that, Tom? D’you get the meaning of it?’