The Stolen Child

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

The Stolen ChildAuthor(s): George O'BrienSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 9-24Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20646487 .

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George O'Brien

The Stolen Child

After my mother died, I was brought up by my fathers family down the coun

try, while my father kept his job teaching primary school in Dublin. Some sum mers he visited us. But most summers I went up to be with him in the city. Before I was old enough to travel by myself my grandmother made the train

journey with me and shared my holiday. We country people were, of course, gready taken by the busde and novelty

of "town," as the natives quaindy called their wonderland. But after she had made her first few inspections of the latest hats and frocks in Cassidy's and Rel

iefs, and had had high tea and a movie at the Metropole, my grandmother became querulous and awkward. She condemned as a waste of time and, worse, of money the things my father suggested that we do?and he had to have us

doing something, the three of us at home all day together being an obviously insupportable prospect to him. She found the seaside too far away. An afternoon at the National Museum was not a trip to our jeweled past but a forced march

through a child-infested, stocking-laddering maze. When my wish was granted to go out to what was then called Collinstown to see the Viscounts and the Fokker Friendships, she couldn't share the uplift that the planes gave me. All that

arriving and departing made her glum, and the long bus ride home was full of "the aerodrome" being such a cold old place and how she had seen nothing there but people putting on airs.

No doubt she did find city life exhausting. But what tiredness also meant was

homesickness. The longer we stayed the more out of place she felt. Being taken out of herself was unnatural, isolating, made her a mere citizen, whereas at

home she was somebody. As was her custom, however, she did everything but speak direcdy about the

way she felt. She let yawns and sighs do her talking for her, and when these did not deliver the message she turned bossy. Commands to "turn off that old

thing" (the radio) became more frequent and more arbitrary. My father and I were called in from our summer evenings?endless daylight, endless backyard

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 9:2 (SUMMER / SAMHREADH, 2005), 9~*4



The Stolen Child

games?to kneel for the family rosary. Words begat words. Family tensions

drizzled into the vacation air, as though we really were at home, in her house, the place from which my father went away from me. And it was at such times

that my grandmother brought up Father Willy. Was he back in the main house

again now? She would love to see him.

It was only natural, I suppose, that my grandmother would want to pay Father Willy a call. He had all the credentials necessary for a permanent place in her good books. Not only was he from our town, he was from Chapel Street,

where she herself had been born and raised, along with Father Willy's mother

and father and all belonging to him, "the old stock," as she rather imperiously

put it, because the past was not a mystery to her, it was authority. And Father

Willy was close not only through clannishness. He and my father were best

friends growing up. Remembering that, her past loomed large in earnest. With

each new reminiscence she translated recall into repossession, put the seal on

her own need to be attended to by dwelling on small boy banalities. Insepara

ble, they were, the pair of them, swimming through the whole summer, kicking a ball above in the Fair Field all the livelong day. (She gave them bodies.) They were the two smartest lads in the town. Brother Carey told her that. (She gave them minds.) She could still see the two of them inside the altar, the mites,

swinging the thurible, lifting the missal. Willy was a great hand at the gong, gave it a hammering that could reach Russia. As the intervening years melted away,

my grandmother became a mother once again, fond and proud, in the middle

of her life. "Don't you remember, John?" But my father just flicked the ash of his cigarette into the empty fireplace and

did not reply.

Apparently seeing this old pal was not something he looked forward to, not

even an old pal with the snob value of being in an order. The ordinary priests at home were pretty much blunt instruments, cut from the same cloth as the

grasping taxman, the officious police, the exigent landlord. But those in orders

were considered classy?genteel, refined, "lovely men," my grandmother called

them. And I had the impression that she gave Father Willy extra points for not

belonging to a cowl-and-sandals outfit, with their embarrassingly ostentatious

poverty, but to a minor order which did good by stealth in their Industrial

Schools. For old times' sake and for God's sake, we should do the decent, neigh

borly thing and make our visit. And for my sake, too. Bringing a child to meet

an inmate of monastery or convent was in those days considered a highly edi

fying treat, all the most desirable in my case because of the family's virtually

unique peculiarity of having neither priest, nun or brother to its name.

This deficiency had not left me wanting, however, thanks to being taken

along for the ride when pals' parents visited their clerical connections. I had no

10



The Stolen Child

reason to suppose that seeing Father Willy would be any different. Not that I wanted to see him, and I whined about having a whole afternoon taken from me when there were still a million things I wanted to do with the Da before we said

goodbye till Christmas. But I knew I would get nothing unless I was good. So I

got my song ready. That was what the religious always expected of us children, a song: "Mary's

Boy Child" which Harry Belafonte?that happy islander, God love him?was the smart choice, though "Oh to be in Doonaree" would do as well. It could be

frightening. Not the singing (though that too, no doubt), but being seen and heard as we never otherwise were supposed to be. And to make matters worse, if the visitee was a nun, she invariably applauded with a hug. We were engulfed in habits with a canvassy scratch to them and enough material to rig a three-mas ter. This was no flattery. This was blackness, occlusion, a momentary kidnapping, a miniature flight into Egypt or some similar realm, nocturnal and unknown.

Harmless, of course. AU in fun. Coming up for air, you noticed how papery Sis ter's complexion was, regarded in shy awe the pure white shiny cardboard breast

plate that made her hard where real women were soft. She was sprouting a

moustache. Her breath was sour. She smelled of chalk dust, empty classrooms. On the way home the grown-ups invariably remarked on how natural Sis

ter Carmel or Mother Philomena was. Much later, I discovered "natural" to be a complicated Irish word for all sorts of social performances, personal accom

modations, family complicities. Back then I heard it as a good thing, a laudato

ry ratification of the real. Yet at the same time, I couldn't help feeling that I was

emerging, or being translated, through some sort of delicate veil or membrane

from an artificial world-within-walls, inhabited by storybook people. It made me uneasy?not the return itself, but the notion that the holy ground was

somehow unreal, a kind of secret garden or underwater chemical plant or even an isle of the blessed from our own highly-colored pagan past.

At least Father Willy wouldn't hug?priests didn't go in for that. And he'd have a tea fit for men, ham sandwiches and egg sandwiches and mahogany-col ored fruitcake, and not the aptiy named rock cakes which were all the nuns ever rose to. And if he made me sing, I'd give him "Davy Crockett"?a proper song about a proper boy child.

An utterly anonymous rainy Thursday afternoon, a tall, gaunt building, lime

stone and roughcast, then one of those religious parlors, colorless, odorless and

tasteless, deathly white. No knick-knacks, no photos, and a long way from home.

There are official-looking armchairs with brass tacks and leather worn sheenless. A holy picture hangs down above the hearth, where a mirror hung in our house. It's a picture of the Virgin Mary in a gown of blue standing with palms turned

11



The Stolen Child

outward. Shafts of old-gold light falls from them. She is ionizing the world with

love. She wears an expression of slightly condescending tenderness. I see the empty, broad expanse of concrete apron in front of the church to

which this priest's house is attached. There was a grotto also, famed far and wide

for reasons now forgotten, and from the murk beyond the clank and jostie of

shunting trains afforded a moment's stimulation. I always felt close to trains.

And places where men worked, even this dank remnant of the nineteenth-cen

tury city, intrigued me. But I was the only one to be taken by the area's ungod ly grime and glower. I don't recall the grown-ups paying me any attention. I

wish I could. I wish I could remember that the cakes were stale or the sandwiches suspect,

the girl who brought in the tea or clatter from the kitchen. I need such details not because through them this clerical afternoon would stand out from others, but because they would make it resemble them. I want the ticking clock, the

splatter of an overflowing gutter, the muffled thumps of distant doors shutting; all the reassurance of the generic occasion. Tried and true minutiae must be

there somewhere. But the memory of Father Willy has obscured it all.

There was something not quite right about him from the start. I picked this

up from my father's diffident greeting and my grandmother merely shaking hands, not fondly holding the hand or patting it. And she didn't greet him with

the familiar, "You're looking grand, boy," but with, "How are you?" in the tone

of a dropping jaw. Yet at first I found him funny. There was a bit of a circus act

to him. He had a prance in his gait like a pony pawing the sawdust preparatory to going around the ring, and his nostrils too were flared and equine. The con

stant shifting of his long, thin dial?squeezed into a grin one minute, elongat ed into an exclamation point the next?made his face a rubber glove, magically

manipulated by some hidden hand. His face was as pale as clown's makeup. The

spikes of uncombed hair shooting out from the sides of his balding head were

less unkempt than comical. And everything he did struck me as laughably exaggerated. His big brown

protruding eyes leapt all around the room, lighting on everything, settling on

nothing. He treated ashtray, cigarettes, and matches like a baby does its dinner,

mixing and moving, attracted, distracted. Smoke came down his nose in a bull

ish snort and out of his mouth in glaucous billows and he had ash all down his

front. A two-bar electric fire glowed in the middle of the wall and he kept rub

bing his hands together and stretching them out towards it and asking if we

were all right. He coughed horribly and spat into a green-mottled hanky. And talk! Father Willy wouldn't stop. But all he had to talk about were

priests, who they were, where they were from, how nice they were. Grand, love

ly. He was being well treated. God was good. His bell of a preacher's voice

12



The Stolen Child

lugubriously swooped, nasally vibrating, and from time to time broke out into

unexpected bursts of high-pitched, whinnying laughter. He had apparentiy for

gotten all about Chapel Street and home, the good old days of chums and childhood. My poor grandmother never got a word in edgeways. Father Willy was not her boy any more.

Tea was served. A fine tea it was, too, with all the goodies that I'd set my heart on. Father Willy pounced on the pot with hosdy enthusiasm. But he couldn't

pour. His hands shook so much when he tilted the pot to the cup that most of the tea went over the saucer, onto the tray, into the sugar bowl. He tried again, lifting a different cup and saucer up close to the pot. Everything rattled like chat

tering teeth and he had to stop. "Here, boy," my grandmother said, then, gently, and took the teapot from

him and was mother.

Father Willy drew his head sideways and upward in a bridling motion, at once averse and alarmed, and absentmindedly began to push the spoons and

plates around and around the tray. He lit a fresh cigarette. He spoke of the Blessed Virgin, the grotto, the devotion of the locals, the people of the lanes, the

flats, the cottages, ordinary working people, he called them, in a tone of strange amazement.

My grandmother tried to put a normal face on things by making me eat, but I could only manage one slice of fruitcake. Father Willys speech was quicker, thicker now as he piously held forth. "The rosary beads itself" he intoned.

"Nothing could be simpler than it, really, and just think of the power of it; was there anything more powerful? Though a child could use it and should use it;

we should all be as children when we use our beads, we'd all be a lot better off...He was intense and urgent. It was like he wanted something. I found

myself transfixed by how gaunt his jaw was, how far out his eyes stuck, how his

pallor was the shade of his clerical collar. Now suddenly it was as if I was hav

ing a bad dream. A monster had reared up before me. His deep voice was the dead's voice. I felt afraid of him. I wanted to go home.

I looked at my father. He was watching the smoke of his cigarette ascend to the ceiling as though he'd found the last word in empty grates up there.

At last we did leave, though not before kneeling for Father Willy's blessing, as was the custom. His right leg acted the pony. Latin rang around the room.

Among the words of farewell spoken were, no doubt, Father Willy's "Pray for me." They all said that.

My father spent the evening behind the newspaper. My grandmother darned a sock. I was fed an egg and sent to bed.

I left the bedroom door open, but they were up to that dodge and had kept the living-room door shut. So all I heard was the odd disconnected few words.

13



The Stolen Child

"... a fright...

"...that old place..."

"... his nerves..."

I never heard anything more.

The holiday ended: my grandmother took me back: Dublin soon dwindled

to hazy images of colored lights. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of Father Willy?in the mad widow's hunt

ed look, when I saw the man with the shriveled ear cock his head, when I heard

the rattle of talk from the boy with the cleft palate whose lingo we kids, in

mocking onomatopoeia, called Nuffy-noffy. Father Willy also came to mind

whenever I was in the neighboring town and saw the orphanage. The sight of it

gave me some shadowy notion of what "that old place" might mean, in the same

way as the hints of him in my handicapped neighbors?those leading per formers in the theater of natural, commonplace cruelty, in whose front row the

rest of us lived?were prompted by my having learned that Father Willy was "a

fright." Then word came that he'd died. He was forty-seven. My grandmother kept

repeating that, sounding puzzled and annoyed. But by that time he'd been gone from me a good while. I'd had no new reasons to bring him to mind. He'd just receded into the nature of things where, I idly assumed, he would rest in peace.

But he's back. That is, he's been brought back. The church in which he

found so little peace has resurrected him and many, many other dead fathers

who held our faith in trust. He holds me in his unliving stare. There's nothing

for it but to countenance him. But I don't know how. If I've never forgotten his

abjection, it's been hard, too, to imagine coming to terms with it.

He is thirteen. Next year will be his last in school. He wishes he could go up the

stairs to the secondary. John O'Brien will be going up the stairs. Boys from Main

Street do. But boys from Chapel Street don't. Instead, Willy will be working. His

father will have him under his thumb out at the Colonel's. His father tells Willy

doesn't know how lucky he is. Willy's older sister, Bid, works for Kitty Flynn, the

hairdresser. It's been the making up of her. But Willy knows he will be shouted

at and have his arse kicked. Even the work itself strikes him as violent. He's

afraid he won't be able for it.

Willy likes to throw a ball. Willy likes to kick a ball. But when sides are

picked he's never chosen until the last. They stick him in goal. The lads out the

field look surprisingly far away and puny to him. Hearing shouts, he looks up.

The ball is dropping from the sky down on top of him. He runs away from it.

14



The Stolen Child

not wanting to be hit. The others hoot at how he skips as he runs. Batty Hallo

ran calls him an eejit. In the schoolyard they stamp on his toes, they creep up behind him and grab his chilblained ears, they try to hit him in the mickey. But

he's fond of a swim. He likes the clean, brown water, the light in it. He lies on his

back and looks up at the heavens.

Willy walks down Chapel Street heading to the library. The usual gang is at

the Monument. He doesn't look. But he feels himself being looked at, talked

about. They will be talking about him. He's grown gangly at fourteen. His

trousers are too short and slack in the arse as well. This is what they talk about,

among them future workmates. "There y'are, Willy," one of them calls. "Out on

yer own like a donkey's tool." He presses the library book tighdy to his chest. His

favorite book is Treasure Island.

Also at fourteen he has to stop being an altar boy. He remembers about his

mother (dead three years now) making his surplice. It was an old blouse she

had, though he never saw her wear white. She ripped away the yoke with main

strength. He remembers being starded. She had very fair hair. At her wake peo

ple said she was an angel. Willy hates not serving. But though he no longer han

dles the cope of cloth-of-gold, the thurible, the cruets, the rituals' power and

glory and Eastern promise still steal his heart away. He has faith. He's a religious

boy. So people say. That's one good thing about him, anyway. From time to time, priests come to school. The local clergy come if there's

been a complaint or to examine the boys in catechism. "Who made the world?"

"God made the world." "Good?you, next: Who is God?" A Main Street boy

recently ordained comes, and standing grave and slender over the kneeling

children, gives his blessing. And sometimes a strange priest calls. This man is

always friendly and jovial. All feel drawn to him because he isn't cranky and asks

no questions. On the contrary, he begins with a joke. "A workman is carrying a

load of manure into the lunatic asylum and one of lunatics wants to know

what it's for. 'Oh,' says the workman, 'for the rhubarb.' 'Wisha, you poor man!'

says the lunatic. 'We always have custard on ours.'" The priest smiles broadly and

repeats, "custard on ours." Everybody laughs, including Brother Barrett.

Then, in a somewhat different voice, the priest goes on: "But it's not about

rhubarb and lunatics that I came the whole length of Ireland to talk to you

today, my dear little brothers in Christ... And so I say to you again, if any boy hears God calling him, be sure and let me know. I'll wait for you after school and

we can have a little chat. I have these lovely magazines here as well?free. Just

remember, my dear young friends, nothing is more insulting or hurtful to God

than a boy who hears the call and isn't manly enough to answer it!"

Willy finds himself listening. He finds himself thinking. The lads in the street

take Bomber the terrier down to the rats' nests by the river. They run off with

15



77k? Stolen Child

apples from the barrow outside Billy Baldwins. Willy doesn't want anything to

do with them. They're too rough, too crude, too madcap. He feels better off

alone. He visits the chapel in the off hours. His prayers seem more sincere then.

At first it's a bit strange, praying when he doesn't have to. But afterwards he feels

good in himself, glad to volunteer. This is how the happy visiting priest must

always feel, he thinks. He develops a devotion to Our Lady. "Hail, Holy Queen,

Mother of Mercy...." The words are soothing. He comes to understand why

priests speak of Mother Church. He prays for his mother too. The repose of her

soul is his special intention. He pictures himself in an all-black suit, a well-cut

suit, with no slack in the arse. His mother would like that. Willy reads the mes

sage woven into the cloth covering the altar: The Master is Here and Calleth for

Thee. His hands will never need washing. He will never lift anything heavier than

the missal. To be a priest is to be spoiled a little, he thinks, and he smiles. Orate,

fratres... He wonders if his mother might have?Sewing up his surplice, as long

ago as that?... And then being born in Chapel Street, as well... Things have a

reason. The last shall be first. He pours his heart out to Father Dunphy in con

fession. Father Dunphy remarks that he's very young. Yet the call grows more

impossible to deny. The more he dwells on it the more captivating its language

becomes. Truth, beauty, goodness. Stainless, perfect, saved. Eternity and heaven.

Big ideas warble harmoniously within him. Flute music. Fairy music.

At last the great day arrives. Goodbye to Colonel Foster's and dunging the

kitchen garden. Goodbye to the ditch-digger's sore back and all the kneeling

thinning the carrots, picking the strawberries. Willy now sees that his long wait

has been a test. Would he be faithful, would he be true? The answer is yes. He's

as staunch as a man must be. This laborer is worthy of his hire. And for the

money to admit him to the Order to miraculously turn up?it's like a story

book. His father stands beside him at the station. Little is said. Leaving is neither

disappointment or betrayal?he's not an emigrant. He's going to a greater,

grander home. It's all for the best. The whistle of the train calls up the line. "'Tis

on time, begor," his father says. They do not touch. Willy gazes out his carriage

window, rapt. All Ireland is spread out before him.

Every Sunday afternoon the seminarians line up for their walk. The lad on

Willy's left is from Scartaglin, the one on the right from Mullinahone. There's

no talk on the walk. The sight of a red squirrel darting through greenery

reminds Willy of Jacob's Wood. The blackbird's song fill him with the Colonel's.

The seminary is bigger than the Colonel's, bigger house, finer grounds. Colder

inside. There are lots of rules, books full of rules, and big, thick books full of

answers to every question under the sun. And there's Latin, balky Latin, lashings

of it. Dinner is in the evening. After dinner the students are allowed to run

around for a half-hour. Willy makes something of a name for himself as a foot

16



The Stolen Child

bailer. Sometimes one of the others runs him down and gives him a fierce tick

ling. Willy overhears older boys talking in low voices about tickling. The priests

go in for it as well, it seems. Willy is surprised to hear it. He has never seen them

at it. The day ends in the chapel with the rosary. All in white, the students prostrate themselves on the sanctuary floor, Willy

with them. This is the last call. Afterwards, he will be a priest forever, according to the order of MelchizedeL The choir attains high doh, uplifting him to a lofty

plane. He gives his glad Adsutnl His sister is there with her two eldest. Her hat

is festooned with artificial fruit. She clicks the camera. They stroll the sunlit

grounds. Bid takes out her cigarettes and Willy asks for one. "Are you smoking?" she screeches. He smiles: why not? He's a grown-up. He dons his biretta. It is the

Marian Year.

What does Father Willy think of being assigned to St. Joseph's?

He is surprised. He sees ordination fitting him rather for duty at the grotto of

the Virgin, as some sort of sentinel, some sort of custodian. But it is God's will.

He bows his head. And he likes the Industrial School's name. St. Joseph's. Stat

ues of Mary abound there, of course. An eight-foot in concrete faces the main

road. That's only natural. Mary, homemaker extraordinaire, presides over every

household in the country. But Joseph, easily forgotten, is important, too. Is he

not, indeed, a highly worthwhile model for the young boys here who have so

much to learn about life? As Father Willy setdes into his new home, the saint's

appeal becomes clearer and clearer. Joseph was a simple man. He sacrificed

everything to duty. He proved himself a trusty surrogate. And yet, his grave

remains unmarked, his miracles undocumented, his absence from Golgotha unaccounted for. The acme of humility, this saint of self-effacement. Not my will

but thine be done. Just a common man. The first one known to us. Father Willy

thinks of all the other toilers who came after, men he knew at home, followers

of commonplace trades, uncomplaining workers, shy men, silent men. Like

them, Joseph was without an ego, without a history. Industrious. Father Willy

offers up a decade of the rosary to his own father. But there are many fathers'

footprints following Joseph's on the path ahead of him. Father Willy is reas

sured. He remembers that he always held St. Joseph high. It was his name he

took in confirmation. Yusuf

What is Father Willy's impression of St. Joseph's?

The size of it surprises him. It is the biggest house Father Willy has ever seen,

barring the Casde at home, of which St. Joseph's reminds him in other ways as

well. Sitting on a little rise in the middle of a thirty-acre field, the school sticks

out, big and bold. Its gray stone emits an aura of the venerable, of something not

17



The Stolen Child

quite of this world. People on the road look up to it. The light lies livid in the

windows. Something lofty, something austere_Father Willy can t quite put

his finger on the right word, but it's all definitely quite imposing. A long straight

treeless avenue leads to the hall-door, severely serious. Nothing casual here.

Here all is founded in meaning, in intention. We stand alone. This is the Rock.

And nobody can see in.

Just like at home, the town begins outside the back door, beyond the trees.

Father Willy is interested in the town, is curious to see its Chapel Street. It's said

to be "a good town"?morally sound, economically solid, culturally sober. In

time, perhaps, he will meet its dutiful teachers, its trustworthy doctors, its pru

dent solicitors, caring men, like the man he has, thank God, become. Father

O'Dea and Father O'Gorman ask him if he's homesick. Father Willy laughs:

"Not at all!"

What does Father Willy learn at St. Joseph's?

It is always cold. The school's exposed location means wind almighty, wind

unceasing. Big fists of it attack the house night and day. It gets on his nerves.

Dirty brown smoke oozes from the black clump in the parlor grate. "Jesus

tonight! Will you look at that?" Father Gilligan takes the poker and attacks the

so-called fire with it. "It's all slate, this blasted Polish coal." There's no money to

fix the furnace. Father Willy offers up his chilblains and cracked skin. He has

spasms of involuntary shuddering. He gets a cough. His flesh is weak. He must

fight that.

The smells are a surprise as well. The whole house reeks of bladder and

bowel, of the boiled black cabbage the boys call blacksmiths' aprons and of

scotch broth, which has the pong of old perspiration. And feet, fags, farts, fug of

all sorts. There were crimson roses and yellow roses under the front windows at

the Colonel's. Sweet-scented flowers here and there would be lovely now, Father

Willy thinks. (And St. Joseph is often shown holding a lily.) But vases would

soon be broken. And there can be no spoiling. But he wishes his own fastidi

ousness were more the rule. The seminary taught him to be neat and clean

about his person. White soap, instead of yellow soap. Izal toilet paper, not scraps

of the Irish Press. There's a manliness to it, somehow, quite apart from its prox

imity to Godliness.

Yet, isn't learning how to labor, how to muck out the pigs and to stoop to the

spud-picking the best thing for the boys? The most honest? For if they can't earn

their bread by the sweat of their brow they'll be done for later on. Laborare est

orare, too. The pigs are devils, though, the squirming and squealing of them, the

gruff, bossy grunting. Gilligan shouts at him to lend a hand loading the bacon

factory lorry. The bristles are electric to his touch. The animals' brute stub

18



The Stolen Child

bornness repels him. He doesn't have the strength. Gilligan is a crude yob. He

drives the youngsters like a ganger. He insists they sing as they march out to

work. "One man and his dog...." It would be good for the boys to have dogs around. But that thought goes the way of the Father Willy's flowers. Gilligan lashes out at those who don't sing up, a crack across the back of the head, a fist

between the shoulder blades. It's the only thing they understand. Spare the rod

and spoil the child.

Father Willy holds with that, to be sure. God knows these whippersnappers do need manners putting on them. And there's satisfaction in landing a clatter

across a kisser, in directly connecting his boot with the cheekbone of an arse. He

doesn't like the screams and tears or the squirming from his grasp when he

hauls a boy off for a caning. But now and then there is a surprising tingle. He's

very down on boys who smoke. (He daren't think where the cigarettes come

from.) Yet the more he barks and beats, the less good it seems to do. The boys don't learn from it. It only hardens the big fellows and makes mush of the nip

pers. But he has to do his duty. God has called him. As long as you do it for one

of these the least my brethren-He tells himself that at least each kick and slap of his are clean-cut, honest and open, natural, perversion-free. His conscience

is clear. But he wishes the world were more than a mere host of bodies and rep etitious tasks. He's smoking heavily. His cough gets worse.

He stands on sentry-go beside the kitchen garden. The boys are bent over

their snagging and rooting. Father O'Dea strolls by. "God bless the work," he

says. "I wonder if I could borrow young Lenane from you?" Father O'Gorman

strolls by. "Have one of mine," he says, proffering his aqueous green box of

Three Casties (no plain John Player for this snob smoker). Father Willy smokes

his own. "I'm looking for Wheeler," says O'Gorman. Father Willy watches the

children slope away. Both boys are smokers, both are brats. But still they're chil

dren. The rod obscenely pops into Father Willy's mind. O'Gorman and O'Dea.

His welcomers.

Autumn evening comes on like a shower of dust. Father Willy prays to the

Blessed Virgin. To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this val

ley of tears. He stamps his feet and swings his arms around his chest, for all the

world like the men on the dole at the Red House corner at home. It's very cold.

How does St. Joseph's make Father Willy react?

The boys are animals. The best of them are cheeky monkeys, most are stupid

donkeys. There are some dumb oxes, a few sly foxes. Father Willy uses these

words. He can say what he likes. Sometimes he surprises himself: "you big

blooming buffalo, O'Toole!" That gives him a kick. The boys are used to this

kind of thing. All their lives they've been pups, curs, sons of bitches. They have

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The Stolen Child

an instinct for cowering, an instinct for fawning. All their lives they've had

scraps thrown to them. Father Willy doesn't have to be told that their fathers were

boozers, their mothers impure. The mothers were runaways, the fathers were

tearaways. They lived in those clusters of naked new houses he'd seen from the

train, their rendering a pig shit fawnish-grey. Definitely a lower form of life_

The most hopeless cases come from the slums of Dublin. How wild they run

around the yard and football field! They must be broken in, that's all there is to

it. But sometimes, if it's not too windy, Father Willy finds himself enjoying the

capering and cantering. It reminds him of the Fair Field long ago. At other times

they fight and swear, form rowdy groups, ignore his whistle. Then his skin

prickles as it used to do when bullies approached. He steels himself and wades

in, catches Houlihan by the ear and drags him aside, a technique learned from

watching Gilligan handling the pigs. The gristle seems to crackle in his grasp. Yes, the boys can be as brazen as dogs. Purely by accident, Father Willy, a

couple of times, sees how they behave at bath-time. Strutting around in their

shame, without a care in the world. He turns away, of course. He is surprised those rods of theirs shoot up so suddenly. It seems unnatural: their bodies so

pale bodies, then this single stroke of living color. And Father Willy knows that

some touch themselves, want to be touched. That sort of thing should be con

trolled. But how best to, when O'Gorman and O'Dea_

Father Willy prays. Many of the boys have boils, large crimson vaguely vol

canic protuberances not only on their necks but in odder spots, their cheeks,

their noses, their arses. They have styes, spots, coughs, foul breath, rotten teeth.

They scratch incessantly. "They're eating you after you rearing them!" Father

Fanning always says that, screeching laughing. Father Willy has to laugh as well.

He's a gas man, Father Fanning, always in good humor. The boys pick at them

selves with their farm-laborer hands. Blood and pus spurt out. "Aha! You're not

so tough now, Delaney!" Father Willy says. The boy cries out at the sting of the

witch hazel. Thighs are on fire from piss acid, what Father Willy remembers his

mother calling "ire." But why is there so much bed-wetting? He can't understand

this at all. It's a disgrace. They're out-and-out animals! He promises Pearson and

Houlihan that he'll put his shoe through them.

Time passes. Father Willy looks sideways down at the ground. He twists his

head around at an odd angle and regards the woolly, indifferent clouds. But he

finds the boys won't let him look away for long. He looks for guidance to Mary

and Joseph, to that exemplary household in Nazareth, that world of peace and

love. Love, after all, is the commandment to which above all others he is bound.

The greatest of these_Violence is too easy. He must renounce it. Thieves and

vagabonds the boys may be. But he can't help feeling sorry for them, too. Poor

bastards, poor orphans. The boys bring misfortune home to him. Complicated

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The Stolen Child

washes of sentiment overcome him?pity, sympathy, sadness, all at once. These lads are hardly any different from the ones he grew up with. They too are from

large families living in small houses. Their people too had a bad name or "the bad drop" or "no nature." Sick people, unlucky people, people whose needs knew no name, made no claim and who were left to God. The poor who are

always with us.

He could have been one of them! Only for his mother dying, having had

only himself and Bid. His mother died for him. He shudders, struck by the

strange ways of mercy and God's plan. God doesn't close one door but he opens another. He must tell the boys this. He must save the boys. But it's difficult to make them pay attention. Father Willy himself often finds himself distracted. A lot of things he overlooked before embarrass him now. It worries him to find his

spirit less than willing. He feels helpless. He feels ashamed. He thinks of himself as being alone. Only for Mary and Joseph he'd feel orphaned entirely.

He's taken off outdoor duty. He's a teacher now. Catechism. Arithmetic. He has them singing out the correct answers. He sees that Brady needs a poultice put on that black eye of his. Conway's cough gets croupier by the day. It's no

warmer inside, and Father Willy misses being outside. There he could let his mind wander. He hates looking at the punished. They slouch in sullenly, with

hangdog slump of shoulders, eyes downcast. Wheeler isn't able to sit down

properly again, his poor little arse is broken. How humiliated they appear! How

humiliating to see! He has to shout at them. "Sit up straight, Bernie Allen!" What Brother Barrett used to roar long ago occurs to him. 'Sit up like a Christian!' He

has the class repeat after him: "To know, love and serve God in this life, and to be with Him forever in Heaven."

Love. That is the plan, surely. If only he could just throw his arms around each and every one of them. Sometimes he feels like doing just that. Just for one

minute. Just to let them know. It would do them all a world of good. He's just softhearted. They know that, don't they? Young Murphy looks very down in the

mouth. He's going to make young Murphy laugh. He's going to ask young Mur

phy if he has any tickles for him.

What does Father Willy understand at the end of his five years at St. Joseph's?

He is standing in the middle of a field. The skirts of his soutane flap wildly about

him. The big statue has its back to him. For some reason he is rooted to the spot, can go neither forward or back. He begs and pleads for the statue to turn

around. It cannot hear. It will not hear. Father Willy is utterly at a loss, bereft and

empty. He reaches out. There is only air. Something is missing, or has escaped him, or has been stolen from him. The rock is no longer his to cling to. He weeps

bitterly. Other dreams repeat the theme.

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The Stolen Child

He's very moody. He asks for bread, he's given a stone. He chews the cud of this and similar bits of wisdom. His mouth was made to bless and praise. Now he thinks of it as full of broken teeth and blood. Strewn about wherever he looks are the ruins of all he once held dear. Concepts not fully comprehended but

deeply felt he now regards with a disappointment amounting to disdain, dis taste. Mercy, charity, chastity, goodness, grace are no more than the roofless

sanctuary of St. Declan's, the despoiled chancel of the friary at Okyle?things of an unattainable, unavailing past. Behold the vineyard!

The violence without which nothing happens has prevailed. Father Willy had believed that love would triumph. It was the Resurrection that always had meant most to him. But all is fallen, fallen. He is weak. He is a child. He has learned to hate himself.

He steers clear of his fellow priests. He would rather be a child than be like them. He prays for innocence. St. Joseph, let your lily light on me. But he knows the sadists still hear confession. The sacrament of penance. Rod-barers contin ue to say Mass. This is my body. Father Willy sees no sign among them of

repentance, or?as required?a firm purpose of amendment. They are free to do what they like. Nobody knows. Except God, of course. And Father Willy. This

knowledge puts him on the side of the boys. But that's no side for him. The poor boys are no more than the sons of disorder and the fathers of chaos. Theirs is an untenable freedom as well. Father Willy has no use for freedom. He desires ser

vice, surrender. Love is greater than freedom. He makes up his mind to lead by example and takes to praying loud and long at evening devotions. He develops an r-rolling, braying baritone and drags out the responses. "Prrhay forr us sin nerhs...." Everybody is annoyed at him. He's the same way when it comes to the

hymns. "Ihmmac-you-late. eehm-mah-queue-laate!" Gilligan tells him not

to be acting the clown. Father Willy overhears young Murphy calling him a bol lox. More and more he keeps himself to himself, jumps when addressed, feels lost without a smoke, eats little or nothing.

It's obvious that he's useless, a nuisance. Word to that effect is sent to Dublin, though there's also a suspicion that Father Willy's method has madness to it. He

may be trying to make out that his vocation has found a second wind. He's a

preacher now. Dublin decides to take him on. There he becomes noted for his

tireless, powerful voice, the emotive body language of his sermons, his peculiar brusqueness in confession, and his lovely, if too lengthy, homilies on the Holy Family.

It was probably not like this at all. Or not all like this. Or quite like this, but not in Father Willy's case.

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The Stolen Child

We'll never know. Priests don't write memoirs. Praying for the promise of the next life makes remembering beside the point. All we ever knew about the

clergy was what they were, not who. They presented themselves as all function, no being; all performance, no green room; all finish, no formation. The pre sentation wasn't consistent by any means. That didn't matter. It intended to be taken as consistent. The intention was sacrosanct. And while, as a tribe, the cler

gy (and the orders in particular) were people of the book, their actions were the last word. So much so that it seems impossible to know how to answer?or how to ask?the most elementary question about them.

So judgment comes quicker than sympathy. It's easier to reject these men of God than to admit they're ours. Best not to think that the procrustean morali

ty, the class prejudice that had almost the status of an article of faith, the state

farming out its dirty work to the church, Christ pocketing Caesar's shilling operated in all our names. To say nothing of the children and what was done to them.

My various views of Father Willy certainly include one of him as a bully, a

brute, a man in black, nocturnal nemesis of terrified ten-year-olds, a creature

beyond their imagining. This view presents itself not because I need to see him in a dark light or because I have actual knowledge of his conduct at "St.

Joseph s." On the contrary, his name is black to me because he was an accom

plice. He may well have not done anything. Or, to fall back on the phrase that

custodial apologetics have made so familiar, he was just doing his job, just car

rying out orders?as if the trade can be divorced from its tools.

And yet I don't see complicity entirely accounting for Father Willy, the

Father Willy type. Because something else we know is that for many, many years after the foundation of the state, many, many young men entered the

priesthood. They came from small towns and small farms and laborer's cottages and lace-curtained side streets. The flower of the infant society's innocence. The

natural products of the apparent need for infancy and innocence (or, to put it

another way, the natural products of the apparent problem of how best to con

trol growth and development).

They entered at a young age, at an age before dancing, before understand

ing that sex was not synonymous with procreation, before alternatives to patri

archy or matriarchy could be imagined. Few had traveled, few had held a job

they'd wanted to hold, a good number had in any case been in boarding school

from the age of eleven or twelve. Some had never seen the sea. Some had never

seen a movie. A number of them were very musical, and there were no quota

tion marks or code attached to that aptitude back then. The majority of them

were priests before there was time for them to be people. Their unworldliness a license to use power. Their youth a presanctified maturity. Their faith a qual

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The Stolen Child

ification to abuse. Children seduced. Children abandoned. Children betrayed. Stolen by the spirit world.

Is there some realization on their part of what happened to them in all the

molestation, humiliation, degradation? Its systemic, recidivistic character sug

gests not only vindictiveness but an unappeasable need for an outlet to release

oppression and rage, the weak feeding off the weaker, carrying out Gods work

in despairing rituals whose purpose was to prove, over and over, that only the

strong survive? We'll never know. But it isn't too difficult to imagine that if

Father Willy suffered some sort of breakdown, he was not alone. My father and

grandmother had no difficulty in acknowledging something strange had hap

pened to him?"his nerves." Families knew, and so did supervisors and nursing staff and hometown gossips. My grandmother, a noted reader of faces, must has

understood as soon as she laid eyes on him. Shocked but not surprised, she

spends the evening afterwards speaking more in sorrow than in anger. My father knows already, knows it all, the Christian Brother colleagues who've been

shifted and the reasons why; over bottles of stout at the teacher's club in Parnell

Square has heard more dreadful stories than he can stomach. He feels darts of

rage. But mainly he's disgusted. He knows how little can be said, and that there's

nobody to say it to. He stands aside. He lets his mother see for herself.

And yet, Father Willy let himself be seen. I keep coming back to that. It's not

only the one thing I can say for sure, but also, the more I think about it, a very

strange decision of his. Of course he may have been so far gone that he thought

nothing had changed and that we all were as we always were, the best of friends

and neighbors. Or he may have been so far gone that what we saw was an

unusually composed Father Willy who was pleased and proud that at least he

still could give his blessing, smoke his fag. It could be also that what we wit

nessed was the daring of the demented?Father Willy not caring how he looked

or carried on, but rather challenging us to give the damn about him that he

himself no longer gave. There's no end of alternatives. He knew he was broken.

He knew he was dying. He was telling the truth. He was saying goodbye. I'll

never know.

Now I wish I could hear him again?yes, and hear him out. But he remains

unmoving and unmoved. An effigy. A totem. An emblem. A rock on which

something foundered. (What part of nature is that?) I'm just the restless heir to

the wreckage, not really knowing what to say, knowing only that Father Willy

and I don't even have a language in which we might make ourselves at home,

and that if we ever did have one we must have been imagining it.

o*^ GEORGETOWN UNVERSITY

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The Stolen Child

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