“It is,” said Flynn. He raised his right hand and pulled at the hairs in his ear.

  “And himself?” Willy asked. His hand was still on the stall. “It’s not bad news you’re bringing me and it still early in the day?”

  “It is not,” said Brian Flynn. He dropped his hand and shoved it into the pocket of his jacket. “But John is in his bed again. The pain come on him bad in the night.”

  Willy Egan shook his head. “May God ha’ mercy on him, and him suffering so,” he breathed. “Will he last it out, d’ye think?”

  “He will,” Gilhooley replied solemnly, “if it’s any of his own doing.”

  “Which is to say, he will,” said Flynn.

  “Ah, he’s a strong one,” Willy said. “The strongest I’ve known. Pray God he’s with us still when most he’s needed.”

  They were all silent a moment, not looking at each other.

  Willy Egan lifted his eyes from the straw at his feet. He patted the mare on the neck and she nuzzled his shoulder.

  “Come look at me beauty,” he said. “Now, I ask ye, won’t she be just fine when the proper time comes round?”

  Father Henning had owned the typewriter, a monstrously heavy black Remington, for forty-nine years. Several of the keys stuck badly and usually required an extra hit or two to make them go, and the space bar responded erratically to his touch. Whenever he used it, the priest invariably ended up muttering to himself that he’d need to hear his own confession when he was done. And, considering the savage nature of his thoughts and the vileness of his wishes for the blasted machine, he wasn’t all that certain he’d even grant himself absolution.

  He had a little room just off the foyer, big enough only for a desk and one filing cabinet, that he liked to call his office. He was in there now, banging away at the machine, typing his bimonthly letter to his superiors in the city of Limerick, begging for funds to make “absolutely essential” repairs to his little church before the winds of winter blew it completely away and left him no place to house his flock. Every now and again, he pounded his fist on the table and muttered dire threats. Each time he did it, Deirdre Corcoran appeared in the doorway, apron still around her wide middle, and gave him a long hard look.

  Finally, sighing with relief, he sat back and read over the product of his labors.

  “It’s done now, woman,” he called out. “You can take the cotton from your innocent ears, without fear of your being scandalized.”

  A minute later, Deirdre appeared and set a cup of tea on the desk beside the typewriter.

  “Drink your tea while it’s hot,” she told him. “Have you typed the envelope to put it in?”

  “Ah, dear God, no, I haven’t,” he said.

  “Well, drink that down, then, to fortify yourself, and I’ll bring another when the job is done.”

  Looking very much the martyr, Father Henning gulped down the tea and went to work on the envelope.

  Deirdre swept away the empty cup and returned with a steaming fresh one just as he finished licking the envelope and pressing it closed.

  “I’ll attend to the stamp,” she said.

  “Deirdre Corcoran, there’s a cozy place waiting for you in heaven, I’m sure.”

  She was still in the doorway. The edge of her apron was crushed in one hand.

  “John MacMahon was took especial bad in the night,” she said.

  The priest’s head snapped up to look at her.

  “I told him to keep to his bed for the day at least,” she added. “Here, won’t you even take the tea before you’re off?”

  But he was already pushing past her into the hall.

  “Well, he’s acting strange, I can tell you that much,” Peggy Mullen said. She looked across the kitchen table at Deirdre Corcoran, then lowered her gaze to the cup of tea that was growing cold in her hand. “But, mind, he could be coming in any time now, so best keep an ear cocked for the sound of the car.”

  “Is he out much?” Deirdre asked. “Isn’t it work he has to be doing? A book to be writing?”

  “It is, and he’s in there, in his office, of a morning, but I couldn’t tell you if it’s work he’s at or not. Sometimes he takes a meal in the middle of the day and sometimes he goes out for it, but he’s always out of an afternoon now.”

  “Does he say where he’s going?”

  “I’ve asked once or twice, just curious-like, you know, and he says only that he’s driving about in the hills.” She raised her eyes to the other woman’s face. “It’s hard, I’ll tell you, to be spying on a man like this, and me an old woman!”

  Deirdre sighed heavily and pushed herself to her feet. She took their two cups and set about making a fresh pot of tea.

  “I couldn’t say for sure,” Peggy Mullen said softly to the other woman’s back, “but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he thought he was seeing things. I don’t think he’s sleeping well at nights, neither.”

  “What’s become of the girl?”

  “She’ll be here again. He’s only waiting for her to be free. She owns a shop, a bookshop, in Dublin. I think he’ll be in a better state when she’s here.”

  Deirdre poured boiling water into the teapot. The top rattled when she put it on.

  “But you think he’s seeing them, do you?” she said without turning around.

  Peggy Mullen was silent a moment. Then she said, “I do.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I don’t know. She was hardly here, you know, and only the once. But him and her is closer, I think, than many a husband and wife I’ve seen. If he’s seeing them, then she’ll see them as well, when she comes. All right, then, that’s what I think, if you ask me.”

  “We’d best be telling himself, then,” said Deirdre.

  “Father Henning?”

  “And John MacMahon as well.”

  Sometimes Father Malcolm Henning thought it was all too much for him. Here were the winters getting colder and wetter, the nights darker and longer, and the hills themselves growing steeper. Lucky thing he’d thought, in his rush from the house, to take his fine old stick to lean on as he climbed the hills to the cottage.

  And another old friend so soon to be lost. First it was Paddy Mullen, and now John was on his way out, and soon it would be his own time. All the years that had passed, all the long evenings and the dark nights, all the rainy days, and the three of them always together, always knowing the others were nearby and knowing the others knew the same. All nearly ended, all coming to the close.

  Did it matter, as he thought of his own death, that he was a priest? His mouth twisted as he walked. He’d done what he could, served as best he was able, trusting more in his conscience and his heart than in theology and canon law, and he’d honored his God to the limit of his strength. All these years, and he’d done what he thought his God wanted of him, on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings and at all hours of the nights in between.

  And—thanks be to God, and with the help of Paddy and John, the three of them together—he’d preserved the other as well.

  And did it make it any easier now, this satisfaction that he’d served both light and dark, both the open practice and the secret, to know that his own time was coming, perhaps before this very year was out, or the next, or the year after that? Was it any easier for the knowledge? He wasn’t sure, but he thought— trusting, as he always had, his conscience and his heart—that only great age brought resignation within reach.

  The light and the dark, they were always so bound up together.

  He had to stop, halfway up a hill, and lean against a stone fence until he caught his breath.

  He should have had Deirdre bring him in the car. No, no, of course not. Hadn’t John MacMahon passed his entire life now and never once ridden in a car? And, besides, it was true, he still liked to walk the hills.

  He looked around him. The moon had appeared between the clouds that drifted quickly overhead. It was still low near the earth, and shining brightly on the silence of the hills, its edges made crisp by the clear, brittle air he breathed. From above him, higher up the slope, he heard the low bleating of a sheep. He listened until the animal did it again and then was still.

  Nothing changed here. The sheep themselves might have been those that lived a hundred years ago, or a thousand. The very shadows on the hillside, rocks or sheep or jagged cuts in the earth or the distant dark shape of a cottage, might have been the same.

  The priest sighed, wiped a cold hand across his face, leaned on his stick for balance, and stepped back onto the road. He’d taken only a few steps when his foot touched something soft.

  The priest stopped and looked down and sucked his breath in hard.

  The man lay in the road, his body clearly visible in the moonlight. He lay on his stomach, his head turned to the side, one cheek on the ground, and his arms stretched out straight before him as if in supplication. He wore only a torn and filthy white shirt, gray in the shining moonlight, and pants held at his waist by a length of hempen rope. His waist was almost the size of a healthy man’s arm, and the ankles and bare feet that protruded from the pants were more bone and blackened skin than flesh. His body might have been dropped there from a great height, crashing to earth in that spot, so still did it lie.

  A cloud passed before the moon just then, and the hill and the road were buried in darkness.

  Father Henning stared down at the spot where the body lay.

  “God rest your soul,” he murmured and, joining the tips of his thumb and index finger together, made the sign of the cross above the body. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

  He stood a moment longer and then, slowly, leaning on his stick, he made his way around the body and continued up the road. The moon came out from behind the clouds again and shone brightly on the hill, but the priest did not look back.

  Finally, with his heart hammering in his chest and his mouth open to take in as much air as possible, thin and icy as it was, he came in sight of John MacMahon’s old cottage. From where he stood in the road, he could see the orange-yellow flicker of candle­light and a turf fire through the single window in the end wall of the tiny house.

  He stood there in the road, catching his breath so that he’d be able to speak when he reached the door. Then he went ahead, more slowly than before and leaning heavily on his stick.

  He reached the cottage and pushed the door open. He saw John MacMahon, his face pale and drawn with pain, lying in the bed. The candle, on the table beside him, left his eyes in dark pools of black. Brian Flynn sat on the one chair, at the foot of the bed, facing John. James Brennan and Martin Gilhooley sat on the hard dirt floor, their backs against the wall. Gilhooley had his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped tight around his legs. Brennan’s legs were stretched out straight before him. In the fireplace, a turf fire burned brightly and heated the room. The air was thick with the warm and acrid scent of the burning peat.

  They turned to look at him and John MacMahon’s head turned a bit on the pillow.

  Father Henning ducked his head beneath the low lintel of the doorway and entered the cottage.

  “God save all here,” he said, and crossed the room toward the bed.

  Liam Nolan warmed up the last of a piece of pot roast in the tiny kitchen at the end of the bar, and served it to Michael Mullen with four thick slices of bread. Mullen finished off the pint he’d been drinking, then bent forward over the food and went at it as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  “You’ll not have your mother back in her own kitchen for a bit yet,” Nolan remarked impassively as he watched Mullen eat. He carefully drew another pint of Guinness and set it on the bar before him.

  “Not for a bit, no,” Mullen said quietly between mouthfuls.

  The pub was not yet filled. Doolin had no rush hour traffic, no swell of office workers stopping off for a pint on the way home. Only a few of the shop owners in the village were there and a few farmers who’d finished up early or had a strong son to see to things at home, and the inevitable oldtimers for whom the pub was restaurant, club house, and parlor. On a week night such as this, the customers were like family, people who had lived all their lives in close proximity and for whom each other’s deep-lined, weathered faces were as much a part of the brooding, ever-­present landscape as the rocks and the hills and the cliffs of the shore.

  “Not for a bit,” Michael Mullen said again, more quietly still. He drank from the fresh pint, swallowed the hearty Guinness with obvious satisfaction, then returned with less urgency to the rest of his meal.

  Two new customers arrived and Nolan went to get their drinks. Then he returned and stood before Michael and dried glasses with the corner of his apron. “Will your brother be along for a bite to eat as well?” he asked.

  “He will, I think,” Michael said. He pushed away the empty plate and lifted the Guinness to wash down the last of his meal. “He’s not much good in the kitchen, no more than me.”

  Nolan set out a dozen glasses, one after the other, on a towel spread on the bar.

  “I’ve a nice pair of lamb chops put aside,” he said. “I’ll give him them.”

  Michael turned sideways on his stool and rested an elbow on the bar. His eyes scanned the faces in the pub, then glanced at the clock on the wall.

  Nolan, still drying glasses, was watching him closely.

  “The old fellow’s sick,” he said, his lips barely moving, his eye on the glass in his hand. “Kept to his bed all day, so I hear, and the pain that terrible it’s twisting him up inside.”

  “No,” said Michael Mullen.

  “ ’Tis so. You don’t see none of them about, do you?”

  “Will he last out the time, d’ye think?”

  “He will,” Nolan said in the same quiet voice, eyes still downcast, hands still moving, polishing the glass. “He will, with the help of God.”

  “With the help of God,” Michael murmured.

  There was a little silence between them. A man at the far end of the bar signalled to Liam and he went off to refill the man’s glass. When he came back, he said, as quietly as before, “It could all fall to you, you know, if it came to it, being the son of one of them.”

  “I know it.”

  “Ah, but can you carry it on, a thing like that?” Nolan asked. Now he was looking Michael straight in the face. “Can you carry it on, and you with so many years still before you?”

  “I can,” Michael said. He stared at Liam Nolan for several seconds, then lifted his pint of Guinness and took a long, long drink from it. When he put the glass down, he had to take a deep breath. He wiped his mouth with his hand. His eyes found Liam Nolan’s again.

  “I can, I tell you,” he said.

  Liam nodded and was silent for a bit. Then he said, “But I wonder does the priest have another notion in his mind.” He lifted his eyebrows a fraction of an inch.

  Michael wiped his mouth again. “He might,” he said. “He might. It’s what I’ve been thinking myself.”

  “I’m near ready for the grave, Malcolm,” John MacMahon said when he recognized the priest. “Nearly done and ready.”

  Brian Flynn rose at once from the chair and offered it to the priest. As Father Henning took the chair and moved it up near the head of the bed, Flynn joined his fellows on the floor. He rummaged among some parcels near his feet.

  “Father,” he said, “will you take a bite of something? There’s not much, only a bit of bread, but there’s currants in it. It’s a long walk you’ve had up the hills, and another the same way back, and the wind blowing in cold from the sea.”

  “I will,” Father Henning said.

  Brennan broke off a generous hunk of the bread and passed it over to the priest. As he took it, he had to suppress a thin smile. The instant his fingers touched the hard golden crust, powdered with white, he recognized Deirdre Corcoran’s own baking.

  They all sat in respectful silence while he ate the bread.

  When he was done, he brushed his hands together and said, “Well, John, how are you this day?”

  John MacMahon closed his eyes wearily, then opened them again. “I’ll be among you a while longer, I’m thinking.”

  “Is the pain so bad?”

  John sighed. “I’ll not say other than the truth. It was fit to tear me in pieces only this morning, but since the middle of the day it’s been giving me a bit of peace. I’ll be up again before long. For a while, at least.” His eyes searched his old friend’s face. “I’m bound and determined, Malcolm, to be with you for it on the night. You know that, I hope. I’ll not be leaving you before then, God willing. You know that, do you not?”

  Father Henning did not answer. Instead, he turned his head and glanced at the three men sitting against the wall. Without a word, avoiding his eyes, they pushed themselves to their feet and shuffled slowly out of the cottage.

  When they were alone, Father Henning turned back to John MacMahon. “John,” he said, “there’s much we have to talk about.”

  MacMahon nodded. His head barely moved the pillow.

  “Are you up to speaking of it now? We must be preparing for the time when you’re gone, and when I’m gone myself as well.”

  Impulsively, he reached out and gripped John MacMahon’s hand.

  After a moment, without withdrawing his hand, Father Henning continued in a lower voice, “We’ll need to pick others, see if they’re right and they’re willing.”

  MacMahon said, “We will. We will. But there’ll be time yet for that.”

  They sat in silence for a long while, hands joined on the blanket that covered John MacMahon’s thin body.

  “Tell me of something else,” MacMahon said at last. “The visitor, the one from America. Tell me about him.” He turned his head and his eyes searched the face of the priest. “You know what I’m asking, Malcolm.”

  “He has it in the blood, I think,” the priest said. “We’ve talked a bit and I know he’s been . . . seeing certain things.”

  “Ah, it’s so strange,” MacMahon sighed. “A man comes such a ways and finds he’s part of it all, and it so dark and deadly. I’d so hoped he’d be gone when the time comes. Is he seeing the lot, d’ye know?”