Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

sidelong at her. “Yes, Molly,” he said, “I’m the weary man.” He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, but she shook her head, with a flick of disdain. He found his lighter. He wondered if his wallet was still in his pocket—she could have stolen it, while he was enjoying his great sleep—but he did not bother to check. It was pleasant and restful, sitting here beside her in companionable warmth; he was at peace, after so many tempests. “Tell me about the priest,” he said. “Tell me about the two of them, the two sharogs .”
    “Tell you what?” she asked. She was smiling sideways back at him now, a teasing light in her eye.
    “Tell me who killed the young one. Tell me who killed Jimmy Minor.”
    She went to the stove and opened the fire door with the metal hook and lifted a log from a wicker basket under the bed in which the child was sleeping. She dropped it into the glowing embers and shut the door again. Quirke looked to the half door that was open at the top and saw the moon shining low in the sky, a strangely small but intensely bright silver disk. When had the rain stopped? He drew back his cuff and looked at his watch, and was astonished to see that it was just coming up to ten o’clock. It seemed to him he must have been asleep for hours, but it could hardly have been for more than a few minutes. How had he come to be lying down, in the first place? He had no memory of stretching out on the bed—had Molly helped him? Strangely, it did not trouble him not to know these things. His muddy shoes had begun to dry out; he could feel the tightness of the leather.
    The stove tended to, Molly sat down again, but this time she sat opposite him, on the bed in which the girl was sleeping. Quirke looked into the opening of her blouse, at the slope of her breasts and the soft shadow between them. Spurking: he smiled to himself.
    Molly had set a hand lightly on the girl’s narrow forehead. Nothing, it seemed, could wake her from her sleep. “’Twas the cuinne that done it,” Molly said.
    The dog had returned, and was outside, whimpering to be let in.
    “The priest?” Quirke said. “What did he do?”
    A long interval passed before Molly spoke again. The moon shone in the window; the dog still whined. Quirke saw again the priest leaning against the bar in Flynne’s Hotel, smoothing his tie with his hand and lifting the whiskey glass in the other and smiling at him over the rim.
    “They’re a queer crowd, them priests,” Molly said. “I’ll have naught to do with them. Himself it was that brought him here.”
    “Packie, you mean?” Quirke said. “It was Packie who brought Father Mick here?”
    “Aye.” The child in the bed gave a little mewling cry, as if she were in pain, and Molly laid her hand once more on her forehead. “Took a great interest in this one, he did,” she said. “Told Packie he could help her, could teach her book learning and the like. What book learning, I said to himself—what book learning could he teach her, and her with no more than a scrap of understanding? Oh, no, he says, Father Mick will learn her, Father Mick is the man .” She was looking down at the girl, and her mouth tightened. “So he started coming out here, every week, of a Sunday night. I knew by the look of him what he was.”
    “And what was that?” Quirke asked.
    She seemed not to have heard him. “Taught her, all right, he did—oh, aye, he taught her.”
    “What kind of things did he teach her?”
    She looked at him, her face tightening. “The like that you wouldn’t find in any decent reading book. Had them all at it, at the learning, so called, all the lads and the girleens in the camp. Himself was delighted. Oh, they’ll all be great scholars, he’d say, they’ll get grand jobs and keep me when I’m old . The mugathawn .”
    She stopped. Quirke eyed the moon in the window, and the moon eyed him back. His throat had gone dry. He saw again the priest standing at the bar in Flynne’s Hotel that rainy night and turning with a smile of broad disdain to watch the red-faced young man walking stiffly in the wake of his angry girlfriend. What was it he had said? Something about love, and love’s difficulties.
    “And what did you do?” he asked.
    It was some moments before Molly replied. “I didn’t know,” she said, very softly. She stroked the forehead of the sleeping child. “She never told me.”
    “Why not?”
    “Why? Y ou might as well ask the wind why it