Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor Read Free Book Online Page B

with the water and heard that asked and observed Father Meade’s slow nod, after a pause. She was thanked for the glass of water.
    ‘Are you Donal Prunty?’ Father Meade asked.
    ‘I served at the Mass for you, Father.’
    ‘You did, Donal, you did.’
    ‘It wasn’t yourself who buried my mother.’
    ‘Father Loughlin if it wasn’t myself. You went away, Donal.’
    ‘I did, all right. I was never back till now.’
    He was begging. Father Meade knew, you always could tell; it was one of the senses that developed in a priest. Not that a lot came begging in a scattered parish, not like you’d get in the towns.
    ‘Will we take a stroll in the garden, Donal?’
    ‘Whatever would be right for you, Father. Whatever.’
    Father Meade unlatched the french windows and went ahead of his visitor. ‘I’m fond of the garden,’ he said, not turning his head.
    ‘I’m on the streets, Father.’
    ‘In Dublin, is it?’
    ‘I went over to England, Father.’
    ‘I think I maybe heard.’
    ‘What work was there here, all the same?’
    ‘Oh, I know, I know. Nineteen-what would it have been?’
    ‘Nineteen eighty-one I went across.’
    ‘You had no luck there?’
    ‘I never had luck, Father.’
    The old man walked slowly, the arthritis he was afflicted with in the small bones of both his feet a nuisance today. The house in which he had lived since he’d left the presbytery was modest, but the garden was large, looked after by a man the parish paid for. House and garden were parish property, kept for purposes such as this, where old priests—more than one at the same time if that happened to be how things were—would have a home. Father Meade was fortunate in having it to himself, Miss Brehany coming every day.
    ‘Isn’t it grand, that creeper?’ He gestured across a strip of recently cut grass at Virginia creeper turning red on a high stone wall with broken glass in the cement at the top. Prunty had got into trouble. The recollection was vague at first, before more of it came back: stealing from farms at harvest time or the potato planting, when everyone would be in the fields. Always the same, except the time he was caught with the cancer box. As soon as his mother was buried he went off, and was in trouble again before he left the district a year or so later.
    ‘The Michaelmas daisy is a flower that’s a favourite of mine.’ Father Meade gestured again. ‘The way it cheers up the autumn.’
    ‘I know what you mean all right, Father.’
    They walked in silence for a few minutes. Then Father Meade asked: ‘Are you back home to stop, Donal?’
    ‘I don’t know am I. Is there much doing in Gleban?’
    ‘Ah, there is, there is. Well, look at it now, compared with when you took off. Sure, it’s a metropolis nearly.’ Father Meade laughed, then more seriously added: ‘We’ve the John Deere agency, and the estate on the Mullinavat road and another beyond the church. We have the Super-Valu and the Hardware Co-op and the bank sub-office two days in the week. We have Dolan’s garage and Linehan’s drapery and general goods, and changes made in Steacy’s. You’d go to Mullinavat for a doctor in the old days, even if you’d get one there. We have a young fellow coming out to us on a Tuesday for the last year and longer.’
    A couple of steps, contending with the slope of the garden, broke the path they were on. The chair Father Meade had rested on to catch the morning sun was still there, on a lawn more spacious than the strip of grass by the wall with the Virginia creeper.
    ‘Still and all, it’s a good thing to come back to a place when you were born in it. I remember your mother.’
    ‘I’m wondering could you spare me something, Father.’
    Father Meade turned and began the walk back to the house. He nodded an indication that he had heard and noted the request, the impression given to Prunty that he was considering it. But in the room where he had earlier fallen asleep he said there was employment to be