In the Forest by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online

about being a forester” and I had to laugh at his reply: “Damn all ... midges eating you alive in the summer and rain water drenching you in the winter every time you sawed off a branch .”’
    ‘You had me there,’ O’Kane says, standing by a low bed with a red cover and a white linen antimacassar over the pillow.
    ‘Yes, everyone thinks his or her own calling the most taxing,’ the priest says, pretending not to be unnerved.
    ‘I want money.’
    ‘Now why would I give you money?’
    ‘Because I could have you disgraced ... I could go to the bishops.’
    ‘It’s you yourself that might be disgraced . . . nevertheless I will give you money if it means a hot meal or a decent pullover,’ the priest says and looks towards the hall, reluctant to leave him alone in the kitchen and disguising his fears by muttering to himself, wondering where his overcoat could be.
    ‘Shitting your pants?’ O’Kane says with a grin.
    ‘England has done you no good.’
    ‘Plenty of fist fucking in the English lavs.’
    ‘No good whatsoever.’
    The priest returns, separating the new clean notes with his dampened thumb - ‘Today was my day for visiting the poor.’ He counts them studiously then hands them over.
    ‘Dirty money,’ O’Kane says and pockets it.
    ‘You should go on down home and make peace with your father.’
    ‘I’m not wanted there.’
    ‘Where are you wanted?’
    ‘Nowhere,’ he says and sits down at the end of the table as if he is about to be given food, staring out, his eyes like holes filled with vistas of nowhere. ‘I might go to the Low countries . . . they have lots of woods there and caves,’ he says with a sudden spurt of excitement.
    ‘Well, please God you’ll find your niche,’ the priest says and holds the door open for him to go out, then lifts his hand in some baleful mimicry of a farewell blessing. He stands dismayed for a long while.
    A curse on the man who puts his trust in man, Who relies on things of the flesh,
    Whose heart turns from the Lord,
    He is like dry scrub in the wastelands:
    If good comes he has no eyes for it,
    He settles in the parched places of the wilderness,
    A salt land, uninhabited.

Father
    On Friday, 15 April at approximately four o’clock, I was working on the road down from the hotel. I was accompanied by Michael Burke. We saw a car, a fairly big family car, maroon coloured, driving very fast. It was driven by my son. He was wearing dark glasses and had on a fisherman’s hat. It swung around in a hand brake turn and backed up the same way as it had come. The driver did this a few times and then he drew towards the digger where we were working at high speed and got through us. I am convinced that he was trying to drive through me and knock me down. I would have been thrown to the ground only for Michael Burke pulling me back towards the wall. He drove so close by me that a button came off my jacket. There is no doubt but that he was trying to get me. Two days later he drove the same car up and down the harbour front yelling, ‘Fucking provos, fucking provos.’ There was damage on the left rear wing of the car. Also he was growing a moustache. The next time I saw him was when I was in my own car and stopped at the bottom of the hill outside the bank. While I was there, a silver coloured car approached from the opposite direction. When he saw me he picked up speed and tore off, shouting some ‘f’ words through the window.

Aileen
    There’s word going around that my brother is back from England, that he was spotted in the north drinking champagne and then in Dundalk arguing in a car park, and then nearer home, thumbing a lift. He’s beginning to be a bit of a legend but I hope he isn’t around and if he is I’m glad I’ve moved away from Cloosh and made my own life here. This world is not his world and frankly I don’t know what his world is and he doesn’t know either, shuttled from one place to another down the years. No sooner would he be let