The Whitest Flower. Brendan Graham

It wasn’t that she particularly wanted a girl; another pair of labourer’s hands to look after them in later years would be equally welcome. Only God could decide, she told herself – but still, she just knew the baby was a girl.

      There was no breakfast to be prepared – they would not break the fast before receiving Holy Communion – so Ellen was able to spend longer than usual getting the girls ready. She started with Katie and Mary, giving their hair one hundred strokes each with the silver and bone brush that the Máistir had given Cáit as a wedding gift. After her mother’s death, the brush had passed to Ellen. She never used it without recalling her father, reminiscing with that faraway look in his eyes:

      ‘I would sit there of an evening while the shadows moved across the lake and the meannán aerach would swoop down through the sky, his wings making the noise of a young goat, and I would watch your mother as she stroked her hair one hundred times with that brush, drawing it through the strands till they were like gold-red silk of the finest ever seen. And she all the while a-crooning in the old style, a soft suantraí. She never counted the strokes at all, but she was never one more nor less, because many’s the time I counted them myself,’ he would recall, longing for those days to be back.

      Now, as she stroked Katie’s hair with her mother’s brush, Ellen was conscious of her role in carrying on and affirming the simple beauty of the lives of those who had gone before.

      Patrick had dressed himself, and was now lacing up a pair of old boots which Michael had worn as a boy. Ellen smiled at this handing down between father and son. Yet another connection between then and now; crossings and linkings, always there, always reminding.

      When she had finished with the children, Ellen took down her good red petticoat and dusted it off. Not a bright red – more the colour of autumn leaves. Surprisingly, it did not clash with her hair but merely added to the radiation of colour which seemed to encircle her. She had already brushed her wild dos of hair into some semblance of order and it now cascaded, loosely bound, at the back of her neck. Finally she draped her shawl – dark green, as her eyes – over her shoulders. This would cover her head on the journey to Finny and for the duration of Mass.

      Michael, his Sunday cap perched jauntily over his black curls, watched approvingly as his family emerged from the cabin. Some of their older neighbours had already begun the trek, and they could see them in twos and threes negotiating the steep path that ran alongside Crucán na bPáiste – the burial place of the children.

      To their right lay the dark beauty of Lough Nafooey, and above it the mountains, like steps in the September sky running all the way back to Connemara. Ahead of them, Bóithrín a tSléibhe wound its way over the crest of the mountain to Finny – the village on the banks of the river which connected the Mask and Lough Nafooey. Everything bound together, thought Ellen, fitting so well. Just like a family.

      ‘Katie, come back here!’

      Ellen’s reverie was broken by Michael’s warning shout as the child careered dangerously close to the side of the mountain. For a moment, Katie looked hurt. Then, breaking into a big smile, she raced back to her mother.

      ‘I just wanted to get these for you,’ she said, gifting to Ellen some purple and yellow wildflowers she had snatched from the edge of the mountain.

      ‘Thank you, a stóirín!’ Ellen smiled at Katie’s burst of generosity. ‘Now, take my hand. You, too, Mary. Hurry up now, we mustn’t be late for Mass.’

      * * *

      As they made their descent, Father O’Brien emerged from the church. He looked up at the mountain track, seeing his people gathering in to hear the Word of God.

      Among the black-clad figures of the old men and women, the sun seemed to pick out the tall figure of Ellen Rua O’Malley as, hand in hand with her twin daughters, she hastened down towards the church. Father O’Brien wondered what fate awaited them, given the news he must shortly break.

      Deep in thought, the priest went back inside to make his final preparations for the Mass. Since Archbishop MacHale had stationed him at Clonbur, he had come to look forward to the one Sunday in a month when he said Mass here at the little church-of-ease in Finny. He loved this place and its people. Here in the midst of the mountains and the lakes, he heard the voice of God much more clearly than in the suffocating cloisters of Maynooth. And the French professors of theology there had taught him little compared to the peasants hereabouts with their humility, their gratitude for the precious few gifts bestowed on them, and their forbearance and dignity in the face of an unrelenting struggle for survival. On the Mass Sunday they flocked to the little Finny church. Some walked the near distance from Kilbride, but others faced more difficult journeys: skirting the edge of Lough Mask round from Glentrague, or climbing Bóithrín a tSléibhe up and over the mountain from Maamtrasna.

      This would be his biggest test so far, and he did not want to fail them. But how was he to tell the peasants and mountainside cottiers who made up his flock of the news he had learned on his recent visit to the Archbishop in Tuam? What hope had he to offer them, what alternatives? None, he thought, except faith in the goodness of an all-providing God. Or, failing that, hope in ‘thy kingdom come’.

      At least he could advise them to dig early rather than waiting until October to lift the potatoes.

      Even so, maybe he was already too late.

      When they reached the church there was still fifteen minutes to go till Mass. As was customary, Ellen, the two girls and Patrick – the latter with some resistance – went and knelt on the right-hand side of the aisle, while Michael, having doffed his cap, joined the men on the left-hand side.

      Ellen thought that Father O’Brien looked a bit on edge as he took his place in the pulpit. He was nice, this new young priest. He had time for everyone, and he wasn’t all fire and brimstone as some of the clergy were. He had a holy face which shone with an inner light throughout the Mass and particularly at the Consecration. His hair was dark brown and neatly kept, in the way of clerics, but his eyebrows were the darkest she ever saw, darker even than Michael’s. She was tempted to look across the church to where Michael was, but knew she mustn’t – the old ones would be watching her, and she mustn’t give scandal by looking across the aisle.

      ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo,’ Father O’Brien intoned. Ellen liked the way he said the Latin. It was as if his Western brogue left him when he spoke the chosen language of the Church.

      The Máistir had studied Latin in the seminary at Maynooth and had taught her enough that she could follow most of the Mass. But she thought it a cold language. Latin didn’t have the life, the earthiness of the Gaelic tongue and was only slightly ahead of ‘the narrow language of the Sasanach’ – as the valley people referred to spoken English – which had neither poetry nor music to it.

      The sermon had started. She had better listen instead of wandering in her mind. Father O’Brien had a habit of picking out a member of his congregation and fixing his eye on them when he spoke.

      In fact, Ellen needn’t have worried. Father O’Brien had come to the conclusion that eye-contact might work in the cities, but the people here were generally so shy and in awe of him that it just served to embarrass them. During last month’s Sunday Mass in Finny, while preaching on the Sixth Commandment – ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ – he had happened to catch the eye of Roberteen Bawn. The boy had looked as if he would bolt from the church. And he just a harmless enough young fellow, unlikely to be up to anything much under his mother’s hawk-like eye. Yet Father O’Brien was in no doubt that his sermon had seriously unsettled young Roberteen. Today he would be more circumspect in the use of his eyes.

      He spoke to them in Irish: ‘Today, my dear people, instead of the usual sermon, I have something to read to you.’

      Ellen began to feel uneasy as the priest began. Then, as the sermon continued, all the feelings of warmth, life and light which had filled her that morning seemed to ebb away.

      ‘The Archbishop has, in his wisdom, decreed that all priests in the Archdiocese should today lay the following information before the faithful.