The whole parish turned out.  Mairead and her friend, Caitlin, walked the whole five miles to see, cold and damp in just their shifts and a scrap of shawl between them.

It was Spring by then and drier weather.  A cold East wind out of Leitrim.  Mairead’s thin, bare arms were pale as Father Nowlan’s corpse: though, overall, she thought he looked considerably healthier.  Plump almost.  Yes: the fever had hollowed something out around his eyes.  Unfinished business, she supposed.  Death would have time enough to gather in its hairst.  And sure, wouldn’t the good priest be well out of it by now: safe in Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ for didn’t they say that, in innocence, he was as a child. Though some children have filthy habits, mind.

But still, now he was passed, it wouldn’t do to think ill of the man – or the child – or the priest – or whatever he was, for hadn’t he administered the Extreme Unction to her mother and her brother, Padraig, when they were almost not-quite gone?  She minds he stepped into the house that last time, grim and feart.  It was already evening and this was not the first house he had visited that day, traipsing from howf to howf across the township.

The last year’s peats had still not dried in the stack.  All year it rained and rained and rained till the potatoes rotted in the ground and the corn was flattened in the field.  Not a glimpse of sun or a spark of warmth and the peat stack bleeding in the smirr.

There was no light and scant comfort from the hearth.  She lit a taper so the man could see to read though, given the number of times he had performed the last rights that Winter, it was a wonder he didn’t have it by heart yet.  Still, you’d think, not something you would want to get wrong – misremember: for the sake of the victim, obviously.

Mairead scratched at her birds-nest thatch of dark hair.

Her brother, Padraig, had already been anointed and gone four days before they called the priest back.  Her mother had already passed through the havering and seemed as if asleep – as if dead but still breathing.  The room was rank with the smell of flesh rotting on her hands and face.

Mairead’s father stood outside in the evening chill, smoking tobacco he had gotten God knows where.  He would have nothing to do with her mother.  Not now. 

“Already gone,” he said.  “She’s gone.”

But she was breathing still: laboured but regular.  And there had been hope in that for surely she, Mairead, had survived.  Her fever broke and the rash subsided, the red spots fading from her pale skin.  Some survive.  Some, like her father, never took to it.

There was always hope. 

And then the priest called and there it was.  A different kind of hope: a hope in the hereafter and, better still, somewhere else.  Somewhere where it wasn’t always overcast and raining.  Somewhere where you felt no hunger.  Where it never felt cold.  Where you wore the raiments of angels, slept on dry bracken.  Where a wood fire roared in the hearth.  Hope!

Four weeks later, Hope had come for Father Nowlan – four weeks to the day after Mairead’s mother passed that night.  Four weeks after the mumbling of prayers behind Father Nowlan’s handkerchief with Mairead, for want of a boy or a table, holding the taper and the glass vial of holy oil.

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per visum deliquisti.”

The priest glanced across at Mairead, needing something.

“Amen,” she said.

He anointed her eye-lids.

“Minister vero, si est in Sacris, vel ipsemet Sacerdos, post quamlibet Unctionera, tergat loca inuncta novo globulo bombacii, vel rei similis, eumque in vasc mundo reponat, et ad Ecclesiam postea deferat, comburat, cineresque projiciat in sacrarium.”

There were stinking sores by then in her mother’s ears.  Mairead saw the priest baulk then marshall himself, pushing forward his fingertips as if on the end of a long pole.

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per auditum deliquisti.”

Father Nowlan was looking at her with longing in his eyes.  Lord knows, he had looked longingly at her before, ever since her flowers came – Mairead and every girl in the Parish – but it was not that kind of longing.  Was it forgiveness that he wanted?  Or permission? 

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per odoratum deliquisti.”

But, unlike with Padraig, he only crossed the oil on her mother’s forehead. 

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per gustum et locutionem deliquisti.”

And now she didn’t bleed: as if the hope of new life itself had withdrawn from her. Not that she needed a child in the midst of this calamity but it was one less thing she used to have.  Still, no priest was going to touch her now and any fellow would have to be desperate.

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per tactum deliquisti.”

Her mother’s hands were rotten black.  Mairead saw the priest shudder, shake his head.

“Say it, Father. Say it.”

Once again, only on the forehead.

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem et suam piisimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per tactum deliquisti.”

He shuffled back as if he had done a vile thing.  As he stood up, he cracked his head upon the roof tree and soot and shreds of straw showered down on the three of them.  She thought he heard him sob before he hurried out.

Her mother was still breathing.  If she had hope now, it wasn’t visible.  She didn’t smell sweet like the shriven saints.  A horse neighed and then she heard the clatter of hooves on the track. She wiped a straggle of thatch from her mother’s forehead.  It was moist and sticky with the oil. Mairead still had the vial of holy oil. 

When she ran outside, the priest had already dissolved into the night.  She followed the scent of tobacco smoke to where her father was sitting on the big rock past the midden.

“She gone?”

Mairead shook her head. “He forgot this,” she said, showing him the oil.

“He’ll not be wanting that.”

“He’ll be needing it.”

“No one needs it, Mairead.  No-one needs it.  Aye.  Except maybe him.”

She sat beside him.  Whatever scant warmth there had been in the feverish fug of the howf was absent here and she wished she had brought her shawl.  She wanted to ask for a draw on his pipe.  Just for the togetherness.  But that would mean…

So she sat for a minute. Breathing the chill night air and whatever warmth she could sift from the spill of smoke.

“What’ll we do?” she asked.

“Go on, lass.  What can we do?”

“Here?”

“Aye.  Here.  It’s our land.”

“Does Sir Edward know that?”

“No, but he’s a deluded eedjit!”

“I best go in,” Mairead said.

“Don’t.  It’ll make no difference.”

“I’d like to see her go,” she said. “To a better place.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Thousands were dying every week.  There was no fol-de-rol available for Mairead Murray.  Not even a wake.  A coffin with a trap door in its base: a shared ditch for a lair. At least the priest got his own box. Educated see. Literate.  So even the Protestant gentry showed a little respect.  When he was dead.

Alive they hated him.  He had faith in Pastorini’s prophecies.  A different sort of hope.  Hope of an end to oppression.  

Good riddance, you would think they would say.  But no: when it comes to it, he was more like them than us.  Is what they thought.

But sure, it rained and rained and the priest said that must be of some significance.[i] There must be hope in that.  A judgement coming on the heretics.  Though it was the likes of the McGuillans shivering and starving in the townships, not the heritors in their big houses.  The fever was less choosy.  Maybe that was a second plague then? Or the third.  The rain and then the famine then the fever.  How many plagues did it take to persuade Pharoah?  Lord, was there more of this shit to come?

The head of Father Nowlan’s funeral procession was almost at the graveyard before its end reached Mairead and Caitlin and they tagged themselves on, curious and compliant.

Caitlin thinks she’ll die any day now.  But sure she hasn’t had the headaches or the fever let alone the spots.  There was hope for her yet.

And am I, Mairead wondered, one of the saved then?  Redeemed already: waiting for the flight from Egypt.  After the last plague.  Surely you wouldn’t be spared one plague to perish in the next: she had endured her sickness after all.  The cold and the hunger, the sickness and now the drizzling grief.

As they approach the cemetery, she can already hear the keener at the head of the coffin intoning the slow rhythmic salutation.   The mourners rocked and swayed to the slow pulse of the keener’s song. 

“Alas! Alas! The pity!”

The song seemed to draw them up, coo’s tail, along the rocky track.  Already the mourners at the foot of the coffin are raising an ullaloo as the girls finally step through the gap in the drystone dyke and find their places, in the back of the crowd, as the second singer takes up the gol, his lamentation.  And Mairead can feel the sorrow well up like black water, cold and black, peat stained and rippling.  For the priest and not the priest.  For her family and not her family.  For Connacht, for Sligo, for Ballintocher. As they join in the chorus, rocking and swaying in the grief for a man none of them liked much but still, by the will of God, who was theirs.

[i] In fact, a consequence of the recent eruption of Tambura.