After the Lockout Read Online Free PDF

voice barks bitterly and a door slams. Lying on my back, I look up and see Charlie hovering.
    â€˜All right, I’m ready to go home now,’ I say.

    It’s been so long since she last even left the house you doubt your own sight. She’s standing at the edge of the lake like a will o’ the wisp, looking like she might blow away. You reach the spot, your spot, where you and Maggie meet, and look up at her in her billowing white robes. She doesn’t seem to see you. The sun is melting like it does in autumn, and the wind gusts. You shout out and she turns to face you, an old woman at forty-five. She smiles beatifically, and you glimpse your mother, not the banshee she has become.
    â€˜Victor, son: life is in the letting go,’ she says.
    She turns away and steps off the high edge of the lake. You watch her fall, serene as a snowflake.

    Stanislaus felt not a day over sixty-five as he reached the crossroads, a mile and a half’s walk from Madden, mostly uphill. Not bad for a man passed over on health grounds ten years before. He turned back and kept a good, even pace, his footsteps ticking like a metronome. Walking was always good for clearing the head. He thought about full bishops promoted since his retirement, all of whom Cardinal Logue, in his vast wisdom, had recommended. He knew of four who were not well and three more who frankly were incapacitated. Soon Madden was in sight, nestling in the gentle hollow. The street lamps flickered against the failing light. From up ahead, just outside the village, came bad singing and laughter, and Stanislaus saw two lads of perhaps eighteen horsing around. Stanislaus’s knuckles whitened on his stick. ‘John McGrath and Aidan Cavanagh,’ he cried. They stopped dead and straightened up in exaggerated protestations of sobriety. Eyes red like diseased rabbits. The stench ofcheap spirit damned them. ‘It’s not even six o’clock and you boys are drunk as lords. Have you no work to be at today?’
    â€˜Everybody quit early the day, Father,’ said McGrath, the post-master’s son.
    â€˜Where did you get the drink?’ Stanislaus demanded.
    â€˜I don’t know, Fa’er,’ said young Cavanagh, the schoolteacher’s brother. Stanislaus slapped the blackthorn stick against the boy’s thigh. ‘Pius, we got it off Pius!’
    â€˜Is this. How you. Behave. When your families. At home. Haven’t even. A spare penny. To waste?’ Stanislaus uttered bitterly, punctuating his speech with slaps to their legs. They yelped like puppies. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves.’
    This business of Pius Lennon and the poteen was getting out of hand. He was making the stuff in such prodigious quantities and selling it so cheaply that he was bringing many others to ruin with him. Nevertheless Stanislaus was troubled by the thought of the Victor fellow as the correcting influence, to Pius and to the wider problems connected to Pius’s dissolution. That such a person would be anyone’s idea of salvation! Obedience and discipline were the answers to vice, indolence and dissolution. People needed leadership from the cloth, not from radical politicals. Stanislaus had read many of the socialistic texts. Mostly screeds written by palpably troubled souls. He found most striking the universal rage and the rejection of authority – the former a consequence of the latter, he believed. Marxians said the meaning of life was struggle, but Stanislaus knew that grace required acceptance. True freedom came through surrender. Only rage was possible where grace was not. In lands where grace was banished, no depravity was unthinkable. The Russian experiment, for example, was sure to end in horror. He hung uphis overcoat in the kitchen and opened the range door. As he poked at the fire and watched the flames rise higher, he wondered if he might work up his ruminations into a paper.
    â€˜It’s after a quarter