The Copper Beech Read Online Free PDF

getting on myself. Maybe I’ll start thinking the same way.’ His voice was jokey. ‘But I have so much to do I don’t feel old.’
    ‘You should have someone to help you.’ Maddy said only what everyone else in Shancarrig said. The old priest was doddery now. Father Gunn did everything. They definitely needed a new curate.
    And it wasn’t as if the priests’ housekeeper was any help. Mrs Kennedy had a face like a long drink of water. She was dressed in black most of the time, mourning for a husband who had died so long ago hardly anyone in Shancarrig could remember him. A good priests’ housekeeper should surely be kind and supportive, fill the role of mother, old family retainer and friend.
    It had to be said that Mrs Kennedy played none of these roles. She seemed to smoulder in resentment that she herself had not been given charge of the parish. She snorted derisively when anyone offered to help out in the parish work. It was a tribute to Father Gunn’s own niceness that so many people stepped in to help with the problems caused by Monsignor O’Toole being almost out of the picture, and Mrs Kennedy being almost too much in it.
    Then the news came that there was indeed a new priest on the way to Shancarrig. Someone knew someone in Dublin who had been told definitely. He was meant to be a very nice man altogether.
    About six months later, in the spring of 1952, the new curate arrived. He was a pale young man called Father Barry. He had long delicate white hands, light fair hair and dark, startling blue eyes. He moved gracefully around Shancarrig, his soutane swishing gently from side to side.He had none of the bustle of Father Gunn, who always seemed uneasily belted into his priestly garb and distinctly ill at ease in the vestments.
    When Father Barry said mass a shaft of sunlight seemed to come in and touch his pale face, making him look more saintly than ever. The people of Shancarrig loved Father Barry and in her heart Maddy Ross often felt a little sorry for Father Gunn, who had somehow been overshadowed.
    It wasn’t
his
fault that he looked burly and solid. He was just as good and attentive to the old and the feeble, just as understanding in Confession, just as involved in the school. And yet she had to admit that Father Barry brought with him some new sense of exhilaration that the first priest didn’t have.
    When Father Barry came to her classroom and spoke he didn’t talk vaguely about the missions and the need to save stamps and silver paper for mission stations, he talked of hill villages in Peru where the people ached to hear of Our Lord, where there was only one small river and that dried up during the dry seasons, leaving the villagers to walk for miles over the hot dry land to get water for the old and for their babies.
    As they sat in the damp little schoolhouse in Shancarrig, Maddy and Mixed Infants were transported miles away to another continent. The Brennans had broken shoes and torn clothes, they even bore the marks of a drunken father’s fist, but they felt rich beyond the dreams of kings compared to the people in Vieja Piedra, thousands of miles away.
    The very name of this village was the same as their own. It meant Old Rock. The people in this village were crying out to them across the world for help.
*
    Father Barry fired the children with an enthusiasm never before known in that school. And it wasn’t only in Maddy Ross’s class. Even under the sterner eye of Mrs Kelly, who might have been expected to say that we should look after our own first before going abroad to give help, the collections increased. And in Mr Kelly’s class the fierce master echoed the words of the young priest, but in his own way.
    ‘Come out of that, Jeremiah O’Connor. You’ll want your arse kicked from here to Barna and back if you can’t go out and raise a shilling for the poor people of Vieja Piedra.’
    When he gave the Sunday sermon Father Barry often closed his disturbing blue eyes and spoke of how