Free The Dark by John McGahern

flutter, so that it wouldn’t have chance to seep through the wool and stain the sheet. Wet came on your hand as you removed the sock and let it fall over the shoes on the floor again. You were able to lie on your back and stare at the ceiling in more stupor than calm.
    You’d broken the three weeks discipline since Confession, you’d not be able to go to Communion in the morning. You’d never be able to be a priest either, you’d drift on without being able to decide anything, it was easier to let it go. You shivered as the interrogation of an hour ago came back, the squalor, but it was better try and shut it out.
    The clocks kept up their insane medley, the single strikes of the half-hours, the medley of the hours. The yellow of the moonlight faded as the day grew light. You stared at the ceiling, different number of boards than over the old bed with the broken brass bells at home, so much variation too in the grain and the knots.
    “Will the morning ever come, ever come, ever come?” as you waited for the cursed clocks, until you could stand it no longer, and dressed and went down outside, holding the knocker as you closed the hall door so as to make no noise.
    The white ground mist filled the morning, promise of a blazing day, the church vague in white twenty yards away. A spider netting of it lay on the laurels, on the cactus leavesabove the iron bugle, it lay on the grass across the graves. Your hand left a gleaming black handtrack on the mudguard of the car, your feet left shining wet tracks on the grass between the graves.
    Your cheeks burned with the fever of fatigue, you wished you could lie naked on all this wet coolness and suck and roll your face in the wet grass, press the hot pores of your body against the wetness.
    You noticed nothing except these and the flitting of a wren low in the laurels. You ground your teeth, your hands clenched and unclenched, the mind bent on destruction of the night before, but only managing to circle and circle in its own futility.
    You couldn’t be a priest, never now, that was all. You’d never raise anointed hands. You’d drift into the world, world of girls and women, company in gay evenings, exact opposite of the lonely dedication of the priesthood unto death. Your life seemed set, without knowing why, it was fixed, you had no choice. You were a drifter, you’d drift a whole life long after pleasure, but at the end there’d be the reckoning. If you could be a priest you’d be able to enter that choking moment without fear, you’d have already died to longing, you’d have already abandoned the world for that reality, there’d be no confusion. But the night and room and your father and even the hedge around the orchard at home were all confusion, there was no beginning nor end.
    In the grappling the things of the morning lost their starkness, you were standing lost between the graves when the door opened, and the priest was there, in his soutane, a jug and heavy latchkey in his hand.
    “Good morning. I didn’t expect to find you afoot so early.”
    “Good morning, father. I couldn’t sleep much.”
    “The first night in a strange house is always bad. By the look of the mist the day’ll be another scorcher.”
    ‘It looks as if it’s going to be hot, father. It’s nearly always hot when the mist’s like that,” the pingball went, and did you wonder how much of your life would go on these courteous noises.
    “Would you like to serve Mass for me?” the priest said, you’d joined each other on the gravel path.
    “I’d be glad to, father.”
    “Usually John serves it, but a break will do him no harm. He’ll have breakfast for us soon as it’s over.”
    “That’s fine so, father.”
    “We’re not very likely to have worshippers. No one comes on the weekdays except seldom. It’s the real country.”
    With the latchkey he unlocked the sacristy door, then went out through the altar and down to the main door, where he lifted off the heavy iron bar,