Free The Parish by Alice Taylor

determination to find the lost head. As the search continued, my builder friend clattered up the stairs.
    “Any luck?” he inquired with a smirk on his face.
    “I’m looking for a head,” I told him.
    “Yerra, half the country is functioning without one of them,” he told me. “What would an ould king want one for?”
    “Still, he’d look better with it,” I informed him.
    “Maybe,” he agreed; “though I see some faces around here and people would be better off without them.”
    I decided at this point that he was not very sympathetic to my situation, but I was too quick in my judgment because just then he shifted a kneeler and there was the head, or rather half a head, as all the poor king had was a face with nothing behind it. My friend was off again.
    “Just the job,” he declared. “Most people are operatingwith half a head anyway.”
    “I’m going to restore him,” I informed him smugly.
    “There’s one born every day,” he declared, shaking his head at the stupidity of his fellow humans.
    “Will you help me carry them down the stairs?” I requested.
    “Missus, you don’t need two wise men; you need two strong men.”
    But despite his protestations he manoeuvred the two battered wise men down the winding narrow stairs.
    They were heavy so I brought up the wheelbarrow to carry them and their spare parts down the hill to their new home. I steered the wheelbarrow in the back door, wrapped my arms around each king in turn and eased him on to the hall table. It was probably as near as I would ever come to hugging a royal. However, these were two weighty royals and each move tested the strength of my muscles.
    When they were anchored on the table, I stood back and surveyed them. They were a sorry sight but one day they must have been quite beautiful. They had been forced to abdicate in the mid-1960s and had been in the crib for about forty years before that, so my two kings were almost one hundred years old. And they looked every year of it! I brought out the Hoover and sucked all the dust off their outsides and then went down the throat of the headless one and cleaned out his insides. Then I rang a local potter about the possibility of moulding a head for my wise man, but I knew after a short conversation that he did not consider it a viable project and wanted to get rid of me. It would have to be a “little red hen” job.
    It was the week before Christmas and, as I drew in holly from the garden to decorate the house, the two wise men keptan eye on my comings and goings, and as the days passed by, the memory of their counterparts in the church of my childhood began to come alive in my mind. Each caller to the house was taken to visit the two wise men. Their original roles were reversed and, instead of being the royal visitors to the crib, they were now the visited. On Christmas Eve, they guarded the stuffed turkey as she waited for her big day, and later when I lit the usual Christmas candle on the back window, they waited in the shadows. Their day was about to dawn.
    After the Christmas dinner, I dragged my two wise men up to the attic where I while away many hours pretending that I am an artist. I had big plans for them but I was also open to inspiration from them. My sister Ellen, who also likes to paint, decided to adopt one of them. I parted with the small black fellow sporting the traces of a gold ear-ring. The evidence that he was originally black was pitted around his elbow and knee while the rest of him was a sludge grey.
    Our first problem was to give my wise man a new head and a new foot, but the head was the big problem. Amazingly enough, with a wooden spoon down his neck and an Irish linen tea towel for a brain, he was moulded into shape with a wonderful gun-full of gooey clay. When the back of his head had been shaped and covered with long flowing hair his face was put into position. When the clay dried, his face was secure and he had a sound head on his shoulders. With similar