Free Winter Song by James Hanley Page B

disfigured—is that true?’
    â€˜Well, yes and no, ah. sure I don’t think it’s noticeable really, being at the back of him and not the front of him. But what’s that matter if the creature’s alive?’
    â€˜True enough.’
    The door opened. Father Moynihan said softly ‘Please come in. Thank you, Delahane.’
    Desmond Fury went in. At first he was a little frightened approaching the bed.
    â€˜Dennis Fury,’ whispered the priest ‘your son has come. Do you understand? Your son has come to see you. He is here. Look at me now.’
    The old man looked up, Father Moynihan thought for a moment that the man was trying to smile—then he said, patting the sick man’s hand—‘I’ll leave you now.’
    He walked away, the door closed, he left Desmond Fury standing alone in the room looking down at what the sea had flung back. Desmond heard the door close, he stood listening, he waited, he wanted the feeling of being alone, suddenly he knelt down at the bed.
    â€˜God help you,’ he said, ‘it’s me. It’s Desmond, father.’
    He saw the hand moving, feeling blindly for something, he gripped and held it.
    â€˜Poor dad,’ he said.
    A lump came into his throat, he could not speak, he looked at his father’s head, the cruel stripe, as of some powerful claw that had torn downwards, with speed, with fury, from head to shoulder.
    â€˜My God Almighty, I don’t know who this is. I suppose it is my father. But mother to see this—she’ll never know him. The sea has had him too long, you can see. My God, you can see, it has struck and struck and smashed, and torn his life out of him.’
    The man in the bed was looking at him now, out of tired eyes, the lips began to move.
    Desmond Fury surprised himself, he lay his head on the white, hard hands, and wept.
    â€˜It’s me, dad, Desmond.’
    The sound seemed to come from the depths, a half-hiss, the words came: ‘I know.’
    â€˜I’m terribly sorry, dad, and I’m glad. Ah, you’ve had your little bit, but no more. By Christ, no more for you. Can you see me, father, can you hear me?’
    â€˜Your mother never came, who always came.’
    â€˜She will.’
    â€˜Always she came. At night she would light that lamp, the little red one, the night I’d be coming from the sea. Do you remember that?’
    Desmond bowed his head.
    â€˜She’s sold me up, your mother’s sold me up. I says to the priest to-day “I want to go home,” and he says “There isn’t any,” and so here I am, and she never came to see me, and I’ve been listening here all the day. They think I’m sleeping when I’m not. They thought I was drunk the first night they brought me here. I was in the sea that time and they didn’t know.’
    â€˜Try not to excite yourself, dad,’ Desmond said, ‘please try; sure mother will come.’
    â€˜All that wide emptiness I come to—why did you let her do it?’
    â€˜Ah, why, she thought you were gone and well gone, that’s all. The creature thought that and nothing else.’
    He looked away from the bed, ‘This isn’t a man at all,’ he thought, ‘that fellow’s right, he’s grown quite small,’ that fellow being the parish priest, Richard Moynihan, and since if he could not call him Father, he could call him Moynihan.
    â€˜Where are you?’
    â€˜I’m here. It’s O.K. I’m here.’
    â€˜Can you lift me up a little,’ his father said.
    He raised him, backed the pillows up behind. ‘No weight, a shell, poor old dad.’
    The tom-tom began to beat again in the old man’s head. ‘Your mother never came. It hurt me. She always met me off the ship.’
    â€˜She’ll come—never fear,’ he said.
    â€˜She broke everything up.’
    But he had no answer to that.
    â€˜It is