Read Online The Travelling Man by Marie Joseph - Free Book Online Page B

brown skirt. He covered his eyes with a hand at the terrible pity of it.
    ‘Have you seen the doctor, child?’
    ‘Oh, no! Don’t tell me to see the doctor, Father. The last time we had him was when our Eddie had rheumatic fever bad, an’ it took more than a year to pay him off.’ Tears spilled from her eyes. ‘I don’t need no doctor. I just need to be told what to do. I don’t
know
what to do. I ask meself every minute what to do …’
    ‘Kneel down, child.’
    Over the bowed head and shaking shoulders, over the sounds of her sobbing, the priest said a prayer. It was a prayer vague in content, asking for forgiveness for Annie’s sins, unproductive even to the old man’s own ears.
    ‘You must hand over your worry to God. He alone can show you the way,’ he finished, then reached for his cloak. ‘In the meantime there must be some woman, some
good
woman you can talk to …’ His voice tailed away. He should have been prepared for what this child had been trying to tell him – it was a confession he’d listened to often enough, but she had knocked him for six. He turned at the door. For a man to take advantage of young Annie Clancy, little scarecrow that she was in her bunchy ragged clothes, was an obscenity. It was a spitting on the face of God.
    ‘No, don’t go doing anything foolish. Will you promise me that?’
    Annie bowed her head. A dreadful certainty was dawning on her. Father O’Leary hadn’t known what to do, either. She’d embarrassed him by what she’d told him. He hadn’t been able to get out of the house quick enough. His face was as red as if he’d had it boiled up in a pudding cloth.
    Automatically, with a quiet desperation, she reversed a vest and a pair of bloomers on the clothes maiden. Giving their other sides a chance to dry.
    It was an almost primeval rage that had flushed Father O’Leary’s face to scarlet. He was known in that part of Lancashire as a man of God, with a wealth of charity and forgiveness in him, a priest first but a man a close second. In his young days, before he left Ireland, he had worked on and off as a fairground boxer, taking on anyone for the price of a meal and a pint of good milk stout. He’d had it in him to turn professional, they’d said, and that might have been if he hadn’t killed a man one day, felling him with a single blow to the head.
    It was not his fault. The man could have died at any given minute from a clot of blood just waiting to be dislodged. It was all part of the game, they said. And let him bear in mind that when he turned professional things would be more ordered, with doctors examining a man before he stepped into the ring. He was a potential champion, they swore. Altogether in the world light-heavyweight class.
    Father O’Leary walked slowly down the sloping street, clenching and unclenching his hands, feeling that same strength in them from so long ago. From that time to this he had never once lifted a hand in anger, but this day … He stopped and stared down at his hands, balling them into fists.
    If Laurie Yates, sailing a far distant sea at that very moment, had been able to see the expression on the old priest’s face, he would have wished himself ten fathoms deep.
    It was later that afternoon when Father O’Leary came up with an idea and acted upon it. Poor little Annie Clancy had been wrong about it being too windy for snow. It was coming down like a great white curtain, soundlessly, from a leaden sky. Snow meant chilblains on the priest’s knobbly toes and fingers, swelling them up into a purple agony. His boots leaked, and the woollen mittens on his hands seemed to soak up the wet before he’d gone ten yards.
    To get where he was going he had to pass the Clancy house, and to his shame he was glad to see the door closed and no sign of Annie. He walked on down the street, being careful where he put his feet, knowing it wouldn’t be long before her young brothers slurred and slithered down this stretch of flags,