Read Grandmother and the Priests for Free Online Page B

incredibly beautiful countryside. The land was meadow, and somewhat flat, but the cloudscapes! Slowly he began to understand that these cloudscapes were the origins of the strange Irish legends. One sunset he paused, struck, to observe a spectacle he was never to see anywhere else.
     
    The green earth was wrapt in a faint mist, and so was anonymous and without feature. It rolled languidly to the horizon. Now cloudscapes anywhere else in the world have a way of standing in the sky. But in Ireland they appear to touch the earth, to rise from it, to be born of it, to be one with it, to merge with it. Edward saw a new earth, a new land, in the enormous clouds. First of all, looming against a red sky, stood a perfect castle, with towers and battlements and walls and a moat and slitted windows. Below it fell away a complete village, with tiny neat houses, roofed with crimson, and little winding streets and a green stream moving down to a greener meadow. Edward could actually discern the forms of sheep in the meadows, and the tiny figures of shepherds. He saw glows in the little windows of the houses, a lantern flash at the end of the street. But it was all so silent!
     
    “Impossible,” murmured Edward, with awe. “Fata Morgana.”
     
    As he watched the tower drifted into nothingness; the walls dropped away; the village was wrapt in a pink mist and hidden from his sight; the green meadows became dim and vanished. The clouds turned sullen and dark, pierced by one ember-like eye of the setting sun. A cold wind arose, and Edward heard cowbells and the complaints of cattle as they moved towards their paddocks. Somewhere a dog barked irascibly. An old man, in a two-wheeled cart, trundled by, pulling his cap at the sight of the young priest, then shrugging. The long purple twilight came down, and Edward stood and thought.
     
    He knew he did not have much imagination. He was too pragmatic for that, and too much of an Englishman. But now he was full of a strange excitement. Could it be possible that past scenes and past eras were indelibly impressed on the retina of Time, so that Time could reproduce them at capricious will? Edward took to roaming the countryside in his infrequent leisure, and watching and listening. Of course, the ‘superstition’ of ‘the natives’ was not to he countenanced by a pious and intellectual priest, even if he did live in an ancient thatched house full of creaks and moans in the moonlight, and even if he did hear weird and uncanny sounds in the dark of the moon, like the howling of ghostly wolves and the crying of witches. “There are more things in heaven and earth — ” Nonsense, he would say to himself, unlocking the church door at dawn, and looking anxiously down the village street for dilatory altar boys and the sacristan. The sexton was rarely there, and Edward would frequently have to pull the bell-ropes himself, a fact the villagers appeared to enjoy slyly. “He has the muscles on him,” the old women would say, pulling the shawls over their heads and fumbling for the rosaries in the pockets of their skirts. “It’s no harm it will do him.”
     
    The Mass is the central and holy celebration of the Church. Edward had always perceived this intellectually. Now, as he became bemused over the cloudscapes, and all the strangeness of them, he perceived the Mass as a tremendous Mystery. He had always been reverent. Now he was quietly ecstatic. He complained less to his people, so he began to find a simple dinner — apparently placed there by the ‘little people’ — on the self-scrubbed table in his dark and miniature kitchen. A piece of cold goose or chicken, a fish on Fridays and holy days, a covered dish of hot potatoes, a slice of simple cake, fresh fruit in season, a slab of cheese, a pitcher of goat’s milk, a pot of tea on the brick stove. Never questioning, he ate voraciously, for he was young. He was simply thankful — and silent — when his roof was mysteriously repaired