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rest of the words were lost to
view as the song turned a bend* in the road.
    'I wonder if I'll see him again,'
pondered Father Rudden. For that reason he had refrained from paying Milligan
by the day.
    *This was a different bend to the
previous one. S.M.

 
Chapter Three

     

     
    The pub door flew in and a fast
stream of silent drinkers moved into position. The air was immediately
machine-gunned with a rapid series of orders -' Guinness - Whiskey - Stout -
Gin - Beer -
    Rum -Port - Beer -
Stout - Stout -'. There followed a silence as the day's troubles were
washed away with great liver-crippling draughts of alcohol. Stock still they
stood, waiting the warming glow that makes us acceptable to all men and vice
versa. The first one to feel a powerful benefit was blind George Devine, a thin
white El Greco figure with two sightless sockets.
    'Good evenin' all,' he said, 'it's
been a lovely day, has it not ?' He spoke with the
authority of a man who had seen it all. Blind since his sixth year, he could
just remember the shapes and colours of the countryside. Those fragile memories
were all he had to relieve his Guinness-blaok darkness. Still vivid was that
last seeing moment. His sister on the swing, him pushing her
away, mother calling 'Tea-time, children'.
    He had turned to say 'Coming Mum',
meeting the full force of the oncoming swing at eye line.
    O'Brien was rattling the bar with his
empty glass.
    'A drop of the real hard stuff now
lad,' he instructed the spotty thin potboy. O'Brien was the head man round
these parts. He ran the village grocery and took bets. He also had money in the
bank, a cousin in America and a girl in the family way. Forty years old, though
a little puffy in the face, he was still a handsome man.
    Like all men in Puckoon, he was
married but single after six at night. When the war started he had, in a fit of
drunken patriotism, joined the Con-naught Rangers, gone to France, caught the
crabs and won the v.c. Arriving home on leave, he was greeted like a hero,
given a presentation casket of blue unction and then thrown into jail for
having obscene French postcards in his haversack. Constable Milli-kudie had
confiscated the offending pictures, and slaved all night duplicating another
hundred. Disguised as a tout, he later sold them to visiting Americans. '
    Genuine Dublin night life,' he told
the startled tourists. As a result two American warships were crewless for a
month while the sailors searched Dublin for the like.
    O'Brien was joined by his friend, Dr
Sean Goldstein. So Semitic did he look, that even at all-Hebrew parties people
would say,
    'Who's that Jewish-looking feller ?' He hadjust come from the ailing Dan Doonan, where
the patient had been complaining of a slight improvement.
    'He's dying, for sure,' said
Goldstein, parting a Guinness with his nose, ' It's a coronary condition. I
give him the best drugs but, tsu, it's just a matter
of time, which I suppose is the sentence we're all under.'
    O'Brien lit a cigarette.' I sometimes
think,' he said, mixing his words with smoke, 'it would be kinder to do away
with incurables.'
    'Oh, nobody's incurable,' Goldstein
was quick to reply. 'It's just that we don't know the cure, and remember,
what's good for the dying is sometimes bad for the living.' 'Eh?'
    'Well, if he dies I'm worse off. Work
it out for yerself.' f
    'Oh, you're a hard man tell me,
what's your feeling about abortions den ?'
    'You're a Catholic. You know the
answer to that.'
    'True, but what's your opinion as a
medical man?'
    ' Murder .'
    'How about that
London
surgeon? The girl had been raped and he took it away. Was he right or wrong
?'
    'I'll ask you the question which goes
before that. Was the child right or wrong ?'
    O'Brien noticed a heated tone
creeping into Goldstein's voice.
    'Well Doc, at the time it wasn't
really a child.'
    ' If it
wasn't really a child O'Brien, what was all the fuss about ?'
    'Well,' began O'Brien, but was shut
up by Goldstein -
    'It's a bloody cosy little