The Village Read Online Free

down the stairs and the front door banged shut behind him. I felt like somebody on a deserted island when all the boats had pulled out.
    Miss Brown and myself were on our own. The only light at the end of the tunnel was the knowledge that Sheila was due at lunchtime which was about two hours away. It was the longest two hours I ever put down. I did nothing to comfort MissBrown. Because she had always kept everybody at a distance, it seemed like an infringement of her dignity to touch her. Not that I wanted to touch her, but I felt that I should be doing something to help, except that I did not know what. With a great sense of relief I heard the door opening and Sheila’s light step on the stairs. I went out to the landing to prepare her for the situation inside.
    “Oh my God! What are we supposed to do?” she asked in alarm.
    “Wait until she dies, I think,” I said lamely, but I felt much better with somebody to sit with me. And so we sat, one on either side of the window, looking down onto a wet, deserted Sunday-afternoon street where a cold wind whipped a newspaper back and forth. In the bed beside us the breathing became more laboured and we knelt to say the rosary and the few prayers for the dying that we knew.
    We heard the front door open and a friend of Miss Brown’s arrived. We were delighted to see her because she was much more competent to deal with the situation than either of us. When Miss Brown died at about four in the afternoon, the friend took charge. She dispatched Sheila to the undertaker for a habit, and told me that I would be needed to help her lay out the corpse. I was too bewildered to refuse and anyway there did not appear to be any alternative as this woman was fairly old and could not do it all by herself.
    I was young and had never before seen anybody die, still less had I ever laid anyone out. My new acquaintance with death haunted me for weeks. I would wake up at night to the sound of Miss Brown’s tortured breathing and the feel of her cold, clammy body. But gradually my horror faded and later I regretted that I had been of such little comfort to a dignified old lady who had died alone with nobody to hold her hand.
    There were many steps on the Bandon social ladder. Theold rich, the new rich, the old poor and the new poor, and on each of these steps were pockets of different religious denominations. It was like a chest of drawers, and while all drawers ran smoothly together, people were inclined to move around within their own compartment. When I asked Dan why this was so he commented tersely, “This was a garrison town; it leaves its mark.” Whatever the reason, it was interesting. At first I found the town cold and austere but gradually I grew to like the old place, with its narrow winding streets on hills and the footbridge across the river. Bandon was rather like a reserved old lady, I felt, and once I began to see behind the façade I learned to appreciate its qualities.
    Occasional intrusions upset this air of faded gentility. We had our own town flasher whom we christened “Johnny Walker”. He crept around in a pair of knee-high wellingtons and a long black overcoat; a crumpled beret sat like an overgrown mushroom on top of his head. If you came on him unexpectedly on going around a corner, he whipped open his overcoat like double doors to display all. However, his tattered underclothes, which acted like lace curtains, rather defeated the purpose of the exercise.
    At work we dealt at our switchboard with calls from smaller post offices; they passed their telephone calls on to us and we then connected them up. It all worked by numbers and nobody mentioned names, but a little old lady in one of the offices had the delightful habit of coming on when her parish priest wanted to make a call and announcing in a voice loaded with reverence: “Hold on for Fr O’Hara!” The tone of her voice suggested that we ought to genuflect in homage, and I always felt that her announcement should