After the Lockout Read Free

fringe flopping over his forehead as he opened it. He set it back on the desk, text facing up. Stanislaus couldn’t help but see it now.
    VL arrive 10 o’clock train STOP
Need transport from station CQ STOP
    â€˜So he’s coming then,’ said Father Daly. ‘Do you think he’ll be able to get his father back on the straight and narrow?’
    â€˜We must hope so.’
    They had given up any hope that Pius Lennon might sort himself out. Stanislaus called often but the door was never answered. Pius’s life seemed to revolve entirely around poteen; a lamentable state for a man formerly so substantial. He had taken to wandering the parish at all hours of day and night, flaming drunk, with a bottle in one hand and a loaded shotgun in the other. Not long ago he wandered up the street while the school-children were on their break, scattering them in terror. The postman Jeremiah McGrath said he remembered when Pius Lennon first came to the parish to marry his Deirdre, before he becamethe respected pillar that Stanislaus knew. Jeremiah said people were right to be terrified of Pius.
    â€˜His method is different but I fear Pius is going the same way as his wife,’ said Stanislaus.
    Pius owned several hundred acres in the east of the parish and Madden’s economy had long depended on the Lennon land. Pius had started his drinking after his Deirdre’s death. They said Deirdre had been the belle of the county in her day, but when Stanislaus knew her, that had been hard to credit. He’d had no choice in refusing her a funeral or burial. Church teaching was clear and unequivocal. The drinking accelerated as each of Pius’s children left, one by one, till they were all gone. Now he lived reclusively, letting his land go to ruin, and no longer offered work to anyone. So Stanislaus had compiled a list of the Lennon children and all the places to which they had emigrated, and wrote to the Cardinal’s office for church contacts in each place. The reply came quickly. It seemed he still drew some water in Armagh. He wrote to parishes and dioceses around the world and, over several months, the replies came. Stanislaus was flattered that some of his colleagues in far-flung places had heard of him and were familiar with his work. They were keen to assist. He got addresses for all but one of the fifteen Lennon children. Of the fourteen, he knew the Sarah girl was only thirty miles away at the Monastery of St Catherine of Siena, but he would not interfere with her vocation. The fifteenth name he circled in red ink. He had no address for that one. It would be a last resort even if he did have one. He sent out thirteen letters.
    Dear Mr/Miss Lennon,
    I write out of concern for your father, Pius, who I must inform you, has succumbed to the evil of drink. His maintenance of the land and his spiritual and physical wellbeing are of concern to all in the parish, and though we have attempted to divert the self-destructive course on which he is set, it is my pastoral experience that only family can save a man in times of moral despond.
    I beg that you return home and care for your father, or failing this, that you ensure another of your siblings can do so.
    Yours in Christ,
Most Rev S. Benedict, Bishop Emeritus
    Six, seven, eight months passed. Jeremiah McGrath assured him nothing was wrong with the long-distance mail, even with the war, and slowly Stanislaus came to accept that there would be no replies. The name circled in red ink rebuked him. The Victor fellow had left Madden boasting of Brooklyn or Botany Bay, but everyone knew he was in Dublin since his name had appeared in the margins of the press during the industrial unrest. He had been a minor figure, not a Larkin or a Countess Markievicz, and Stanislaus had denounced Larkin’s union from the pulpit, as per the Cardinal’s policy, but he knew the parishioners had a sneaking regard for ‘their’ Victor. When their Victor joined the