Country Days Read Free Page A

when I put down the phone, there was an ache in my heart for my friend whom I knew would be filled with a deep sorrow.
    We drove out to their parish church where the crowds overflowed on to the road outside. As there was no way we could get in, we decided to drive ahead to the graveyard which was a few miles away. Cars were parked all along the road and people huddled in the cold under the trees beside the high graveyard wall. As sometimes happens at funerals, the woman waiting beside me turned out to be an old neighbour from where I had lived as a child and who was now married on a farm near Eileen. We chatted as we waited for the funeral and she talkedabout Eileen and John and what great neighbours they were and how pleasant it was to be living near them. When the hearse arrived, people poured out of surrounding cars and you would wonder where the long stream of funeral cars were going to park, but everybody found a place eventually.
    Eileen was pale-faced and alert and surprised me by being totally in touch with everything and everybody present. She was amazingly composed, and I thought of that young girl outside the convent so many years before. She still had her pool of serenity. As I walked past her in the row of sympathisers, she pressed my hand and whispered, “Come back to the house afterwards.”
    I had never been to her house. The narrow country roads in the hills behind the graveyard were not the easiest to negotiate and several times we went astray. In the end my husband suggested, “Why not leave it for another day. She would appreciate a call more in the days to come.”
    It was a practical suggestion, but sometimes practical suggestions are not always the ones we want to hear. We continued and finally we came in sight of the house, which was across the valley from us and on the side of a sloping hill. The yard and the road up to it were lined with cars. There was something very sad about the sight of all those cars gathered around that hillside farmhouse on a bleak December afternoon. It was a celebration of sadness, and the man who had gathered them all togetherwas gone from their midst. I felt that Eileen was now floundering in a great solitary sea of loneliness, although surrounded by friends and neighbours.
    In a farmhouse if you are a regular caller you go in the back door and if not you go to the front one. I went to the front. Inside Eileen was surrounded by people.
    “I was expecting you,” she said, and I sensed then that even though I would come often in the future, it was right to be there on that day. The house was packed with people and I was glad to meet Eileen’s brothers and sister, some of whom I had not met since I had stayed with them years before. Neighbouring women laid out table after table of food and everybody was catered for. As Eileen and I sat together having tea late that evening, I said, looking at the laden table in front of us, “How did you get all this together?”
    “Every Christmas cake in the parish is on that table today,” she told me.
    It was a few days before Christmas and the statement was simply made, but it told a lot about her neighbours. After the tea I asked Eileen where Fr Tom was, and she smiled and said, “Out in the back kitchen washing cups.”
    I found him there, and because everybody was after their tea, we had time to talk. He was a young man full of the love of God and his fellow human beings and a conversation with him overflowed with laughter. He was not a heavy-duty cleric buta heavenly violin and God’s music played easily though him.
    Among the topics of conversation we ranged over was the improvement in rural houses.
    “I remember,” he said, “when I was a child that most of the chairs in our kitchen were without backs. They had fallen off over the years, and we children sat on the backless ones and left the good chairs for the adults. One day I had to go into town to get the vet for a sick cow. I was very young and had never been in