would invariably threaten to leave him behind when she attended the seven o’clock Mass on Sunday mornings. That was something he couldn’t bear to contemplate. He never wanted to be left alone with silent Uncle Joseph who rarely left his study except to rant at anyone’s God as all deities had been absent from the mud of Flanders when and where he’d most needed them or, even worse, with moist-lipped Aunt Hannah who was always wanting to smother him with kisses and tell him that he was the little boy she’d always wanted to have.
He could never decide which was worse—all that luvvy stuff or tall Aunt Nora, who not only hated warmth and light but was always silent on the way to church, while yanking painfully at his arm to make him keep up with the enormous strides of her hairy legs (he’d glimpsed her one Saturday afternoon in the bath). They were the only two occupants to flee the numbing cold of Lanoe on a Sabbath dawn, though obviously that wasn’t something she had in mind. Perhaps she was trying to make up for naughty Uncle Joseph who, she said, had become a pagan because of his dreadful experiences before coming home from the Great War. Listening to Aunt Nora as a child, Davey got the impression that her beloved brother’s loss of faith was far worse than all the wheezing and coughing he did even before taking out his leather tobacco pouch and rolling and smoking his own cigarettes.
With Aunt Hannah it was different. Her sister-in-law told him the reason she wasn’t at early Mass was because she was a lazy Methodist and everyone knew they only got up early when there was a chance to make money.
After Davey and his aunt got inside St. Brychan’s, the name of the patron saint of Pentudy Church—the two of them were always early—they would be subsequently joined by a scattering of worshippers: ghosts among the deep shadows beyond the array of flickering candles on the votive stand at the entrance to the Lady Chapel where the early Masses were always said.
When she wasn’t complaining to him about his filthy boyish habits, Aunt Nora seemed to enjoy shocking him. Standing there at the foot of the stairs, some sixty years later, he still recalled her saying to him, “Of course, I prefer the First Mass of the day. There are no damn people you have to talk to before or after. And they don’t want to have some stupid chat with you, which is even better!”
As he heard the Verrans skittering toward him from the direction of the kitchen at the back of the house, he conceded, in spite of himself, just how much they belonged. It was because they blended so congruously into that remote ancestral world he kept recalling: of a sadly dehydrated marriage between his uncle and aunt, of the ever-present animosity between childless Aunt Hannah and her stubborn spinster of a sister-in-law, and of their mutual dislike that, even in his child eyes, had seemed to embrace them like the contracting convulsions of a hungry python. That strangling serpent that had entwined them only increased its pressure with the departure of their umpire—the sole man of the house—who finally succumbed in his fiftieth year to the mustard gas that had lurked in his lungs since he encountered it, unsuspectingly, on the battlefields of France.
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