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he went outside and busied himself opening more bottles of stout.
At first the men seemed shabby to Eilis and she noticed body odours from a good number of them. As they sat down and drank their stout waiting for the soup or the food, she could not believe there were so many of them, some of them so poor-looking and so old, but even the younger ones had bad teeth and appeared worn down. Many were still smoking, even as the soup came. She did her best to be polite to them.
She observed a change in them soon, however, as they began to talk to each other or shout greetings down the table or enter into low, intense conversations. At first they had reminded her of men who sat on the bridge in Enniscorthy or gathered at the seat at Arnold’s Cross or the Louse Bank by the Slaney, or men from the County Home, or men from the town who drank too much. But by the time she served them and they turned to thank her, they seemed more like her father and his brothers in the way they spoke or smiled, the toughness in their faces softened by shyness, what had appeared stubborn or hard now strangely tender. As she served the man she had thought was her father, she looked at him carefully, amazed at how little he actually resembled him, as though it had been a trick of the light or something she had completely imagined. She was surprised also to find that he was talking to the man beside him in Irish.
“This was the miracle of the turkey and the ham,” Miss Murphy said to Father Flood when large plates of second helpings had been left on all the tables.
“Brooklyn-style,” her sister said.
“I’m glad it’s trifle now,” she added, “and not plum pudding and we don’t have to worry about keeping it hot.”
“Wouldn’t you think they’d take off their caps when they are eating?” her sister asked. “Don’t they know they’re in America?”
“We have no rules here,” Father Flood said. “And they can smoke and drink all they like. If we can get them all home safely, that’s the main thing. We always have a few a bit too under the weather to go home.”
“Too drunk,” one Miss Murphy said.
“Ah, on Christmas Day we call it under the weather, and I have a rake of beds made up for them in my own house,” Father Flood said.
“What we’ll do now is have our own dinner,” Miss Murphy said. “And I’ll set the table and I’ve kept a nice dinner for each of us hot and everything.”
“Well, I was wondering if we were going to eat at all,” Eilis said.
“Poor Eilis. She’s starving. Will you look at her?”
“Should we not serve the trifle first?” Eilis asked.
“No, we’ll wait,” Father Flood said. “It’ll stretch the day out.”
By the time they were removing the trifle dishes, the hall was a mass of smoke and animated talk. Men sat in groups with one or two standing behind them; others moved from group to group, some with bottles of whiskey in brown paper bags that they passed around. When all the cleaning of the kitchen and the filling of garbage cans had been completed, Father Flood suggested that they go into the hall and join the men for a drink. Some visitors had arrived, including a few women, and Eilis thought, as she sat down with a glass of sherry in her hand, that it could have been a parish hall anywhere in Ireland on the night of a concert or a wedding when the young people were all elsewhere dancing or standing at the bar.
After a while Eilis noticed that two men had taken out fiddles and another a small accordion; they had found a corner and were playing as a few others stood around and listened. Father Flood was moving about the hall with a notebook now, writing down names and addresses and nodding as old men spoke to him. After a while he clapped his hands and called for silence but it took a few minutes before he could get everyone’s attention.
“I don’t want to interrupt the proceedings,” he said, “but we’d like to thank a nice girl from Enniscorthy and two nice women from Arklow for their hard day’s work.”
There was a round of applause.
“And, as a way of thanking them, there’s one great singer in this hall and we’re delighted to see him this year