The man laughed then a horrible laugh like a lash of rain into your face, and the other soldiers brought him away. We could hear them cajoling the prisoners along the paths. I was shaking in all my body. The commander, when the room was clear, held out a big hand to Fr Gaunt, and helped him to his feet.

'I'm sorry, Father,' he said. 'It has been a terrible night. Murder and mayhem. Excuse me.'

He spoke so sincerely my father I'm sure was as struck by the words as I was.

'It was a blackguardly thing to do,' said Fr Gaunt, in a small voice that nevertheless had a strange taint of violence in it.

'Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.'

'You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.'

'You let me have my own thoughts on that,' said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. 'What are you going to do with the body? Don't you want to take it with you?'

'What do you want to do with it?' said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John's brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.

'I'll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.'

'You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.'

Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John's brother Willie was most silent of all.

'I am extremely angry,' said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, 'to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.'

My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father's unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie's stiffening corpse.

'I'm sorry,' said my father. 'I'm sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.'

'You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.'

With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.

'I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.'

My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.

How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.

There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

I think it was that my father embarrassed history.

He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.

Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn't fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father's bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.

My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? These seem not my thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings of Sir Thomas Browne. But they feel as if they are mine. They sound in my head like my own belling thoughts. It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.

He had better be in my case, or I may dwell with the devil shortly.

Our house was clean, but did not look so clean the day that Fr Gaunt came to visit us. It was Sunday morning about ten, so I may assume Fr Gaunt was between masses and had hurried from his church along the river to knock on our door. As my mother had an old mirror balanced on a yellow brick in the window of the sitting room, we could always see without showing ourselves who was at the door, and the sight of the priest sent us scurrying about. A fourteen-year-old girl is always vividly aware of her appearance, or thinks she must be, or whatever it is, but speaking of mirrors I was at that time a slave to the one in my mother's bedroom, not because I thought I looked well, but because I did not know how I looked, and laboured many a minute to adjust myself into a picture I could trust, or was content with, and never could achieve it. The gold of my hair looked like some wet grass gone wild to me, and for the life of me I did not know the soul of the person that peered back at me in my mother's mossy little mirror. Because the edges of the mirror were strangely decayed, she had actually bought some unusual enamel paint in the chemist as may be, and decorated the edges of the mirror with tiny black stems and leaves, that lent everything that appeared in that less-than-poetical mirror a funereal look, which perhaps had suited my father's profession, at least up to now. So my first action was to dash up our few little stairs to the mirror and make an assault on my fourteen-year-old sense of horror.

When I got back down to the living room my father was standing in the middle of it, looking about him like a baulking pony, his eyes lighting first on the motorcycle, then on the piano, then on the spaces in between, his hand dashing now to a cushion on the 'best' chair. When I glanced out into the tiny hall, my mother was merely lodged there, stuck there, not moving a muscle, like an actor waiting to go out on a stage, gearing up her courage. Then she lifted the latch.

As Fr Gaunt edged into our room, the first thing I noticed was how glistening he seemed, his face shaved so closely you could write on it with a pen. He looked so safe, the safest thing in Ireland in an unsafe time. Every month of that year was the worst month, my father had said, as every person killed echoed in him. But the priest looked sacrosanct, pristine, separate, as if separate from the history of Ireland itself. Not that I thought this at the time, God knows what I thought, I don't know, only that this cleanliness made me fearful.

I had never seen my father quite so fussed. He could only speak in rushes and gaps.