PART FOUR -- Bill is described as being “carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not see but knew he would encounter.” The combination of excitement and fear suggests someone who is conscious of violating a law or social taboo and knows he will be sanctioned in some way, yet simultaneously craves the exhilaration of breaking that taboo. To avoid any more awkward encounters with people he knows, Bill considers taking the long way home, but then decides to keep following his usual route through the middle of town. Bill has to pause for a moment, however, while Sarah vomits in the street, something he encourages: “Good girl … Get it all up. Get that much out of you.” It could be that Sarah is full of nervous anxiety at the thought of escaping from the convent and incurring the wrath of the Mother Superior, or is purging herself of the convent’s toxic influences. Another possibility is that she’s fallen ill with something contagious she’ll spread to Bill’s household. The idea of a man and woman walking through the snow seeking shelter on Christmas Eve brings to mind Mary and Joseph that night in Bethlehem, and sure enough, Bill and Sarah stop at the Nativity scene in the Town Square. There is something odd about Sarah’s reaction. She stands “in a type of trance” looking at the manger scene. But not even the sight of the “Baby Jesus” elicits any reaction from her to suggest she’s thinking of her own child. Instead, she’s drawn to the figure of the donkey. “Isn’t he lovely,” she says. At this point, as Sarah and Bill walk the last short distance to his front door, Keegan shows us Bill’s state of mind and leaves us to decide on the wisdom of his actions. We can sympathize with and even admire Bill’s willingness to take a stand against an organization that would leave a barefoot young mother to spend Christmas Eve alone inside a cold, dark coal shed. We fully applaud the fact that Bill has a conscience that prevents him from turning a blind eye to such injustice and hypocrisy, and compels him to intervene to rescue Sarah. It’s also apparent that Bill feels an obligation to Mrs. Wilson for having taken in his own mother all those years ago, thereby saving her-and himself-from suffering the fate of Sarah and her baby. By bringing Sarah home with him, Bill feels he is repaying a debt to Mrs. Wilson. And not only to Mrs. Wilson, but to Fate, the Universe, or whatever eternal forces control his life, for I can’t help but think that Bill’s superstitious thinking is at work again. As disruptive as it may be to his marriage and family to bring Sarah home with him, Bill may believe that such a grand act of charity will help avert far greater calamities. As to the likely effects on his own marriage and family life resulting from bringing an unexpected houseguest home on Christmas Eve, Bill shows no sign of having considered this aspect of the situation at all. Exactly what should he say to Eileen? What about the logistics of finding a place for Sarah within his household? How will his daughters react? Instead of addressing such practical questions, Bill seems to be caught up in a mood of euphoria and grandiose thinking: “How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side”. (I’ve had that feeling, too, walking along with a girl at my side, but under different circumstances.) Bill feels that “the best bit of him was shining forth … some part of him … was going wild”. What I found most disturbing about Bill’s state of mind is that he feels he is happier now than at any other time in his life: “never once in his whole unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.” The same Bill Furlong who, when we first met him and his daughters earlier in the novel, “felt a deep private joy that these children were his own”, now seems to have set thoughts of his girls’ future aside in favour of this young woman, Sarah, who is largely a stranger to him. But despite his elevated mood, a part of Bill’s mind is still moored to reality. When he imagines that, in different circumstances, he might have been saving his own mother, he immediately qualifies this thought by adding the proviso, “if saving was what this could be called”, as if he still has doubts as to the wisdom of freeing Sarah from the convent. Bill also realizes that, just a few steps ahead of him there is “a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door”, that is, the door to his own home. Bill justifies his decision to complete those last few steps to his doorstep with the rationale that, whatever difficulties he might have to endure arising from his decision to bring Sarah home with him, they still won’t equal the horrendous ordeal that she has already suffered during her confinement at the convent. Bill’s thinking is also narrowly focused on himself. In his mind, the worst possible consequence of the present situation is the unbearable burden of guilt he would have had to carry “for the rest of his life” if he had ignored Sarah’s predicament and abandoned her to the tender mercies of the Mother Superior. In Bill’s world, as long as he has a clear conscience, everything else comes secondary. Having a clear conscience is certainly a desirable thing, but it is not the only thing, and people have committed horrible crimes in the name of their conscience. In the final scene of her novel, Claire Keegan presents us with a situation where the future welfare of Bill and his family hangs in the balance. On one side of the scale, we have Bill’s conscience, which rests easy in his soul because he is convinced that he is doing the right thing by bringing Sarah home with him. On the other side of the scale, we have all those things of value in Bill’s life which his decision to rescue Sarah has cast into jeopardy: his daughters’ continued attendance at St. Margaret’s School, his family’s social acceptance in the local community, his financial security arising from his profitable coal and timber company, and the stability of his marriage and family life. All of these are of less significance to Bill than his clear conscience. In her novel’s final sentence, Claire Keegan tells the reader where she stands on Bill’s decision. “Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.” The juxtaposition of “barefooted girl” and “box of shoes” draws our attention to Bill’s blinkered view of the world. He can’t see that the remedy to Sarah’s bare feet is tucked under his arm. And as for his “foolish heart”, this, of course, harkens back to the “hugely practical” Mrs. Kehoe and her view that some men “weren’t men at all but foolish boys.” It is this same “foolish heart” that has Bill convinced that, somehow, he and his family will muddle through, though the odds of this seem unlikely given the foreboding hints we’ve seen that his “run-in” with the Mother Superior has already been met with the disapproval of by the community, as Mrs. Kehoe warned Bill it would be. Stealing away Sarah from the convent in the middle of the night will surely provoke the outright condemnation and ostracization of the Furlong family, with Eileen and the girls having had absolutely no say in the matter. We can imagine Eileen’s consternation when Bill walks through the door with barefoot Sarah in tow. Her consternation may well turn into blistering anger when she fully realizes the calamity that her April Fool of a husband has inflicted upon her and her girls. Eileen may decide that only by packing up her daughters and moving in with family or friends-providing there are any willing to take them in-can she and her girls hope to escape the condemnation of the Catholic Church. We can also imagine Sarah suddenly remembering that she has a child, and deciding it is worth the pain of returning to the convent in order to be near her baby. Or she could be offended to find that she is so obviously unwelcome at the Furlongs, and decide that staying anywhere else is preferable, even if it’s on the street. Bill could very well end up celebrating Christmas on his own. So, I don’t find that “Small Things Like These” ends on an upbeat note, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s the story of the collateral damage that can result from one man’s commitment to follow his conscience regardless of the consequences. See, for example, Senator Tommy Tuberville’s actions in putting up roadblocks to promotions in the American military. I’ll be interested to see how the producers of the film version of “Small Things Like These” resolve the story’s ending. From the bits of information I’ve found online, it appears a young male actor will be playing the part of “Young Bill Furlong”, suggesting there will be a flashback sequence showing Bill and his mother living with Ned and Mrs. Wilson. Another actor will be playing “Sarah’s father”, making it likely her character’s backstory will be filled in. Who knows, perhaps the film version will end with Bill Furlong returning Sarah to the care of her Grinch-like father on Christmas Eve, with Sarah’s father having a change-of-heart and bursting into tears at first sight of his grandson.
These analyses are so in depth and thought provoking, thank you for sharing! I really like how you dove into Bill's character arc. I also found the ending quite unsettling and it was strange to see how hypocritically blind he was becoming by the end of the novella, for better or worse, but it was a refreshingly different read! I'm really excited to see how Cillian Murphy brings this character to screen and how they translate these complex internal thoughts, really hope the film does the text justice! :)
@@charlize.blicharski Thank you for your kind words, and for having had the patience to read through my disjointed hunks of text. I wrote out my thoughts on “Small Things Like These” partly to stop them from wearing grooves in my brain, and partly for the intellectual exercise. I’m not sure how much you know about modern Irish history, but when Claire Keegan wrote “Small Things” it was against the backdrop of the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916 and the resulting War of Independence against Great Britain, followed by the Irish Civil War ending in 1923. I think it’s possible to see Keegan’s story as an allegory for the 1916 Easter Uprising, with Bill Furlong representing some of the naïve young Irish rebels who sparked off years of violence and bloodshed without seeming to realize what they were doing. As far as the film version goes, it had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 15th, which is yesterday from my pov on the globe (southern Ontario, Canada), and the couple reviews I’ve seen online have been positive. It sounds as if the film’s producers resisted the impulse to make a positive, feel-good Christmas story, and instead tried to preserve the ambiguity of Keegan’s final scene. Anyway, thanks again for reading my comments and for taking the time to leave your own. I really appreciate it! P.S. If you’re interested, elsewhere on The Foxed Page I’ve set down my lengthy thoughts on Claire Keegan’s “Foster”, which I first became aware of about a year ago when I first saw the Irish language film adaptation, “An Cailín Ciúin”-“The Quiet Girl”-an experience that caught me totally off-guard with the emotional impact of its final scene. There are images and moments from “The Quiet Girl” that have lingered in my mind ever since. -- Tom
PART ZERO -- From a survey of some of the reviews of Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” it appears that many critics have focused on the traditional Christmassy aspects of the story, even invoking Charles Dickens in the process. Others devote their attention to the novel’s social justice issues and the moral courage of the central character, Bill Furlong, in standing up to the Catholic Church and its harsh treatment of the young mothers placed in its care at the town’s local convent, as well as the community’s complicity in the Church’s cruel policies. As I read “Small Things Like These”, however, what struck me most about the story was Bill Furlong’s slow descent from a loving husband and father, concerned for the welfare of his wife and five daughters, into a self-absorbed man with a mission, determined to rescue a young woman from the local convent, regardless of the consequences for himself, his wife, his five daughters, and the family business upon which they all depend. At the same time, I couldn’t help but admire Bill for being the type of person who can’t turn a blind eye to cruelty and injustice, and is willing to take steps to confront the evils of society no matter how small and Quixotic his efforts might be. As the story begins, we see that Bill is a successful family man. He has a home, a wife named Eileen, and five healthy daughters. Bill also carries the traditional burden of care inherent in being a husband and father. He worries about his daughters growing up, becoming adults, leaving home, and “going out into the world of men.” Bill is approaching his fortieth birthday. Despite his apparently happy family life and success as owner of a profitable coal and timber business, he sometimes awakens in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. “What was it all for?” he wonders. He thinks of other paths his life might have taken. All the signs point to Bill heading for a midlife crisis. On top of this, the circumstances of Bill’s birth and upbringing have left him feeling a type of survivor’s guilt. His mother was only sixteen and unmarried when she became pregnant with him. With no husband and no family support, she would have been condemned to a life of servile drudgery at the local convent had not a kindly and well-to-do Protestant woman, Mrs. Wilson, taken her in to live with her. Thus, Bill’s mother was able to raise her son in a safe and stable home. Because of his own good luck, Bill feels acutely the financial misfortunes and personal tragedies of the friends and neighbours who have not enjoyed his advantages in life. He is also well aware that there is nothing shielding him or his family from accidents of Fate or similar calamities. “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything,” he often thinks. Bill is a naturally generous and kind-hearted person. He gives his customers extra time to pay their bills if they need it, while to others he leaves free bags of firewood or the spare change out of his pocket. These acts of charity are consistent with the Catholic doctrine which values good works as part of the road to salvation. But in Bill’s case, his charitable acts seem more likely evidence of a superstitious pattern of thinking, for he doesn’t seem to be a very religious man, and we never find him seeking solace or guidance in prayer.
PART TWO -- While waiting for someone to come to the door, Bill considers dropping off the girl at the local priest’s house, or of simply taking her home with him. He is reacting impulsively, not thinking clearly of the bigger picture. Driving the young woman to the priest’s house would only be taking her out of the frying pan into the fire. How could Bill not realize the priest would return Sarah to the convent as soon as he left her there? As for bringing Sarah home with him, Bill gives this option less forethought than he probably would to bringing home a kitten or a puppy. The Mother Superior eventually comes to the door and Bill tells her that he found the young woman locked in the coal shed overnight. It is an awkward situation for the Mother Superior and she puts on a show of being shocked to hear this and concerned for the girl’s welfare, but we are not fooled and neither is Bill. When the Mother Superior invites Bill to come inside and have some tea, his initial reaction is to say no and step backwards out of the doorway, “as though the step could take him back into the time before this.” To leave at this point would be the easy thing to do. Bill could drive away from the convent and ease his conscience by persuading himself that the Mother Superior’s solicitude for the young mother was sincere. But at the same time, for Bill to decline the Mother Superior’s hospitality could be viewed as rude, and a sign that he has seen through her charade. He allows himself to be prevailed upon to stay for tea and he and the girl proceed down a hallway toward the convent’s kitchen. At this point, Bill is deferential towards the nuns. He takes his hat off and apologizes for leaving muddy footprints on the floor. The young mother is taken away by one of the nuns while the Mother Superior ushers Bill into a large, well-appointed room with a fireplace. The Mother Superior is on her home turf now and presses her advantage. Though she initially addressed Bill as Mr. Furlong, she now calls him “Billy”, as if to infantilize him and emphasize the social distance between a Mother Superior and a mere coal merchant. She is not above practising a bit of extortion either. After making polite enquiries about Bill’s five daughters and eliciting his hopes they’ll all be able to attend St. Margaret’s school next door-the only good school for girls in the town-she reminds him that, “It’s no easy task to find a place for everyone.” In other words, if Bill wants all his girls to eventually be able to attend St. Margaret’s school, he should forget what he’s seen at the convent this day. To further diminish Bill in his own eyes, Mother Superior expresses sympathy for the fact that he has no son to bear his name forward, only five daughters. Is there an implied doubt about Dan’s manhood intended? Be that as it may, the Mother Superior has overplayed her hand. Bill has been through variants of this conversation before and has a ready reply: “Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it to me.” Bill no longer feels on the defensive. Earlier, he had apologized for his muddy boots. Now, as a small gesture of defiance, he carefully lets one of those same muddy boots touch the polished brass of the fireplace fender. Unfortunately, it is at this point that I think Bill begins to lose sight of what’s really important in the situation he finds himself in. Rather than focusing on the girl’s welfare, Bill becomes distracted by his desire to take the mickey out of the Mother Superior for treating him in such a condescending manner. When a nun escorts the now cleaned-up and warmly dressed young mother into the room, Bill speaks up promptly to ask how she’s feeling, as if to show he can be quicker off the mark than the Mother Superior in expressing concern for the girl’s welfare. The Mother Superior then goes through a ritual of pulling out a chair for the young mother to sit on and personally serving her some tea and fruit cake. From the girl’s reaction, it’s apparent this is far from the kind of treatment she’s used to receiving in the convent. The Mother Superior engages Bill in some idle chitchat, as if to show she has nothing to hide, before turning her attention to the young mother again. She repeats her pretense of maternal kindness while she asks the girl how she came to be locked in the coal shed. With great trepidation, the girl replies to the Mother Superior’s leading questions and says she was locked in the coal shed by the other young women while playing hide and seek. Following the Mother Superior’s promptings, the girl agrees, “It was a big nothing” before being ushered out of the room by another nun. It is obvious to the reader that this is a staged performance by the Mother Superior intended to present Bill with an apparently innocent explanation of how the young mother came to be locked in the coal shed. This is Bill’s cue to thank the Mother Superior for his tea and be on his way. But as eager as he was earlier to leave the convent, Bill now finds that “the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground … He sat on, encouraged by this queer, new power. He was, after all, a man amongst women here.” This display of male chauvinism sounds totally out of character for Bill. This is the same man who, shortly before, deflected the Mother Superior’s barb about his lack of sons to carry on his name by telling her that he carries his mother’s surname and that it’s never done him any harm. The same man who leaves his oldest daughter to run the coal yard office while he’s out making deliveries, which she does quite competently. The same man who quite readily acknowledges what he owes to the women in his life, such as the late Mrs. Wilson and his own wife Eileen. And it’s not just any random group of women Bill is suddenly feeling superior to; these are the Sisters of the Good Shepherd with the full might of the Catholic Church behind them. So precisely because he knows the Mother Superior wants him gone, Bill deliberately delays his departure. He dawdles, makes small talk, and decides he’ll have another cup of tea after all. Still, the Mother Superior has the power to put Bill at a disadvantage and remind him of their relative social positions by giving him an envelope containing a card and a Christmas bonus that Eileen is later gratified to learn contains a fifty-pound note. Bill takes his time leaving the convent and, while walking out, he pauses to talk to the young mother again, learns her name is Sarah-“That was my own mother’s name”-gives her his name, tells her where he can be found, and says that she can call on him for help anytime. Bill wants to reassure Sarah that she has a friend on the outside, but he fails to understand that by centering her out for attention in this way, he is only increasing the likelihood that the Mother Superior will make her the target for further retribution once he has left. It does no good for Bill to deliberately antagonize the Mother Superior, and indeed, before long Sarah will be spending the night in the coal shed again. From this point on, Bill becomes even more inward looking and emotionally isolated from his wife and daughters. When he returns home, Eileen can tell that he’s “out of sorts” about something, but Bill denies that there’s anything wrong and says nothing about his encounter with Sarah and the Mother Superior at the convent. Reluctantly, he accompanies Eileen and the girls to the local Catholic church for Mass. He betrays his tense mood when, uncharacteristically, he snaps at Eileen when she makes a harmless joke about the girls having no change for the collection plate because their father has given it all away. Rather than sit with his family, Bill stands brooding at the back of the church during the service. Rejecting the authority of the Catholic Church, he doesn’t take communion and instead concentrates on looking at the figure of Christ in the Stations of the Cross mounted on the wall, leading the reader to wonder if Bill is starting to see himself as some sort of Christ figure. Bill’s restless mood continues after the family returns home. He’s unable to relax and get into the Christmas spirit with his wife and daughters. He decides to drive out and see his old friend Ned before the weather turns bad. He feels a sense of relief when Eileen suggests he invite Ned to come for Christmas dinner and gives him a bag of mince pies to take to him. Unfortunately, when Bill arrives at the Wilson place, a young woman tells him Ned is no longer there but is recovering from pneumonia “in a home” somewhere. The young woman gives Bill a shock by telling him she guesses Ned must be an uncle of his because she can see the resemblance between them. All through the novel, we find Bill wondering who his father might be, and now he may have an answer. He now has this new information to digest as well as his sense of guilt that he didn’t do more to help Sarah when he was at the convent earlier that day. The reader feels at this point that, if only Bill had had a chance to talk with Ned, the novel might have had a different ending. Bill is a Quixote-like character desperately in need of a Sancho Panza.
PART THREE -- We next see Bill making deliveries on Christmas Eve. As he drops off his loads of coal and timber, some of his customers give him small gifts of sweets, vegetables, liquor, and even money. “People could be good,” Bill thinks to himself, but then he immediately reproaches himself for not having thought to share some of these gifts with the less fortunate. We can appreciate how Bill feels, but he still seems to be setting impossibly high standards for himself. Considering how generous he is to others, surely, he can be forgiven for bringing home some Christmas goodies to his wife and daughters on this one day of the year. Once back in town, Bill goes to the coal-yard to see how his work crew are finishing up for the day and to close up shop for the Christmas break. At this point, Bill is thinking of his wife and daughters: “all he wanted, now, was to get home”. But he spends some time lingering over dinner at his friend Mrs. Kehoe’s restaurant, talking to his employees and expressing his appreciation to them, something he feels “he seldom made time for.” “It’s been a busy time,” Bill remarks to Mrs. Kehoe. “Won’t the few days off do us no harm.” He says this, oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Kehoe’s work day is far from over as she is still tending to her leftover food. “What it is to be a man and to have days off,” replies Mrs. Kehoe, with a harsh sarcastic laugh. Once again, Bill’s focus on himself and his own thoughts and priorities have blinded him to the fact that other people, such as Ms. Kehoe, may be working over Christmas. Mrs. Kehoe’s comment also raises once again the issue of men’s and women’s differing views of the world and the roles they see themselves playing in that world. Despite her sarcastic laughter at his expense, Mrs. Kehoe is sympathetic towards Bill. She tells him that she’s heard of the “run-in” he had with the Mother Superior, and warns him to be wary of making an enemy of her. “Surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie”, she says. But Bill is doubtful of the nuns’ real influence in the community. “Surely, they’ve only as much power as we give them,” he tells Mrs. Kehoe. We are then told that Mrs. Kehoe pauses and looks at Bill “the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys. More than once, maybe more than several times, Eileen had done the same.” In other words, Mrs. Kehoe is responding to Bill’s concern for the young mothers at the convent the same way his wife did when he first told her about them. Mrs. Kehoe also makes the same appeal that Eileen did by reminding Bill of his five daughters and how much their future depends upon remaining on good terms with the nuns at St. Margaret’s School. After exchanging Christmas greetings with Mrs. Kehoe, Bill leaves her restaurant and goes walking into the snowy night. It is unfortunate that Bill is now alone as he walks the streets of the town. As long as he was in the company of other people, such as his workmen or Mrs. Kehoe, he was reminded of his responsibilities towards his family and felt a desire to go home. But Bill seems to be an essentially solitary person, and once he is outside walking on his own, he feels “a bit freer now, being out in the open air … The urgency to run the one errand he had to run and get on home was falling away.” The one errand Bill has to run is to buy the pair of shoes his wife wants for Christmas, but instead of making this his priority, Bill “almost lightheartedly” goes window shopping downtown. Mrs. Kehoe had looked at Bill as if he were a foolish boy instead of a man, and he now confirms this opinion by going to the toy store and staring, “as a child might”, at the toys and other items in the store window. Bill sees two dolls dressed in frilly dresses posed with their arms held out in front of them, “as though they were asking to be lifted”, but the sight of the dolls doesn’t twig Bill’s mind to his five daughters waiting for him at home. Eileen’s shoes shift to the backburner as the little boy inside Bill, who didn’t receive his wished-for 500-piece jigsaw puzzle at Christmas decades ago, now goes into the toy store to ask Mrs. Stafford if she has any such puzzles in stock, only to be disappointed once again by being told no. Bill now acts like a man who is looking for reasons to avoid going home, or like a man who is mulling over a decision at some subconscious level and trying to keep open the options which going home would foreclose. Earlier I stated that Bill seems to be a superstitious man, and at this point he seems to be waiting for Fate or the Universe to give him some sign as to what course of action he should take. In the meantime, he does some more window shopping, catches sight of his reflection in a mirror, and decides he needs a haircut. The barber shop has a queue of men ahead of him, but Bill takes a seat anyway. He gazes at himself in a mirror, looking for a resemblance to his old friend Ned, a resemblance “he both could and could not see.” It almost seems as if Bill is losing sense of his own identity as a husband and father with a family waiting for him at home. Keegan describes Bill as sitting with a sense of his mind being freed up “to stray and roam”; he doesn’t mind at all sitting in the barber’s shop waiting to get his hair cut. And, in fact, as Keegan will tell us a few pages later, at this very moment Bill is considering returning to the convent and is thinking ahead as to whether he might find Sarah confined in the coal shed again. So, Bill is definitely thinking of rescuing Sarah from the convent, but there is no indication that he’s thinking of what he’ll do once he arrives home with her. Bill finally leaves the barber shop and at last goes to pick up the pair of shoes that are to be his Christmas present to Eileen. At the shop, Bill is met by a “well-dressed woman” behind the counter. She is another one of those “practical women” in Bill’s life, though not as friendly towards him as Eileen or Mrs. Kehoe as she “didn’t seem overly eager to serve him.” The woman is also the wife of one of Bill’s best customers, and her chilly attitude should trigger Bill’s Spidey-Sense that news of his contretemps with the Mother Superior is spreading around town and may begin to affect his profit margin. But Bill’s mind is above such petty concerns and after paying for the shoes he simply walks out of the store into the night again. We are told that it is now well past dark and that Bill is “more than ready to climb the hill towards home”, yet all it takes is the smell of hot oil from a nearby chip truck to divert Bill from his purpose. After getting a can of 7Up at the chipper, Bill turns his feet in the direction of the bridge over the River Barrow that will take him to the convent. We are told that Bill “found himself walking back down to the river”, almost as if it wasn’t a conscious choice on his part. Perhaps it’s a stretch to suggest this, but Bill almost seems to be having an episode of mild disassociation brought on by the cumulative stress of the responsibility he feels towards Sarah and the discovery that his lifelong friend Ned may actually be his father. There is a sense of Bill being detached from his own actions as he walks towards the bridge: “[H]e wondered why he had not gone back to the comforts and safety of his own home”, where Eileen would be wondering where he was and preparing to attend Midnight Mass. But we are told that Bill’s day “was filling up now, with something else.” Bill continues walking in the direction of the convent, thinking of his mother and Ned and the young mother who wanted to drown herself in the River Barrow. He looks in the windows of the upscale houses he passes, seeing the sort of domestic Christmas scenes he could be enjoying himself at his own home. Even the sight of a schoolgirl in a St. Margaret’s School uniform doesn’t make him yearn to head home and see his own daughters. Making his way to the convent grounds in the dark and around to the coal shed, Bill’s resolve falters briefly and he hopes that perhaps Sarah might not be inside the coal shed after all. It is another Christlike moment for Bill, reminiscent of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying, “Let this cup pass from me.” But Bill finds “everything was just as he’d feared” and Sarah is in the coal shed after all. He gives her his coat to put over her shoulders, but the sight of her bare, black feet doesn’t remind him that he’s carrying Eileen’s shoes in a box under his arm. We also note that Sarah makes no mention of her baby, the one she was so anxious to nurse the first time Bill met her. Has the child died? Although Bill says, “You’ll come home with me now, Sarah”, he feels his sense of “self-preservation and courage battling against each other”, and his thoughts keep leaning towards the idea of leaving Sarah at the priest’s home, only to reject this plan every time. As Bill leads Sarah through the streets of the town, he meets people he knows who respond to the sight of him and the barefoot Sarah with shock, unease, or mild outrage.
@@neelchand2268If you’re looking for comments that I’ve made on other books here at The Foxed Page, I can refer you to Kimberly’s three lectures on Claire Keegan’s long short story, “Foster”, where I had something to say about each of the three talks. I’ve also left comments about “Lolita” and “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma”, also here at The Foxed Page. I plan on leaving more comments on other books Kimberly has singled out for study, but it’s a matter of finding time to organize my thoughts as well as being a painfully slow, one and two-fingered typist. Anyway, thank you for asking and I really appreciate your interest!
PART ONE -- Instead of trusting in a personal God, Bill has adopted the practice of being kind and generous towards his neighbours as a way of expiating his survivor’s guilt. He behaves as if he can appease Fate or the gods or the inscrutable forces of the Universe through his acts of kindness and self-sacrifice to others, and so protect himself and his family from harm for a little while longer. Bill’s habit of generosity has become a slight friction point in his relationship with his wife. Eileen’s opinion of the objects of Bill’s charity is more judgmental than his. “You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?” she reminds her husband when he mentions a man with a drinking problem. Eileen’s attitude towards society’s unfortunates is fatalistic: “Always there’s one that has to pull the short straw.” She would have agreed with the conservative Catholic Church position that ‘the poor will always be with us.’ Bill envies Eileen’s ability not bedevil herself with thoughts about the past or worry about things she can’t do anything about. He asks her: “Do you not go back over things, Eileen? Or worry? I sometimes wish I had your mind.” Indeed, that was one of the reasons Bill married Eileen: “He was attracted to her … practical, agile mind”, a trait Bill believes she has passed on to their daughters. As Bill views the world, men might have physical strength and powerful positions in society, “but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.” Keegan puts a similar thought into the mind of John Kinsella in her novella, “Foster”, when she has him say, “A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.” Thinking of his wife, Bill continues: “He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts.” Keegan seems to be saying that, for all men’s authority in society and their prevailing belief in their own dominance, in reality, it is women who have the keener insight into how the world works, and who bear the ultimate responsibility for keeping the wheels of family, home, and community running smoothly. As we read “Small Things Like These”, we notice that Bill’s most meaningful interactions occur almost entirely with women. First, with his wife and daughters; then, retrospectively, with the late Mrs. Wilson; also Sarah and the young mothers at the convent; the Mother Superior and the other nuns of the Good Shepherd; Mrs. Kehoe at her restaurant; the comely young woman who invites Bill to step inside for a cup of tea; Mrs. Stafford at the toy shop; the well-dressed saleslady at Hanrahan’s leather goods store; the young girl who gives Bill a Christmas card; and finally, the young woman at the Wilson’s home who answers the door when Bill comes calling asking for his old friend Ned. Bill has no friend outside of his family. Ned, Mrs. Wilson’s former farmhand, turns out to be the only male with whom Bill has any significant interaction in the whole course of the novel. But even this contact occurs in the past, and we know of it only because Bill recalls a particular conversation with Ned from years ago. When Bill goes looking for Ned at the old Wilson place towards the end of the story, he finds he is no longer there. The only males we see Bill speak to face-to-face in the present are the old man with a bill-hook of whom he asks directions when he gets lost driving away from his visit to the convent, and the charming little boy who gives Bill the traditional Christmas greeting of, “Fuck off, why don’t you”, towards the end of the book. There are men at the barber shop when Bill gets a haircut, but he holds aloof from them, just as he stands on his own at the back of the church when he attends Mass. As for the crew of men who work at the coal yard, Bill’s relationship with them is entirely on an employer/employee basis. If only Bill had a close friend to confide in, he might have come up with a better plan for dealing with the situation he finds at the local Catholic convent in the course of the novel. The first hairline cracks in Bill’s world appear one day when he drives to the local convent to deliver a load of coal and wood. This visit is important for two reasons. First, Bill witnesses, apparently for the first time, the harsh conditions under which the young mothers and their children live and work at the convent. He is taken aback by the young women’s desperate pleas for help; one of them begs for the chance just to get away and drown herself. Bill is suddenly faced with a situation he can’t make good with a bag of firewood or some spare pocket change, and the realization begins to gnaw at his conscience. The second reason this visit is important is because it becomes a humiliating experience for Bill. While attempting to steal a pear from the convent’s orchard, he is chased off by a flock of hissing geese. When he encounters one of the nuns, she treats him in a condescending manner, accusing him-albeit correctly-of “upsetting” the geese. She also makes a show of scrutinizing the paperwork for the load of coal and wood he’s delivered, as if Bill can’t be trusted not to shortchange the convent. Between the demands of the young mothers and the rudeness of the nun, Bill has been made to feel hapless, shamed, and ineffective. He is so flustered by the episode that he makes a wrong turn while driving away from the convent and gets himself lost on a country road.
That night, when Bill tells Eileen of his visit to the convent and what he observed there, she instantly responds with a prepared speech. It’s obvious she’s been dreading the day when her husband would learn enough of how the young mothers are treated by the nuns to want to do something about it. Eileen accuses Bill of being “soft-hearted” and of thinking too much: “Where does thinking get us? … All thinking does is bring you down.” When Eileen tells Bill he thinks too much, a modern-day mental health therapist might say he is ruminating; that is, obsessing over a negative thought or experience. We are told Bill lies in bed at night “with his mind going round in circles, agitating …” That is probably why, when Bill is at work, he chooses to make all the coal and timber deliveries himself. Being alone in his truck and driving around the town affords him plenty of time to mull over his past, his present, and the misfortunes of those around him. But getting back to Eileen, she appeals to Bill to consider their five daughters and their future welfare, and states her own personal philosophy: “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” This is the “practical” side of Eileen’s mind speaking, the one that Bill envies and admires. Eileen’s arguments carry an extra note of urgency because she shares Bill’s awareness of how easy it would be “to lose everything”, as well as her fear that her husband’s misguided sense of charity might one day prove to be the undoing of their family’s whole way of life. Not for nothing are we told that Bill was born on April Fool’s Day. Bill is taken aback by the intensity of his wife’s response. He knows he’s touched a sensitive nerve, but Eileen’s mention of their daughters and Bill’s late mother only leads him to ask her to consider that, in other circumstances, it could well have been their own daughters’ fate to end up at the convent, as it would have been his mother’s had it not been for the kindness of Mrs. Wilson. Eileen is quick to point out that it was only Mrs. Wilson’s wealth and property that allowed her to ignore her local society conventions and be so generous to Bill’s mother years ago. “Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?” In other words, it was Mrs. Wilson’s money that allowed her to act with the independence of a man. Again, the issue of the different roles and levels of authority men and women are assigned to play in society comes to the forefront of the story. Given what transpires in the few days, one wonders whether it was at this moment that Bill begins to think seriously about rescuing one or more of the young women from the convent, as a way of assuaging the sense of guilt he feels for the privileged life he leads as well as repaying Mrs. Wilson for the similar action she took years ago in taking his pregnant mother into her home. That he possesses neither the financial resources nor social standing of Mrs. Wilson to carry out such a consequential step, so potentially disastrous for his family, does not seem to factor into his thinking. The day comes when Bill must make another delivery of coal and timber to the convent. It is on this frosty morning that he finds that a young woman has been locked in the coal shed, at least overnight if not longer, apparently as a punitive measure. Bill responds with his natural humanity and puts his coat over the young woman’s shoulders and helps her outside to his truck. All the while, however, he’s struggling with “the ordinary part of him” that wants to forget he ever saw the girl and just get on home. After all, this is one of those situations his wife told him should be ignored so he could keep on with his own life. Instead, “he carried on, as was his habit”, and leads the young woman-who tells him she is a mother with a baby who needs feeding-to the front door of the convent and rings the bell.
Highly embarrassing this, but please disregard the "Please disregard ... " instruction below and read the sections below in numerical order; i.e., PART ZERO, PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR Thanks again!
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Thanks for a beautiful in-depth analysis of this wonderful little masterpiece. I also really enjoyed your videos on Foster and The Vanishing Half.
I'm so glad! Thanks for tuning in! A lecture on So Late in the Day is being edited this week (by me haha) and will be available in the new year!
I just finish this wonderful novel. I really enjoyed your analysis of this sublime piece of fiction!
Thanks so much for listening and for the kind words! I just recorded a lecture on So Late int he Day! Coming to you in the new year!
PART FOUR -- Bill is described as being “carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not see but knew he would encounter.” The combination of excitement and fear suggests someone who is conscious of violating a law or social taboo and knows he will be sanctioned in some way, yet simultaneously craves the exhilaration of breaking that taboo.
To avoid any more awkward encounters with people he knows, Bill considers taking the long way home, but then decides to keep following his usual route through the middle of town. Bill has to pause for a moment, however, while Sarah vomits in the street, something he encourages: “Good girl … Get it all up. Get that much out of you.” It could be that Sarah is full of nervous anxiety at the thought of escaping from the convent and incurring the wrath of the Mother Superior, or is purging herself of the convent’s toxic influences. Another possibility is that she’s fallen ill with something contagious she’ll spread to Bill’s household.
The idea of a man and woman walking through the snow seeking shelter on Christmas Eve brings to mind Mary and Joseph that night in Bethlehem, and sure enough, Bill and Sarah stop at the Nativity scene in the Town Square. There is something odd about Sarah’s reaction. She stands “in a type of trance” looking at the manger scene. But not even the sight of the “Baby Jesus” elicits any reaction from her to suggest she’s thinking of her own child. Instead, she’s drawn to the figure of the donkey. “Isn’t he lovely,” she says.
At this point, as Sarah and Bill walk the last short distance to his front door, Keegan shows us Bill’s state of mind and leaves us to decide on the wisdom of his actions. We can sympathize with and even admire Bill’s willingness to take a stand against an organization that would leave a barefoot young mother to spend Christmas Eve alone inside a cold, dark coal shed. We fully applaud the fact that Bill has a conscience that prevents him from turning a blind eye to such injustice and hypocrisy, and compels him to intervene to rescue Sarah.
It’s also apparent that Bill feels an obligation to Mrs. Wilson for having taken in his own mother all those years ago, thereby saving her-and himself-from suffering the fate of Sarah and her baby. By bringing Sarah home with him, Bill feels he is repaying a debt to Mrs. Wilson. And not only to Mrs. Wilson, but to Fate, the Universe, or whatever eternal forces control his life, for I can’t help but think that Bill’s superstitious thinking is at work again. As disruptive as it may be to his marriage and family to bring Sarah home with him, Bill may believe that such a grand act of charity will help avert far greater calamities.
As to the likely effects on his own marriage and family life resulting from bringing an unexpected houseguest home on Christmas Eve, Bill shows no sign of having considered this aspect of the situation at all. Exactly what should he say to Eileen? What about the logistics of finding a place for Sarah within his household? How will his daughters react?
Instead of addressing such practical questions, Bill seems to be caught up in a mood of euphoria and grandiose thinking: “How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side”. (I’ve had that feeling, too, walking along with a girl at my side, but under different circumstances.) Bill feels that “the best bit of him was shining forth … some part of him … was going wild”. What I found most disturbing about Bill’s state of mind is that he feels he is happier now than at any other time in his life: “never once in his whole unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.” The same Bill Furlong who, when we first met him and his daughters earlier in the novel, “felt a deep private joy that these children were his own”, now seems to have set thoughts of his girls’ future aside in favour of this young woman, Sarah, who is largely a stranger to him.
But despite his elevated mood, a part of Bill’s mind is still moored to reality. When he imagines that, in different circumstances, he might have been saving his own mother, he immediately qualifies this thought by adding the proviso, “if saving was what this could be called”, as if he still has doubts as to the wisdom of freeing Sarah from the convent. Bill also realizes that, just a few steps ahead of him there is “a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door”, that is, the door to his own home.
Bill justifies his decision to complete those last few steps to his doorstep with the rationale that, whatever difficulties he might have to endure arising from his decision to bring Sarah home with him, they still won’t equal the horrendous ordeal that she has already suffered during her confinement at the convent. Bill’s thinking is also narrowly focused on himself. In his mind, the worst possible consequence of the present situation is the unbearable burden of guilt he would have had to carry “for the rest of his life” if he had ignored Sarah’s predicament and abandoned her to the tender mercies of the Mother Superior. In Bill’s world, as long as he has a clear conscience, everything else comes secondary.
Having a clear conscience is certainly a desirable thing, but it is not the only thing, and people have committed horrible crimes in the name of their conscience. In the final scene of her novel, Claire Keegan presents us with a situation where the future welfare of Bill and his family hangs in the balance. On one side of the scale, we have Bill’s conscience, which rests easy in his soul because he is convinced that he is doing the right thing by bringing Sarah home with him. On the other side of the scale, we have all those things of value in Bill’s life which his decision to rescue Sarah has cast into jeopardy: his daughters’ continued attendance at St. Margaret’s School, his family’s social acceptance in the local community, his financial security arising from his profitable coal and timber company, and the stability of his marriage and family life. All of these are of less significance to Bill than his clear conscience.
In her novel’s final sentence, Claire Keegan tells the reader where she stands on Bill’s decision. “Climbing the street towards his own front door with the barefooted girl and the box of shoes, his fear more than outweighed every other feeling but in his foolish heart he not only hoped but legitimately believed that they would manage.” The juxtaposition of “barefooted girl” and “box of shoes” draws our attention to Bill’s blinkered view of the world. He can’t see that the remedy to Sarah’s bare feet is tucked under his arm. And as for his “foolish heart”, this, of course, harkens back to the “hugely practical” Mrs. Kehoe and her view that some men “weren’t men at all but foolish boys.”
It is this same “foolish heart” that has Bill convinced that, somehow, he and his family will muddle through, though the odds of this seem unlikely given the foreboding hints we’ve seen that his “run-in” with the Mother Superior has already been met with the disapproval of by the community, as Mrs. Kehoe warned Bill it would be. Stealing away Sarah from the convent in the middle of the night will surely provoke the outright condemnation and ostracization of the Furlong family, with Eileen and the girls having had absolutely no say in the matter.
We can imagine Eileen’s consternation when Bill walks through the door with barefoot Sarah in tow. Her consternation may well turn into blistering anger when she fully realizes the calamity that her April Fool of a husband has inflicted upon her and her girls. Eileen may decide that only by packing up her daughters and moving in with family or friends-providing there are any willing to take them in-can she and her girls hope to escape the condemnation of the Catholic Church. We can also imagine Sarah suddenly remembering that she has a child, and deciding it is worth the pain of returning to the convent in order to be near her baby. Or she could be offended to find that she is so obviously unwelcome at the Furlongs, and decide that staying anywhere else is preferable, even if it’s on the street. Bill could very well end up celebrating Christmas on his own.
So, I don’t find that “Small Things Like These” ends on an upbeat note, in fact, quite the opposite. It’s the story of the collateral damage that can result from one man’s commitment to follow his conscience regardless of the consequences. See, for example, Senator Tommy Tuberville’s actions in putting up roadblocks to promotions in the American military.
I’ll be interested to see how the producers of the film version of “Small Things Like These” resolve the story’s ending. From the bits of information I’ve found online, it appears a young male actor will be playing the part of “Young Bill Furlong”, suggesting there will be a flashback sequence showing Bill and his mother living with Ned and Mrs. Wilson. Another actor will be playing “Sarah’s father”, making it likely her character’s backstory will be filled in. Who knows, perhaps the film version will end with Bill Furlong returning Sarah to the care of her Grinch-like father on Christmas Eve, with Sarah’s father having a change-of-heart and bursting into tears at first sight of his grandson.
These analyses are so in depth and thought provoking, thank you for sharing! I really like how you dove into Bill's character arc. I also found the ending quite unsettling and it was strange to see how hypocritically blind he was becoming by the end of the novella, for better or worse, but it was a refreshingly different read! I'm really excited to see how Cillian Murphy brings this character to screen and how they translate these complex internal thoughts, really hope the film does the text justice! :)
@@charlize.blicharski Thank you for your kind words, and for having had the patience to read through my disjointed hunks of text. I wrote out my thoughts on “Small Things Like These” partly to stop them from wearing grooves in my brain, and partly for the intellectual exercise.
I’m not sure how much you know about modern Irish history, but when Claire Keegan wrote “Small Things” it was against the backdrop of the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916 and the resulting War of Independence against Great Britain, followed by the Irish Civil War ending in 1923. I think it’s possible to see Keegan’s story as an allegory for the 1916 Easter Uprising, with Bill Furlong representing some of the naïve young Irish rebels who sparked off years of violence and bloodshed without seeming to realize what they were doing.
As far as the film version goes, it had its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 15th, which is yesterday from my pov on the globe (southern Ontario, Canada), and the couple reviews I’ve seen online have been positive. It sounds as if the film’s producers resisted the impulse to make a positive, feel-good Christmas story, and instead tried to preserve the ambiguity of Keegan’s final scene.
Anyway, thanks again for reading my comments and for taking the time to leave your own. I really appreciate it!
P.S. If you’re interested, elsewhere on The Foxed Page I’ve set down my lengthy thoughts on Claire Keegan’s “Foster”, which I first became aware of about a year ago when I first saw the Irish language film adaptation, “An Cailín Ciúin”-“The Quiet Girl”-an experience that caught me totally off-guard with the emotional impact of its final scene. There are images and moments from “The Quiet Girl” that have lingered in my mind ever since. -- Tom
PART ZERO -- From a survey of some of the reviews of Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These” it appears that many critics have focused on the traditional Christmassy aspects of the story, even invoking Charles Dickens in the process. Others devote their attention to the novel’s social justice issues and the moral courage of the central character, Bill Furlong, in standing up to the Catholic Church and its harsh treatment of the young mothers placed in its care at the town’s local convent, as well as the community’s complicity in the Church’s cruel policies.
As I read “Small Things Like These”, however, what struck me most about the story was Bill Furlong’s slow descent from a loving husband and father, concerned for the welfare of his wife and five daughters, into a self-absorbed man with a mission, determined to rescue a young woman from the local convent, regardless of the consequences for himself, his wife, his five daughters, and the family business upon which they all depend. At the same time, I couldn’t help but admire Bill for being the type of person who can’t turn a blind eye to cruelty and injustice, and is willing to take steps to confront the evils of society no matter how small and Quixotic his efforts might be.
As the story begins, we see that Bill is a successful family man. He has a home, a wife named Eileen, and five healthy daughters. Bill also carries the traditional burden of care inherent in being a husband and father. He worries about his daughters growing up, becoming adults, leaving home, and “going out into the world of men.”
Bill is approaching his fortieth birthday. Despite his apparently happy family life and success as owner of a profitable coal and timber business, he sometimes awakens in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. “What was it all for?” he wonders. He thinks of other paths his life might have taken. All the signs point to Bill heading for a midlife crisis.
On top of this, the circumstances of Bill’s birth and upbringing have left him feeling a type of survivor’s guilt. His mother was only sixteen and unmarried when she became pregnant with him. With no husband and no family support, she would have been condemned to a life of servile drudgery at the local convent had not a kindly and well-to-do Protestant woman, Mrs. Wilson, taken her in to live with her. Thus, Bill’s mother was able to raise her son in a safe and stable home.
Because of his own good luck, Bill feels acutely the financial misfortunes and personal tragedies of the friends and neighbours who have not enjoyed his advantages in life. He is also well aware that there is nothing shielding him or his family from accidents of Fate or similar calamities. “It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything,” he often thinks.
Bill is a naturally generous and kind-hearted person. He gives his customers extra time to pay their bills if they need it, while to others he leaves free bags of firewood or the spare change out of his pocket. These acts of charity are consistent with the Catholic doctrine which values good works as part of the road to salvation. But in Bill’s case, his charitable acts seem more likely evidence of a superstitious pattern of thinking, for he doesn’t seem to be a very religious man, and we never find him seeking solace or guidance in prayer.
PART TWO -- While waiting for someone to come to the door, Bill considers dropping off the girl at the local priest’s house, or of simply taking her home with him. He is reacting impulsively, not thinking clearly of the bigger picture. Driving the young woman to the priest’s house would only be taking her out of the frying pan into the fire. How could Bill not realize the priest would return Sarah to the convent as soon as he left her there? As for bringing Sarah home with him, Bill gives this option less forethought than he probably would to bringing home a kitten or a puppy.
The Mother Superior eventually comes to the door and Bill tells her that he found the young woman locked in the coal shed overnight. It is an awkward situation for the Mother Superior and she puts on a show of being shocked to hear this and concerned for the girl’s welfare, but we are not fooled and neither is Bill. When the Mother Superior invites Bill to come inside and have some tea, his initial reaction is to say no and step backwards out of the doorway, “as though the step could take him back into the time before this.” To leave at this point would be the easy thing to do. Bill could drive away from the convent and ease his conscience by persuading himself that the Mother Superior’s solicitude for the young mother was sincere.
But at the same time, for Bill to decline the Mother Superior’s hospitality could be viewed as rude, and a sign that he has seen through her charade. He allows himself to be prevailed upon to stay for tea and he and the girl proceed down a hallway toward the convent’s kitchen. At this point, Bill is deferential towards the nuns. He takes his hat off and apologizes for leaving muddy footprints on the floor. The young mother is taken away by one of the nuns while the Mother Superior ushers Bill into a large, well-appointed room with a fireplace.
The Mother Superior is on her home turf now and presses her advantage. Though she initially addressed Bill as Mr. Furlong, she now calls him “Billy”, as if to infantilize him and emphasize the social distance between a Mother Superior and a mere coal merchant. She is not above practising a bit of extortion either. After making polite enquiries about Bill’s five daughters and eliciting his hopes they’ll all be able to attend St. Margaret’s school next door-the only good school for girls in the town-she reminds him that, “It’s no easy task to find a place for everyone.” In other words, if Bill wants all his girls to eventually be able to attend St. Margaret’s school, he should forget what he’s seen at the convent this day.
To further diminish Bill in his own eyes, Mother Superior expresses sympathy for the fact that he has no son to bear his name forward, only five daughters. Is there an implied doubt about Dan’s manhood intended? Be that as it may, the Mother Superior has overplayed her hand. Bill has been through variants of this conversation before and has a ready reply: “Sure, didn’t I take my own mother’s name, Mother. And never any harm did it to me.” Bill no longer feels on the defensive. Earlier, he had apologized for his muddy boots. Now, as a small gesture of defiance, he carefully lets one of those same muddy boots touch the polished brass of the fireplace fender.
Unfortunately, it is at this point that I think Bill begins to lose sight of what’s really important in the situation he finds himself in. Rather than focusing on the girl’s welfare, Bill becomes distracted by his desire to take the mickey out of the Mother Superior for treating him in such a condescending manner. When a nun escorts the now cleaned-up and warmly dressed young mother into the room, Bill speaks up promptly to ask how she’s feeling, as if to show he can be quicker off the mark than the Mother Superior in expressing concern for the girl’s welfare.
The Mother Superior then goes through a ritual of pulling out a chair for the young mother to sit on and personally serving her some tea and fruit cake. From the girl’s reaction, it’s apparent this is far from the kind of treatment she’s used to receiving in the convent. The Mother Superior engages Bill in some idle chitchat, as if to show she has nothing to hide, before turning her attention to the young mother again. She repeats her pretense of maternal kindness while she asks the girl how she came to be locked in the coal shed. With great trepidation, the girl replies to the Mother Superior’s leading questions and says she was locked in the coal shed by the other young women while playing hide and seek. Following the Mother Superior’s promptings, the girl agrees, “It was a big nothing” before being ushered out of the room by another nun.
It is obvious to the reader that this is a staged performance by the Mother Superior intended to present Bill with an apparently innocent explanation of how the young mother came to be locked in the coal shed. This is Bill’s cue to thank the Mother Superior for his tea and be on his way. But as eager as he was earlier to leave the convent, Bill now finds that “the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground … He sat on, encouraged by this queer, new power. He was, after all, a man amongst women here.”
This display of male chauvinism sounds totally out of character for Bill. This is the same man who, shortly before, deflected the Mother Superior’s barb about his lack of sons to carry on his name by telling her that he carries his mother’s surname and that it’s never done him any harm. The same man who leaves his oldest daughter to run the coal yard office while he’s out making deliveries, which she does quite competently. The same man who quite readily acknowledges what he owes to the women in his life, such as the late Mrs. Wilson and his own wife Eileen. And it’s not just any random group of women Bill is suddenly feeling superior to; these are the Sisters of the Good Shepherd with the full might of the Catholic Church behind them.
So precisely because he knows the Mother Superior wants him gone, Bill deliberately delays his departure. He dawdles, makes small talk, and decides he’ll have another cup of tea after all. Still, the Mother Superior has the power to put Bill at a disadvantage and remind him of their relative social positions by giving him an envelope containing a card and a Christmas bonus that Eileen is later gratified to learn contains a fifty-pound note.
Bill takes his time leaving the convent and, while walking out, he pauses to talk to the young mother again, learns her name is Sarah-“That was my own mother’s name”-gives her his name, tells her where he can be found, and says that she can call on him for help anytime. Bill wants to reassure Sarah that she has a friend on the outside, but he fails to understand that by centering her out for attention in this way, he is only increasing the likelihood that the Mother Superior will make her the target for further retribution once he has left. It does no good for Bill to deliberately antagonize the Mother Superior, and indeed, before long Sarah will be spending the night in the coal shed again.
From this point on, Bill becomes even more inward looking and emotionally isolated from his wife and daughters. When he returns home, Eileen can tell that he’s “out of sorts” about something, but Bill denies that there’s anything wrong and says nothing about his encounter with Sarah and the Mother Superior at the convent. Reluctantly, he accompanies Eileen and the girls to the local Catholic church for Mass. He betrays his tense mood when, uncharacteristically, he snaps at Eileen when she makes a harmless joke about the girls having no change for the collection plate because their father has given it all away. Rather than sit with his family, Bill stands brooding at the back of the church during the service. Rejecting the authority of the Catholic Church, he doesn’t take communion and instead concentrates on looking at the figure of Christ in the Stations of the Cross mounted on the wall, leading the reader to wonder if Bill is starting to see himself as some sort of Christ figure.
Bill’s restless mood continues after the family returns home. He’s unable to relax and get into the Christmas spirit with his wife and daughters. He decides to drive out and see his old friend Ned before the weather turns bad. He feels a sense of relief when Eileen suggests he invite Ned to come for Christmas dinner and gives him a bag of mince pies to take to him.
Unfortunately, when Bill arrives at the Wilson place, a young woman tells him Ned is no longer there but is recovering from pneumonia “in a home” somewhere. The young woman gives Bill a shock by telling him she guesses Ned must be an uncle of his because she can see the resemblance between them. All through the novel, we find Bill wondering who his father might be, and now he may have an answer. He now has this new information to digest as well as his sense of guilt that he didn’t do more to help Sarah when he was at the convent earlier that day. The reader feels at this point that, if only Bill had had a chance to talk with Ned, the novel might have had a different ending. Bill is a Quixote-like character desperately in need of a Sancho Panza.
PART THREE -- We next see Bill making deliveries on Christmas Eve. As he drops off his loads of coal and timber, some of his customers give him small gifts of sweets, vegetables, liquor, and even money. “People could be good,” Bill thinks to himself, but then he immediately reproaches himself for not having thought to share some of these gifts with the less fortunate. We can appreciate how Bill feels, but he still seems to be setting impossibly high standards for himself. Considering how generous he is to others, surely, he can be forgiven for bringing home some Christmas goodies to his wife and daughters on this one day of the year.
Once back in town, Bill goes to the coal-yard to see how his work crew are finishing up for the day and to close up shop for the Christmas break. At this point, Bill is thinking of his wife and daughters: “all he wanted, now, was to get home”. But he spends some time lingering over dinner at his friend Mrs. Kehoe’s restaurant, talking to his employees and expressing his appreciation to them, something he feels “he seldom made time for.”
“It’s been a busy time,” Bill remarks to Mrs. Kehoe. “Won’t the few days off do us no harm.” He says this, oblivious to the fact that Mrs. Kehoe’s work day is far from over as she is still tending to her leftover food. “What it is to be a man and to have days off,” replies Mrs. Kehoe, with a harsh sarcastic laugh. Once again, Bill’s focus on himself and his own thoughts and priorities have blinded him to the fact that other people, such as Ms. Kehoe, may be working over Christmas. Mrs. Kehoe’s comment also raises once again the issue of men’s and women’s differing views of the world and the roles they see themselves playing in that world.
Despite her sarcastic laughter at his expense, Mrs. Kehoe is sympathetic towards Bill. She tells him that she’s heard of the “run-in” he had with the Mother Superior, and warns him to be wary of making an enemy of her. “Surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie”, she says.
But Bill is doubtful of the nuns’ real influence in the community. “Surely, they’ve only as much power as we give them,” he tells Mrs. Kehoe. We are then told that Mrs. Kehoe pauses and looks at Bill “the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys. More than once, maybe more than several times, Eileen had done the same.” In other words, Mrs. Kehoe is responding to Bill’s concern for the young mothers at the convent the same way his wife did when he first told her about them. Mrs. Kehoe also makes the same appeal that Eileen did by reminding Bill of his five daughters and how much their future depends upon remaining on good terms with the nuns at St. Margaret’s School.
After exchanging Christmas greetings with Mrs. Kehoe, Bill leaves her restaurant and goes walking into the snowy night. It is unfortunate that Bill is now alone as he walks the streets of the town. As long as he was in the company of other people, such as his workmen or Mrs. Kehoe, he was reminded of his responsibilities towards his family and felt a desire to go home. But Bill seems to be an essentially solitary person, and once he is outside walking on his own, he feels “a bit freer now, being out in the open air … The urgency to run the one errand he had to run and get on home was falling away.”
The one errand Bill has to run is to buy the pair of shoes his wife wants for Christmas, but instead of making this his priority, Bill “almost lightheartedly” goes window shopping downtown. Mrs. Kehoe had looked at Bill as if he were a foolish boy instead of a man, and he now confirms this opinion by going to the toy store and staring, “as a child might”, at the toys and other items in the store window. Bill sees two dolls dressed in frilly dresses posed with their arms held out in front of them, “as though they were asking to be lifted”, but the sight of the dolls doesn’t twig Bill’s mind to his five daughters waiting for him at home. Eileen’s shoes shift to the backburner as the little boy inside Bill, who didn’t receive his wished-for 500-piece jigsaw puzzle at Christmas decades ago, now goes into the toy store to ask Mrs. Stafford if she has any such puzzles in stock, only to be disappointed once again by being told no.
Bill now acts like a man who is looking for reasons to avoid going home, or like a man who is mulling over a decision at some subconscious level and trying to keep open the options which going home would foreclose. Earlier I stated that Bill seems to be a superstitious man, and at this point he seems to be waiting for Fate or the Universe to give him some sign as to what course of action he should take. In the meantime, he does some more window shopping, catches sight of his reflection in a mirror, and decides he needs a haircut.
The barber shop has a queue of men ahead of him, but Bill takes a seat anyway. He gazes at himself in a mirror, looking for a resemblance to his old friend Ned, a resemblance “he both could and could not see.” It almost seems as if Bill is losing sense of his own identity as a husband and father with a family waiting for him at home. Keegan describes Bill as sitting with a sense of his mind being freed up “to stray and roam”; he doesn’t mind at all sitting in the barber’s shop waiting to get his hair cut. And, in fact, as Keegan will tell us a few pages later, at this very moment Bill is considering returning to the convent and is thinking ahead as to whether he might find Sarah confined in the coal shed again. So, Bill is definitely thinking of rescuing Sarah from the convent, but there is no indication that he’s thinking of what he’ll do once he arrives home with her.
Bill finally leaves the barber shop and at last goes to pick up the pair of shoes that are to be his Christmas present to Eileen. At the shop, Bill is met by a “well-dressed woman” behind the counter. She is another one of those “practical women” in Bill’s life, though not as friendly towards him as Eileen or Mrs. Kehoe as she “didn’t seem overly eager to serve him.” The woman is also the wife of one of Bill’s best customers, and her chilly attitude should trigger Bill’s Spidey-Sense that news of his contretemps with the Mother Superior is spreading around town and may begin to affect his profit margin. But Bill’s mind is above such petty concerns and after paying for the shoes he simply walks out of the store into the night again.
We are told that it is now well past dark and that Bill is “more than ready to climb the hill towards home”, yet all it takes is the smell of hot oil from a nearby chip truck to divert Bill from his purpose. After getting a can of 7Up at the chipper, Bill turns his feet in the direction of the bridge over the River Barrow that will take him to the convent. We are told that Bill “found himself walking back down to the river”, almost as if it wasn’t a conscious choice on his part.
Perhaps it’s a stretch to suggest this, but Bill almost seems to be having an episode of mild disassociation brought on by the cumulative stress of the responsibility he feels towards Sarah and the discovery that his lifelong friend Ned may actually be his father. There is a sense of Bill being detached from his own actions as he walks towards the bridge: “[H]e wondered why he had not gone back to the comforts and safety of his own home”, where Eileen would be wondering where he was and preparing to attend Midnight Mass. But we are told that Bill’s day “was filling up now, with something else.”
Bill continues walking in the direction of the convent, thinking of his mother and Ned and the young mother who wanted to drown herself in the River Barrow. He looks in the windows of the upscale houses he passes, seeing the sort of domestic Christmas scenes he could be enjoying himself at his own home. Even the sight of a schoolgirl in a St. Margaret’s School uniform doesn’t make him yearn to head home and see his own daughters.
Making his way to the convent grounds in the dark and around to the coal shed, Bill’s resolve falters briefly and he hopes that perhaps Sarah might not be inside the coal shed after all. It is another Christlike moment for Bill, reminiscent of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying, “Let this cup pass from me.” But Bill finds “everything was just as he’d feared” and Sarah is in the coal shed after all. He gives her his coat to put over her shoulders, but the sight of her bare, black feet doesn’t remind him that he’s carrying Eileen’s shoes in a box under his arm. We also note that Sarah makes no mention of her baby, the one she was so anxious to nurse the first time Bill met her. Has the child died?
Although Bill says, “You’ll come home with me now, Sarah”, he feels his sense of “self-preservation and courage battling against each other”, and his thoughts keep leaning towards the idea of leaving Sarah at the priest’s home, only to reject this plan every time. As Bill leads Sarah through the streets of the town, he meets people he knows who respond to the sight of him and the barefoot Sarah with shock, unease, or mild outrage.
Such thorough observation! It's yet another testament to the skill of Keegan that we can have so much to say about such a slim work!
Thanks, Kimberly, for your kind words. @@thefoxedpage
Please disregard the "PART ZERO", "PART ONE" etc. below and just read the sections below in order from top to bottom. Thanks!
Sir, where we can find you for more such read?
@@neelchand2268If you’re looking for comments that I’ve made on other books here at The Foxed Page, I can refer you to Kimberly’s three lectures on Claire Keegan’s long short story, “Foster”, where I had something to say about each of the three talks. I’ve also left comments about “Lolita” and “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma”, also here at The Foxed Page. I plan on leaving more comments on other books Kimberly has singled out for study, but it’s a matter of finding time to organize my thoughts as well as being a painfully slow, one and two-fingered typist. Anyway, thank you for asking and I really appreciate your interest!
PART ONE -- Instead of trusting in a personal God, Bill has adopted the practice of being kind and generous towards his neighbours as a way of expiating his survivor’s guilt. He behaves as if he can appease Fate or the gods or the inscrutable forces of the Universe through his acts of kindness and self-sacrifice to others, and so protect himself and his family from harm for a little while longer.
Bill’s habit of generosity has become a slight friction point in his relationship with his wife. Eileen’s opinion of the objects of Bill’s charity is more judgmental than his. “You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?” she reminds her husband when he mentions a man with a drinking problem. Eileen’s attitude towards society’s unfortunates is fatalistic: “Always there’s one that has to pull the short straw.” She would have agreed with the conservative Catholic Church position that ‘the poor will always be with us.’
Bill envies Eileen’s ability not bedevil herself with thoughts about the past or worry about things she can’t do anything about. He asks her: “Do you not go back over things, Eileen? Or worry? I sometimes wish I had your mind.” Indeed, that was one of the reasons Bill married Eileen: “He was attracted to her … practical, agile mind”, a trait Bill believes she has passed on to their daughters.
As Bill views the world, men might have physical strength and powerful positions in society, “but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.” Keegan puts a similar thought into the mind of John Kinsella in her novella, “Foster”, when she has him say, “A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.”
Thinking of his wife, Bill continues: “He’d had moments, in his marriage, when he’d almost feared Eileen and had envied her mettle, her red-hot instincts.” Keegan seems to be saying that, for all men’s authority in society and their prevailing belief in their own dominance, in reality, it is women who have the keener insight into how the world works, and who bear the ultimate responsibility for keeping the wheels of family, home, and community running smoothly.
As we read “Small Things Like These”, we notice that Bill’s most meaningful interactions occur almost entirely with women. First, with his wife and daughters; then, retrospectively, with the late Mrs. Wilson; also Sarah and the young mothers at the convent; the Mother Superior and the other nuns of the Good Shepherd; Mrs. Kehoe at her restaurant; the comely young woman who invites Bill to step inside for a cup of tea; Mrs. Stafford at the toy shop; the well-dressed saleslady at Hanrahan’s leather goods store; the young girl who gives Bill a Christmas card; and finally, the young woman at the Wilson’s home who answers the door when Bill comes calling asking for his old friend Ned.
Bill has no friend outside of his family. Ned, Mrs. Wilson’s former farmhand, turns out to be the only male with whom Bill has any significant interaction in the whole course of the novel. But even this contact occurs in the past, and we know of it only because Bill recalls a particular conversation with Ned from years ago. When Bill goes looking for Ned at the old Wilson place towards the end of the story, he finds he is no longer there.
The only males we see Bill speak to face-to-face in the present are the old man with a bill-hook of whom he asks directions when he gets lost driving away from his visit to the convent, and the charming little boy who gives Bill the traditional Christmas greeting of, “Fuck off, why don’t you”, towards the end of the book. There are men at the barber shop when Bill gets a haircut, but he holds aloof from them, just as he stands on his own at the back of the church when he attends Mass. As for the crew of men who work at the coal yard, Bill’s relationship with them is entirely on an employer/employee basis. If only Bill had a close friend to confide in, he might have come up with a better plan for dealing with the situation he finds at the local Catholic convent in the course of the novel.
The first hairline cracks in Bill’s world appear one day when he drives to the local convent to deliver a load of coal and wood. This visit is important for two reasons. First, Bill witnesses, apparently for the first time, the harsh conditions under which the young mothers and their children live and work at the convent. He is taken aback by the young women’s desperate pleas for help; one of them begs for the chance just to get away and drown herself. Bill is suddenly faced with a situation he can’t make good with a bag of firewood or some spare pocket change, and the realization begins to gnaw at his conscience.
The second reason this visit is important is because it becomes a humiliating experience for Bill. While attempting to steal a pear from the convent’s orchard, he is chased off by a flock of hissing geese. When he encounters one of the nuns, she treats him in a condescending manner, accusing him-albeit correctly-of “upsetting” the geese. She also makes a show of scrutinizing the paperwork for the load of coal and wood he’s delivered, as if Bill can’t be trusted not to shortchange the convent. Between the demands of the young mothers and the rudeness of the nun, Bill has been made to feel hapless, shamed, and ineffective. He is so flustered by the episode that he makes a wrong turn while driving away from the convent and gets himself lost on a country road.
That night, when Bill tells Eileen of his visit to the convent and what he observed there, she instantly responds with a prepared speech. It’s obvious she’s been dreading the day when her husband would learn enough of how the young mothers are treated by the nuns to want to do something about it. Eileen accuses Bill of being “soft-hearted” and of thinking too much: “Where does thinking get us? … All thinking does is bring you down.”
When Eileen tells Bill he thinks too much, a modern-day mental health therapist might say he is ruminating; that is, obsessing over a negative thought or experience. We are told Bill lies in bed at night “with his mind going round in circles, agitating …” That is probably why, when Bill is at work, he chooses to make all the coal and timber deliveries himself. Being alone in his truck and driving around the town affords him plenty of time to mull over his past, his present, and the misfortunes of those around him.
But getting back to Eileen, she appeals to Bill to consider their five daughters and their future welfare, and states her own personal philosophy: “If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on.” This is the “practical” side of Eileen’s mind speaking, the one that Bill envies and admires. Eileen’s arguments carry an extra note of urgency because she shares Bill’s awareness of how easy it would be “to lose everything”, as well as her fear that her husband’s misguided sense of charity might one day prove to be the undoing of their family’s whole way of life. Not for nothing are we told that Bill was born on April Fool’s Day.
Bill is taken aback by the intensity of his wife’s response. He knows he’s touched a sensitive nerve, but Eileen’s mention of their daughters and Bill’s late mother only leads him to ask her to consider that, in other circumstances, it could well have been their own daughters’ fate to end up at the convent, as it would have been his mother’s had it not been for the kindness of Mrs. Wilson. Eileen is quick to point out that it was only Mrs. Wilson’s wealth and property that allowed her to ignore her local society conventions and be so generous to Bill’s mother years ago. “Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?” In other words, it was Mrs. Wilson’s money that allowed her to act with the independence of a man. Again, the issue of the different roles and levels of authority men and women are assigned to play in society comes to the forefront of the story.
Given what transpires in the few days, one wonders whether it was at this moment that Bill begins to think seriously about rescuing one or more of the young women from the convent, as a way of assuaging the sense of guilt he feels for the privileged life he leads as well as repaying Mrs. Wilson for the similar action she took years ago in taking his pregnant mother into her home. That he possesses neither the financial resources nor social standing of Mrs. Wilson to carry out such a consequential step, so potentially disastrous for his family, does not seem to factor into his thinking.
The day comes when Bill must make another delivery of coal and timber to the convent. It is on this frosty morning that he finds that a young woman has been locked in the coal shed, at least overnight if not longer, apparently as a punitive measure. Bill responds with his natural humanity and puts his coat over the young woman’s shoulders and helps her outside to his truck. All the while, however, he’s struggling with “the ordinary part of him” that wants to forget he ever saw the girl and just get on home. After all, this is one of those situations his wife told him should be ignored so he could keep on with his own life. Instead, “he carried on, as was his habit”, and leads the young woman-who tells him she is a mother with a baby who needs feeding-to the front door of the convent and rings the bell.
Highly embarrassing this, but please disregard the "Please disregard ... " instruction below and read the sections below in numerical order; i.e., PART ZERO, PART ONE, PART TWO, PART THREE, PART FOUR Thanks again!