Time of the Child

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death. 

“In all churches, the time between settling into the pew and the starting of Mass is its own interlude, and in Faha was the only certified moment of stillness. You sat, and if you didn’t join the rosary, or sideways survey the congregation, you went to that inner place where the pages of your life lay open. For Jack Troy those pages contained the same defeats and regrets familiar to all whose years lived outnumbered years left, but added to these was the realization he had come to that morning in the shaving mirror: four years after the death of the amateur chemist, Annie Mooney, he was still in love with her.”

The narrator’s descriptions of the Faha Mass introduce the community’s Catholic tradition and Jack Troy’s relationship to the faith. Jack is present at the service because Catholicism is an integral part of Faha life. However, because he doesn’t have a strong attachment to the faith any longer, Mass offers him the opportunity to think. The narrator likens his meandering thoughts to pages in a book—a metaphor that describes Jack’s need for meditation amid his otherwise busy life. The latter line of the passage thus instigates a shift into Jack’s private, internal world, offering insight into his personal history and heartbreak over Annie Mooney.

“The doctor registered it but looked away without enlightenment. It would not be until the night of the Christmas Fair that he would remember it. Then Jude Quinlan would be standing at the front door, with the child in his arms. The doctor looked away. He reached for the top bar of the pew in the reflex that comes before rising. But he did not rise. All of which happened in the paused time in which story stretches to allow for the four dimensions of human nature.”

The author uses foreshadowing to create narrative tension and mystery. Because the narrator has access to events beyond the characters’ immediate consciousnesses, the narrator can predict the night they will find the baby. Foreshadowing this event establishes an anticipatory mood and mobilizes the otherwise static narrative plotline.

“From a love affair without end, fields were some part-submerged, and would stay that way until spring when, if a fine spell came, for a time the love would go the other way. They were fields with the soil washed away, and then washed away some more, in a timeless surrender or slow return to when the world was water. The ground was mud, thin-skinned with a shallow benevolence of grass that acted as glue. Animals out on it all months of the year, it was pocked in all the places that were not stone. […] In a December light, weak and watered, was a palpable sense of the year thinning out.”

The detailed description of the Faha landscape creates a leaden narrative mood. Jack is studying his surroundings as he drives, observations that instigate this descriptive moment.