Summary
Crows make an appearance in the beginning of the fourth chapter. They gather in groups larger than ever, watching and scavenging in town during the day and roosting in large old trees near the convent at night. The convent garden is well-kept, with its cut lawns, trimmed ornamental shrubs, and cut hedges. Outdoor fires create strange green smoke that the wind carries across town or away in the other direction. People comment that the convent resembles a Christmas card because of its trees dusted in frost and its untouched holly berries growing nearby.
The Good Shepherd nuns in charge of the convent run a training school for girls as well as a laundry business. The laundry is renowned for providing good quality washing, and clients include restaurants, guesthouses, the nursing home, the hospital, the priests, and rich households. Speculation circulates concerning the girls who attend the school. People say that they are "of low character," and that they work extreme hours in horrible conditions to repent for their sins. Others claim that the nuns themselves work with little food to fuel them. Still others insist that the nuns make an illegitimate profit by adopting out the babies born at the convent to poor unmarried girls. Furlong does not heed this gossip, saying that there is no shortage of idle minds in the town.
While delivering coal to the convent one day, he walks into the convent's fruit orchard since no one is around to receive the delivery. A flock of geese prevents him from taking a pear, so he walks on. He comes upon more than a dozen young women and girls polishing the floor of a small chapel with old-fashioned lavender polish. They wear ugly gray shifts and black socks with no shoes. One girl has an infected eyelid, while another has extremely roughly cut hair. Furlong observes them looking "scalded" at the sight of him. The girl with roughly cut hair asks Furlong for help. When he steps back, she asks him to simply take her as far as the river. He holds out his empty hands and tells her that it's not up to him, and that he can't take her home to work for him either. Upset, she angrily expresses her intention to drown herself.
A nun enters the chapel and seems to chastise Furlong for upsetting the geese. Momentarily distracted, he follows the nun out of the convent to inspect the order of coal and logs. The nun reminds Furlong of a "strong, spoiled pony who'd for too long been given her own way." Despite his desire to confront the nun about the girls polishing the floor, he stays quiet. On the road again, he misses his turn and heads in the wrong direction. He thinks about what he saw at the convent: the padlocks on the inside of the door leading to the orchard, the high wall topped with broken glass, and the way the nun locked the front door just to come out to pay.
The foggy weather and lack of space on the winding road prevent Furlong from turning around, so he continually makes right turns until he loses his sense of direction. When he stops and asks an old man for directions, the man tells him that "this road will take you wherever you want to go."
That night, Furlong shares what he witnessed at the convent with Eileen. She immediately tells him not to get involved particularly because the nuns always pay for their coal orders on time. Eileen believes that whatever goes on at the convent has nothing to do with their family. She reminds Furlong that their own daughters are "well" and "minded." Furlong responds by saying he does not understand what their daughters have to do with the conversation. Eventually, Eileen says, "If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on." Their agitated conversation continues until Eileen references Furlong's own mother, which renders him speechless. Eileen's perspective is that inadequate parenting leads these girls to "[get] into trouble" by getting pregnant, and then the families abandon them.
The heart of the argument between Furlong and Eileen is that he expresses empathy by imagining if his daughters underwent such abuse in a place like the convent, while Eileen insists that they focus on the reality of their situation. Their daughters are well-cared for, and they have to maintain cordial relations with other townsfolk to keep their business going. Furlong counters this by asking where he and his mother would be if Mrs. Wilson shared Eileen's perspective. Eileen's rebuttal concerns Mrs. Wilson's economic status: being rich allowed her to "do as she pleased."
Analysis
The fourth chapter begins with a description of crows congregating about the town. Crows have a rich and varied symbolism, representing mystery, transformation, intelligence, death, and rebirth. In Small Things Like These, crows bring forth all these symbolic connotations. It is particularly relevant that they appear right before Furlong observes indications of abuse at the convent because this kickstarts his moral dilemma (the main conflict in the novella).
Behind the veneer of the Christmas-card-like convent (with its snow-dusted yews, evergreens, and holly bushes) lies a terrible open secret. Keegan juxtaposes beautiful nature imagery with the padlocked doors and broken glass lining the high walls. The abuse that takes place at the convent can be considered an open secret because the townspeople have speculated as much, but no one does anything about it.
Keegan reveals the human rights abuses occurring at the convent both implicitly and explicitly. Details about the girls' appearances (such as their gray shifts, lack of shoes, and general unkemptness) as well as the way they scrub the chapel floors suggest they are being forced to labor in difficult conditions. A conversation that Furlong has with one of the girls indicates the maltreatment that these girls and women suffer. This particular girl has hair that "had been roughly cut, as though someone blind had taken to it with shears." It is significant that Keegan specifies that "it was she who came up" to Furlong because this implies that the girl's willingness to speak led someone (possibly a nun) to shear her hair. The girl asks Furlong to collude in her escape, which she is willing to take as far as suicide. He responds by "showing her his open, empty hands," a gesture that symbolizes a failed desire to reach out and help. This interaction with the desperate girl deeply affects Furlong on a personal level.
The girl's revelation about her desire to drown herself reveals the ways in which a community (or lack thereof) can impact an individual. Keegan does not write about what happened in this girl's life, but whatever it was led her to be treated as a social outcast. She tells Furlong "I've nobody," indicating that her family has abandoned her. Rather than find sympathy, care, and the chance to move on in life at the convent, it is clear that this girl and the entire group are undergoing forced labor and being treated as second-class citizens.
Furlong wonders what would have become of his mother and himself had she ended up at a place like the convent. While his empathy causes him to imagine his own daughters in this situation, Eileen reveals the major difference between the couple when she insists that it is not their concern. She also implies that the girls and women at the convent possibly brought about their own suffering. This touches on the theme of individual versus community in terms of responsibility. Many townspeople (including Eileen) fault individuals for their own hardships rather than take into account any wider social circumstances that contribute to creating the hardship. This theme also relates to Furlong's options for responding to the situation. To keep his professional relations not only with the nuns but possibly with other clients, Furlong is obliged to stay silent and turn a blind eye to the suffering he observed at the convent. However, he is unable to forget what he saw and move on the way Eileen instructs him to.
Eileen brings up issues of class, agency, and freedom in her disagreement with her husband. When Furlong asks where he and his mother would be had Mrs. Wilson not allowed them to live in her house, Eileen responds by saying, "'Weren’t Mrs Wilson’s cares far from any of ours?...Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on this earth who could do as she pleased?'" In Eileen's view, she and Furlong are prevented from taking any action regarding the girls at the convent because it would potentially risk their family's finances. The man that Furlong encountered to ask for directions told him that the road ahead would take him wherever he wanted to go, symbolizing agency. But here, roadblocks already complicate Furlong's journey.
