Summary
When Furlong arrives home, Eileen tells him that he missed the first Mass. He informs her that he stayed for a cup of tea at the convent, and when she asks what else they gave him besides tea and cake, he hands over the Christmas tip. She gladly opens it and states that they will use it to pay what is owed at the butcher's for their Christmas turkey and ham. The envelope also includes a card depicting the Flight into Egypt with an angel in a blue sky, the Virgin, a child on a donkey, and Joseph. Inside, it reads, "For Eileen, Bill, and Daughters. Many happy returns to you and yours."
Eileen can tell that her husband is upset, but he is reluctant to explain what happened. Since he does not concede, Eileen urges him to wash up and change so that they can go to the second Mass. Furlong scrubs his hands and nails to try to clean the soot. Eileen jokes with her daughters, asking if they have enough change for the collection box since Furlong gives so much of it away. He snaps back that there is "no need for that type of ugly talk." Astonished, she wordlessly hands out change to the girls. They bless themselves at the marble fountain outside the chapel, and Furlong watches how easily his daughters kneeled in humble prayer before sitting in the pew as they'd been taught.
Furlong observes the other worshippers: women with headscarves murmuring the rosary and thumbing prayer beads, members of big farming families, business people in wool and tweed, the old and young making respectful signs of prayer, and the gossips gawking at everyone. Parents give keys and soothers to their children for entertainment, and some men smoke and chat on the porch before entering. The Mass feels long to Furlong, who listens distractedly. Rather than go up to receive Communion after the consecration, Furlong stays "contrarily" in his seat.
Later at home, the Furlongs eat lamb chops with cauliflower and onion sauce, and then Furlong puts up the Christmas tree. He watches as the girls decorate, occasionally rethreading an ornament with broken strings. Grace plays the accordion, Sheila watches TV, and Eileen announces that it is time to make minced pies and ice the cake. Furlong wishes his wife would just sit down. As the girls work on the cake, Furlong gets up to refuel the fire and sweep the floor. Eileen chastises him for raising dust as they attempt to ice the cake. Furlong feels "as though the room [is] closing in," and "a longing to get away [comes] over him" as he imagines himself walking in a dark field wearing his old clothes.
The Angelus comes on the TV at six p.m., and Furlong resolves to go see Ned (the farmhand from Mrs. Wilson's upbringing). Eileen asks if that is what was bothering him, but Furlong deflects by saying that Ned's health is poor and that if Furlong does not go now, he won't go at all. Eileen sends six mince pies and a Christmas invitation to Ned. When Furlong asks whether Eileen would mind having another mouth to feed at Christmas, she says, "Sure haven't we a house full? What's one more?" Relieved, Furlong heads out. He enjoys the fresh air and wonders why he can't seem to relax on Sundays like other working men. To Furlong, Sundays can "feel very threadbare, and raw" because he does not know what to do with himself.
Furlong remembers a different visit to Ned years ago when his oldest daughter Kathleen was still an infant. Ned had reminisced about Furlong growing up in the Wilson household and how Mrs. Wilson allowed them all to live and work there in peace. Ned also confessed to having stolen some of Mrs. Wilson's hay to help feed a starving donkey until a strange encounter with a nonhuman thing made him stop. During this visit, Furlong asked if Ned knew the identity of Furlong's father. Ned shares that many Wilson family members and their friends visited during the summer before Furlong was born, and that one of them was likely Furlong's father.
Furlong feels emotional driving up the avenue to the house. The house itself is freshly painted, has new electric lights in the front rooms, and a Christmas tree displayed in the drawing room. Feeling conflicted, Furlong knocks on the back door. An unfamiliar woman opens and greets him, and he explains that he is looking for Ned. The woman informs Furlong that Ned was at the hospital and is now convalescing from pneumonia in a home. The woman (likely working in the household) declares that it is easy to tell that Furlong and Ned are related.
Once the woman goes back inside, Furlong sits for a while to absorb this revelation about Ned possibly being his father. On the drive back home, he thinks about the girl at the convent. Worse than finding her in the coal shed, Furlong regrets having let her be handled the way she was in his presence, and that he accepted the Mother Superior's money without asking about the girl's baby. He repents having left her there alone in the kitchen with breast milk staining her blouse, and also that he hypocritically attended Mass later that day.
Analysis
The card that the nuns include in Furlong's Christmas tip depicts the biblical Flight into Egypt. In this story, an angel appears in Joseph's dream to warn him that King Herod intends to kill the infant Jesus, and so Joseph takes Mary and Jesus to Egypt for safety. Just as Egypt was a safe place for the holy family, the convent is allegedly intended to be a sanctuary for the girls and women living there. Instead, it serves as a punishing prison. Thus the card referencing the Flight into Egypt can be read ironically because the nuns do not practice what they preach.
Furlong demonstrates resistance to the religious norms that dictate the way things are in his community. For example, when Eileen teasingly asks their daughters if they have coins to drop in the collection box (since Furlong gives loose change to people in need), Furlong shuts down what he calls "that type of ugly talk." The reader can assume that Furlong feels that the loose change goes a lot farther in the hands of the poor rather than the church collection box. Based on the description of the convent's well-furnished sitting room in the previous chapter, it is possible to deduce what the collected money is used for, at least in part.
Another instance where Furlong refuses to follow his community's religious customs is when he remains seated rather than go up and receive Communion. Communion is a ritual that signifies an intimate union with Christ and the Church, and there are several reasons why Furlong refuses to take part in it. Firstly, he wishes to remain "contrarily" against the grain of things because of the abuse he witnessed at the convent. Secondly, he reveals at the end of the chapter that he feels like an intense hypocrite for attending Mass after not sufficiently intervening on the girl's behalf at the convent. The Mother Superior and other religious officials may have no qualms about punishing young mothers, but Furlong feels that it is egregiously wrong.
The story that Ned once shared about how "something that wasn’t human, an ugly thing with no hands" stopped him from stealing more of Mrs. Wilson's hay contributes to a folkloric sense of place in the novella. In a review of Small Things Like These for The London Magazine, the Irish writer David Butler refers to this as "a rich tapestry of life at work, both natural and human." Another example occurs in Chapter Four when an old man with a goat tells Furlong that the road will take him wherever he wants to go. Keegan offers no further explanation for these scenes, instead allowing their existence to create a mysterious atmosphere. In literature, the "uncanny" is a term that describes when things become defamiliarized and unnerving.
Throughout the novella, Furlong has been obsessed with the question of his paternal heritage. As in the previous chapter where distance and reflections impact Furlong's viewpoint, here it is a stranger's perspective that brings about a fundamental revelation concerning Furlong's father. When he stops at the Wilson household to visit the farmhand Ned, the young woman who answers the door asks if Furlong and Ned are relatives considering their resemblance. Perhaps Furlong was too close to the situation to ever realize that Ned was his father. Sometimes a different vantage point is needed to arrive closer to the truth, and here it takes "a stranger to come out with things."
In the final paragraph of the chapter, Keegan uses a run-on sentence to evoke Furlong's shame concerning how he handled the situation at the convent. Specifically, Keegan uses semicolons, dashes, coordinating conjunctions, and commas to contribute to Furlong's compounding anxiety. The detail about the girl's breast milk leaking out under her cardigan and staining her blouse conjures her intense longing for her baby. Her body expresses this absence in the form of milk, which then stains the clothes in which the nuns dressed the girl, presumably for Furlong's benefit. The fancy clothes are a mirage of care created by the nuns, but they do not succeed in hiding the truth.
