Summary
Christmas Eve arrives, bringing an intense desire in Furlong not to go down to the yard to work. The men he hired and kept on to work stand there moving their bodies against the cold and making small talk. Furlong calls them decent men who aren't apt to complain or slack off. Mrs. Wilson had taught Furlong to treat people well in order "to get the best out of" them. To this day, Furlong takes his daughters to visit both his mother's grave and Mrs. Wilson's on Christmas to show their respect.
After going through the motions of greeting the men and checking to see that everything is in order, Furlong gets in the lorry to make the deliveries. Black smoke coming from the exhaust indicates that the engine is failing. This in turn means that the family will have to put off replacing new windows at their house for another year. As Furlong makes his deliveries to the houses "out the country," some people ask if they could pay their debts at a later time. Others offer him gifts of cards, food, and clothing.
At one house, a pair of siblings squabble when the girl tells her brother not to touch the dirty coal. She then gives Furlong a Christmas card and says that her mother knew Furlong would come since he is "a gentleman." This reminds Furlong of the goodness in people and of the importance of managing and balancing "the give-and-take in a way that lets you get on with others as well as your own." However, he immediately chastises himself for not redistributing the gifts he received to lower-income households.
Back at the yard, the men cheerfully go about their work despite noon having already passed. They wash up and go eat at Kehoe's, with dinner paid for by the yard. Furlong wants to go home but he stays to exchange pleasantries with his workers. When he goes to settle the tab with Mrs. Kehoe, she asks if it is true that he had a run-in with the Mother Superior. Mrs. Kehoe advises Furlong to be careful about what he says concerning the convent, and to keep his enemies close. The reason for this is that the nuns "have a finger in every pie," meaning that they influence a great deal of the town's affairs. Furlong challenges this by asking whether the nuns only have as much power as the people give them. Mrs. Kehoe looks at Furlong the way Eileen sometimes does (with practical disdain), pointing out that Furlong's five daughters attend St. Margaret's, which is run by the convent. Furlong pays and departs after he and Mrs. Kehoe exchange a happy Christmas.
Outside it is snowing, and Furlong pauses before heading out on foot to complete an errand. He feels free out in the open air with another year of hard work behind him. Mrs. Kehoe had given him hot whiskey and a large bowl of sherry trifle, which makes Furlong tipsy enough to nearly trip on a paving stone. He peers into shop windows and admires the shiny items on display. He goes into a shop that sells old items including toys and asks for a jigsaw of a farm in five hundred pieces. When the shop owner says that they don't have difficult jigsaws, Furlong leaves with a bag of Lemon's jellies.
After seeing a reflection of himself in a furniture store, Furlong decides to go get a haircut. While waiting in line, he remembers that the barber's son was diagnosed with an illness, and he also reflects on the revelation that Ned could be his father. For Furlong, he sees this as a kindness on Ned's part that the old farmhand played an active role in Furlong's upbringing while encouraging the belief that the boy came "from finer stock." Furlong remembers how Ned was the one who polished Furlong's shoes, tied his laces, bought him his first razor, and taught him how to shave.
Next, Furlong makes his way to the clothing store Hanrahan's to pick up the shoes he had ordered for Eileen's Christmas present. By the time he pays and leaves the store, the sky has already darkened. Furlong buys a can of 7UP and continues walking towards the bridge. He wonders why he does not return home and get ready for midnight Mass with his family.
While crossing the bridge, Furlong thinks about how people say there is a curse that was placed on the Barrow related to the order of monks who built the abbey. The monks overcharged people to navigate the river, and the people eventually drove them out of town. But the abbot placed a curse on the town that would kill three people per year. Furlong's own mother believed that this was true because she had known a cattle dealer who became the third person to drown in the river that year. Furlong remembers how his mother used to hold him with one arm while turning the churn with the other, how she sang while milking the cows, and how she had occasionally slapped her son for being impudent.
Furlong uneasily remembers how one of the girls from the convent asked him to take her to the river so that she could drown herself. He keeps walking past different households decorated for Christmas, and observes the homely holiday scenes taking place inside. Furlong keeps going until he reaches the convent. Broken glass, visible beneath the snow, tops even the huge high walls that surround the place. Being there at this hour makes Furlong feel almost excited, similar to a "nocturnal animal on the prowl." He turns a corner and sees a black cat feasting on a crow carcass.
The trees lining the front of the convent are "pretty as a picture, just as people had said." Furlong follows footprints in the snow toward the coal storage shed, where, after some internal conflict, he unbolts the door and finds Sarah inside. Earlier while waiting for his turn at the barber's, Furlong had wondered whether the door to the coal shed would be locked, whether he would have to carry Sarah, whether she would be in the shed, and whether he himself would come to check at all.
Furlong tells Sarah that she will accompany him home. Back at the bridge, Furlong envies how easily the water follows its course. He decides not to take Sarah to the priest's house because Mrs. Kehoe had stated that "They're all one," meaning that the priest was aware of the happenings at the convent. People notice that Sarah (whose barefoot feet are stained dark with coal) is not Furlong's daughter, and they either avoid Furlong or cut the conversation short. No one addresses Sarah directly or asks where Furlong is taking her. Fear and excitement battle inside Furlong.
Along the way, Sarah vomits. She stops to rest in the square, and admires the figure of the donkey. Furlong reflects on what the point of being alive is if not to help others. He decides that calling himself a Christian and being able to face his own reflection in the mirror requires him to be brave enough to go against the grain and stand for what he thinks is right. An immense joy overtakes him even though he knows he will later pay for his actions. But never in Furlong's life had he felt such happiness, even when his daughters were born.
Furlong thinks about all the small things that Mrs. Wilson both did and did not do, and how much they impacted his life. If it had not been for Mrs. Wilson, Furlong understands that his mother would have likely ended up in a place similar to the convent, and God only knows what would have happened to Furlong. He knows that trouble lies ahead, but that he would not have been able to live with himself if he had not gone back for Sarah. Approaching his house with the barefoot girl and a box of shoes, Furlong feels immensely afraid but has faith that his family will manage.
Analysis
Sarah's fixation on the donkey out of all the characters in the nativity scene has interesting connotations. The reader might expect Sarah to focus on the mother or the baby considering that the nuns separated her from her own child, but instead, she connects with the donkey. In Christian ideology, the donkey at the manger represents the gentiles or non-Christians. Although Keegan has stated that she never thinks about themes while writing, in this scene, the donkey could represent the idea of the outsider reconciled with Jesus' teachings of love and peace.
The issues of perspective and reflection appear again in this chapter when Furlong asks, "Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?" The unknown identity of Furlong's father obsesses him throughout the novella, often driving his motivations and sense of place in the world. He spends a great deal of time thinking about things from multiple angles. In other words, Furlong considers a variety of perspectives as he inwardly reflects. This demonstrates that he cares a lot about how he operates in his life. Having to go through the draining tasks of his daily labor does not prevent these obsessions and reflections from surfacing, and he combs through memories of Ned taking part in his upbringing. Discovering the missing part of Furlong's parental heritage sheds new light on these memories and guides him to act.
Furlong's moral awakening ultimately leads him to return to the convent coal shed (where he finds Sarah again locked out in the cold) and bring her home. Furlong makes this choice so that he can face himself for the rest of his life. This is shown in the line, "the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been—which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life." In one sense, the issue of reflections (and of Furlong being able to stand his own reflection) resolves through choosing right action.
Keegan has been criticized for not centralizing the experience of women in a story that focuses on their abuse. In response to this, she has stated in interviews that she does not consider this book to be directly about the Magdalene laundries, though they do play an important role. From the author's perspective, she says, "I’m interested in how we cope, how we carry what’s locked up in our hearts. I wasn’t deliberately setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland or economic hardship or fatherhood or anything universal, but I did want to answer back to the question of why so many people said and did little or nothing knowing that girls and women were incarcerated and forced to labour in these institutions." The novella's primary concern, then, is how the community of New Ross turns a blind eye to what is happening at the convent despite the abuses taking place there being an open secret.
Furlong's mid-life crisis and his ultimate decision to help Sarah will likely jeopardize his own daughters' futures. The Mother Superior threatened to revoke the girls' right to attend St. Margaret's School for Girls, which will have long-lasting implications on their lives. In the first chapter, St. Margaret's is designated as the only good school for girls around. Mrs. Kehoe confirms this when she says, "Can’t I count on one hand the number of girls from around here that ever got on well who didn’t walk those halls." However, Furlong's personal stakes in the situation do not prevent him from intervening on Sarah's behalf.
In line with her usual brevity, Keegan ends the story soon after the climax, leaving the rest up to the reader's imagination. Other writers might have continued on to depict what happens when Furlong brings Sarah home, but ending the story at this point maintains the novella's tension without offering a complete catharsis. Furlong feels light and joyful in the moment, but he knows he will shortly face an extreme amount of conflict.
