Reidy's harvest

The sermon for that Sunday took the Gospel account of the rich landowner who had built extra barns to accommodate his bumper harvest. The punch line, delivered with great gusto by Father McGuire, left Reidy with a mixture of guilt and apprehension. Wasn't it himself who had a bumper oat crop and who had pegged out the site for his second haystack that very morning before Mass? And did he not have more than enough in the first stack to cover his needs? Then, there was the matter of the mouse plague. Micky Skehill avowed that the rodents were on the march and that farms not forty miles away had been completely eaten out. A vague notion of some biblical plague had settled in Reidy's mind and he was half convinced that the Gospel parable, which he had unaccountably confounded with certain other themes from the Bible, was about to take on a more modern form. He might even be called to his Maker before the stack was built, just as in the Gospel account.