St Joseph novena card

The St Joseph novena card is a mass-produced devotional object that links Cushla’s effort to care for Davy McGeown with the private, morally troubled memories she keeps of Michael Agnew. Bought in Dublin as part of a religious gift for Davy, it offers a promise of protection and the possibility of making a wish. Cushla later finds it among the mementoes of her weekend with Michael, where its reassuring language sits uneasily beside her knowledge of loss and danger.

Purchase and devotional use

In Dublin, Cushla selects the card from a shop display of prayers near the till, alongside a navy-blue missal embossed in silver and plain silver rosary beads for Davy. She chooses a novena to St Joseph that her grandmother used to recite when someone was in trouble. The card comes in a plastic sleeve with an oval medal, an everyday format that makes devotion available as a small, purchasable object. Its placement among the shop’s other religious goods gives it a practical setting: Cushla is choosing something to take home, not participating in a church service.

The card’s printed instructions make a substantial promise. Whoever reads, hears, or keeps the prayer is assured protection from sudden death, drowning, poison, enemies, fire, and defeat in battle; the prayer is to be said for nine mornings for a desired outcome. Its assurances range from ordinary personal fears to dangers associated with conflict. The wording presents the novena as a repeatable practice and an instrument for asking for something specific, while the medal and sleeve make that practice portable. Cushla’s choice has a family precedent in her grandmother’s recitation, but the text does not establish how often Cushla herself prays it or that she accepts every promise literally.

A gift amid unequal kinds of faith

Michael asks whom the religious items are for. When Cushla answers that the gift is for Davy, Michael takes the bag, reads the prayer, and responds lightly to its extensive guarantees, suggesting that he might buy one himself. Cushla objects that he is making fun of her. He returns the card to the bag and says there might be something in it, adding that it advises care about what one wishes for. The exchange moves from mockery toward an unsettled acknowledgment: neither person establishes whether the card’s claims are true, but Michael’s final remark draws attention to the risks carried by desire.

For Cushla, the objects also make her conduct visible to herself. She has little faith, yet feels the impropriety of bringing religious souvenirs home from a weekend with someone else’s husband. The card therefore does not simply mark belief or disbelief. It belongs simultaneously to a gift intended for a child, a devotional practice inherited through family memory, and a purchase made during an affair. The bag’s ordinary contents expose that overlap: an act of care for Davy is bound to a weekend Cushla recognizes as morally compromised.

Religious authority and personal prayer

The card’s modest, personal mode of devotion stands in contrast to the religious authority Cushla encounters at school. Father Slattery enters classrooms unannounced to deliver catechism and uses religious teaching to instill fear and sectarian hostility in children. Cushla also resents him because, when her father was delirious in hospital, he prayed with him and persuaded him to write a cheque for a colour television. These experiences do not establish that Cushla rejects religion; rather, they distinguish private practices of prayer and care from the priest’s use of his position.

At the children’s First Confession, Father Slattery invokes original sin, guilt, and penance, warns that there will be no leniency, and measures the children’s sinfulness by how long they must kneel. Cushla has told them to make up minor faults because she thinks they are too young to have sins. Against this disciplinary version of religious practice, her choice of a prayer associated with her grandmother offers a more intimate response to trouble. Later, after Tommy McGeown has been arrested and Cushla fears that the situation may be a mistake, she makes a desperate promise in her own prayer to change her life if God will help them. The passage does not say that she uses the novena then; it does show that supplication remains available to her in crisis, beyond the card’s particular ritual.

Keepsake and afterlife

After Michael’s death, Cushla gathers objects associated with the life and weekend she shared with him: Irish books, a book she had been too giddy to read, soap wrapped in hotel paper, a coin, and the novena she bought and Michael found silly. She regards the pile as the mementoes of a lovestruck teenager. The card has shifted from a gift for Davy to one fragment in a private archive of the affair. Its original purpose remains, but its presence among these belongings binds it to Cushla’s attachment to Michael and to the life now irretrievable to her.

That changed context sharpens the card’s promise without turning it into a simple prophecy. Its prayer names dangers including death and fire, but the story does not show that the card prevents either, or that Cushla’s purchase causes what follows. Instead, the object gathers contrasting meanings: a grandmother’s customary prayer for someone in trouble, a practical gift for a child, an uncomfortable reminder of an illicit weekend, and a keepsake held after Michael’s death. Its small assurances of protection persist beside events they cannot undo, leaving faith, wish, and memory in unresolved proximity.