—Tell me what She said, I said.—You’re saying She was unkind but you have to tell me what was said.
—Think of all the unkind things you could say about Father Dowd, or Declan, or your sister. Whatever occurs to you, She’s already said it.
—Tell me what She said about Orla.
Tess sighed.—I can’t. It’s disgusting.
—Tell me, I said.
—She says that they’ve … that they’ve sinned together. She called Orla a hoor.
As she said it I felt the cold worming up out of my belly, out of the place Declan had made. It was then I knew the Blessed Mother would never have given Orla or even Tess the chance to take back their sins. Tess was right. But I shook my head and said,—I don’t believe it.
Tess looked at me.—Which part?
—No matter what they did together, She’d never call Orla a hoor. Never.
—You know I haven’t imagined it, Síle. Suddenly Tess seemed very tired.—You know I’m not telling tales. I didn’t answer, so she went on.—She has said things no good Christian would ever say, let alone the Blessed Virgin. So it can’t be Her. It can’t be. Tess covered her face with her hands, and I could see she was trembling.—It’s something else. Something deceiving us.
She’d said it. The words were too sharp not to cut through everything that was, all that we’d known and trusted in before. We looked at each other and knew there was no going back.
—Are you saying it’s the Devil? I asked.—The Devil appearing to us, pretending to be the Blessed Mother?
—I’ve been reading about other apparitions, Tess said.—They do say the Devil can disguise himself so well even the Pope would be fooled.
I saw the sense behind her words, but something was hardening inside of me. I knew Tess would never make things up and yet I knew she was mistaken.
—What will you do? I asked.—What will you say to Her, the next time She comes to us?
—There’ll be nothing left to say, she replied.—You said it yourself that She’s always with us. She’s overheard every word we’ve said.
I thought I’d caught her then.—But if She’s only a demon, how could She know our secret thoughts? How could She heal your mother’s leg?
—Now, that I haven’t an answer for, Tess sighed.—But it keeps me awake nights, remembering how my mam was healed, and to think I might have the Devil to thank for it.
I don’t know what Our Lady will have to say to Tess after all this. But for my part, I believe in Her and I always will.
At half past ten I drove down Shop Street to the bookstore, and found Paudie already waiting for me outside. Brona was doing an hors d’oeuvres demo at the supermarket, and said she’d pay Leo a visit later in the day. “It’s good of you to bring me,” Paudie sighed as he settled into the passenger’s seat. “I don’t drive if I can help it, and at my age, isn’t it a public service?”
Johnny’s phone rang as we were walking up the hospital steps, and I hung back to answer it. “I hear you had a chat with my mother the other night,” Orla said.
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “She made herself perfectly clear.”
“Have you had any contact with Síle since then?”
I almost laughed. “No.” She didn’t say anything more, so I asked, “Is that the only reason you called?”
“No,” she said. “There’s something else. Something I’d forgotten about, and if you’re going to write your story, I want you to include it.”
I probably didn’t want to hear this, but still I said, “Fire away.”
“There was a crack in the wall beside her bed,” Orla began, “and she used to put her lips to it and whisper, like there was somebody listening on the other side. It went on like that every night for months.”
“That sounds like Síle.”
“No,” Orla said. “You don’t get it. There was nothing endearing in it. It wasn’t ‘cute.’ Sometimes I knew she was waiting until I was asleep, and other times she couldn’t wait, she was whisperin’ away—urgent, like. Those were the nights I’d go down to the sitting room and fall asleep on the sofa.”
“It bothered you that much?”
“I was so ill at ease lying in that bed, listening to her whisperin’ like that. There was no way I could sleep. I couldn’t. I asked our dad to patch up the crack, but he gave in when Síle begged him not to.” She added softly, “I’d almost forgotten that.”
“Why did it make you uneasy? Lots of kids have imaginary friends. I don’t see how it’s any different.”
“It was different. I couldn’t tell you why, except that it frightened me. And nobody cared that it frightened me.”
I waited for her to continue. Why did she want me to write about this?
“After a few months, she finally stopped,” Orla said. “When I asked her why, she said they’d gone away, only she’d never say who ‘they’ were.”
“She never said who she thought she was talking to?”
“No. She never said.” I could hear Orla’s baby crying in the background. “I’ve got to go now. I suppose I was only calling to ask you … if you’re going to write about Síle … to show her for who she is, not just who she likes to think she is.”
“We’re all guilty of that,” I replied, and my own words came back on me like the final slug of moonshine.
“You say that, but how many of us believe we’ve Mother Mary on the line?” Orla sighed. “It isn’t harmless. She isn’t any sort of ‘chosen one.’ I suppose that’s what I’ve been trying to say to you all along.”
I let the pause go on a beat too long. Finally I said, “Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” Orla replied.
“Was there another reason you wanted Síle put away? Something besides what you’ve told me?”
I’d never known a telephone silence could feel so oppressive. Finally she said, “Why would I tell you, when I’ve said far too much already?” She hung up then, and I stood there in the hospital foyer just looking at the phone in my hand.
When I went in, I found Leo looking considerably worse. A nurse was changing his IV bag, and he asked her irritably when that bloody tube was coming out of his arm. “You’ll get used to it,” she replied with equanimity, and gave me a look—he’s all yours—as she passed from the room.
Paudie seemed almost at home as he took the electric kettle off the table by the window and refilled it at the sink. “I’m makin’ myself a cuppa,” he said over his shoulder. “Would either of ye like one?”
“No, thanks,” I said. I was sick of tea. “How do you feel today, Leo?”
He groaned. “Like I flew all night on a tour of Hell on the back of a winged monkey.”
“At least your tongue’s still working,” said Paudie as he stirred a packet of sugar into his white cafeteria teacup.
“Go away wit’cha, if you’ve only come here to hound me,” Leo sighed. “I’d like to see you in this bed, Padraic McGowan. We’d all see then if you’d suffer it any better than I can.”
“I’m very thankful not to be in your place,” Paudie replied, soberly this time. “If you were me, you’d say the same, and I’d not begrudge you for it.”
“I’m not begrudging,” Leo murmured, more to himself than in reply. “I’m not begrudging.” Then he looked up at me and asked, “Did I ever tell you how Jack Brennan came to dance at his own wake?”
“No,” I said. The phone call with Orla had unsteadied me, so that I’d much rather listen than talk—and anyway it was too good a story not to hear a second time.
Leo’s irritable mood vanished in a wink. “Now, I was only a boy when it happened, but I would have passed Jack Brennan in the street on occasion, and seen him at Mass on the Sunday. We all knew the man.”
“I remember him,” said Paudie as the electric kettle began to rumble. “Not well, but I do remember him. He was so tall he had to duck through most of the doorways in town.”
“And a fine-looking man, too, so all the ladi
es said. Jack was married to a lass called Mary, and though they’d no children they seemed to be very much in love. He tilled his own plot of land and Mary kept the house, and for a time all was right in their world.” Leo sighed. “Then came the sad day. He wasn’t a very young man, but sure, he wasn’t near old enough to be droppin’ dead in the field.”
“Not a day past forty, if even that,” Paudie put in.
“Nearer to thirty-five,” Leo said. “In any case, someone sent for the doctor, but the doctor could do nothing for him. And so his wife and sisters washed the body and laid him out, and the priest came, too, and the next night everyone turned up for the wake.
“Now, you’ve been to Johnny’s wake, but you’ll never know how ’twas done in the old days. Everyone stayed up all night, dancin’ and drinkin’ and carryin’ on, till they took the dearly departed to the church in the morning, said all the prayers and laid him to rest in the graveyard. Jack had a good many friends and family, and soon his cottage was packed to the rafters with all those in mourning.
“Night had fallen, and the only light there was to be had came from the candles and the peat fire, and so you might well find yourself dancing with a person when you couldn’t quite make out his face. Jack’s widow Mary had been sitting in a corner just starin’ into the fire, until someone came up to her in the gloom, swept her up and made her dance, payin’ no heed to her protests. And for a time the young widow forgot her grief.
“A whileen later, someone else—’twas one of Jack’s sisters, if I remember—went into the bedroom to keep vigil with the corpse, and found the bed empty. She came boundin’ back into the crowded front room, roarin’ with panic because she feared he’d been snatched, though for what purpose she never could have told. When she cried out, the fiddler stopped his fiddlin’, and the piper laid down his pipes, and the dancers stopped their dancin’, and then another cry rose up from the crowd: it was poor Mary Brennan, who found herself in the arms of her dead husband.
“As soon as he was discovered, Jack gave a moan and crumpled to the floor, and they found this time that he was well and truly dead. And that,” Leo said, as his eyelids grew heavy, “is how Jack Brennan came to dance at his own wake.”
For a minute or two, we watched him doze. “I suppose you’d better be heading on to Dublin,” Paudie said finally. “But I’ll tell you this—we’ll miss you at the pub.”
I drew the unfinished pack of Player’s out of my jacket pocket and left them on the bedside table. It would be a treat for Leo not to have to roll his own for once. Paudie watched me do it, but he made no comment.
“You’ll miss me for a few nights,” I said. “After that, you’ll hardly remember I was here.”
“Ah, now,” Paudie replied. “You’re too young yet to be talkin’ like that.”
* * *
The rain was coming down in sheets as I dropped Paudie off at the bookshop. He shook my hand and said he hoped I’d be back in a year or two, but as he eased himself out of the car, I felt the sinking certainty I’d never drink another pint with any of them.
I drove slowly toward Napper Tandy’s on my way out of town, the wipers set to frantic, and through the rain I could make out a group of men huddled at the entrance smoking their cigarettes. I saw Hennessey there, and “Yeats,” they and all their friends wearing the same green football jersey. They hadn’t come to the pub on their lunch break.
A dark-haired man took a step toward the curb as I passed them, the end of his cigarette glowing as he took one last, hungry suck. It wasn’t a face I’d seen among the pack that night, but it was a face I knew, albeit with twenty more years on it. Declan Keaveney met my eye through the windshield, smiling insolently as he flicked his used-up cigarette into the road ahead of my car. Home at last? Really?
Another beat and I was past them, though for most of the way to Dublin I wanted very badly to punch something. For the first few miles, I thought of turning around—to see if it was really him or if I was seeing things—but if I did, I knew I’d regret it either way.
There isn’t any point setting down the chain of encounters that led me to Kerala, nor can I say why I feel pressed to write again after all these years. I could have left this diary in the box under my bed at home; but then, I do know why. I packed it because She told me to.
I’d been in India nearly nine months when things began to unravel, as I ought to have known they would. At first the night trains and the rickshaws were exciting and new to me, and I felt that sense of adventure everywhere I went, saw the magic in everything I laid my eyes on; all the colours! And the colours were new, and hadn’t they been invented especially for me? And aye, I’ll admit there was a man, and for a while he made me feel as if no one in all the world had ever experienced any of these things before. We were like Shiva and Parvati, Shiva the god who never blinked and Parvati his consort who playfully showed her love by pressing her palms to his eyes, only to find the Universe plunged into darkness, no stars, no suns, as Shiva’s sight was broken. Shiva, the god who could never sleep.
My love brought me to the ashram and I was welcomed, as he’d promised I would be, and within a day I’d settled into my place as if I’d always been there. There were friends there I felt as if I’d never not known. But my favourite place, my favourite time, was in the little temple the community had formed and grown up around. Before they arrived no one had tended it for a thousand years.
In the high heat of the afternoon when the others laid down to rest, I went to the temple, sat down on the cool stone and let my tired eyes rest upon the icons until the colours ran together and I was refreshed. Indians believe that the divine is not hidden from us, that it is to be seen everywhere we look, and that when they gaze into the painted eyes of the idol the god, the real god, gazes back.
But sure, the people put so much love and care into the painting and dressing of the icons—they treat them like precious dolls, or living babbies—that you’d almost wonder if it’s the lavishing of the attention that brings the deity to life. I never felt as if anyone were looking out of the eyes of our statues, not in the church and certainly not on the hill. When the Light would go away and She took Her leave I’d look up at the statue in the grotto and wonder how they could have gotten Her so wrong.
I often thought of Our Lady on those sweltering afternoons, though I can’t say I prayed to Her. I told myself that if She ever came to me again I’d ask Her about the gods of the Hindus, about Shiva and Parvati, and was there any truth in them at all.
And yet … and yet I knew for myself that there was, and I’ll tell you how I knew. In the hut where we took our meals there was a statue of Hanuman. I’d been partial to him since that afternoon in Bangalore, when my love had taken me to his temple. There the priest’s apprentice (a boy of nine) offered me a piece of coconut candy, and the monkey-god watched me from his perch on the roof as the sweetness filled my mouth. I’d never tasted anything so delicious in all my life.
On the evening before I left the community, I saw the statue as if for the first time. Hanuman was tearing his chest open, showing the gods Rama and Sita inside his heart, to prove the love he bore for them, and all I could think was I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this already, I’ve seen this somewhere before. That’s when I knew I had to leave.
In the hour before sunrise the next morning I packed my things and walked the five miles to the nearest village, where I caught the bus to Madurai, and from there another bus to Munnar, though that bus never arrived. When it broke down none of the Indians were at all put out, and I watched from the roadside as they set off on foot. When another bus came along in an hour or two, someone said, they’d be picked up; and others were near enough to their homes that they could walk the rest of the way.
The road which eventually led to Munnar wound along a cliff, the tea plantations laid out below, lush and gleaming in the sunshine. I knew I shouldn’t have set out that way, not on foot at least, and I can’t say what propelled me, only that I was drawn by somet
hing, or someone. By the end of the first hour there was no one but me left on the road and I was down to my last sip of water, but sure, the next bus would come along any minute.
At some point I came upon a little shrine, and it was Kali, the goddess of destruction, dressed in blue, forever in the midst of devouring her own baby. The statue seemed to writhe in the heat, and I fell to my knees without intending to, and She came to me there, in that unfamiliar place.
—Blessed Mother, I said, and I noticed I was trembling, as if I weren’t quite inside my own body.—How I’ve missed you!
—It isn’t so long as it feels, She said.—And have you forgotten that I’m always with you? She bent over me, Her face hovering inches above mine, and I smelled that same sweet scent of Her, coconut candy and every other good thing I ever ate or breathed.—I bless you, child, She whispered, and I felt Her sweep the damp hair away from my face as the light around us grew dim.—I’ll see you safe. No harm can ever come to you, not so long as I’m near.
That was the last thing I can recall before I woke up in hospital.
Orla has come all the way to Madurai to collect me. If I ever thought in years past that she would come round someday, if not to love me then at least to make her peace with my existence, well I know better now. She fumes at the doctor and I can see the nurses cringe whenever she walks in. I thanked her the day she arrived and she only said,—I’ll never be free of you, will I?
December
I came home to an empty apartment, and just as I’d predicted, Laurel hadn’t left a single dish in the sink. It had been my place to start with, she’d only moved in a couple years before, and yet the air in these four rooms was intolerable to me now—I’d lost something that hadn’t felt essential until it was subtracted. It was all so ordinary and lonely that every time I thought of Síle, she seemed farther and farther away from me, remote and impossible. Where was she now? How could she have let me leave without her?
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