In These Dark Places

by Stephen Duffy

  ‘Christ is your King. Our King! Are you willing to give up your heart for him? Our King is dying… He is dying on His cross right now, as He will for all eternity. Our King is dying for your sins! The sins you have committed in the past and those you have yet to commit. Will you give up your heart for Him? Or will you merely pay him lip service with empty prayers and confessions, communion? Sunday Mass and fish on a Friday? Jesus wants your heart, He is begging for it, and to deny Him that is to blow that feather away from your own head.’

  He came down from the pulpit once more and again took his seat on top of the altar rail. After a momentary pause, he continued.

  ‘So, how might you give your heart to Jesus? How do you give your heart to the Son of God made man, He who dies an agonising death on his cross for all of our sins. How do you repay that debt? I’ll tell you how. You do it by living your life as He did. Be kind to your neighbours, help those in need. Turn the other cheek when a grievance falls down on you. Give to the poor. Spend time alone just thinking of Him, talking to Him, thanking Him. Let Jesus be in your every breath, in your every action, your every thought. Go out into the world and live as He commanded, and my friends, then you will have given your heart to Jesus and in return you will receive the blessing of the Holy Spirit and the happiness of the Lord.’

  ‘You will make this world a better place by bringing the light of Jesus out into the enveloping dark and light a way for goodness and truth, peace and happiness. Take this lesson today and live it, I promise you, your reward will be eternal. Give your heart to Him, to your King, forego the lip service and my friends, a blessed happiness awaits you. Mark my words, believe what I tell you, I speak of my own experience of having devoted my life to Him, of having given my heart to Him.’

  15

  As we filed out of our little parish church that bright Sunday morning, I walked as though in a daze. With Jessop’s words still ringing in my ears, with his impassioned plea still swelling in my own heart I felt a warmth, an empowerment in my very soul. Of course, as a ten year old boy I couldn’t articulate that, back then it manifested as a nothing more than a warm and fuzzy feeling. I didn’t know what exactly it was but I knew it made me feel good and happy, and well, right. I was filled with a newfound assuredness that all could be good in the world, that all could be right. That gorgeous summer morning I felt as though I could do anything I ever wanted to, that the world was indeed a good place, filled with truth and light and love. Above all of this, buried deep in my heart was the gnawing realisation that I had been wrong about this man. I had misjudged him entirely. I had been utterly wrong and terribly unfair.

  I had been a fool. A fool to fall for inane gossip, the muttered, monosyllabic murmurings of a ten year old boy, who couldn’t possibly know what he was speaking of. Surely, a man with that much love in his heart for Our Lord Jesus could not be capable of those terrible things which I had so easily, so readily assumed he could be. Trudging along home behind my father and Grandfather I mulled it all over in my head and tried desperately to make sense of it all.

  What of my own experience with him that Sunday in December 1962 as I washed the dishes in the Teacher’s Room? Had he touched me? Yes. Inappropriately? No, not really. His hands on my shoulders. Well, so what? Yes, his gaze had lingered for just a moment too long, but I had seen that today too. There was nothing untoward in it after all, he had done it to the entire congregation repeatedly that morning at mass.

  And what had Peter actually told me? Nothing really, well, nothing of substance. All he had said was that he didn’t like the man. Perhaps Jessop had scolded him for one reason or another and Peter had taken it too close to heart. Or maybe he didn’t like him and had no particular reason for doing so. It was the same for me with Mr McNamee, the caretaker at our school. The poor man had never once cast even a sideward glance at me, nor had he harassed or harangued me in anyway whatsoever and yet, for some inexplicable and indefinable reason I didn’t like him. In fact, I hated him.

  In light of Jessop’s sermon I now had two very different assessments of the man to contend with. On the one hand there was a man so passionately devoted to the word and the love of God. The man who only that morning had instilled a fire in me and indeed in the rest of the congregation. A man who had spoken with such grace and passion and love. A man who had implored us to go out into the world and spread the love of God, to make the world a better place. A man whose conviction that what he spoke of was so undeniably true and right that the smile had not only reached his eyes, it had positively set them alight. Counter that with the notions I had surmised from Peter’s cryptic comments that long ago summer morning. How could a man with that much love for Jesus possibly be capable of thinking of, let alone perpetrating the horrible acts which I had so readily accused him of in my mind? I had been wrong. I was absolutely certain of the fact. Right from the get-go, I had been wrong. Yes, there were still the odd things about him which I would always dislike. How frequently he called to our home, how he chewed with his mouth open. The way he would dig his pinkie into his ear and wiggle it about before pulling it out again to examine the pay dirt of his excavations… but I no longer hated him. Nor did I believe that he was a monster who preyed on young boys. That very notion now seemed absurd and alien to me given the passion of his speech that glorious Sunday morning. It seemed that I was not the only parishioner affected by his sermon.

  As the weeks morphed into months while we awaited the arrival of our new Parish Priest, my outlook on the Jessop situation transformed entirely. The notion that I had been wrong and that our Curate was a genuinely nice, if somewhat odd, man, cemented itself firmly in my mind. I was not alone in my newfound assessment of the man. The dynamic of the group in Bible Club also changed. In the wake of Jessop’s impassioned oration from the pulpit the mood had mellowed somehow. Try as I might to detect it, after a couple of months there wasn’t a hint of fear or reticence among any of the other boys. On the outside all appeared cheerful and happy and, well, normal. At a push I would have to admit that it looked and felt that way from the inside too. Jessop still preached to us on how God’s love permeated the world, he continued to extoll the virtues of abstaining from gossip, something I had previously believed to be his primer, his preamble to unnatural deeds. It didn’t feel that way anymore. He also preached on forgiveness, honesty, charity and all of those wonderfully wholesome Christian edicts which any young priest is wont to do. The other boys didn’t flinch from his touch as they had done in the past. The group was no longer a hostage to the nervous tension which in the beginning had smothered it.

  One week in the middle of October 1964, when the meeting of The Women’s Auxiliary clashed with Bible Club, they appropriated our little room, citing that the many arthritics among their throng couldn’t endure the cold out in the big hall. Sitting there that night beneath the feeble light of flickering fluorescents, with the cold rising through my feet and into my legs, as Jessop related to us the story of Zacchaeus the tax collector, any lingering suspicions which I may still have carried about the man disappeared entirely. No light on the road to Damascus could have been brighter. He was actually a good man. A warm man, a wholesome individual with a good heart. We took Bible Study in the little room off the hall because it was indeed warmer in there. It was as simple as that. There had been no ulterior, deeper, seedy motive. The man didn’t want us to be cold. That was it, there was nothing more to it than that.

  ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth so that you can listen twice as much as you talk.’ Granddad’s voice boomed in my head. He could reduce any predicament or situation in life down to common sense with one of his many adages. When this one thundered into my mind that night out in the big hall I physically winced at the truth it carried with it.

  As Jessop rambled on about the recalcitrant tax collector his voice faded and my mind ran rampant. All Peter had ever said was that he was a bad man. Didn’t most children categorise the world like that? If something wasn’t good, if for wha
tever reason a child doesn’t like someone or something, well, then it’s got to be bad. Your father smacks you because you disobeyed him, he’s bad. Something doesn’t taste good? That’s because it’s bad.

  ‘He’s a bad man.’ That’s all Peter had ever said about him. He had never elaborated any further than that, which on the face of it, meant absolutely nothing! Then came the night of the Christmas Bazaar. What had really happened that night? Nothing, nothing at all. He had asked me to join the football team, that was all. There really wasn’t anything untoward afoot at all. We had been alone in a locked room, he had touched me on the shoulder and from that, based on nothing more than the offhand comment of a nine year old, I had put two and two together and gotten five.

  The room had indeed been locked, but that was nothing more than a prudent security measure as he counted the money. He had touched me on the shoulder, true. How many teachers had done that? I couldn’t begin to count. It was true, he did comment on my physical stature, but bear in mind he was trying to sign me up for the Gaelic Football team and it was in that context that he made the remark. He was the team coach after all, why wouldn’t he try to recruit new blood. Hadn’t I seen him with my own eyes on the side-lines at every match, howling and screaming like the rest of us, caught up in the fury of victory, flag waving, scarf swinging. Given that level of passion and commitment to victory, surely there was nothing more to it than succession planning on his part. Since hearing his sermon that Sunday morning I had given all of these things more than a little consideration, however, sitting in the big hall that Thursday night, with the cold prodding me with an accusing finger, all of it finally made sense to me. I had been wrong about the man, plain and simple.

  And what of the other boys in Bible Club? Perhaps the fear I believed I had seen on their faces was simply because Jessop was indeed a little too ready to use the cane. Maybe it was the fear of being singled out to answer a particularly difficult question in Catechism. Every child knows that dread, every child fears that moment. ‘Please don’t pick me! Pick someone else, anyone! Just not me!’ Was it as simple as that? I believed so. Even Peter seemed more at ease around him of late, albeit from a distance. And what of the adults of the parish, the grown-ups? Surely if there was something untoward in Jessop, could all of them, every single one of them, have missed it? And Granddad, who was held in particular esteem by the parish elders for his ability to read a person, unfailing in his assessment of character without exception, had not detected the slightest hint of anything unsavoury in our Curate. In fact, he practically worshipped the man. So much so, that Jessop was the only visitor to our home to be offered a dram or two of the really good whiskey. Surely Granddad would have cottoned on to him had there been anything in the slightest which was “off” about the man. No matter how good an actor he may have been, there was simply no getting past my grandfather’s radar.

  That Bible Club should be the sight of my epiphany was not lost on me. In my innocence I attributed it to God. He had seen the error of my reckoning and had sought to put it to rights. Was thinking such bad things about a man of the cloth wrong? I couldn’t recall anything from the scriptures to confirm that, but I did know that Jesus had gone on a lot about how people would try to turn others against the preachers of the good news. That evening, when Bible Club finished up, I held back as all of the other kids filed out into the cold October darkness. This was something just a short time previous I would never had dared to do, but that night, with the light of contrition glowing in my heart, I went to Jessop. He was busying himself with collecting up our pamphlets and stacking them on the counter top by the window. He hadn’t noticed that I had stayed behind and he started on hearing my voice.

  ‘Father?’ The sheaf of papers went up into the air and see-sawed down with a comic, slow-motion hilarity.

  ‘Gabriel? You startled me, boy.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to.’ He chuckled and tossed my hair. I didn’t flinch. Neither by my own volition or unconscious reaction. Another revelation. Even my subconscious mind no longer perceived him as a threat. And wasn’t that automatic reaction to danger the truest a body could have to a perceived threat? That rainy day that he called to our house, I couldn’t help but flinch when he tossed my hair, but this night I didn’t. As a young boy I had always trusted that automatic reaction since it had been demonstrated to me so clearly one summer morning.

  I remembered the apple tree in our back yard and how, as is always the case, the richest, lushest fruit always seemed to sprout from the branches highest above the ground. Higher than myself or Rob could reach with Granddad’s broom handle. Beyond even the most precise punt of a football, those apples hung, their red skins glowing in the dappled summer sun. One morning, having picked the lower branches clean, Rob took it on himself to clamber up onto the highest and weakest boughs of the tree, with myself safe on the grass below egging him on. I watched, mouth agape as he deftly swung from one branch to another. Climbing higher and higher, his shadow on the dew soaked grass growing smaller with each of his acrobatic feats, until finally he was perched away out on a thin and limber branch. Straddling the bough he began to shake it and a rain of delicious red apples peppered the grass far beneath him, much to my delight.

  The branch gave way with a shattering crack and Rob followed his apples all the way down. His screams sent me running for Granddad. After the initial and obligatory reprimand, and with myself tagging along out of a morbid curiosity, he took Rob to the Casualty Department down in The Barrow Hospital, where with much dramatics and wails of pain, Rob had his broken arm set and plastered. He had torn the ligaments in his arm too, and as such his recovery was a long and drawn out process. After many months and countless physiotherapy sessions Rob was still unable to bend his arm, rendering him useless to anyone, my father in particular who had come to rely on him by then for weekend shifts down in the yard.

  ‘It’s all in your head, boy.’ Granddad would tell him when he’d beg off washing the dishes or mowing the grass as he proffered his right arm to lend a greater weight to his point. ‘There’s nothing on earth to stop you bending that arm now that the cast is off.’ But Rob would have none of that talk. He insisted that his arm remained locked in place, and as it was his good arm, his writing hand, long were the days that I had to listen to him mourn for his dream of becoming an architect. I knew then that he wasn’t faking it, his disability was real, real to him in any case.

  Our father dragged him from doctor to doctor, one specialist to another and every one of them had agreed that there was permanent and irreparable damage to the ligaments. The hinges of his arm were busted and no amount of oil was going to release them. Granddad however, was of another opinion altogether, dismissing the various diagnoses as uninformed quackery. Citing his experience in the trenches at Flanders he said that while he believed Rob’s injury was a very real and painful thing to begin with, the inability to move his arm came from a mental block Rob’s subconscious had put in place. When I asked him how such a thing was possible he simply shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go and get that brother of yours and we’ll fix this once and for all.’

  Rivulets of nervous sweat sparkled on Rob’s brow as he sat at the kitchen table. Granddad stood opposite him, a cadaver in his collarless shirt.

  ‘Put your hand on the table, boy,’ he said. My brother nervously complied. ‘Now, look at it. Keep your eyes on it, don’t even blink, don’t look away. Watch that hand of yours all the time it’s on there, okay?’ A solemn nod from Rob. ‘Your arm works, it works just fine. It’s your brain that’s the problem. It’s scrambled. Your arm can bend fine, but your mind, for whatever reason, believes that this isn’t the case and we’re going to fix it here today, right now…’

  ‘Granddad,’ said Rob as he looked up from the table.

  ‘Don’t look at me, boy. Concentrate on your hand. Keep it steady, keep it in the exact same place.’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, Sir,’ said Rob. Granddad resumed his soliloquy.

  ‘I knew fellas in the war,’ he said looking down to the end of the kitchen table to where I sat in sadistic anticipation. ‘Had themselves lose an arm clean off, or a leg… didn’t matter which, a chair is broken no matter the leg that fails. Well, they’d swear to me, grabbing a hold of my craw and twisting my shirt, a blue glazed sheen in their pain maddened eyes, they’d swear it to me that they could feel it, the arm or the leg like. For the lucky ones it might have been a finger or two, an ear maybe, didn’t really matter much what it was, the point is that they believed they could feel it when they were lying there in their bunks at night. Now, I don’t know exactly how that might work, but I seen it enough to believe it to be real. The brain works in a way that we can’t even begin to know and well, son, I believe that’s the case with you. You’ve held that arm straight for so long, it pained you so much that even a flinch would set it off and somewhere, deep down there somewhere in your head, a switch was tripped. Your arm doesn’t bend no more because your mind is trying to protect it, self-preservation is what they call it. All we need to do is convince your brain that a new and different threat exists.’

  In a furious blur of motion Granddad grabbed at the knife which sat by a half-eaten loaf on the breadboard and stabbed it right down onto the table, right to the spot where Rob’s hand was resting. His reaction was instantaneous – his arm snapped back away from the danger and he folded it protectively under his left arm, cradling it to his chest.

  ‘What the hell, Granddad? Are you trying to kill me?’ Rob blurted.

  ‘Now,’ said Granddad in that unerring calm tone of his. ‘That’s it fixed. See, just a simple trip of a switch.’ With that he turned from us and walked out of the kitchen without saying another word on the matter. I stared at Rob, our mouths slack-jawed with amazement.