Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  They shooed the children off to look for their presents under the tree, and Tatep turned to Nick. “Share, Nick—your surprise for Marianne.”

  Nick reached under the table. After a moment’s searching he brought out a large bulky parcel and hoisted it onto the table beside the heap of Halemtat nuts. Marianne caught a double-handful before they spilled onto the floor.

  Nick laid a protective hand atop the parcel. “Wait,” he said. “I’d better explain. Tatep, every family has a slightly different Christmas tradition—the way you folks do for Awakening. This is part of my family’s Christmas tradition. It’s not part of Marianne’s Christmas tradition—but, just this once, I’m betting she’ll go along with me.” He took his hand from the parcel and held it out to Marianne. “Now you can open it,” he said.

  Dropping the Halemtat nuts back onto the pile, Marianne reached for the parcel and ripped it open with enough verve to satisfy anybody’s Christmas unwrapping tradition. Inside was a box, and inside the box a jumble of gaudy cardboard tubes—glittering in stars and stripes and polka dots and even an entire school of metallic green fish. “Fireworks!” said Marianne. “Oh, Nick . . . ”

  He put his finger to her lips. “Before you say another word—you chose today to celebrate Christmas because it was the right time of the Rejoicer year. You, furthermore, said that holidays on Dirt and the other human worlds don’t converge—”

  Marianne nodded.

  Nick let that slow smile spread across his face. “But they do. This year, back on Dirt, today is the Fourth of July in the United States of America. The dates won’t coincide again in our lifetimes but, just this once, they do. So, just this once—fireworks. You do traditionally celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, don’t you?”

  The pure impudence in his eyes made Marianne duck her head and look away but, in turning, she found herself looking right into Tatep’s bright expectant gaze. In fact, all of the Rejoicers were waiting to see what Nick had chosen for her and if he’d chosen right.

  “Yes,” she said, speaking to Tatep but turning to smile at Nick. “After all, today’s Independence Day right here on Rejoicing, too. Come on, let’s go shoot off fireworks!”

  For the next twenty minutes the night sky of Rejoicing was alive with Roman candles, shooting stars, and all the brightness of all the Christmases and all the Independence Days in Marianne’s memory. In the streets, humans ooohed and aaahed and Rejoicers rattled. The pops and bangs even woke Halemtat, but all he could do was come out on his balcony and watch.

  A day later Tatep reported the rumor that one of the palace guards even claimed to have heard Halemtat rattle. “I don’t believe it for a minute,” Nick added when he passed the tale on to Marianne.

  “Me neither,” she said, “but it’s a good enough story that I’d like to believe it.”

  “A perfect Christmas tale, then. What would you like to bet that the story of ‘The First Time Halemtat Rattled’ gets told every Christmas from now on?”

  “Sucker bet,” said Marianne. Then the wonder struck her. “Nick? Do traditions start that easily—that quickly?”

  He laughed. “What kind of fireworks would you like to have next year?”

  “One of each,” she said. “And about five of those with the gold fishlike things that swirl down and then go bam! at you when you least expect it.”

  For a moment, she thought he’d changed the subject, then she realized he’d answered her question. Wherever she went, for the rest of her life, her Christmas tradition would include fireworks—not just any fireworks, but Fourth of July fireworks. She smiled. “Next year, maybe, we should play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as well as The Nutcracker Suite.”

  He shook his head “No,” he said, “The Nutcracker Suite has plenty enough fireworks all by itself—at least your version of it certainly did!”

  Although still kept to some extent in the U.K., the Christmas tradition of telling or reading ghost stories is one custom that either never caught on or is no longer enjoyed in the U.S. Washington Irving, in his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819), wrote of a British parson “dealing forth strange accounts of popular superstitions and legends” on Christmas Day. Henry James framed his The Turn of the Screw (1898) as a tale told on Christmas Eve. M. R. James wrote in the preface to his Ghost Stories of An Antiquary (1904) that most of the stories “were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas . . . ” But the custom of telling scary tales on long, dark midwinter nights is probably an ancient one carried over into historic times. We can still enjoy it with this deliciously spooky and seasonally suitable story from Gene Wolfe.

  How the Bishop Sailed to Inniskeen

  Gene Wolfe

  This is the story Hogan told us as we sat before our fire in the unroofed chapel, looking up at the niche above the door—the niche that had held the holy stone.

  “ ’Twas Saint Cian’s pillow,” said Hogan, “an’ rough when he got it—rough as a pike’s kiss. Smooth it was when he died, for his head had smoothed it sixty years. Couldn’t a maid have done it nicer, an’ where the stone had worn away was the Virgin. Her picture, belike, sir, in the markin’s that’d been in the stone.”

  It sounded as if he meant to talk no more, so I said, “What would he want with a stone pillow, Pat?” This, though I knew the answer, simply because the night and the lonesome wind sweeping in off the Atlantic had made me hungry for a human voice.

  “Not for his own sins, sure, for he’d none. But for yours, sir, an’ mine. There was others, too, that come to live on this island.”

  “Other hermits, you mean?”

  Hogan nodded. “An’ when they was gone the fisherfolk come, me own folk with them. ’Twas they that built this chapel here, an’ they set the holy stone above the door for he was dead an’ didn’t want it. When it was stormin’ they’d make a broom, an’ dip it in the water, an’ sprinkle the holy stone, an’ the storm would pass. But if it was stormin’ bad, they’d carry the stone to the water an’ dip it in.”

  I nodded, thinking how hard and how lonely life must have been for them on the Inniskeas, and of fishermen drowned. “What happened to it, Pat?”

  “ ’Twas sunk in the bay in me grandfather’s time.” Hogan paused, but I could see that he was thinking—still talking in himself, as he himself would have said. “Some says it was the pirates an’ some the Protestants. They told that to the woman that come from Dublin, an’ she believed them.”

  I had been in Hogan’s company for three days and was too sage a hound to go haring off after the woman from Dublin; in any event, I knew already that she was the one who had fenced the cromlech at the summit of the island. So I said, “But what do you think, Pat? What really happened to it?”

  “The bishop took it. Me own grandfather saw him, him that was dead when I was born. Or me great-grandfather it might be, one or the other don’t matter. But me father told me, an’ the bishop took it Christmas Eve.”

  The wind was rising. Hogan’s boat was snug enough down in the little harbor, but I could hear the breakers crash not two hundred yards from where we sat.

  “There was never a priest here, only this an’ a man to take care of it. O’Dea his name was.”

  Because I was already thinking of writing about some of the things he told me (though in the event I have waited so long), I said, “That was your grandfather, Pat, I feel certain.”

  “A relative, no doubt, sir,” Hogan conceded, “for they were all relations on this island, more or less. But me grandfather was only a lad. O’Dea cared for the place when he wasn’t out in his boat. ’Twas the women, you see, that wetted the holy stone, when the men were away.”

  I said, “It’s a pity we haven’t got it now, but if it’s in the bay it ought to be wet enough.”

  “ ’Tis not, sir. ’Tis in Dublin, in their big museum there, an’ dry as a bone. The woman from there fetched it this summer.”

  “I thought you said the bishop threw it into the bay.”
/>   “She had a mask for her face,” Hogan continued, as though he had not heard me, “an’ a rubber bathin’ costume for the rest of her, an’ air in a tin tied to her back, just like you see.” (He meant, “as I have seen it on television.”) “Three days she dove from Kilkelly’s boat. Friday it was she brought it up in two pieces. Some say she broke it under the water to make the bringing up easier.” Hogan paused to light his pipe.

  I asked, “Did the bishop throw it into the bay?”

  “In a manner of speakin’, sir. It all began when he was just a young priest, do you see? The bishop that was before him had stuck close to the cathedral, as sometimes they will. In the old days it was not easy, journeyin’. Very bad, it was, in winter. If you’d seen the roads before they were made, you’d thank the Lord for General Wade.”

  Having had difficulties of my own in traveling around the west of Ireland in a newish Ford Fiesta, I nodded sympathetically.

  “So this one, when he got the job, he made a speech. ‘The devil take me,’ he says, ‘if ever I say Mass Christmas Eve twice in the same church.’ ”

  “And the devil took him,” I suggested.

  “That he did not, sir, for the bishop was as good as his word. As the time wore on, there was many a one that begged him to stop, but there was no holdin’ him. Come the tag end of Advent, off he’d go. An’ if he heard that there was one place worse than another, it’s where he went. One year a priest from Ballycroy went on the pilgrimage, an’ he told the bishop a bit about Inniskeen, havin’ been once or twice. ‘Send word,’ says the bishop, ‘to this good man O’Dea. Tell him to have a boat waitin’ for me at Erris.’

  “They settled it by a fight, an’ it was me grandfather’s own father that was to bring him.”

  “Ah,” I said,

  “Me grandfather wanted to come along to help with the boat, sure, but his father wouldn’t allow it, it was that rough, an’ he had to wait in the chapel—right here, sir—with his mother. They was all here a long time before midnight, sure, talkin’ the one to the other an’ waitin’ on the bishop, an’ me grandfather—recollect he was but a little lad, sir—he fell asleep . . .

  “Next thing he knew, his mother was shakin’ him. ‘Wake up, Sean, for he’s come!’ He wakes an’ sits up, rubbin’ his eyes, an’ there’s the bishop. But, Lord, sir, there wasn’t half there that should’ve been! Late as the sun rises at Christmas, it was near the time.

  “It didn’t matter a hair to His Excellency. He shook all the men by the hand, an’ smiled at all the women, an’ patted me grandfather’s head, an’ blessed everybody. Then he begun the Mass. You never heard the like, sir. When they sang, there was angels singin’ with them. Sure, they couldn’t see them, but they knew that they were there an’ they could hear them. An’ when the bishop preached, they saw the Gates an’ got the smell of Heaven. It was like cryin’ for happiness, an’ it was forever. Me father said the good man used to cry a bit himself when he talked of it—which he did, sir, every year about this time, until he left this world.

  “When the Mass was over, the bishop blessed them all again, an’ he give O’Dea a letter, an’ O’Dea kissed his ring, which was an honor to him after. Me grandfather saw his father waiting to take the bishop back to Erris, an’ knew he’d been in the back of them. Right back there, sir.”

  We were burning wreckage we had picked up on the beach earlier. Hogan paused to throw a broken timber on the fire.

  “The stone, Pat,” I said.

  “The bishop took it, sir, sure. After he give the letter, he points at it, do you see.” Hogan pointed to the empty niche. “An’ he says, ‘Sorry I am, O’Dea, but I must have that.’

  “Then O’Dea gets up on a stool—’twas what they sat on here—an’ gives it to him, an’ off he goes with me grandfather’s father.

  “All natural, sir. But me grandfather lagged behind when the women went home, an’ as soon as there wasn’t one lookin’, off he runs after the bishop, for he’d hopes his father’d allow him this time, it bein’ not so rough as the night before. You know where the rock juts, sir? You took a picture from there.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Me grandfather run out onto that rock, sir, for there’s a bit of a moon by then an’ he’s wantin’ to see if they’d put out. They hadn’t, sir. He sees his father there in the boat, holdin’ it close in for the bishop. An’ he sees the bishop holdin’ the holy stone an’ steppin’ into it. Up comes the sun, an’ devil a boat, or bishop, or father, or holy stone there is.

  “Me grandfather’s father’s body washed up on Duvillaun, but never the bishop’s. He’d wanted the holy stone, do you see, to weight him. Or some say to sleep on, there on the bottom. ’Tis the same thing, maybe.”

  I nodded. In that place, with the wind moaning around the ruined stone chapel, it did not seem impossible or even strange.

  “They’re all dead now, sir. There’s not a man alive that was born on these islands, or a woman either. But they do say the ghosts of them that missed midnight Mass can be seen comin’ over the bay Christmas Eve, for they was buried on the mainland, sir, most of ’em, or died at sea like the bishop. I never seen ’em, mind, an’ don’t want to.”

  Hogan was silent for a long time after that, and so was I.

  At last I said, “You’re suggesting that I come back here and have a look.”

  Hogan knocked out his pipe. “You’ve an interest in such things, sir, an’ so I thought I ought to mention it. I could take you out by daylight an’ leave you here with your food an’ sleepin’ bag, an’ your camera. Christmas day, I’d come by for you again.”

  “I have to go to Bangor, Pat.”

  “I know you do, sir.”

  “Let me think about it. What was in the letter?”

  “ ’Twas after New Year’s when they read it, sir, for O’Dea wouldn’t let it out of his hands. Sure, there wasn’t a soul on the island that could read, an’ no school. It says the bishop had drowned on his way to Inniskeen to say the midnight Mass, an’ asked the good people to make a novena for his soul. The priest at Erris wrote it, two days after Christmas.”

  Hogan lay down after that, but I could not. I went outside with a flashlight and roamed over the island for an hour or more, cold though it was.

  I had come to Inniskeen, to the westernmost of Ireland’s westernmost island group, in search of the remote past. For I am, among various other things, a writer of novels about that past, a chronicler of Xerxes and “King” Pausanias. And indeed the past was here in plenty. Sinking vessels from the Spanish Armada had been run aground here. Vikings had stridden the very beaches I paced, and earlier still, Neolithic people had lived here largely upon shellfish, or so their middens suggest . . .

  And yet it seemed to me that night that I had not found the past, but the future; for they were all gone, as Hogan had said. The Neolithic people had fallen, presumably, before the modern Celtic Irish, becoming one of the chief strands of Irish fairy lore. The last of St. Cian’s hermits had died in grace, leaving no disciple. The fishermen had lived here for two hundred years or more, generation after generation, harvesting the treacherous sea and tiny gardens of potatoes; and for a few years, there had actually been a whaling station on North Island.

  No more.

  The Norwegians sailed from their whaling station for the last time long ago. Long ago the Irish Land Commission removed the fisherfolk and resettled them; their thatched stone cottages are tumbling down, as the hermits’ huts did earlier. Gray sea-geese nest upon Inniskeen again, and otters whistle above the whistling wind. A few shaggy black cattle are humanity’s sole contribution; I cannot call them wild, because they do not know human beings well enough for fear. In the Inniskeas our race is already extinct. We stayed a hundred centuries and are gone.

  I drove to Bangor the following day, December 22. There I sent two cables, made transatlantic calls, and learned only that my literary agent, who might perhaps have acted, had not the slightest intention of doing so before
the holidays, and that my publishers, who might certainly have acted if they chose, would not.

  Already all of Ireland, which delights in closing at every opportunity, was gleefully locking its doors. I would have to stay in Bangor over Christmas, or drive on to Dublin (praying the while for an open petrol station), or go back to Erris. I filled my rented Ford’s tank until I could literally dabble my forefinger in gasoline and returned to Erris.

  I will not regale you here with everything that went wrong on the twenty-fourth. Hogan had an errand that could neither be neglected nor postponed. His usually dependable motor would not start, so that eventually we were forced to beg the proprietor of the only store that carried such things to leave his dinner to sell us a spark plug. It was nearly dark before we pushed off, and the storm that had been brewing all day was ready to burst upon us.

  “We’re mad, you know,” Hogan, told me. “Me as much as you.” He was at the tiller, his pipe clenched between his teeth; I was huddled in the bow in a life jacket, my hat pulled over my ears. “How’ll you make a fire, sir? Tell me that.”

  Through chattering teeth, I said that I would manage somehow.

  “No, you won’t, sir, for we’ll never get there.”

  I said that if he was waiting for me to tell him to turn back, he would have to wait until we reached Inniskeen; and I added—bitterly—that if Hogan wanted to turn back I could not prevent him.

  “I’ve taken your money an’ given me word.”

  “We’ll make it, Pat.”

  As though to give me the lie, lightning lit the bay.

  “Did you see the island, then?”

  “No,” I said, and added that we were surely miles from it still.

  “I must know if I’m steerin’ right,” Hogan said.

  “Don’t you have a compass?”

  “It’s no good for this, sir. We’re shakin’ too much.” It was an ordinary pocket compass, as I should have remembered, and not a regular boat’s compass in a binnacle.

  After that I kept a sharp lookout forward. Low-lying North Island was invisible to my right, but from time to time I caught sight of higher, closer South Island. The land I glimpsed at times to our left might have been Duvillaun or Innisglora, or even Achill, or all three. Black Rock Light was visible only occasionally, which was somewhat reassuring. At last, when the final, sullen twilight had vanished, I caught sight of Inniskeen only slightly to our left. Pointing, I half rose in the bow as Hogan swung it around to meet a particularly dangerous comber. It lifted us so high that it seemed certain we were being flipped end for end; we raced down its back and plunged into the trough only to be lifted again at once.