by Annie Murphy
When it came to it, he pressed his hands down so hard he demolished my headdress with lilies of the valley.
“I hope you aren’t that rough,” I said.
Eamonn held up his hands. “Gentle.”
I acknowledged it with a smile.
“Could it be, Annie, the reason you dislike religion is that you’ve always been lawless?”
Wasn’t be? But he may have thought that he at least acknowledged laws existed, even if he broke one of them nightly, whereas I didn’t even know what sin was.
From my point of view, what we did was not a sin but the most natural thing in the world. I was the best judge of that because of the unnatural things that other men had done to me.
He read my thoughts.
“If you were to tell me everything that men did to you, I’d pass out.”
He collapsed onto the floor and lay prone as if I had told him everything. I fainted on top of him. Seconds later, we were quaking with laughter in one another’s arms.
But, as we got up, I realized that a serious point had been made. His great heart had got him to a place from which his head would have excluded him. For his head still believed that his love for me was a sin because of who he was. That is why he kept needing to beat his breast at the most splendid thing in his whole life.
“Tell me, Annie, why did you give up your religion?”
I stayed silent. The truth would have wounded him too much. At the age of seventeen, I did things the Church forbade, saying nothing about them in confession and then receiving communion in what priests, not I, called sin.
“All right, Annie, what about after you gave up religion?”
“You’d only collapse again on the carpet.”
He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Fire away.”
I shook my head. But I remembered.
We were living in Texas at the time, land of guns, snakes, and tornadoes, because my father was employed there in a veterans hospital. Mom was always saying, “No one ever gets out of Texas except in a Cadillac or an electric chair.”
My boyfriend, Jeff Fox, who had replaced Don who tried to rape me, was a Baptist. He was my first sexual partner.
Jeff was always poking fun at Catholic rules. He only did this so he could lay me without me feeling guilty. I didn’t mind because I, too, thought rules, made by guys like that overfed Bishop, were crazy. So we had a good time.
He used to say, in the usual imitation of John Wayne, “I know what you’re thinking, Annie bunch. Your dirty-minded God’s followin’ us every inch of the way so He can hit you with a bolt of lightnin’ before you have a coupla seconds to repent.”
The landscape of the lake where he took me once scared me. Trees leafless as skeletons against a red Texas sky. From everywhere came a threatening locust-throb and there was oil-still water around. I knew there were rattlesnakes in the vicinity and water moccasins whose poisonous saliva was thick as a ball of cotton and tarantulas at twilight and red scorpions that roamed the bare rocks with their tails poised to strike.
We parked the car deep in the tall green reeds circling the lake and made love. Love in a car. Teenage stuff. Great. Pleasure began at the base of my spine and lightning-flashed to every part of me.
Satisfied, I opened my window to let in a light breeze. Time stopped while I sat there, unthinking, uncaring.
Without warning, something landed on my bare back, its suckers extended over several inches. I buried my head in Jeff’s perspiring chest.
“What is it?” I screamed.
“What d’you think, honey, the devil in the shape of a moccasin snake come to bite you ‘cause you just did somethin’ dirty?”
He guessed right.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“Just a big old grasshopper.”
I refused to make love there again that night.
Jeff was disgusted with me. “Don’t forget to tell what we just did to Father Brannigan, in confession.”
In spite of the gibes, I loved Jeff and trusted him.
As memories of those days came back, I began to cry.
“Don’t, Annie,” Eamonn said gently, rubbing his hand over my hair. “I’ll help you rebuild your faith.”
I was crying not because of my lost faith but because, in the end, Jeff betrayed me. And in the worst way a man can betray the woman he loves.
It was a night of raw 107-degree heat and we were driving at sixty miles per hour with the top of the convertible down, toward a mad painter’s sunset: impossible pinks, reds, oranges, blues. Jeff had booked us into the Ramada Inn. On the way, I fortified myself with gin and tonic.
Inside our air-conditioned motel room, he stocked a makeshift bar from his cooler and played Sinatra from his tape deck. By my second or third drink—who was counting?—we danced and stripped to the Big Bands sound, before making passionate love. My whole body thrilled to his touch. Afterward, another drink.
I lay relaxed for a while on my back in bed in an ocean of pleasure.
He stood over me. “You really turn me on, baby. This next time is for me, right?”
I smiled at him as he turned me over on my belly and, lifting me up from behind, put his arms under me while his hands weighed and caressed my dangling breasts.
This was security, bliss, the fulfillment of all I had ever hoped for in a man. Then he entered me cruelly just below my spine. The violence and unexpectedness of his approach in the rear passage made me shudder and scream with pain.
Like an unbroken horse, I tried to throw him off, but he was too strong for me. The sense of betrayal hurt but even more painful was the sense that I had brought this on myself by being so wicked.
Held in an iron vise, I could only listen to his wild cowboy yells of pleasure. I would never hear their like again. The flower of me, the world that was me, withered with the withering of his flesh.
“You are mine forever now,” he cried, “body and soul,” while I felt I belonged not to him, to God, to the world, or even to myself. I, Annie Murphy that was, had died in those moments of cruel penetration and frenzied orgasm.
Impervious to the physical pain, I got up and, late or soon, I found myself in the parking lot.
In the car, Jeff tried to tell me it was the gin that made him do it. I believed him because I had to believe in something. Back home, having torn my dress off, I sat crouched in the corner of the shower in the dark, with cold water running over me for a whole hour. Mom came into the bathroom and switched on the light. “Switch it off,” I screamed. She did, though she sat down outside the shower door.
“If Jeff hurt you —”
“He didn’t.”
“Your new pink dress is all torn.”
“I caught it on some brambles.”
After a long pause: “I’m scared, Annie.”
“I’m okay, I tell you.”
“For him, Annie. You fought with me since you were a kid. If he oversteps the mark, you’ll kill him.”
I nearly did, too. For, in spite of his promise, he did the same accursed thing to me again.
Afterward, I pointed his gun at his sleeping head. He awoke to find the barrel right up to his open mouth. What saved him? I wasn’t worth the expense of the state sending me to the electric chair. I fled from Texas, driving faster than Eamonn himself ever drove even when, as this morning, the devil perched on his shoulder.
I joined my sister, Mary, in New Jersey by the sea. There I had a dream. I was seven years old and dressed for Mass—white gloves, prayer book in my hand. Suddenly, the bright morning darkened. Through the window I saw a stranger with a huge head. When he opened his eyes, they were blood red and he had a fierce tongue. This snake tried to smash the window to get at me. It was as high as the house and it curled and filled the entire landscape of Inafield. Up and down it went, smashing the house to bits. I ran away, but the space kept getting less and less.
That dream still haunts me.
While I was remembering, Eamonn looked into my eyes and
saw something of my appalling anguish. That was why he, my White Knight, found it necessary to enter into my world and save me.
Dear God, I prayed, if you are out there somewhere, thank you for sending me the one man who would never betray me.
Without realizing it, I had been weeping for some time. Eamonn had his broad protective arm around my shoulder.
“I’ll look after you, Annie,” he was saying. “I’ll bring you back into the fold.”
That night, poor Eamonn was himself in for a shock. Even in my sad mood, I could not resist playing a little joke on him. After prayers, he came into my bed, only to find me unwilling to make love.
“Whatever’s the matter, Annie?”
“I’m busy.”
“Busy?”
His hand went wandering down me, only to come to a shuddering halt. He snorted like a water hose starting up.
“God Almighty, is it a brick you have between your legs?”
He peeped below the covers.
“A red brick,” I said. “Be grateful.”
“Grateful to a brick?”
“Bow down to it. Without it, you’d drop dead.”
“ ’Tis true, ‘tis very true.”
He had finally seen the proof that I was not pregnant.
“I really would expire, Annie, if that sort of monthly blood-letting happened to me.”
“You’re learning what we women go through to produce men like you.”
“So,” he said, “red is the green light, so to speak.”
“If you’re Irish you might put it like that.”
His restless mind was already at work on a new problem.
“Why, Annie, don’t you use those internal things?”
“You’d prefer them?”
“Wait, now, this is very, very serious.” He was squirming with roguish delight. “I might enter you in a rush and push one of them things right up to your navel.”
“Knowing you, you might.”
“Promise me one thing. Don’t leave them lying around.”
“Okay. What’re you going to do now, leave the bed?”
Wistfully like a dog: “I won’t stay as long.”
Why not? I wondered. Didn’t I need healing when I had a period?
“Please yourself,” I said.
“You don’t seem as concerned as Helena about such things.”
“That’s because Irish women plan their lives around their periods, which is sad.”
“But you are free from all that.” Then that thought started to scare him. “Maybe you ought not to be so free.”
“Maybe you ought not to be so free,” I said, seeing that his only worry was that I was not worried.
At least he was able to administer confirmations for a few days without first having to race to Killarney to confess.
Chapter Sixteen
ONE SUMMER’S EVENING around eight, Eamonn took me to see his relatives at Castleisland.
Joan Browne owned a bottling company, so I expected a distinguished house. Instead, as I passed through the open front door, I was too late in making a grab for Eamonn’s arm as I fell down crooked stairs onto a crooked floor.
“I feel drunk,” I said.
“You will be before you leave,” he promised. “Eat plenty of cheese and crackers. Leave anything cooked by herself alone.”
Joan came to meet us with her brother, Paddy Joe. Their welcome was overwhelming.
“After our charming evening at the Glenbeigh,” Joan said, enveloping me in her arms, “I couldn’t wait to see you again. Finally, the greedy Bishop has consented to bring you.”
“Are you talking about anyone I know?” Eamonn said.
In the living room, after pouring us each a big glass of sherry, she said:
“You were brilliant at the dinner, Annie, turning Mary O’Riley’s disgrace into a medical emergency. Eamonn could not have been more cunning himself.”
“Cunning?” Eamonn echoed, helplessly.
“Why haven’t you brought your housekeeper tonight?”
Eamonn said, “She is in Killarney, preparing for my clergy dinner tomorrow evening.”
Joan put on some music and, as a crowd gathered, there was dancing. Pushing her dark glasses onto the forehead, she opened wide her big brown eyes, and said, “Why don’t you leave, Eamonn?”
“I have only just come.”
“Leave the priesthood, I mean.”
Eamonn and I looked at each other and laughed.
“Leave and marry Annie,” she went on, in her lilting voice. “A blind man can see you are mad for her.”
“In the name of God…” He almost choked on his drink. “You know I am vowed to celibacy.”
“I also know,” Joan returned, “that the present Pope has dispensed thousands of priests to allow them to marry.”
I was out of touch. Since I was a girl I had taken it for granted that the Church never allowed priests to marry.
“But I’m not an ordinary priest, I’m a bishop.”
“You mean it’s too nice being a bishop to give it up.”
“I mean I don’t want to give anything up when I’ve given my solemn word.”
Joan rolled her eyes operatically. “Really. When Annie’s around, I could pick up splinters by the light in your eyes.”
“For God’s sake, Joan, you’re daft.”
Paddy Joe chipped in with “One thing she isn’t.”
Joan said, “I read in the Kerryman you inherited three and a half million pounds from a parishioner. Sure you could leave”—she snapped her fingers—“any time.”
“What are you talking about?”
Joan said, “That dinner and the band the other night must have cost you eight hundred pounds. Anyway, your name is Casey, is it not?”
He banged his palm with his fist. “Did the name have ‘Bishop’ in front of it?”
I said, “He has to deny it, Joan, whether he inherited the money or not.”
“But I didn’t,” and he slammed three drinks down his throat in irritation.
Afterward, Joan said to me privately, “Why did you defend him?”
“I didn’t want to spoil a great time.”
Joan looked at me slyly. “I like you. You are a fellow conspirator.”
Eamonn’s mother, she told me, had been a real saint. His father, on the other hand, was obsessively religious. He put Eamonn in the care of the parish priest, who encouraged him to enter the seminary.
“With the father always working,” Joan said, “it was young Eamonn who had to sort out family problems. Too much responsibility on young shoulders.”
She went on to say how much Eamonn loved England. When he worked there soon after ordination, he had a motorbike and freedom and he started housing projects for young people.
Eamonn enjoyed being among his relatives. He danced with everyone. Later, the youngsters went on dancing and trying to eat Joan’s food while the rest of us chatted in the living room. We had had far too much to drink when Joan took Eamonn in one arm and me in the other as if to introduce us.
“My God,” she exclaimed, “it has just struck me.”
“What, Joan?” Eamonn tittered, rocky on his feet. “What has just struck you and where?”
“What if Annie gets pregnant?”
Paddy Joe fell off his chair, clutching his heart and saying, “I am going to die. I am. I am.”
“I always knew you would break your vows,” Joan said. “Annie’s an excellent choice.”
“Joan Browne,” Eamonn said, “you are murdering your brother with the wicked things you say.”
Junior, Joan’s eldest son, married to a Rose of Tralee, came over to hear his mother say, “If Annie gets pregnant, you will have to dip into your millions then.”
She could say anything to Eamonn. Mischief was irresistible to him, even when he was on the receiving end of it.
Really high now, he grabbed me for a dance and even cuddled me in a corner with Joan looking on, smiling and nodding her wise
old head.
She mouthed to me over his shoulder, “Sure, himself is gone on you, completely gone.”
The drive home was scary because, for the first time, Eamonn was really plastered.
“Slow down,” I said. “Think of the cops.”
“Three and a half millions,” he said, in a slurred voice, his left hand busy under my dress. “How would I get anyone pregnant?”
We were within a mile or so of Inch when, trapped in the headlights of the car right in the middle of the road, there was a lamb. There was a loud crunchy bang and a flight of wool.
“Why didn’t you swerve?” I screamed.
“We would have gone over the cliffs ourselves.”
“Stop, Eamonn, it might not be dead.”
“ ‘Course ‘tis dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, Annie. I have hit them before. ‘Tis a lamb, only a lamb.”
Slaughterer of lambs. Eamonn, supposedly a shepherd—“Behold the Lamb of God”—did this regularly and still drove like a madman with one hand poking me under my panties. My man was a ruthless man.
That lamb, spring-born, innocent, was suddenly a symbol of everything that stood between us. How could he hit it and not even bother to stop?
I started to open my door with us careering up the narrow mountain road at about fifty miles an hour.
“No, Chicky Licky, you will kill us both.”
Seconds later, we halted with a screech and shudder at the front of the house.
He opened my door and saw I was almost in tears.
“Why didn’t you stop, Eamonn?”
He touched my shoulder gently.
“I didn’t want you to see a poor bloodied little lamb spread on the rocks. I’ll drive back, it can’t be more than a mile, and check ‘tis dead.”
I nodded and made to accompany him.
“No, Annie.” He spoke protectively. “Your baby covered with blood still haunts you.”
“I guess you’re right.”
He took the flashlight and drove away. That made me even more apprehensive. I was sending him back down a mountain road high on drink. If he crashed, I’d never forgive myself.
