The Translation of the Bones

by Francesca Kay

  From the pulpit Father Diamond looked down across the upturned faces. He searched for Stella but did not see her. No surprise. He closed his eyes a moment. Self-sacrifice, he said. Self-giving. He does not ask for holocaust and victim but an open ear, an open heart. Love one another as I have loved you. And yes, it’s hard.

  Seamus and Major Wetherby had both turned out, praise be. There was also Xavier, an occasional Sunday server. Major Wetherby took charge. After the sermon he gestured to the men sitting in the front pew to come forward. Larry Armitage, Mr. Kalinowski, the pale youth who had intimations of a vocation, Danny and Kafui, other regulars. They could not make the twelve. Shuffling a little, looking sheepish, they filed into the sanctuary and sat down on the chairs placed for them. At Major Wetherby’s signal, they stooped to take off their right shoes and socks. Mr. Kalinowski, bending, found suddenly he could not reach. Larry, seeing this, took his shoe off for him.

  Major Wetherby held a ewer, Seamus a basin, Xavier a stack of towels. Father Diamond knelt down before Kafui, the first man in the row: Kafui raised his foot. Major Wetherby passed the ewer to Father Diamond, who poured water over the foot into the basin, held by Seamus on his left. Xavier passed him a towel. Carefully Father Diamond dried Kafui’s foot. He stood up and bowed to the next man, and knelt again, eight feet in a line. The pale boy’s toes were long and bony, Danny’s as hairy as a goat’s, Mr. Kalinowski’s twisted and his toenails gnarled.

  After Communion Father Diamond, escorted by Seamus and Major Wetherby bearing candles, transferred the Holy Eucharist to the tabernacle in the place of reposition, while the faithful sang:

  Word made Flesh, by word he maketh

  Very bread his Flesh to be;

  Man in wine Christ’s Blood partaketh;

  And if senses fail to see,

  Faith alone the true heart waketh

  To behold the mystery.

  And, when the mass was ended and he had disrobed, Father Diamond stripped the altar. He extinguished all the candles and the lamps. He emptied the Holy Water stoups. The only light left in the church came from the candles in the place of reposition. A few of the faithful stayed there to watch awhile, and pray. But long before midnight, one by one, they drifted quietly away. Father Diamond snuffed the candles out. Among the shrouded figures, before the naked altars, in the silence, Father Diamond kept vigil by on his own. Facedown on the floor he lay the whole night long, in the darkness of the empty church.

  Good Friday. Confessions in the morning in the church. Mary-Margaret O’Reilly was among the early penitents. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, she whispered through the grille. I have had unkind thoughts about my mother. I have been proud. I have failed to keep my Lenten resolution.

  What was your Lenten resolution? Father Diamond asked. To take my tea without milk and sugar, Mary-Margaret said. And so I did, most of the time. But lately . . . tea without is shocking bitter.

  Say one Hail Mary, Father Diamond said. And pray for me.

  Pray for me, that this bitter cup should pass. He was caught in the inexorable progress of the days. Good Friday. After the penitents had left, the church would empty again and stay silent till the ninth hour, when there was darkness over the whole land. Then the church would fill. The Litany of the Word. The Veneration of the Cross. Holy Communion. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. To the last syllable, the last leaden syllable, of recorded time.

  How to bear the reiterated story? The thorns, the whips, the wounds, the broken reed, the broken man stumbling over cobblestones under the weight of his own crossbar, vinegar and hyssop, blood and water spilling from his side. Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, why have you forsaken me, O Lord?

  The faithful would listen, kneel, sing mournful songs and process one by one to kiss the feet of the corpus on the cross, which Major Wetherby and Seamus would prop against a stool, and guard, taking turns to wipe the lip marks off. I opened the sea before you, but you opened my side with a spear. I am forgotten as a dead man, out of mind, I am like a broken vessel, my bones are wasted away.

  I go mourning all the day long.

  For my loins are filled with burning;

  And there is no soundness in my flesh.

  On Friday night Father Diamond slept the sleep of the dead and woke early the next morning, more refreshed. Felix Morrison woke early too and went in search of food for his pet wood lice. Yesterday he had researched their needs. It had been good to learn that they did not require a lid on their container because they could not crawl up the plastic sides. He liked to think that although they were actually captive they would feel free in their well-provisioned world, with the open sky above them. He had also discovered they had lots of other names, apart from slater. And deeply satisfactory they were, these names: bibble bugs, monkey peas, penny bugs, roly-polys, tiggy hogs. Cud worms and coffin cutters.

  Stella woke later to the gentleness of a house shared only with a child. She could hear Felix pottering about downstairs, talking to his wood lice, humming. This enchanting, eccentric child, with his quick imagination and his empathy—it was so good to have him home. And, later today, his brother. Rufus was staying in New York for a party but would be back first thing tomorrow, in time for the feast-day celebration. Meanwhile, there was this peaceful day, and Felix, and nothing much to do but bake a cake and pick up Father Diamond’s flowers.

  When Felix was a tiny baby, less than a month old, the family had spent a few days in Cornwall, in a hotel by the sea. There had been some confusion with the booking so that the interconnecting rooms they had requested were already taken. To Rufus’s annoyance, they had ended up with two rooms on separate floors. Having ruled against leaving the older children on their own, Rufus went in crossly with them. Stella, pretending disappointment that she could not sleep with Rufus, was secretly pleased. Her room faced the sea. She left the curtains undrawn and the windows open; all night the wind blew in, lifting the hair off her face where she lay on the pillow, making billowing white sails of the curtains, blessing the swaddled baby in his cot beside her. The nights were a journey across water and the little room a vessel; sleeping the half sleep of the mother of a newborn child Stella drowsed and woke and dreamed to the rhythm of the sea and the kiss of the wind, feeling there was no one but the two of them in the entire world. Almost it was as if she had been returned with Felix to an airy womb, to complete safety, self-containment, absolute fulfillment. The baby woke and suckled himself back to peaceful sleep; in the morning he was next to her, as warm as a new egg, perfect as apple blossom.

  A cake, and flowers. A pistachio cake, she thought, with orange flower icing; green for Easter, green for new life, now the green blade riseth from the buried grain. Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been. Felix would help her bake it, and they could paint hard-boiled eggs together. She had promised Father Diamond she would arrange the flowers for the church this afternoon: white roses, yellow mimosa, white broom, lilies.

  Alice Armitage slept badly. As a woman who did not think of herself as over-imaginative, it disturbed her that her dreams were out of her control. Last night she dreamed that she’d come home from the Good Friday service to find a man in uniform standing on her doorstep. From a distance she thought that it was Fraser. But, coming closer, she’d seen the shoulder flashes and the cap badge; she’d known the uniform was not her son’s, and at once she knew what the man had come to tell her. The shock of grief was so intense that it woke her clean out of sleep and left her unsure for a while if she’d been dreaming or awake. The pain left real traces, as if its origin were physical and factual; it was like a promise, or a foretaste, of what Alice would endure if Fraser were to die in Afghanistan. Her firstborn son. Her love and her delight.

  A dream is not a premonition, Mrs. Armitage assured herself. It is a dream, and nothing else. Only the ignorant hold with omens. It’s natural for a mother to be anxious. But still, but still. Men did die in battlefields on the eve of their return, as they died on their first day of deployment. A twis
t of fate or, as Fraser would say, sod’s law. But not God’s law, Alice prayed. Holy Mary, mother of God, who had to watch your own son die, watch over mine and bring him back unharmed in soul or body.

  There were different accounts, as Mrs. Armitage was aware, of exactly who was standing at the foot of the cross while the man Jesus died His agonizing, drawn-out death. A plethora of Marys, and mothers of sons, Johns and James, it seems. Mary, blessed among women. There could not be a grief more unendurable than to watch your own child suffer. How could Mary not have hated God when she saw the broken carcass of her son being hauled down from a stick like the tatters of a superseded flag? Who so loved the world that He sent His own son to die upon a cross?

  And where was Joseph, while Mary bore the hours of pain? Or the other fathers, come to that? In the end, then as always, women had to take the burden, pick up the broken pieces, wipe away the tears and blood. In sorrow they shall bring forth children and in utter loneliness they shall lay those children in their graves. This night I shall go through the land of Egypt and strike down all the firstborn in the land. But let me not bury my child, please God, not mine, not Fraser, my firstborn son.

  Mrs. Armitage sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Larry was asleep beside her, lying on his back, his mouth a little open, a glaze of dribble in its corner. He stirred in the sudden light and muttered something. Alice? It’s nothing, love, she said, and turned the light back off. Lying down again, she wriggled across the bed. Still asleep, he stretched out an arm and drew her closer in. Eventually she slept also, and when she woke in the morning it was with a faint ache only, a memory of pain, as if a migraine suffered in the night had ebbed or an old wound surfaced briefly before burying itself beneath her skin again.

  Mary-Margaret was woken by the thudding of her heart. Today, today, today it beat, like a panicked dream, fast as fury, urgent as alarm. She leapt up at once; no time to waste, no slugabed hours, no daydreaming in the warmth and tangle of her sheets this morning. All hands on deck, Mrs. Armitage had said on Thursday, when she was telling everybody what they had to do for Easter. All hands. Mary-Margaret took that to mean she would be expected. Which was to the good, given how peculiar Father Diamond had been since the accident, and Mrs. A so nasty and suspicious. Even though on Thursday Mary-Margaret and Mrs. Armitage had polished, swept and dusted as if their lives depended on the cleanness of the church, it would still need another go this morning. All those people toing and froing—Thursday evening, Friday afternoon—would have left their trails of rubbish. There would be fingerprints on the brass. On this day, of all days, for this holy Vigil, all must be perfect and every inch must shine.

  And more than this, much more than this, the statues and the pictures. The moment Mary-Margaret had been waiting for since she fell off the altar had come at last. Alleluia, at long last. The perfect dress she had found yesterday was hanging from a hook behind the door. Oh God, the waiting had been hard. But now the truth would be revealed and the faithful bathed in radiant light. At last. All hands on deck, Mary-Margaret said out loud. To make ready the way of the Lord. For this is the day the Lord has made. My day. And the Lord’s.

  She really ought to eat some breakfast. Breakfast like a king and dine like a pauper, wasn’t that the saying? Breakfast for the King of Heaven. But she really didn’t think that she could take a single mouthful. Her stomach was churning like the white water that frothed and foamed behind a ferry. There was a strange feeling in her head. And her heart still thumping, thumping like a fish caught in a net, like a trapped bird beating on a window, like a mad thing hammering for escape.

  Do you think we’ll have any more trouble with the ‘pilgrims’? Larry Armitage was asking Father Diamond.

  Oh, I do hope not, Father Diamond replied. It’s been fairly quiet this Passiontide, so far. We’ve had our regulars and the visitors we would expect; I think the sensation seekers have given up on us . . .

  I’m sure that’s right, Mrs. Armitage interrupted. These things are nine-day wonders really; the sorts of people who believe that nonsense soon move on to the next sensation and forget the last. She gave Mary-Margaret a look.

  But perhaps we ought to keep the door locked, just in case, this afternoon? Stella Morrison will do the flowers at five. Or thereabouts. I think that’s what she said. So I’ll be around then and will get things organized in time for six o’clock. Then there’ll be tomorrow’s solemn mass, of course.

  Will Mrs. Morrison need a hand? asked Mrs. Armitage.

  It’s sweet of you to think of it. But I imagine she’ll cope. I mean, if she needs someone to deal with her Oasis, I’m her man! I may not be Constance Spry, but I can tell a cabbage from a rose. As long as they’re not cabbage roses, I suppose. You’re too good really, Mrs. Armitage. We’ve already trespassed enough on your precious time. And on yours, of course, he added, to Mary-Margaret.

  Mrs. Armitage managed a smile in acknowledgment of Father Diamond’s wit, but Larry and Mary-Margaret looked at him askance. What on earth is he on about? Mary-Margaret asked herself, momentarily distracted. Hanging on to an oasis?

  I’ll pop along in any case, said Mrs. Armitage. It won’t be any trouble.

  It had been weird in the church when Mary-Margaret got there that morning. There was only Father Diamond and everything so quiet and so empty, as if the stripping of the altars had taken something with it, some essential thing that Mary-Margaret could not name. She felt all shivery. She couldn’t even look at the open tabernacle. It was like looking at something shameful, someone naked, a dead person in the road. But now that the others—Seamus too, all hands on deck—were there and busying about with dustpans and with bin bags, she felt a little better. She wondered if they could hear the beating of her heart.

  Father Diamond and Seamus brought the ladder in (where had they hidden it before?) and began their widdershins progress round the church. They worked systematically, starting at the door, carrying the ladder between them. In front of each image they halted and the priest climbed up, while Seamus steadied him. Mary-Margaret watched them out of the corner of her eye. Stealth and cunning. That’s what it took. Mary-Margaret was no one’s fool.

  The statue of St. Joseph first. Then the big painting of a martyr. The Good Shepherd and some other dark and smudgy paintings of unlabeled saints. When Larry Armitage noticed what was happening, he hurried over to collect the fallen cloths. Mrs. Armitage joined him with her duster. They moved to the first chapel. And then to the Chapel of the Holy Souls. Mary-Margaret averted her face from them while they were there. She pretended to tidy up the trays of cards and pamphlets by the door, as if she had no interest whatsoever in the unveiled crucifix. Stealth and cunning, she reminded herself. She’d wait until they were distracted by the difficulty of unwrapping the big cross that hung over the high altar. Meanwhile she held her breath.

  Oh God, what could be taking them so long? There was the sound of rushing wind. Mary-Margaret stopped her ears against it but it was just as loud. Be a love and put the kettle on, Mrs. Armitage called down to her from the entrance to the chapel. So, had they done it then at last? Only say the word, she prayed, my dear, my darling, my sweetheart and my Savior, get on and say the word, O God. I’ll do that, she shouted back to Mrs. Armitage. Be there in a tick.

  Slowly, casually, as one with absolutely no care in the world and no thought in her mind other than the brewing of the tea, Mary-Margaret strolled up the side aisle past the chapel. At its entrance she stopped. Mrs. Armitage and the others were clustered in the sanctuary round the ladder, on the top rung of which Father Diamond stood and stretched precariously. They paid her no attention. She went in. She knelt. Could her heart literally burst? She looked up into the beautiful and suffering face of her tormented God. I’m here, she whispered. And I’m ready. Silent and unmoving, the plaster face gazed down. The painted eyes remained unblinking. The drops of blood upon His side and on His hands, His feet, His wounded head stayed as they were, dull red, solidified.

  Mar
y-Margaret stood up. She climbed the step up to the altar. She reached for the foot of the crucifix and pressed her hand against it. I’m sorry it took so long, she said. Forgive me. But I’m here now. And I’m all ears. And I really love you.

  Still the face stared down. His lips stayed sealed. If he saw her standing at his feet and weeping, he gave her no sign. Where have you got to, Mary-Margaret? Mrs. Armitage was calling.

  I suppose you expect me to paint some bunnies or some baby chicks on these? Felix had positioned the first of his hard-boiled eggs in the specially designed egg clamp from the Easter painting kit that came out once a year. He was considering it with care and a poised paintbrush. His mother wasn’t listening. Almonds, she said. A hundred grams. Ground. And pistachios.

  Mum! Listen up! Did you hear my question? Do you want rabbits, or what?

  Sorry, darling. I am listening. Rabbits? Well, what would you like to paint? Rabbits are conventional.

  Spiders, Felix said. And tiggy hogs. I could do them with felt pen. These paints are a bit old now, they’re all dry and crumbly.

  Spiders would be a change, most certainly. Whatever you want, Felix. Stella looked down at the back of his bent head and stopped herself from kissing the bare nape of his neck. The paints will probably be all right, though, when they’re mixed with water.

  Felix stopped to watch Stella separate four eggs. In marble halls as white as milk, he quoted. Lined with a skin as soft as . . . How do you say this word, Mum—s-i-l-k?

  Silk, she said.

  What do cows drink?