by Brian Hodge
More to the heart, I began to regret all the years I’d never truly known my uncle, letting others form my opinion of him for me. When I told him this one night, I was glad to learn he didn’t hold it against me, as he waved my guilt aside like a pesky fly.
“You’ve a great many relatives, but I daresay not a one of them could understand how you’d be feeling now any better than I can,” he said. “After all … I’m the one who once left seminary.”
Astounding news, this. I’d never been told; had assumed Uncle Brendan to have been an incorrigible heathen from the very start. “Father Brendan, it almost was?” I exclaimed, laughing.
“Oh, aye,” he said, mischief in his eyes. “I was going to win souls back from the devil himself, until I began to really listen to those claiming to be out of his clutches already, and started wondering what he could ever want with them in the first place. Not a very bright or ambitious devil, you ask me.”
“You left seminary because of … who, the priests?”
“Oh, the whole buggery lot of them. Them, and that I woke up one day to realize that all I’d been studying for years? I didn’t believe a word of it. Now, love and compassion, aye, they’ve their virtues … but a message that basic doesn’t need any act of divine intervention.” He winked. “Not as dramatic as your experiences with those collared old pisspots, but you’re not the only one to give in to a crisis of faith.”
He knew of the stigmata, I’d freely told him of that. Of the rest, that awful Christ come down off the wall, I’d been silent.
“But we’re in good company, we are.” He toasted his stout to companions unseen. “Hardly the Church’s finest hour, not a thing they’re any too proud of, you understand, but last century, I think it was, the pope decides he’s a bit fagged of hearing the Bible attacked on educated terms. Science, history. If the Church fathers didn’t have the wee-est clue what they lived on was round, and orbited the sun, then why in hell assume they knew what they were talking about when it comes to eternity? Or, fifteen hundred years after he’s dead, you still had minds like Saint Augustine’s setting down doctrine. Augustine had said it was impossible that anyone could be living on the other side of the world, because the Bible didn’t list any such descendants of Adam. So the pope, under that big post-hole digging hat, the pope decides he’s heard quite enough of this shite, from these smart-arse intellectuals, so he decides to establish his own elite corps of priests who can argue their faith on the same terms … scientific, historical, like that.
“Except the more they studied, tried to arm themselves, the more these buggers quit the priesthood altogether.” Brendan gulped a hearty swallow of stout and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. “Game called on account of brains.”
“You’re a hostile man, Uncle Brendan,” I joked, setting no accusation by it. In truth, I admired the courage it took to make no secret of such opinions in a mostly Catholic country.
“Aye. Ignorance brings out the worst in me, it’s true, and the Church has never been much bothered by facts getting in the way of the dazzle. Like a magic show, it is … the grandest magic show anyone’s ever put on, and the fools who pay their money or their souls are plenty keen on letting themselves be fooled.” He shook his head. “Like with the relics. Never mind all the saints’ bones that actually came from animals — the Vatican won’t even keep its own records sensible. What are they up to now, more than a hundred and fifty nails from the crucifixion? Used that many, why, they’d still be taking him down off the cross to this day. What else…? Ah — nine breasts of Saint Eulalia. Twenty-eight fingers and thumbs of Saint Dominic. Ten heads of John the Baptist. Ten! You show me where in the gospels it says anything about John the Baptist being a fucking Hydra, and I’ll still not believe it, but at least I’ll admire their bloody audacity in trying to pull that one off too.”
Quite in my cups by now, I lamented how sad it was that faith and reason were so often at odds with one another. What a joke it would be on the whole planetary lot of us if it turned out that whatever made us in its own image had then filled the books with the most improbable bollocks imaginable, and put incompetents in charge of keeping them, just to make it that much harder on us and weed out everyone but the truest of true believers.
“Who’s to say it hasn’t happened that very way?” my uncle said. The seriousness with which he was taking this surprised me, even unsettled me. “But what you’ve got then? It’s no god of love and mercy. What you’ve got then … it’s a master who wants slaves.”
“Uncle Brendan,” I said, “I was only joking.”
“I know you were. But even jesters can speak the truth. They just do it by accident.”
“Forget all the dogma, then,” I said. “You don’t even believe in something so basic as a god of love?”
“I believe in love itself, oh, aye. But, now, love could just as easily be our own invention, couldn’t it? Took a few billion years of bloody harsh survival of the fittest before we’d dragged ourselves out of the mud far enough where we could even think of love. So why should we take for granted that something out there loves us any more than we love ourselves? I’ll tell you why: Any other alternative is too horrible for most people to contemplate.”
I remembered the way my mother reacted when I told her what the blood-kissing angel had said on that day of the bomb. This is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side. I’d not made it up, only repeated it, but my mother hadn’t wanted to hear another word. Hadn’t wanted to know any more about that woman who’d comforted me as my friends lay dead. It hurt me now much more than it had then. How rigid our fears can make us; how tightly they can close our minds. I wondered aloud why the uncomplicated faith that ran like a virus through the generations of our family hadn’t been enough for Brendan and me.
“Wondered that myself, I have,” he admitted. “Who knows? But I like to think it might be our Celtic blood. That it’s purer in us, somehow, than it is in the rest of the family … and the blood remembers. Greatest mystics that ever were, the Celts. So you and I … could be we’re like those stones they left behind.”
“How’s that — the standing stones?”
“Aye, those’re the ones,” Brendan said, and I thought of them settled into green meadows like giant grey eggs, inscribed with the primitive ogham alphabet. “Already been around for centuries, they had, by the time the bloody Christians overrun the island and go carving their crosses into the stones to convert them … like they’re trying to suck all the power out of the stones and turn them into something they were never intended to be. But the stones remember, still, and so do we, I think, you and I. Because our blood remembers too.”
The blood remembers. I liked the sound of that.
And if blood could only talk, what stories might it tell?
*
The stigmata still came, the flow of blood awe-inspiring to me, still, but there was something shameful about it now, as if leaving the Franciscans had made me unworthy. Worse, it terrified me now more than ever, for I exhibited the wounds of a Christ who had denied himself. They came like violent summons from something beyond me, indifferent to what I did or didn’t believe in.
They knew no propriety, no decorum. One night, soon after I’d confessed to my uncle that I’d never been with a woman, he paid for me to enjoy the company of one who certainly didn’t live in the area, and then he stepped discreetly from the house to share a drink with a neighbour. They’d scarcely tipped their glasses before she ran from the house and demanded he take her back to Limerick. Brendan first came in to see what had upset her so, and found me sitting on the bed with my wounds freshly opened.
“Oh suffering Christ,” he said, weary and beaten. “Ordinarily it’s the woman who bleeds the first time.”
For days I felt stung by the humiliation, and the loneliness of what I was, and tried to pull the world as tight around me as it had been at the friary. Once a cloister, now a boat. I’d leave the docks e
arly in the morning, rowing out onto Lough Derg until I could see nothing of what I’d left behind, and there I’d drift for hours. Chilled by misty rains or cold Atlantic winds, I didn’t care how cruelly the elements conspired against my comfort. The dark, peaty waters lapped inches away like a liquid grave.
I often dwelt upon Saint Francis, whose life I’d once vowed to emulate. He too had suffered stigmata, had beheld visions of Jesus. Francesco, repair my falling house, his Jesus had commanded him, or so he’d believed, and so he’d stolen many of his father’s belongings to sell for the money it would take to get him started. Repair my falling house. Whose Jesus was more true? Mine appeared to want from me nothing less than that I tear it down.
But always, my reflections would turn to that which to me was most real: she who had come on the day of the bomb. Who had smiled reassuringly at me with my blood on her lips, then never seen fit to visit again. A poor guardian she’d made, abandoning me. Since I’d been a child kneeling beside my bed at night, I had prayed to every evolving concept of God I’d held. I’d prayed to Saviour and Virgin and more saints than I could recall, and now, adrift on the dark rippling lake, I added her to those canonical ranks, praying that she come to my aid once more, to show me what was wanted of me.
“You loved me once,” I called to her, into the wind. “Did I lose that too, along with all the blood?”
But the wind said nothing, nor the waters, nor the hills, nor the skies whence I imagined that she’d come. They were as silent as dead gods who’d never risen again.
In the nights that followed these restless days, I learned to drink at the elbow of a master. No more shandies for me — the foamy black stout now became the water of life. Women, too, lost much of their mystery, thanks to a couple of encounters, the greater part of which I managed to remember.
And when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I broke down and told my uncle the secrets that had been eating away at me — the one for only a few weeks, the other since I was seven. It surprised me to see it was the latter that seemed to affect him most. Brendan grew deathly quiet as he listened to the story of that day, his fleshy, ruddy cheeks going pale. He was very keen on my recounting exactly how she’d looked — black hair shimmering nearly to her waist, her skin a translucent brown, not like that of any native I’d ever seen, not even those called the Black Irish.
“It’s true, they really do exist,” Brendan murmured after I’d finished, then turned away, face strained between envy and dread, with no clear victor. “Goddamn you boy,” he finally said. “You’ve no idea what’s been dogging your life, have you?”
Apparently I did not.
He sought out the clock, then in sullen silence appeared to think things over for a while. When at last he moved again, it was to snatch up his automobile keys and nod toward the door. Of the envy and dread upon his face, the latter had clearly won out.
IV. De contemptu mundi
“Somebody once said — I’ve forgot who — said you can take away a man’s gods … but only to give him others in return.”
Uncle Brendan told me this on our late-night drive, southwest through the countryside, past hedgerows and farms, along desolate lanes that may well have been better traveled after midnight. A corner rounded by day could have put us square in the middle of a flock of sheep nagged along by nipping dogs.
Or maybe we traveled by the meager luster of a slivered moon because, of those things that Brendan wished to tell me, he didn’t wish to do so by the light of day, or bulb, or fire.
“Wasn’t until after I’d left seminary that I understood what that really meant. You don’t walk away from a thing you’d thought you believed your whole life through without the loss of it leaving a hole in you, hungering to be filled. You’ve still a need to believe in something … it’s just a question of what.”
Sometimes he talked, sometimes he fell silent, collecting his remembrances of days long gone.
“I tried some things, Patrick. Things I’d rather not discuss in detail. Tried some things, and saw others … heard still other things beyond those. You can’t always trust your own senses, much less the things that get whispered about by people you can’t be sure haven’t themselves gone daft before you’ve ever met them. But some things…
“That woman you saw? One of three, she is, if she’s who I think she was. There’s some say they’ve always been here, long as there’s been an Ireland, and long before that. All the legends that got born on this island, they’re not all about little people. There’s some say that from the earliest times, the Celts knew of them, and worshipped them because the Celts knew that the most powerful goddesses were three-in-one.”
We’d driven as far down as the Dingle Peninsula, one of the desolate and beautiful spits of coastal land that reached out like fingers to test the cold Atlantic waters. The land rolled with low peaks, and waves pounded sea cliffs to churn up mists that trapped the dawn’s light in spectral iridescence, and the countryside was littered with ancient rock — standing stones and the beehive-shaped huts that had housed early Christian monks. Here hermits found the desolation they’d craved, thinking they’d come to know God better.
“There’s some say,” Uncle Brendan went on, “they were still around after Saint Patrick came. That sometimes, in the night, when the winds were blowing and the waves were wearing down the cliffs, a pious hermit might hear them outside his hut. Come to tempt him, they had. Calling in to him. All night, it might go on, and that horny bugger inside, all alone in the world, sunk to his knees in prayer, trying not to imagine how they’d look, how they’d feel. No reason they couldn’t’ve come on in as they pleased — it was just their sport to break him down.”
“Why?” I asked. “To prove they were more powerful than his god was?”
“Aye, now that could be. More powerful … or at least there. Then again, some say that, by the time the Sisters of the Trinity finally got to their business on those who gave in, all the hours of fear … flavoured the monks better.”
“Flavoured? Their blood, you mean?”
“All of them. It’s said each consumes a different part of a man. One, the blood. One, the flesh. And one, the sperm. It’s said that when they’ve not fed for a good long time? There’s nothing of a man left but his bones, cracked open and sucked dry.”
I couldn’t reconcile such savagery with the tenderness I’d been shown — the sweetness of her face, the gentle sadness in her eyes as she looked upon us, two dead boys and the other changed for life. Only when she’d tasted my blood had anything like terrible wisdom surfaced in her eyes.
The sun had breached the horizon behind us when Uncle Brendan stopped the car. There was nothing human or animal to be seen in any direction, and we ourselves were insignificant in this rugged and lovely desolation. We crossed meadows on foot, until the road was lost to sight. Ahead, in the distance, a solitary standing stone listed at a slight tilt. It drew my uncle on with quickened steps. When we reached it, he touched it with a reverence I’d never thought resided in him, for anything, fingers skimming the shallow cuts of the ogham writing that rimmed it, archlike.
“It’s theirs. The Sisters’. Engraved to honour them.” Then he grinned. “See anything missing?”
I looked for chunks eroded or hammered away, but the stone appeared complete. I shook my head, mystified.
“No crosses cut in later by the Christians. It wouldn’t take the chisel. Tried to smash the rock, they did, but it wore down their sledges instead. Tried to drag it to the sea, and the ropes snapped. So the legend goes, anyway. Like trying to pull God’s own tooth. Or the devil’s. If there’s a difference.” He shut his eyes, and the wind from the west swirled his graying hair. When he spoke again his voice was shaking. “Killed a boy here once. When I was young. Trying to call them up. I’d heard sometimes they’d answer the call of blood. Maybe I should’ve used my own instead. Maybe they’d’ve paid some mind to that.”
On the wind I could hear the pounding of the ocean, and as I tr
ied to imagine my generous and profane uncle a murderer, it felt as if those distant waves had all along been eroding everything I thought I knew. I asked Brendan what he’d wanted with the Sisters.
“They didn’t take the name of the Trinity just because there happens to be three of them. Couldn’t tell you what it is, but it’s said there’s some tie to that other trinity you and I thought we were born to serve. Patrick, I … I wanted to know what they know. And there’s some say when they put their teeth to a man, the pleasure’s worth it. So what’s a few years sacrificed, to learning what’s been covered up by centuries of lies?”
“But what if,” I asked, “all they’d have to tell you is just another set of lies?”
“Then might be the pleasure makes up for that, too.” He took a step toward me and I flinched, as if he had a knife or garrote as he would’ve had for that boy whose blood hadn’t been enough. Brendan raised his empty hands, then looked at mine.
At my wrists.
“Maybe you’ve the chance I never had. Maybe they’ve a use for you they never had for me.”
And in the new morning, he left me there alone. I sat against the old pagan stone after I heard the faraway sound of his car.
The stone remembers, he’d once told me, and so do we.
Demon est Deus inversus, I’d been told by another. Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.
On this rock will I build my church, some scribe had written, putting words in the latter’s mouth.
The blood remembers.
Three days later my flesh remembered how to bleed.
And the stone how to drink.
*
Regardless of their orbits, planets are born, then mature and die, upon a single axis, and so the stone and those it honoured had always been to me, even before I knew it. Now that I was here, I circled the stone but wouldn’t leave it, couldn’t, because, as in space, there was nothing beyond but cold dark emptiness.
