Falling Idols (13 page)

“So. Which vow should we have you breaking first?” he asked.

Penniless, I’d turned to Uncle Brendan for help in making my new life. By renouncing the order in disillusion, I had become a shame to my devout family in Belfast. As they’d regarded Brendan the same for as long as I could recall, it was inevitable that two such black sheep as ourselves throw in together. I’d long realized he was hardly the devil my mother — his older sister — had painted him to be, for refusing to set foot in a church since before I was born, and scoffing at nothing less than the Holy See itself.

“Some choose to face the world with a rosary in their hands, and some get more out of holding a well-pulled pint of stout,” he said. “Not that one excludes the other, but at some point you do need to decide which is more fundamentally truthful.”

I lived with him in Killaloe, northeast of Limerick, where at the southern tip of Lough Derg he rented out boats to tourists and wandering lovers. I helped him most days at the docks, on others motoring down to Limerick to earn a little extra money tutoring Latin. In this way I slowly opened up to a wider world.

Early evenings, we’d often find ourselves in one of Brendan’s favourite pubs. Great pub country, Ireland, and Brendan had a great many favourites. Poor man’s universities, he called them, and we’d further our educations at tables near fires that crackled as warm and welcoming as any hearth in any home.

Guinness for Brendan, always, and in the beginning, shandies for me. I was little accustomed to drinking and inclined to start slow. But they relaxed me, and this I needed, often feeling that I still didn’t belong outside cloistered walls. I would look at all these people who knew how to live their days without each hour predetermined as to how they’d pass it, and I’d wonder how they managed, if they knew how courageous they were. I’d listen to them laugh and would feel they had no more than to look at me to see that I was only pretending to be one of them.

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 early 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?”