William H. Hallahan - (4 page)

"You see before you the power of hatred," he said. And
then alone he set off for Eden. The battle between heaven and hell
had been joined.
 
 

Satan was impressed: Eden was compellingly beautiful. The Pishon
River and its three companion rivers, the Gihon, Hiddekel and
Euphrates, flowed through a lush garden that would bloom forever.
When he saw Adam, Satan was disturbed: He had red hair--like Timothy.
But Eve was stunning. Lovelier than any angel with a natural grace of
movement that awed Satan. He watched her greedily.

He approached Adam in the form of a serpent.

"You should eat of the fruit of knowledge," he said.

Adam told him that it was forbidden by the Lord. And Satan laughed
at him.

"You are fenced about by rules, Adam. You're not free. And a
life of ignorance is no life at all. Immortality will be a prison.
Boredom will drive you mad.

"You must dare to seize life. Dare to adventure into the
unknown. Besides, if the Lord loves you, why does He place such
enormous temptations in your path? Because, you may be sure, secretly
He wants you to eat the fruit. So break your chains and eat. Great
adventurers like you were not meant for security and boring comfort."

Adam hung back. But Eve had listened to every word and she talked
eagerly to the serpent. In her innocence and lack of knowledge of
good and evil, he easily seduced her. And for the first time he
discovered passion in his own heart. He was awed by his own feelings
of love.

She asked him to show her his true shape; and he promised her if
she would eat the fruit, he would do even more--he would teach her
how he was able to assume the shape of many animals.

He would make her queen of hell.

And when he showed her his true shape, it was not that of a golden
angel. Instead she saw a bulking, powerful, goatlike figure with
short horns and two mad eyes, burning like green flame. And she saw
his lightning-scarred left leg and wept for it.

Later she went to Adam and called on him to be a fearless
adventurer and dare to explore the stars in heaven. And they ate the
fruit.

The Lord came in a rage and He had Michael drive them out. Now
they would know pain and death.

As they were leaving, Satan whispered to Eve that she should name
her firstborn Cain, for Satan himself was to be the father.

When they were gone, Satan went back to hell. In his hand Satan
carried a blue ribbon taken from Eve's hair. She haunted his memory.
He prepared a place in hell for her. And waited for Death to bring
her to him. Often he would put the blue ribbon to his nose and inhale
the odor of apples.
 
 

The Lord made heaven shake with His anger. He sent Michael to
fetch Timothy, who had been languishing in a far corner of heaven
with his disgraced followers, awaiting the Lord's verdict.

The Lord struggled to compose Himself and suppress the anger He
felt over the corruption of Eden. "This is your fault!" He
said to Timothy. "Man has been corrupted! He and his descendants
will suffer terribly. And you caused it. I want your soul seared by
that suffering. You are condemned to watch man through all his
history. Since you are the instrument of man's downfall, you will be
the instrument of his salvation. You will wander the earth through
all the ages until one day you find a mortal with benevolence great
enough to forgive you in the name of man. And only then will you be
able to return here to heaven. Only after you are forgiven will
mankind's suffering end. And only then will Satan and his traitors
receive their final punishment."

Timothy frowned. "How will I know this mortal?"

"He will have a purple aura, the sign of true benevolence."

Timothy turned to go. And the Lord said:

"Timothy. You must realize that Satan is your adversary. He
will do everything in his power to prevent you from finding the
mortal with the purple aura."

The Lord now stepped out of His pavilion and He looked at that
great army of Timothy's followers. "You shall have your penance
too," he said to them. "The most difficult penance of all.
You must sit in limbo and wait for Timothy's return."

Timothy was put on the earth in the form of a magus who would go
in the guise of a priest of the religion of the land, sometimes a
Hindu monk, sometimes a Christian minister or a Catholic priest, a
rabbi, or a Moslem scholar, accompanied always by a bull mastiff.

When he first trod on the earth, the fallen angel Timothy found a
small band of humans, outcasts from the Garden, children of Adam and
Eve, nomads guiding their animals and wandering a desert.

And when Timothy saw Cain, he recognized the mark of Satan, and
his heart fell. Already this new race of angels had been corrupted by
Satan. And when Timothy went among them, he saw a baby with a purple
aura asleep in a tent. But as he hurried toward it, Satan's hawk
appeared and quickly smothered the baby.

Timothy was stunned. And Satan said to
him, "Suffer, Timothy traitor. You will never find a benevolent
man alive. Every time a baby with a purple aura is born, my hawk will
find him first. You will wander. Forever."

To this day, all up and down the west coast of Ireland, they still
talk, over endless cups of tea in cottage kitchens and over pints in
pubs at crossroads villages, late at night, about what happened to
Kathleen Sullivan Davitt.

She was nineteen, the bride of Jim Davitt, and they were on
holiday from America, visiting his relatives in the Burren of County
Clare.

That day began with an ominous note just after she opened her
eyes. At first it was fine. She saw bright Irish sunshine gleaming
through windowpanes still wet from the night fog. And she heard the
restless wind sprinting off the sea and whistling in the thatched
roof over her head, eager to be off. She felt comfortable and safe
there under the quilt with Jim next to her, and she inhaled the
kitchen odors of the turf fire and frying bacon. She let her eyes
rove over the whitewashed walls of the cottage bedroom. A spotless
room it was in the home of Aunt Agnes, with handmade rugs on the old
wooden floor, an antique washstand and handmade chairs. Even the
quilt was handmade and over fifty years old, Aunt Agnes had told her.
Ireland was so peaceful.

She felt the baby stir within her: So he was awake too. His name
would be Brendan. One month from today: Welcome to the world, Brendan
Timothy Davitt. She had felt life at five months when the baby's
heart had started to beat, and with it had come to her an
overwhelming sense of benevolence. The baby was like a little dynamo,
purring inside her, generating love.

The wind rushed at the house again and sighed in the thatching,
and when it subsided, she heard a great shriek outside somewhere. It
astonished her, it was so grief-filled. She lay very still and
listened. And a moment later she heard it again: a long shriek of
pain. She gasped involuntarily. It was like a terrible warning to
her.

"It's all right," Jimmy said next to her. He gave her a
tight smile. "It's the shrike. The butcher-bird."

She put her hand into his and pulled the quilt over them. "I
don't like it. I wish it would go away."

"Just a bird." He kissed her nose. Charming Jim Davitt,
the darling of his family, who could make the world spin at his
bidding. She hoped the baby would inherit his personality. "What
shall we do today? Would you like to see the old family church?"

The shrike stabbed his shrill cry into her heart again: a sharp
warning, but of what?

As she dressed, she realized the baby's position seemed to have
dropped. Kathleen wondered if that was normal. She had four full
weeks to go and her obstetrician was far away in Brooklyn. Just as
she was about to leave for breakfast, she felt a sharp twinge of her
abdominal muscles.

Things became more ominous in the kitchen. Jim's Aunt Agnes served
a small Irish breakfast that would have felled a field hand: coarse
Irish oatmeal and cream, eggs and Irish bacon, battercakes and
sausage, and soda bread with butter and jam and quantities of strong
hot tea. The three of them sat by the peat fire in the sun-bright
kitchen and chatted. Aunt Agnes was a small round middle-aged woman
with a great store of family history and she soon made Kathleen
forget about the shrike.

Even in her tweed skirt and sweater, Aunt Agnes looked like the
retired nurse she was. "I've barely touched on the Galway branch
of the Davitt family," she said, pouring from her copious pot.

Kathleen smiled. "I've almost, a padful of notes already."

"Why don't we let Jim go out in the fields with the men and
I'll take you to an old church where the Davitts are all buried. We
can take some rubbings from headstones."

Jim said, "Aunt Agnes has the second sight."

"What's that?" Kathleen asked.

"Oh, she can read emanations from things. Isn't that right,
Aunt Agnes?"

"Oh, don't believe him, Kathleen."

"It's true," Jim insisted.

Kathleen was delighted. "Can you really read emanations?"

"Oh, no, child," Aunt Agnes answered. "It's a game
we played when we were children. I'm just a good guesser."

"She's more than that," Jim said. "Here. Read
Kathleen's emanations. Tell her about her baby." And he held out
Kathleen's bottle of vitamin pills.

"Oh, am I not after telling you I don't--" But she'd
fisted the small bottle and pressed it against her forehead. "It's
going to be a boy. His name will be Brendan." And she chuckled
again.

"Be serious, Aunt Agnes," Jim said.

Kathleen touched her arm. "Will he be born on my father's
birthday? That's a month from now, on--"

"Oh, no, child," Agnes said. "He'll be born long
before that. He'll be born in Ireland." Agnes frowned and
glanced once at Kathleen. There was a long pause.

"What else do you see?" Kathleen asked.

Agnes shrugged at last and mumbled. "Nothing at all. I told
you. 'Tis only a game." And she put the bottle down as if it
were suddenly too hot to hold. She avoided Kathleen's eyes.

Later Kathleen and Agnes got into the old Ford Anglia. They were
going to drive to the coast past Lisdoonvarna to see the ruins of the
church--St. Brendan's, no less--where many Davitts were buried. As
they drove off, Agnes still seemed preoccupied. Kathleen told herself
she didn't believe in the old country folkways.

There was another strange event awaiting Kathleen Davitt at the
church. It was in tumbled ruins, the stained glass long gone from the
arched windows, the roof long ago fallen in, the stones all covered
with brown lichens and green moss, and at the top of the crumbling
walls, gorse bushes were shaking in the sea wind. That wind was
pervasive: It soughed sadly in the broken archway of the church
entrance and whistled on the edges of the weathered tombstones that
were hidden behind crowds of wild daisies and blue cowslips.

Out on the sea, sitting on the horizon, were the barren purple
patches of the Aran Islands.

Kathleen and Aunt Agnes strolled among the flowers, reading the
headstones. Agnes called out the names and recited thumbnail
histories. There were Davitts and O'Malleys and Corcorans and
Scullys, all ancestors of Jim's.

Kathleen looked about the green fields with their white-stone dry
walls and gazed far out to sea at the purple smudges where the Arans
lay. Then she looked at the old church. "My. It's lovely even in
ruins," she said.

Aunt Agnes nodded. "Ireland was once the center of European
civilization." Her fingers touched a stone fallen from the
archway. "All cut by the hands of Irish monks."

"What's that?" Kathleen asked.

Aunt Agnes stood up and looked at the tiny headstones in the
separate walled-in section. "Babies," she said flatly.

Babies. Kathleen's eyes looked with dismay: There were so many.

Inside the church, open to the sunlit sky, Kathleen strolled up
the grass-grown aisle to the altar and felt a sudden flood of
loneliness. She turned and saw a man standing at the back of the
church. He wore a priest's collar and black dickey and an old tweed
jacket. Probably about thirty-five, he had soft, pale-red hair under
an Irish cap set on the back of his head. It was his eyes that were
the source of the terrible feeling of loneliness. Sea-pale green they
were, set in a strong craggy face, weather-tanned with crow's-feet at
the corners. They were the loneliest eyes she had ever seen. She felt
he was a stranger there, a wanderer seeking a way home. Beside him
stood an enormous bull mastiff.

Without a sign to her, the priest turned and left, followed by the
dog.

Then the shrike called again, and she backed away from all the
loneliness and went outside to Aunt Agnes. "Does that priest
belong here?" she asked. "I mean they don't hold Mass here
anymore, do they?"

"What priest?" Aunt Agnes asked.

"The one I saw inside."

"Where?" She stood up.

"How could you have missed him? A red-haired priest."

Aunt Agnes glanced about, then she looked long and hard into
Kathleen's eyes. "Did he have a big white dog with him?"

"Yes."

Aunt Agnes looked away.

As they walked back to the car, Kathleen felt haunted by those
wanderer's eyes; they filled her with a sense of homelessness, as
homeless as the restless wind that blew through that empty land. She
glanced once more at the solemn parade of babies' headstones and felt
another twinge in her abdomen.

On a large blackthorn shrub by the path, the shrike had left a
present: Impaled on a two-inch thorn was a dead field mouse.

Ireland's west coast was a place for strangeness anyway. The
countryside was largely deserted. Ruined cottages, their thatched
roofs long ago fallen in, were everywhere, and wild horses roamed
over abandoned fields.