forgotten mischief we’d gotten up to. I knew the gray calm of an early autumn day, then fire and a roar, and suddenly I stood alone. One moment my friends had been walking one on either side of me, and in the next had disappeared.
“Don’t look at them,” she said, in a gentle voice not of the Emerald Isle, the first of two things I fully recall her telling me, even if I don’t know where she’d come from. It was only later, from the odd translucence of her otherwise light brown skin, that I realized she was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. “Don’t look.”
But look I did, and I remember the feel of her hand atop my head, although not to turn me from the sight. Lighter, it was, as if even she were rendered powerless by my schoolboy’s curiosity.
They both lay where they’d been flung, behind me, cut down by bricks propelled with the velocity of cannonballs. Nothing have I seen since that’s looked any deader, with more tragic suddenness, and there I stood between them, untouched but for a scratch across my bare knee that trickled blood down my hairless shin.
I felt so cold my teeth chattered, and thought she then told me I must’ve been spared for a reason. It’s always made sense that she would. It’s what angels say. And whatever reason she had, in the midst of an afternoon’s chaos, for stooping to kiss away that blood from my knee, I felt sure it must’ve been a good one.
“Oh yes,” I think she said, her lips soft at my knee, as if something there had confirmed her suspicions that in my survival there lay design.
Even today I can’t say that the mysterious touch of her mouth didn’t inspire my first true erection, if stubby and immature.
She looked up, smiling at me with my young blood bright upon her mouth. She nodded once toward the smoking rubble of the pub, once at the pitiful bodies of my lads, then said the other thing I clearly recall: “Never forget — this is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side.”
When I told my mother about her that night, how the smiling woman had come to me, I left out the part about her kissing away my blood. It had been one of those moments that children know instinctively to separate from the rest, and keep secret, for to share it would change the whole world. I saw no harm in sharing what she’d said to me, though. But when I did, my mother shook me by the shoulders as if I’d done something wrong.
“You mustn’t ever speak of it again, Patrick Kieran Malone,” she told me. Hearing my full name used meant no room for argument. “Talk like that sounds like something from your Uncle Brendan, and a wonder it is he’s not been struck by lightning.”
The comparison shocked me. The way she normally spoke of her brother, Brendan was, if not the devil himself, at least one of his most trusted servants. I protested. I was only repeating what the angel-lady said.
“Hush! Word of such a thing gets round, they’ll be showing up one day to drag us off and sink us to the bottom of a bog, don’t you know.”
Of course I wondered who she meant, and why they would feel so strongly about the matter, but as I think about it now I don’t believe she even fully knew herself. She knew only that she had one more reason to be afraid of something at which she couldn’t hit back.
There are all kinds of tyranny employed around us. Bombs are but the loudest.
*
To those things that shape us and decide the paths we take, there is no true beginning, not even with our birth, for many are in motion long before we draw our first breath. Ireland’s monastic tradition predates even the Dark Ages, when the saint I was named for returned to the island where he’d once been a slave, to win it for Christianity. While that tradition is now but a sliver of what it used to be, when thriving monasteries housed hundreds of monks and friars, on the day I joined the Franciscan order my whole life felt directed toward the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
For as long as I could recall, the mysteries of our Catholic faith had sparked my imagination, from the solemn liturgy of the priests, to the surviving architecture of our misty past, to the relics that had drawn veneration from centuries of believers. Ever thankful for my survival, my parents exposed me to as much of our faith as they could. They took me to visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, and to his retreat on Cruachan Aigli in County Mayo. Down in County Kerry we undertook pilgrimages to Mount Brandon, and to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in Kilmalkedar. I touched Celtic crosses that had been standing for a millennium, the weathered stone hard and sacred beneath my fingers.
Most mysterious of all to me was the 300-year-old head of the newly-canonized Saint Oliver Plunkett, staring from the splendor of his reliquary in Saint Peter’s Church in Drogheda. Blackened skin stretched over his bald skull like leather. His upper lip had shriveled back from his teeth to give him the start of a smile, and I could stare at him in full expectation that those dry lips would continue to move, to whisper some message for me alone.
It held no terrors for me, that severed head of his. I’d seen the dead before, and a damn sight fresher than old Oliver was.
Of the ethereal woman who came and went unnoticed on that day death had come so close, for years I hoped she might show herself again so I could put to her the questions I was old enough now to ask, and felt a deep ache that she did not. The mind reevaluates what’s never validated, giving it the fuzzy edges of a dream, and as I grew taller, older, there were days I almost convinced myself that that was all she’d been; that I’d hallucinated a beautiful, compassionate adult because she was what I needed at the moment, since so many others around me were busy killing each other.
But on those nights I dreamt of her, I knew better. I could never have invented anything so radiant out of thin air. Every few months, a dream so crystalline would unfold inside me it felt as if she were in the same room, watching. Angel, phantom, whatever she was, she was as responsible as anything for my joining the Franciscans of Greyfriars Abbey in Kilkenny, for she had done so much to open my eyes to the things of the spirit, and inspire my hunger to let them fill me.
“Does it hurt to become a saint?” I asked the first time I set eyes on those sunken leathery sockets of Oliver’s.
“Some of them were hurt staying well true to the will of the Lord,” my mother answered. “But on that day they were made saints they felt only joy, because they’d already been in Heaven a long, long time, in the company of their angels.”
“Then that’s what I want to be,” I declared.
She smiled at such impudence, waiting until later to tell me that no saint had ever aspired to such, as the first thing they’d given up was ambition for themselves. Sainthood was something that happened later, usually decided by people who’d never known them in the flesh.
