“Save me,” he begged, again in Latin. “Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.”
“You mean … you never died?”
“Everyone dies. Everyone and everything,” he said. “But there is no salvation in anyone’s death but your own … and sometimes not even then.”
“What … what of your being the Son of God, then?”
“There are many gods. There are many sons conceived by rape.” For a moment he was still, almost contemplative. Then he reached through the opening with a filthy arm, torn hand clamping upon my wrist. “The things I’ve seen, the secrets he keeps … if babies were born remembering these things, they would tear apart their mothers trying to return to the womb.”
His hand felt hot and wet, the splintered bones as sharp as nails, gouging deep scratches where before my flesh had opened of its own accord. He held fast as our blood mingled.
“
He released me then, his arm withdrawing like a serpent back to its lair. A moment later I heard him abandon the confessional, and hurriedly I drew my curtain again, so I wouldn’t have to see him passing before me, lacerated and limping.
The footsteps receded into the chapel silence. For a moment I thought it might be safe to leave, but what I heard next persuaded me to remain until morning light had driven away every shadow:
The pounding of hammers.
*
When I came awake a few hours later and left the booth, the dawn showed no blood upon the walls, nor sticky footprints along the aisle. But I don’t think I was expecting any, really.
Later on in the day, I told the tribunal from Rome that I’d been causing the stigmata myself, and showed them the fresh wounds on my wrist as evidence. The matter was officially closed. Abbot O’Riordan seemed greatly relieved, and only mildly distressed when I informed him that I planned to leave Greyfriars.
The prior night could have been a dream, and I might’ve found it easy to convince myself, as I’d nearly done with that spectral comforter who’d at least been substantial enough to kiss the blood from my knee. What evidence to the contrary did I have, except for some deep scratches on my wrist that I could’ve made myself?
None, but for unshakable conviction … and the other thing.
It went unnoticed until my last day with the order, as alone I stood in the chapel gazing silently up at the lurid crucifix and its Christ frozen in suffering like an ancient fly trapped in the amber of another epoch. The change in it was so subtle I doubted anyone else would even notice, and if they did, they’d merely dismiss their memories of how it had looked as being mistaken.
Surely, they’d tell themselves, their Saviour had been nailed up there through the wrists all along.
III.
After the pinched faces and ectomorphic frames of most of my Franciscan brothers, the robust lumpiness of my Uncle Brendan came as a welcome change. He drove me away from Greyfriars with a ruddy scowl for the abbey, and only when we were rolling west through that green and treeless countryside did he break into a relieved grin and slap his big hard hand upon my leg.
“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. “
“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
