Gospel (23 page)

Ballymacross was a village of no more than 500, laid out like a “Y” with the one fork off the main highway, which led up a hill and soon degenerated into a muddy farm road. The houses, typical of the British Isles, were right on the street and some villagers' front doors opened to the road, with only a few feet of pavement and a slight dip that was the drainage gutter separating the living room from traffic.

“The Crown!” said O'Hanrahan gleefully, spotting the one of two pubs in town. “Let us off here, Master David.”

Boy, these Prods sure love that
crown,
Lucy noted. Every town big or small had an alcoholic homage to Her Majesty.

David pulled the car beyond the town's one intersection and zebra crosswalk. The Crown Inn, founded 1723, according to the suspended sign creaking in the stiff coastal wind, was the one hotel of any sort in town. Everyone reluctantly stepped out of the car into the gale.

“That's the sea,” David said, pulling up his collar, pointing down the hill of the main road. “Ye can't really tell, can ye, 'cause it's pissin' down so, but she's there.”

O'Hanrahan got his suitcase and briefcase gathered to himself in the spitting rain, and the rabbi took a small flight bag from the trunk. They trotted inside to the Crown to get two of the five rooms at the inn above the pub.

“Davey, m'boy!” shouted a middle-aged man, who poked his head out of the Crown.

It was Mr. Robert McCall. David hurried to give his father a tentative pat on the shoulder and Lucy followed along and they huddled in the doorway to the pub. Mr. McCall was a dark-haired, tough-skinned man of rough handsomeness, the same squinting, laughing eyes as his son. He announced that he had gotten off early at the local cannery, but after apprehending that news Lucy found his accent impenetrable.

“Aye, son, who's the girl?” he said, after a brief catching-up concerning David's term at Trinity.

“Dad, this is Lucy Dantan.”

Handshakes and well-wishing all around as Lucy feared conversation because of Mr. McCall's thick brogue. “How're ye tholin' this thrawn son of mine, eh?” he asked Lucy, who merely smiled.

“We'll come back down in a wee bit,” said David.

David and Lucy got back in the car and traveled up the turnoff, the steep hill lined on each side with townhouses, which gave way to separate dwellings at the hilltop before the road itself turned to mud. Behind a fortress of low-lying trees and bushes there was the McCall house, a simple bungalow with a rusted steel roof and a stone foundation. They darted with their bags toward the side door.

The house reminded Lucy of her grandparents' because things looked comfortably used and out-of-date, old pictures, old books, the smell of the kitchen permeating the house, the noise of a crackling fire. David's mother, Mary McCall, was a pretty woman who didn't look fifty, with smooth white skin except for a warm rose in the cheeks, as only this weather could produce, and raven-black hair with the occasional strand of gray. She ushered Lucy to the bedroom of Fiona, David's sister a year younger who was away at Queens College in Belfast. Lucy sat on the bed and was presented with bathtowels and a barrage of friendly, nosy questions from Mrs. McCall, who spoke of her one trip to the United States and her piecemeal knowledge of Chicago. Then she excused herself to go lecture her son for losing his fifth scarf in a row.

Lucy leaned back on the tidily made-up sister's bed, the smells of damp from the old house and the smell of soap on the laundry mingled on the pillowcase near her face. Lucy was weary from exposing herself to the gale; she listened to the noise of the rain. With this weather, she fancied, no wonder the Irish stayed inside and sang and told stories and became the social people they were.

“Well,” said David, leaning into his sister's room. “The Crown awaits!”

After a three-minute run with an umbrella down the hill, with most of that devoted to navigating the stepping stones through the mud, they arrived to find O'Hanrahan, the rabbi, and Mr. McCall installed by the fireplace and O'Hanrahan entertaining the whole bar, the seven other locals who had gathered to hear his storytelling.

“It's true,” O'Hanrahan was saying, reviving another Celtic booze legend. “The first Celtic saint was a vintner. I wouldn't make this up.”

Mr. McCall laughed, laughed very easily. “Ye're just tellin' us what we wanna hear, man!”

“I speak of the Most Blessed St. Theodotus, martyred May 18, 303.”

Said Jack the innkeeper good-naturedly, “Doos that make him Catholic or Presbyterian then?”

“Orthodox,” said O'Hanrahan diplomatically. “Theodotus was a Celt from Galatia, a town whose name translates to Celtic City, related to Gaelic and Gaul and
galloise
and Galway and Galicia in Spain and Portu
gal
and all other places we ancient Celts got around to. He owned a tavern and turned it into a home for the needy and destitute, the dregs of society.”

“A lot like the Crown here'n Ballymacross,” suggested Mr. McCall as the assemblage guffawed.

It was time for dinner. The sky was now clear as they headed out. Icy winter-sky clear, with the stars precise and innumerable. The weather often changed just like that, David explained as he unexpectedly ran ahead of O'Hanrahan, his father, and Rabbi Hersch, to take Lucy's arm.

“Hate this hill,” he said. “After a few pints, it's like the friggin' Alps. When I get rich I'm building a tunnel from the Crown to under me house and then an elevator straight to me bedroom. Maybe put me bed right in the elevator, ye know?”

Lucy laughed and tried to make her arm light as air so he wouldn't release it. “Why not put your bed right in the bar—the pub, I mean.”

“Ah, now maybe that's what we need. Ye don't like our Guinness?”

She had not finished her hefty pint glass. “No, it's all right…”

“Nyeh, you don't cotton to it, you can say so. When we go back we'll getcha a Harp. Eh, now you can get that miserable Budweiser stuff in Ireland, ye know. Can't see how ye drink the American beer.”

“I'm not much of a drinker, really.” Probably the kiss of death in Ireland, thought Lucy as she said it.

“Just as well. Ye keep your girlish figure that way, not drowning in Guinness every night. Not like our local girls.”

This was the first unsolicited compliment her figure had ever gotten by a young man. The fact was to be etched in stone, in some most permanent, treasured part of her memory! Hear
that,
Judy?

“What're ye laughing like such fools aboot?” said David to the men behind, his accent more pronounced. Lucy looked back to see the men giggling like schoolchildren. “Oh, I see. That prayer pamphlet from Knock.” The booklet O'Hanrahan picked up at the Catholic ecclesiastical store in Belfast for fifty pence.

“Knock?” wondered Lucy aloud.

David: “You know, Lucy, the whole village that got drunk and talked themselves into seeing the Virgin and Joseph and Angels and the Lamb of God. First time the Lamb had ever been seen. 1880-something. The pope's been there and they built this big barn—aww it's awful, ye can't believe it.”

“Like Lourdes and all that?”

“Worse I'm sure, 'cause we're Irish and we got no taste. There's this sign there't has toilets this direction, holy water-tap that direction—ye can't make fun of it, it's doing such a good job making fun of itselflike.”

When they returned to the house, Mrs. McCall announced it would be a half-hour
more
before dinner would be on the table, a dinner they could smell, chicken broth and leeks and cabbage that had been steeping together all day in the pot.

“Smells fabulous, Mary,” said the rabbi, as they all sat in the parlor. “Sell my birthright for it.”

David gave his mother some lip about why in God's name she called if it was still to be a half-hour ‘fore they could get eating at it, and his father joined, demanding in his castle the meal should be a-waiting for him, a-handed to him on the plate as he walked in the door, but Mary McCall made short work of them, popping her son's backside with the soup ladle and chasing her husband “who smelled like a chip shop” to the showers before she deep-fried him and wrapped him in yesterday's newspaper.

“You heard of Ballinspittal?” asked David. “Back in 1988 there was a statue of the Virgin Mary there that moved and everyone saw it and they came from all over Ireland to see this thing, newspapers and television and
everyone
saw it. Even Protestants. And then every village was going after that. We had dancing statues, Mother Mary doing the bleeding hula dance.”

His mother, leaning in from the kitchen, suggested a politer frame of reference was required to discuss the Woman Who Bore Our Savior.

“Well, anyway,” David concluded, “the
Irish Times
decided that if you stared at something long enough with a lot of people around ye, it
would
move.”

“Like Fatima,” said O'Hanrahan. “Must be a thousand different accounts of what happened there, which isn't surprising when you get 70,000 miracle-starved Catholics staring at the sun for hours.”

The rabbi was busy thumbing through the Knock indulgence prayerbook. The Joyful Mysteries, the Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima, the Blessed Visions of Medjugorje—not approved by the Vatican, but in the '80s it was Yugoslavia's number-one tourist attraction, with people setting up appointments at the children's homes to observe their daily conversations with Mary. Our Lady of the Scapular, pray for me, St. Catherine, pray for me, St. George, St. Christopher—all outlawed saints, according to Vatican II, but the racket's gone on too long in Ireland ever to put on the brakes.

The rabbi read out loud: “A single ‘To The Blessed Virgin' gets you 500 days indulgence. Salve Regina gets you five years out of Purgatory. The Anima Christi can knock off 300 days—”

“But Morey,” interrupted O'Hanrahan, looking beatific, “if you do the Anima Christi after Holy Communion, you get a whole
seven
years off. So said our founder, my guide, Ignatius Loyola.”

Rabbi Hersch waved that aside. “Here's the ticket. If one as much as
hears
someone say the ‘Three Very Beautiful Prayers for the Dying,' you get a whopping
400 years
indulgence.”

David: “That'd be the one for you, Patrick.”

Rabbi Hersch: “And if you say, ‘Eternal Father I offer Thee the Wounds of Our Lord Jesus Christ to heal the wounds of our souls,' you get 300 days. Nu, just like that you get 300 days?”

O'Hanrahan clarified, “Only on the large-beaded rosary. The smaller rosary has another sentence assigned to it.”

The rabbi marveled. “How do you actually know all this nonsense?”

He glanced at Lucy and read her expression of displeasure. Lucy sat apart from the group, not particularly amused with the familiar game of let's-tear-Roman-Catholicism-apart.

“Hey, Paddy,” said Rabbi Hersch provocatively, “I think we're offending Lucy here. She believes all this stuff.”

Lucy: “No one believes everything in those prayerbooks.”

But Lucy knew in her heart that her own maiden aunts and their black-clad companions who made their daily processional to St. Bridget down Archer Street back home believed it all, every little ludicrous bit, offering up rosaries to the Blessed Child of Prague, however the hell that jewel-studded babydoll got so popular.

(Yes, We're somewhat mystified by that one too.)

“Give me something I can use here,” requested O'Hanrahan. “Something that'll knock off centuries in Purgatory.”

Mrs. McCall announced in the doorway, “You'll be needing those centuries if you keep this sorta talk going.” She didn't, however, seem genuinely upset. “Not that we believe in Purgatory, but I'll thank you not to blaspheme in my parlor, Patrick.”

The rabbi was unchastened: “Oh wait,” he said, turning a page and skimming,
“St. Bridget of Sweden for a long time wished to know the number of blows Our Savior received during His Passion and Jesus, Our Most Holy Lord and Savior, appeared to her and said, ‘I received 5480 blows upon my body.'
So here's the prescription. Fifteen prayers a day for a year equals almost 5480.”

(If O'Hanrahan hadn't had three Guinnesses down at the Crown, he might have remembered that Pope Leo XIII approved the number 6666 blows directly to the Body, with 150 knocks to the Head, 108 kicks on the shoulder, 24 hair-pullings, 23 beard-pullings, and an array of thorn wounds—there were 72 thorns in the crown of thorns, piercing our Savior lightly 110 times with 3 mortal wounds on the forehead, 1008 separate mockings. Direct spittings in the Face were put at 180 and the pièce de résistance was Leo's drops-of-blood calculation: 28,430. These important calculations were worked out April 5th, 1890.)

“What's the Sacred Letter?” asked David, looking over the rabbi's shoulder at the next page.

Lucy watched the professor revive, his expertise appealed to.

“It was thought that Jesus may have committed something to paper in his final hours. When the Holy Sepulcher was discovered, supposedly in the crypt area was a letter written in Christ's own hand, in a silver box. It gave directions for how many Glorias, Paters, and Aves to say, for how much indulgence and time off in Purgatory. St. Gregorious adored the Letter and proclaimed anyone who carried a copy would come to no harm.”

Enlivened by his two pints of beer, David blurted, “I can't see how Catholics can be so damn stupid!”

Lucy felt defensive. Worse, Lucy knew she was appearing to be prim and she didn't want David to think she was bound for the rosary brigade at the nearest Our Lady of Prompt Succor.

“But more interesting,” O'Hanrahan continued, “is the continual Nestorian and Armenian claim that Jesus
did
actually write things in his lifetime and engage in celebrated correspondences.”