Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  Her tone had changed slightly. He looked back curiously.

  She was straightening up, having just stooped down apparently. Her face wore a deep frown, the wrinkled eyelids half-lidded.

  She held his race form between her fingers.

  “You dropped this.”

  “Nope, not mine,” said Father Tim smiling airily. “Must’ve been one of the parishioners.”

  “It slipped out of your bible.”

  “Did it?” He squinted across the church. “Oh that. I found it in the pew. I was using it as a bookmark. You can toss it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, smiling.

  “Good day, Ms. Laidhe.”

  He ducked into the sacristy and muttered a curse against the old bitch as he stripped off his vestments. He’d never make the track now.

  He phoned the bodega in East Boston and asked José the young chicken killer to put aside a black cockerel for him, then locked up the church and hopped on the Blue Line with his kitty carrier.

  Being in veritable eye shot of the Downs was a bitch, but he resisted the strong urge to jog down to the track and ducked into the bodega instead, waving to Josefa at the counter and proceeding to the back hallway, where a couple of kids were eating Chiclets and impassively watching José through the glass.

  The dingy killing floor was flecked with blood and white feathers, and José in his black apron and rubber boots stood between two large grey plastic garbage pails, one full of dead chickens, the other with a lid on it.

  José mechanically lifted the lid a crack to slip his yellow gloved hand in and pulled out a squawking chicken. He twisted its neck and flung it into the other bin.

  By the time Father Tim had rapped loud enough on the glass to get José’s attention he had killed six the same way, rapidly and unmercifully, Father Tim supposed, as the End of Days must be.

  José grinned a golden toothed smile and put a red brick on the lid of the live chicken bin, then came over and let him in.

  “Padre! Necessita un negro, si?”

  Twenty bucks later he had a black rooster in the kitty carrier and was on his way back to the church.

  The sun had gone down and Eladio had locked up the church, but Father Tim had his keys.

  He locked the door behind him, went into the sacristy, and changed into his vestments, taking the old red iron knife that had been his great uncle’s from the lock box at the bottom of his closet. He took the carrier out to the altar and lit the candles.

  He laid out the chalice, missal, and the black corporal, and began the orate fratres.

  “Orate, fratres, ut meum ac vestrum sacrificium acceptabile fiat apud Deum Patrem omnipotentem.”

  The greatest injustice to the Roman rite had been the Vatican’s abandonment of Latin. His uncle had always told him that old words had power, and English diluted that power.

  He had loved the old Latin mass since his boyhood, and as an altar boy had not confined himself to the responses, but memorized even the priest’s words. Indeed, he had imagined himself not a mere server, but a kind of acolyte in the sacred traditions, a boy-priest on a mystic path. He sometimes fancied in his most blasphemous moments that the opulent house of God with its marble floors and golden accoutrements was his own throne room.

  Then once during a particularly early mass, he had mistakenly dashed the silver paten against the edge of the altar and the Holy Eucharist had fallen to the floor. Just a clumsy, daydreaming boy’s mistake, but the entire congregation had let out a collective gasp that had colored his cheeks and ears.

  The disapproving scowl of Father John as he stooped over to retrieve the Host by hand had solidified his embarrassment, and to make matters worse, Sister Doligosa had slapped him in the sacristy when he’d returned to change out of his cassock after mass.

  “You serve like a cowboy,” the wrinkled old woman had scolded.

  He’d been eleven, and run from the church with stinging tears.

  He’d been something of a bad boy after that, smoking, profaning, drinking, fleeing wholly from the church in frustrated anger. He had decided that in that moment of innocent clumsiness, he’d been afforded a glimpse at the true nature of so-called believers; that they put more stock in pomp and ritual than in the true love of God.

  Hypocrites.

  Yet his dear mother had been worried at his turn around, and sent him off to spend time with his great Uncle Patrick, a priest himself from the old country, though of a decidedly different kind than any he’d ever met before or since.

  Uncle Patrick had seen the anger in the boy, and one day coaxed the story of why he’d all but abandoned his faith.

  To Tim’s surprise, Uncle Patrick had said;

  “It’s entirely right you are, Tim. The world is populated wholly by dumb bleating sheep with no understanding whatsoever of the power of the Mass. The Mass is nothing less than magic, Tim. Magic passed down to us from the agents of the gods. And through it,” he said, touching the side of his red nose and winking one sky blue eye, “those with the knowing can bend the will of the angels to our own purpose.”

  Tim recited the sursum coda, sang the trisanctus and the hosanna, and then unlocked the carrier and took out the twitching black cockerel.

  Now, with relish, he lifted the clucking chicken high with the iron knife and recited the consecration, the ultimate blasphemy, naming the fowl the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

  The knife was a relic of the Old Religion, Uncle Patrick had said, given to a monk named Finnian by one of the legendary Tuatha De, the magic folk of Old Ireland, Tuan mac Cairill. The story was that the monk had sought out Tuan and preached the Gospel to him. Tuan had told the monk of his own gods, and that the monk Finnian had realized the folly of Christianity, and pledged himself to Tuan’s instruction. Tuan, knowing that Christ had conquered his people, saw an opportunity to keep their memory alive and strike at the Church from within. He bestowed Finnian with the sacred sacrificial knife, and the monk became the first of a secret line of priests who paid lip service to Christ but honored the old gods, and perverted the Mass to their ends whenever they could.

  And so Tim had become the latest of that ancient line.

  He passed the sacred knife of Tuan beneath the beak of the rooster and lets its blood piddle into the chalice.

  When it was drained, he raised the brimming cup of blood and the dead animal carcass again to the empty church and proclaimed;

  “Per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso est tibi Deo Patri omnipotenti in unitate Spiritus Sancti omnis honor et gloria per omnia saecula saeculorum.”

  He recited the rest of the rite of transubstantiation, broke the chicken’s neck symbolically, and laid it on the paten.

  Then, he recited in Gaelic the age old curse;

  “Michael O’Bannon –

  No butter be on your milk nor on your ducks a web

  May your child not walk and your cow be flayed

  And may the flame be bigger and wider

  Which will go through your soul

  Than the Connemara mountains

  If they were a-fire.”

  He raised the cup to his lips and downed the warm iron-tasting blood.

  That night, as ever, he roasted and ate the chicken.

  Sunday morning he returned to St. Brigid’s and found his new priest waiting for him, a beaming young Filipino man, fresh from St. John’s seminary, with huge oversized glasses, his dark eyes made dim from years spent squinting at theological texts.

  “Father Tim?”

  “Father Matthew,” Tim said, smiling and taking his hand. “Will you be assisting me today?”

  “I thought I would watch from the sacristy, if that’s OK.”

  “Alright,” Tim said smiling. “Sunday’s as good a day as any to take a leave of rest. This is yours. But I expect you to assist tomorrow, and I want to see you run your own Mass on Tuesday.”

  “OK Father,” Matthew laughed nervously. “OK.”

  The Sunday mass went smoo
thly. The usual crowd was doubled due to the number of temporary congregants from Gates Of Heaven. A week ago he would’ve been squeezing his fists at the sight of that brimming collection basket, but today he had money in his pocket and felt good.

  He saw the Ladhe woman sitting in the front pew. She had squeezed out some of the other old biddies who liked to arrive early and get the seat before the rail, shuffling through the morning paper as they passed it back and forth before the rest of the sinners drifted in; haughty old bitches who thought themselves lordly and righteous, as though grace alighted faster on their blue and white heads because they got their Communion first.

  When the time came for the Intercessions to be read he ascended the podium and said;

  “All grace flows from God. Let us now turn to God with our needs and the needs of the world, confident that our prayers will be answered.”

  After leading the respondents through several general prayers for the country, the church, the pope and the bishops, he got out the list of recently departed old Mrs. Villalobos always brought him before first Mass and read the list of names.

  “For the souls of Javier Vergara, Louisa Pena, Rachel Davies, Joseph R. Mulcahey, and Michael O’Bannon, that they may be welcomed into your eternal kingdom, we pray to the Lord.”

  The church thundered back in one mechanical voice;

  “Lord hear our prayer.”

  It was done.

  That night, while perusing the sports page of the evening edition, he turned to the obituaries and read that one Michael O’Bannon had somehow managed to step into an open manhole in the instant between when the city workers had removed the safety barrier and turned to replace the heavy cover. He had fallen and died of a broken neck.

  The supplicants had spoken, unifying their will, just as his Uncle Patrick had taught him. The shepherd conducted the sheep. The Mass was the staff with which they were goaded.

  * * * *

  Monday Father Matthew assisted him in the Mass. He was a nervous sort, and nearly tripped over the altar boys a couple times, but never wholly humiliated himself. His speech was clear and strong, and he doled out Communion like an old hand.

  Father Tim smiled encouragingly after the closing prayer, and when he rose from his chair he whispered in Matthew’s ear;

  “Alright Father, let’s go shake some hands.”

  After the procession, the two of them flanked the exit and pumped hands, exchanged blessings and well wishes. Tim was glad to see most of the people funneling towards the new priest. They were talking to him. Good. You never could tell with Catholics. Sometimes a priest rubbed them the wrong way, particularly if he wasn’t an old Irishman or at least their color. He had worried a bit that a Flip would put them off and he’d wind up doing Saturday confessions the same as always. But this boy would work out fine, and he’d be back at the track next weekend.

  The old sanctified biddies hobbled up last as always and put out their withered claws for him to touch. He usually champed at the bit to get out of here, but watching them fawn over the ‘handsome’ young Matthew was entertaining. The final approval of the old reliables.

  But the last of the old women ignored Matthew and stood expectantly before him, a newspaper clenched in her bony fist, her face drawn down in a disapproving grimace that was petrifying to behold in such a lined and sagging face. The smear of wine red lipstick on her pursed lips was like an angry lesion, and the snow white knit cap atop her head shone like a terrible halo.

  “I know what you’re up to,” said old Ms. Ladhe.

  He raised his eyebrows, the genial smile still on his face.

  She shook the paper in front of his face.

  “Michael O’Bannon,” she hissed. “Read in the mass yesterday morning and dead only that evening.”

  His eyes widened, and the stupid smile faltered into a toothy grimace.

  “What are you talking about, woman?”

  She pointed the rolled up paper at him like a sword and fixed him with a strange glare.

  “May your Blessings be less,

  May your troubles be more,

  And nothing but sadness come through your door!”

  She spat on the ground in front of him and turned away in a huff, limping out the door and down the steps with surprising alacrity for one who had professed such infirmity only a few days ago.

  Father Tim watched her go and barely mastered the trembling of his bones. How could the old woman possibly know what he had done? He glanced down at the ugly splotch of snotty saliva at his feet and recoiled from it as if from a fire.

  Father Matthew came over, a concerned look on his brown face.

  “Father Tim? Are you alright? What was that about?”

  He fought to keep the tremor out of his voice, the quiver from his smiling lips and stammered, shrugging to hide his trembling;

  “Oh Mrs. Ladhe. She had a problem with the Mass, same as always.”

  Behind Father Matthew, the other old reliables craned their turkey necks and eyed him curiously like pigeons looking for a sign of bread crust.

  He waved the young priest off.

  “I’d hoped to share dinner, Father, but I’m feeling a bit under the weather. I think I’ll head home early.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  As Tim stalked to the sacristy, he heard Father Matthew call cheerily;

  “And don’t worry about tomorrow’s Mass, Father. I’ll be just fine.”

  In the sacristy he tore off his vestments and flung them in a heap in the bottom of his closet, then fell to one knee and tore them away, snatching up his lock box with Tuan’s knife. He threw on his coat and stood in the doorway for a few seconds thinking furiously.

  How could she know what he was or what he had done? Was it possible she was talking about something entirely different? His gambling? Had he only imagined her accusation? Given it more meaning than it had. He thought furiously.

  No, his mind screamed at him. Michael ‘O Bannon. She had said it outright. The name of a living man read in the Mass. She knew.

  No one had ever known. Not even Mrs. Villalobos who compiled the list of the dead for him every morning ever commented on his occasional additions. Probably she had assumed they were personal friends of his.

  And she had lain a curse on him, plain as day. What had she said?

  Nothing but sadness come through your door.

  Was she a witch of some sort? Why couldn’t she be? If there were men like him and his Uncle Patrick in the world, didn’t it stand to reason there could be opposite numbers?

  That was when he made up his mind.

  He had to read her name in the Mass tomorrow. Choke the hex off at its source.

  He ran from St. Brigid’s to the Blue Line. His knee bounced anxiously the whole ride, and he nearly killed himself throwing himself down the stairs to the street.

  He walked cautiously after that. What if that was her hex working on him?

  He went steady and carefully to the bodega.

  It was closed. No note on the door, but he got from a boy smoking outside that someone had died in the family.

  He walked around to the back alley in his desperation, thinking he might be able to jimmy the back door and....and what? Pull a roaster from the cooler? No live chickens passed that back room. They came on a truck. There was nothing in the shop. Nothing he could use.

  He rode the train back home.

  He thought about Mary Ladhe. Where did she live? Even if he knew, so what? He couldn’t very well go to the woman’s house and strangle her in her kitchen.

  But he knew someone who could.

  At home he rang Peachy Muldoon.

  “Fadder, that you?”

  “Peachy, I’ve a favor to ask you.”

  “I told you if I heard anything about the stakes I’d tell you, right?”

  “It’s not about the stakes, Peachy. I need you to do something else for me.” He lowered his voice, even drew the blind. “What would it cost me, Peachy? That is, if I wer
e to hire you to do a job.”

  “A job?”

  “I won’t pull any of that old times sake crap on you. I’ve got my share from O’Bannon. I’ll give it to you if you want.”

  “Fadder, don’t say that. Er....who’s Michael O’Bannon?”

  “I didn’t say his first name you...,” Father Tim sighed, regained himself.

  “Look Fadder,” said Peachy. “I don’t know what you heard, but I don’t do them kinda jobs no more.”

  “Peachy, please. It’s an old woman. No trouble at all. Mary Ladhe. Her name’s Mary Ladhe. All you gotta do is find her...”

  The phone went dead.

  He dialed Peachy again. Got a busy signal.

  He stood by the window.

  He needed a sacrifice. It was getting dark. On the corner, under the streetlamp, a black kid maybe ten years old waited for the bus, bobbing his head to something piping through his ear buds. It was late. Nobody on the street. Too late for a kid like that to be out alone. They listened to their music so loud, these black kids. You could come right up on them and they’d never know.

  A black kid.

  Not a black rooster, but...

  He went to open the lock box, but found in his haste he’d left his keys in the sacristy.

  It took him a half hour to break the box open with a hammer and get at the knife. By the time he did the bus and the black kid had come and gone.

  He sat in his bed with the knife and stared into the shadows of his room, waiting for some flock of black winged sluagh to come smashing through his window clamoring and screeching for his soul. He tried to doze, but would snap awake, hearing the hoofbeats of the headless Dullahan coming to claim him, realizing with a hollow chuckle that it was only the steady tramp of his own blood in his ears.

  But he didn’t sleep.

  The next morning he trudged off to St. Brigid’s exhausted and feeling foolish, wondering if he’d dreamt the entire encounter between himself and Mary Ladhe.

  Father Matthew was there already with coffee and Dunkies.

  “I found your keys on the table, and your vestments hanging out of your closet, Father,” he said. “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine, Father,” he said. “Will you be alright to lead the mass today?”