Catholics
Page 2
“What about the father provincial in Dublin, sir?”
The general sighed. “It seems that he and the abbot of Muck have a disagreement going back as far as the Pauline papacy. As you know, since Vatican IV, bishops are no longer bound by the orders of provincials. These Irish abbots are mitred and of episcopal rank. Each is a prelatus nullius, belonging to no one. This one has chosen to ignore the provincial’s recommendations. However, he cannot ignore mine.” Father general picked up a xerox sheet, a facsimile of an old chapter house record book, microfilmed, its original now destroyed. “The recalcitrant abbot of Muck,” the general said. “Let’s see. He is one Tomás O’Malley, now in his sixty-ninth year, the son of a greengrocer. What is a greengrocer, I wonder?”
“A seller of vegetables, sir.”
“Ah. The abbot is the product of an Irish seminary, a place called Kilcoole. Prizewinner, Latin, oh, lala! Doctorate in—can’t read this script, must be uncial—doesn’t matter. Four years at Buckmore Abbey in Kent. Then, Ireland, Dublin, hmm, hmm, and appointed abbot of Muck. Cast down on some remote little island and abandoned at a relatively early age, it would seem the order had no great hopes of him. Subsequent life of poverty, thirty monks, fishermen all, income from kelp and dulse, whatever that is, and manure sales—well, that’s quite enough of that. You can look this over at your leisure.” The general picked up an order fact form. “Now, this gives the age of the abbey, details of grants, et cetera. I think I see why the media people are interested, sick as we all are nowadays for a past we never knew. The monastery was founded in 1216.” The general lolled in his Eames chair and looked out of the tall windows of his office. Below was the new pedestrian mall of the Lungotevere Vaticano and, beyond it, the dull, muddy flow of the Tiber. The general’s eye moved left to fix on the roofs of the Vatican, and the dome of St. Peter’s, immense, even at a distance. “The year twelve hundred and sixteen. Think of it. The fourth Lateran council had just closed. Innocent the Third was in the chair of Peter. And that great monstrosity down the road there was three hundred years away from being built.”
He looked again at the fact form. “In the beginning the abbey was not ours. It was founded by some local king, at the behest of Patrick, an Irish bishop saint. The Albanesians petitioned to take over in 1406. Within a couple of hundred years they owned half the lands of Kerry, which is why they have this priory on the mainland. The abbot of Muck has always had the right to appoint the prior of the cell of Holy Cross at Cahirciveen.”
“I believe there is no prior there now, sir.”
“That’s right, yes.” The general consulted the fact form. “There are nearby parishes, of course, but the monks still cross to the mainland to say Mass and perform sacerdotal duties. And the changes that have taken place elsewhere in our time have simply been bypassed at Cahirciveen. Our Irish provincial has made ‘suggestions’ on four differing occasions, but this abbot remains blind and dumb. I wonder how long it would have gone on, if it had not been for the tourists? Anyway, it was a BBC crew that did the damage. Latin Mass. Imagine that,” the general said, and smiled. “I’d rather like to see one again, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t really remember it, sir.”
“Backs to the congregation, vestments, introibo ad altare dei. And the bell! The Sanctus! Oh, lala, how one forgets. And now it’s packing them in. Listen to this. Ferry tours from Liverpool and Fishguard, charter flights from Leeds, Boston, New York—pilgrimage from France—even bella Italia.” The general’s amusement turned to a fit of sneezing. He used a nasal inhaler, then stared again at the brownish waters of the Tiber. “It is cliché to say it was to be expected. Even Vatican IV can’t bury two thousand years in a few decades. But, I’d have thought Spain. Or, perhaps, some former Portuguese possession.” The general sighed. “We are so infallibly fallible, aren’t we? Wasn’t it Chesterton who said something about a thing being too big to be seen? Ireland. Of course! Well, here you are. Take the file. Let my secretary have your itinerary. I’d suggest you hop a supersonic tonight and go straight to Amsterdam. It’s a formality, of course, but in an affair of this kind everything should be strictly kosher.” He smiled. “I’ll alert the council that you are my plenipotentiary. After Amsterdam, get straight over to Ireland. Remember, I want this settled by the end of the month.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get that old fool down off that mountain, James. And if he gives you any trouble—bite him!”
A fishing boat was instantly in sight, bashing through the tops of the whitecaps, as though in the moment Kinsella had looked away, some Brobdingnagian hand had painted it into the seascape. A diesel-engined ten-tonner, it was built to scramble up and over these gray walls of waves. The wind force increased, sending a great slap of water over the edge of the pier. A black storm cloud filled the edge of the horizon. As the fishing boat approached across the strait, Kinsella picked up his dispatch case, which contained the general’s letter and an order plenipotentiary, signed in Amsterdam by the four current members of the World Ecumen Council. He walked to the stone steps as the boat cut its engines and drifted outside the bar. A man in a tweed hat appeared and moved about in the bow. Another stood in the wheelhouse, a stout young fellow in a white turtleneck sweater. Not monks, as he had expected, but islanders, the few fisher families still living on the abbot’s domain. The man in the tweed hat untied a black curragh, which floated light as a mussel shell at the stern of the ten-tonner. Pulling it close, he jumped in, raised long oars, and rowed strongly toward the pier, the curragh swinging up like an amusement park gondola to hang on the white-tipped peaks, then fall, dizzyingly, into the trough of waves. The mother boat heeled. With a rattle, an anchor spilled like entrails from its bow, falling deep into the sea. The stout youth came out of the wheelhouse and stood at the side, staring across the water at Kinsella. With his curling red hair, freckled skin, snub nose, and white fisherman’s sweater he looked like Dylan Thomas.
The curragh, stroked easily now that it had passed into the shelter of the pier, came toward the steps where Kinsella waited. The rower had his back to the steps. Skillful, he shipped the oars as he glided alongside, his hand, with the blind touch of practice, finding the solitary iron bollard at the foot of the steps.
As the tweed-hatted rower turned to look back at the pier, a smile rose on Kinsella’s face, an American smile, the currency of greeting. But the rower’s eyes moved past him as though he were some idle seabird come to rest on the pier. Eyes swept the pier, the sheds, the road beyond, then, reluctantly, came back to him. “Morning,” the boatman said.
“Hello, there.” Kinsella, smiling, moved confidently down the last slimed steps toward the curragh. But the boatman shook his head, warning him not to board. The boatman was young, vulpine, with a wild cub’s grace. His gray eyes stared, as the eyes of an animal stare from a zoo cage.
“I’m James Kinsella, Catholic priest,” Kinsella said, from Ecumenical habit.
The boatman’s tongue appeared, round as a teat between his teeth. Its owner sucked on it, staring, silent.
“Father Kinsella,” Kinsella corrected himself.
“Ah, come off it,” the boatman said, in a soft island brogue.
“I’m sorry?”
“I come for a priest. I can’t take nobody else. Sorry, now.”
“But I’m the man you came for. I am a priest.”
The boatman, sucking his tongue again, looked past Kinsella, again searching the pier, the sheds, the road beyond. Then turned to look out at the fishing boat anchored at the bar. On deck, Dylan Thomas raised his head in query.
“Not here yit,” the boatman called.
The boy on deck turned and looked back at the distant mass of the island. The fat black cloud was now immense, moving like a dark lens across the sky. The boatman also stared up at the sky.
“Storm coming up?” Kinsella asked.
“’Tis.”
“Well, let’s go, then. Do you want to see my papers, or something?”
On deck the white-sweatered boy pointed to the sky. “Let’s go—o b—aack, Padraig,” he called, syllables of sound separated in their transit across the waves.
The boatman abruptly let go of the bollard and took up his oars. Kinsella, irritated, reached down and caught hold of the curragh’s stern.
“Let go of that.”
“I tell you, I am Father Kinsella. The abbot is expecting me.”
Padraig, the boatman, let go of one oar, seized up a steel rowlock from beneath it and, swift as a biting dog, struck the knuckles that held the curragh’s stern. With a gasp of pain, Kinsella drew his hand back. The rowlock snapped into its hole, the oar in it, and, with two swift strokes, the boatman swung the curragh out of reach.
“You don’t look like a priest, I just can’t imagine you as one.” His mother said that, long ago, when in his second year at college he decided to study with Hartmann. Agnostic herself, his mother had continued her son’s religious education after her Catholic husband died. She was one for keeping promises. Futures were another matter, as her son found when he told her he intended to become a Catholic priest. Useless to instance that his new hero, Gustav Hartmann, had taken holy orders as an Albanesian monk, much as Malraux had become a minister of state in the Fifth Republic, not for the obvious condition, but as a means toward social action. Which, in Hartmann’s case, had made him a twentieth-century Bolívar to this generation of South American revolutionary priests and nuns. The church, Hartmann taught, despite its history and its dependence on myth and miracle, exists today as the quintessential structure through which social revolution can be brought to certain areas of the globe. But Kinsella’s mother, a Liberal, born in the nineteen thirties, did not believe in the combination of holy orders and revolutionary theory. She, like that fisherman rowing away from him now, could not see things as they really were.
The curragh tied up beside the fishing boat. The fishing boat’s engine came to life, the anchor growled up from the sea. As the fishing boat, turning, churning, headed back toward open waters, Kinsella found himself running, up the pier toward his rented car. Jumped in, went breakneck toward Cahirciveen and a telephone. He was a priest and they had not known he was a priest because the priests they knew wore black suits, or the clothes of old women, long brown habits, sandals, thick belts knotted about with big rosary beads, and he must telephone and order them to turn that boat around and send it back for him at once.
Four miles from the pier, driving through the flat trench landscape of a turf bog, he came, unexpectedly, to a crossroads. A whitewashed cottage stood on one corner, and what seemed to be a larger cottage, also whitewashed, but with a big barn behind it, faced on the opposite corner. On the doorway of the larger cottage was a sign.
P. MCGINN: LICENSED TO SELL WINES & SPIRITS
And a smaller sign, in Gaelic, telefon.
Hens rose in fright as he swerved into the cobbled yard. A rooster ran past, wattles loose, one skelly eye fixed on the car in wild alarm. Inside the pub it was dark as evening. Two Irish laborers, wearing greasy old black suits, once their Sunday best, now their daily dungarees, white shirts open at the neck, and knee-length rubber Wellington boots. Faces the color of strawberry jam looked up from large glasses of black porter. Behind the small bar, a man, broad as a rain barrel, wearing a white turtleneck sweater, wiped glasses with a linen cloth. “G’day,” said he, to Kinsella. “’Twill rain, I would say.”
“I want to telephone Muck Island.”
“You wouldn’t get them.”
“I’m a priest. They’re expecting me.”
Strawberry faces of the laborers bobbed uniformly in greeting, as though Kinsella had just entered the pub. “G’day, Father,” in unison, they sang. From beneath the bar the proprietor took up a receiver on a hand-crank stand, cranked it up, spoke in a language that Kinsella assumed to be Gaelic. Then: “There, Father. There you are, so.”
The crackly island voice. “What? What … ? Padraig didn’t get you? Ah, sure that’s a disaster.” And, over the wire, wheezing laughter. “Didn’t know you were a priest? Oh, God love us! I’m sorry, Father, but do you see that weather out there, I’m afraid we’ll not get you in today. … What? What?”
He had to shout. Three faces watched him in that small, hop-stinking room. “Send the boat back! I have to get there today. It’s urgent.”
“Well, now, Father, the minute the we—eeee—ather clears, do you heeeee— do you heeeee—aa-arr?”
Static crackles. Silence. Then a girl’s voice. “You were cut off, Father. It’s a bad connection at the best of times. I could try them later, if you like?”
“I’ll call you,” he said, and put the phone down.
Three faces turned to him. Unlike people from more civilized places they did not pretend that they had not overheard. Strawberry cheeks bunched in grins. “So, Padraig refused you,” the proprietor said. “Isn’t that a good one!”
They laughed. It was.
“Those boys on the island, you see,” the proprietor explained. “They never come out, they have no notion that the priests out here do be just like the rest of us, nowadays. Begging your pardon, Father. Are you an American?”
“Yes.”
“A grand country, so. You’ll get out tomorrow. I’d say ’twill clear.”
“’Twill clear,” one of the laborers promised.
“How much do I owe you for the phone?”
“Ah, not at all.”
“Well, thank you. Thank you very much.”
“G’day, Father.”
“G’day, Father.”
“Thank you again,” Kinsella said.
Outside, in the cobbled yard, hens tacked cautiously around his feet. He looked at the crossroads and there, blurring its outlines, was a rainbow’s end. The rainbow arched up and away from this place to disappear behind a brow of mountain. Raindrops spat warnings. Hens stalked to cover. Rain came, wetting to a thick flow. As Kinsella retreated into the shelter of the pub doorway, thunder banged above him. Thunderclouds, massing over the far mountain, advanced to take possession of the sky.
He felt cold. He thought of Hartmann in the rain forests of Brazil. He looked again for the rainbow, but it had vanished, shimmering, in that sudden rain. It had appeared, then disappeared, in this lonely place, a place that now, in its noon darkness, made him think of a Beckett landscape, that place in which Vladimir and Estragon might have waited for Godot. The rainbow had seemed to end, down there, in the center of the white cross formed by two concrete ribbons of road. In such phenomena people once read signs of God’s hand. He turned and went back into the pub.
PART TWO
The helicopter drifted over the crossroads, the pub, the yard, then, tilting slightly forward, moved downwind to land in a field on the edge of the bog. The rotor blades still turned at takeoff speed as Kinsella hurried toward the machine in the afternoon’s continuing drizzle, ducking under the great propellers as the pilot slid the door aside and held out a hand to take him up. He sat, buckling his seat belt. The door shut. The green-and-white helicopter, the wind from its rotor blades flattening the whin bushes of the field, rose like some huge dragonfly, its legs, which had bent on hinges under it, stiffening and retracting as it rose in flight. It poised, then, tilting forward, moved up and out. Away.
Below, three faces mooned up, the laborers and the publican. Like children they waved as the helicopter lurched over them. And were gone. Kinsella looked at the pilot, a young man of his own age, dark haired and smiling, staring ahead into the fog and rain. The pilot wore a uniform of black coveralls, but with showy encrustation of gold braid at wrists and shoulders, and, on the peak of his cap, a gold crest. Caparisoned like
some admiral of former days, he seemed a personage of importance. Kinsella reflected on the times; cardinals went shabby in mufti, hirelings of all kinds had increased their false panoply of rank.
“Have you even been on the island?” he shouted at the pilot.
“No, but I’ve flown over it.”
Thunder. Lightning sheeted the sky. Within three minutes, they were over the ocean, a rough sea pitted by rain-squalls, but ahead, toward the west, a shaft of sunlight like a stage flood. The pilot pointed to it, grinning and winking to show this was good news. Kinsella nodded. He had waited three hours for the helicopter, fretting, worrying that it would not find the lonely crossroads. In action once more, airborne, traveling at speed, his confidence returned. He would be diplomatic, but firm. With luck, he could have agreement before nightfall.
Now they were over the island, chopping along above a deserted strand, fine gray sand, green grassy dunes, and, at the edge of the sweep of beach, a harbor with a stone pier and two fishing boats tied up at it. One was the ten-tonner that had refused him that morning. Beyond the pier was a ruined medieval castle, built strategically on a green headland, commanding the sea approach. He pointed at it and the pilot, nodding, flew up and hovered the helicopter over the roofless castle maw.
“The fort of Granuaile,” the pilot shouted.
“What?”
“Very old. Grace O’Malley built it and lived in it.”
“Who?”
“Grace O’Malley. The Sea Queen. Granuaile.”
Circling the headland, the helicopter moved down the spine of the island, flying over the village adjoining the fort. The village was a street of a dozen whitewashed cottages, with hen-littered backyards in which were rough stone sheds housing animals and tools. As Kinsella peered down, two small children ran out, stared, then waved. Four of the dozen houses in the street were abandoned, windows broken, holes in the roofs. The helicopter bucked into stormy wind, lurched up and away over tiny fields divided into jagged squares by walls of roughly piled boulders. A road, never paved, led off to two other farms, long abandoned. The helicopter, using the road as marker, curved across the bay, climbed a hillside to a mountain pass, dipped into the pass, was surrounded by walls of gray Gothic rocks, then came out to beauty, on the western slope of the island, to the abbey, as the old guidebook had said, on a headland, a splendor of sea. From the abbey tower, the visitor looks down on gray waves that curl on barren rock. The helicopter, strange dragonfly, wheeled and went down on a field to the left of the monastery, rotor blades fanning the grasses, as it came to rest, its strange legs extending, bending to accommodate its weight as it touched ground. The Plexiglas door slid open. The rotor blades became visible, whirling, slowing.