“Was it to be the blackberries in the glass jars and the red currants in the stone pots? Or was it the other way around, you told me?”
Brother Paul, filled with the demanding urgency that infects the deliberations of small minds, entered the abbot’s parlor, above the chancery of the abbey, without knock or by-your-leave. The abbot, looking out through the narrow aperture of a thirteenth-century window, did not answer at once. When he did, he said, “Blackberries jars.”
“Ah, I was right, so I was! I thought it was the blackberries in the glass jars. Would you come down yourself now and have a look at the fruit?”
“We have a visitor,” the abbot said.
“A visitor?” Brother Paul was alarmed. “Ah, no. Sure, didn’t Padraig go out this morning and come back empty? And no other boat could come in, in this weather.”
But the abbot did not seem to hear. “His vorpal blade went snicker-snack,” the abbot said. “It would be a good description of that helicopter out there.”
“A what?” Brother Paul bustled to the window. “Oh, that’s that yoke from Dingle. I’ve seen it many’s the time passing over here. Is he broke down, or what? Why did he land?”
The abbot looked at Paul. “Did you not hear it come over, a minute ago?”
Paul blushed. He was deaf, ashamed of it, and a bad liar. “How would I hear it and I down in the calefactory room taking the stems off berries?”
“Go on back down, now,” the abbot said, suddenly weary of Paul. “I had better see to our visitor.”
But Paul lingered, his head close to the abbot’s in the vise of the narrow medieval window. “That’s not the priest from Rome, surely?”
“I would say it is.”
“They’d have to wear special clothes to go up in one of them things,” Brother Paul announced. He had not traveled to the mainland in a decade, and had never traveled by air.
“Yes.” The abbot turned from the window. “Go along now and tell Brother Martin to bring the visitor up directly. There is no sense in my climbing the stairs twice.”
“I will do that, then,” Brother Paul said.
The abbot turned back to the window. The green-and-white helicopter increased its engine noise, the blades blurring to invisibility. The frumious bandersnatch, the abbot said to himself. The words fuming and furious made frumious, and frumious it was now as it rose, levitating a few feet above the grass, hesitating as though looking for directions. Getting its bearings, it tilted forward, moving up and out to sea. He will stay the night, the abbot decided. I will ask Father Manus to get us salmon from the pool. The sky was clearing, but, out there toward Slea Head, the wind force was building. There would be rain.
He heard steps, uncertain, coming up the winding stone staircase beneath his parlor, heard, predictably, Martin’s warning. “The ninth step is longer than the others, Father. The trip step, they called it in the old days. Be careful, so.”
“Thank you,” said the visitor in his American voice, the voice the abbot had heard on the telephone. Footsteps reached the top of the second flight. Good. It would not do to trip Rome up. “This way, Father,” the abbot called.
To Kinsella, turning and turning in that cold stone turret, to come out through the narrow door into the abbot’s parlor was dizzying, confusing, causing him, at first, to miss his host’s welcoming hand.
“How are you, Father.” The abbot’s voice was very soft.
“I’m sorry, excuse me, how are you. Good to meet you, Father Abbot.”
“So Padraig left you standing on the pier. Oh, he’s thick, that lad. I am sorry you had such a lot of trouble.”
“It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t realize I was a priest.”
“But you came on, anyway. Enterprising. Do you know, Father, that’s the first flying machine of any description that has ever landed on Muck. You’ve brought us the symbol of the century. Just when I thought we’d be able to close the hundred years out and say we missed our time.”
“Would you have preferred that, Father Abbot?”
“Preferred what?”
“To have missed this century, to have been born in another time?”
“I should think not,” the abbot said. “If we had lived in the eighteenth century, for instance, our religion was under interdiction by the English. And the nineteenth century was not much better. Unless you had a lust for becoming a martyr, the past was not a time to be a Catholic priest here.”
“Yes, of course. I forgot,” Kinsella said. “By the way, I have a letter for you from father general. And this is my Ecumenical order of mission. Perhaps you’d care to have a look at them?”
The abbot would indeed. He stretched out his hand. “An Irish name, you have,” he said, as Kinsella undid his dispatch case.
“Yes.”
“That is a County Mayo name.” The abbot took the letters, shuffling them like a mailman as he went toward his desk. The abbot sat, spreading the letters, opening them with a paper knife, reading with attention. As Kinsella tried to read him, noticing first, below the heavy brown woolen robe, black farmer’s boots, with double leather soles, great hobnail cleats, and white woolen socks, their tops folded over the tops of these formidable boots. Of course the monks would not wear sandals in this cold. And, similarly, there were fisherman’s black oilskins and a fisherman’s sou’wester hat, hung up behind the abbot’s door. Those boots; that hat. A practical man. His hands, clumsy on the pages of the Ecumenical order of mission, were a workingman’s hands, scaled with old cuts, the nails double thick, blue edged. Thin neck, large, glottal Adam’s apple, moving in the socket of an oversize collar. The abbot’s grizzled hair was cut very short and, with gray eyes set far back in his skull, separated from his weathered face by a web of white frown lines, he had the look of a seabird, a fisher hawk, perhaps. Yet, as he put the Ecumenical order aside and began, attentively, to read the general’s letter, Kinsella thought he saw something else. There was, in this humbly dressed old monk, a presence, a power, which recalled to his visitor a painting seen in Venice: Bastiani’s portrait of Doge Francesco Foscari, mercantile noble, consummate politician. No, this would not be easy.
“A red-letter day,” the abbot said cheerfully, holding the general’s letter up, the better to read it in the window light. “I have been an Albanesian monk for forty-five years, yet this is the first time I’ve ever held in my hand the signature of our father general. A red-letter day, indeed. A pity it has to be a letter of censure.”
“It is not meant as such, I can assure you.”
“I agree. The tone is not unkind,” the abbot said. “But if you have attention paid to you from headquarters and you’re in a place like this, well, it’s a fair guess that you’re in hot water.”
Kinsella laughed.
“Do you know what we call a place like this, in Ireland? The back of beyond. That’s where you are now. The back of beyond.”
“It’s a great phrase.”
“Mind you,” the abbot said. “A few hundred years ago, no place in Christendom was the back of beyond. The pope, in those days, had a very long arm, indeed. I’ll show you something that turned up out in the back there, twenty years ago, in a heap of stuff that was stored away and forgotten. It might amuse you. I mean, the container.” The abbot tugged at the side drawer of his desk. It opened with an unused squeal. Took from the drawer a flat tin on which was a colored picture of a bearded British sailor of former times. And a legend: Player’s Navy Cut Cigarettes. “In the days when a lot of people smoked cigarettes—fags they called them in Ireland—we had an old lay brother, he was very fond of a smoke and so, when he found this, he thought he was made. ‘Fifty fags, Father,’ said he to me, pleased as Punch with himself. And so”—the abbot opened the box—“when he opened it up, lo and behold, this was what was in it.” The abbot took out a something, wrapped in tissue paper. He unwrapped it, showing a wax seal. “Have a look at that.”
Kinsella took the seal, handling it gently as a sand dollar. Traced in bro
wn wax, the letters:
PIUS PAPA II
“In fourteen sixty-three, that seal came here on a letter. We had someone look up the date for us in Rome. In that year Pope Pius the Second wrote to Walter Tobar, the abbot of Muck, and told him there was a deanship in Kerry reported to be held by a man who had no canonical title. The pope wanted the abbot to jump on the man and teach him a lesson. And the abbot did what he was told.”
Laughter, which became a fit of coughing. “So, you see when the word comes this far down the line it usually means trouble for somebody or other. Eh, Father?”
Kinsella smiled and carefully handed back the seal. The abbot shut it in the tin box. “Cup of tea?”
“Oh, no thanks.”
Irishly, the abbot appraised this and, Irishly, decided the denial was mere politeness. “Ah, you will!” the abbot said. He called downstairs. “Brother Martin?”
Aye.
“Bring us a cup of tea, will you?”
“Two teas,” Martin’s voice rumbled from below. The abbot, this settled, again picked up father general’s letter. “I am the sort of person who has to read everything important at least twice over.”
“Go ahead.”
As the abbot reread, Kinsella stared about the room. The parlor was large, with a high ceiling, located somewhere over the abbey’s sacristy. Three narrow windows gave onto the sea. The furniture, carved by monks, was serviceable, without style. The walls were shelved by books, hundreds of them, spilling onto tables and stacked in odd corners. Surprisingly, there was a special table covered with old green paperback Penguin mystery stories. On the wall, to the abbot’s right, were three stone panels, seventeenth-century Celtic, saints or apostles, figures of beauty, their simplicity emphasized by a horrid oil that took pride of place behind the abbot’s desk, a Victorian painting of a ship sailing in a storm-tossed sea, under heavens rent by the Virgin Mary, prayerful, in blue and white robes, imploring her heavenly Son for the vessel’s safety.
On a window ledge, five large, wooden games boxes, each labeled in italic script.
chess (I)
chess (II)
draughts (2 sets)
dominoes (I)
dominoes (incomplete)
“Do you have television here?”
The abbot paused in his reading. “Sometimes when there is something big happening in the world, we draw lots and five of us bicycle across the island to Doran’s shop on the strand. They have television there.”
A pause.
“Not more than five of us, though. Doran’s is a small place.”
“You know, of course, Father Abbot, that the Mass on Mount Coom and the pilgrims who come to Cahirciveen were widely publicized on a BBC television program a couple of months ago.”
“Indeed I do. Didn’t we get hundreds of letters about it. I had no notion the Latin Mass was so popular. Do you know, it has given us a new penance. When one of us accuses himself of error before the chapter, he now has to answer some of those letters.”
Footsteps. Stout, stertorous, Brother Martin emerged from the stairwell. On a wooden tray were two heavy china bowls, the size of soup bowls. They were filled with strong tea. Milk, sugar, a knife, a pot of blackberry jam. And two plates, each with a thick slice of white bread.
“Did you want an egg with that?” Brother Martin asked, putting the tray down on the abbot’s desk.
“No. We’re having salmon with our supper, if Brother Manus can find a few in the pool.”
“Salmon?”
“Yes, salmon. Father Kinsella has come all the way from Rome. This is an occasion, Martin.”
Brother Martin turned to Kinsella. “That bread is our own baking. Irish soda bread.” He went back downstairs.
“Poor Martin, he’s getting on. We all are, here. I remember, last year, I said to Father Matthew, our master of novices, I said when you retire, we will retire your job with you. For not one recruit did I see coming along. But, do you know, after that television program, we had all sorts of enquiries. I tell you, I could recruit enough young men now to fill a regiment.”
“I suppose that’s a relief.”
“A relief?” The abbot paused, staring over the rim of his tea bowl. He held the bowl, his index finger cupped over its lip, in the eighteenth-century manner.
“I mean the prospect of being able to get recruits.”
“It is not,” the abbot said, putting down his tea bowl and addressing himself to bread and jam.
“You are not anxious for new recruits?”
“I am not. It is a hard life on this island. Fishing, drying kelp, farming a few potatoes. It rains a lot. The monastery is a cold place, there is no way of heating it properly. And we are often hard put to make ends meet.”
“But, isn’t that the thing about hardship? I mean, men will accept it, if they feel it’s for a worthwhile cause.”
“Just so.” The abbot spread blackberry jam on his bread. “But the monastic life, as you know yourself, Father, is often something else. I’d break all clergy into two groups. Proselytizers or prayers. Or, if you like, missionaries or monks.”
“Monks can also be missionaries, surely?”
“Not on Muck Island. It takes a special vocation to live in a place like this. Not many have it. I do not have it myself, I sometimes think.”
“But you have lived on this island most of your adult life?”
“That does not mean I like it.”
“You’d prefer to be somewhere else?”
“I did not say that.”
“I’m sorry. Of course not.”
“This blackberry jam,” the abbot said, “is last year’s. Brother Paul is down in the calefactory room now, bottling this year’s jam. He is thinking of his jam. He is not thinking of anything else. I would say Brother Paul has a true vocation for this life.”
Kinsella bit into his bread. “And it’s delicious jam.”
“It is.”
“I suppose I am the missionary type,” Kinsella said. “My great desire was to be sent to South America.”
“Ah, Father Gustav Hartmann. A fine man he must be.”
“He is.”
“So you went to South America?”
“No. But I studied with Father Hartmann in his class in Boston. He’s crippled now, you know.”
“No. I did not know.”
“He was tortured so many times. The pau de arara. Finally, the Brazilian militares broke his back.”
“I would like to meet him,” the abbot said. “Tell me, does he talk much about God?”
“In what way do you mean, Father Abbot?”
“Ah, I don’t know. Forget it. No, what I mean is,” the abbot paused, as though thinking. “Is it souls he’s after? Or is it the good of mankind?”
“I would say the second.”
The abbot nodded. “I gathered as much. Of course, I’m not well up on such things. I never had the missionary impulse myself.”
“But your zeal for the old Mass, your continuance of the Latin ritual, surely that could be interpreted as missionary spirit?”
“I thought you’d get around to that,” the abbot said, and laughed. “Come on. Let’s take a turn outside. The rain has stopped and I want to order up that salmon for our supper. You’ll stay the night?”
Kinsella hesitated.
“Ah, you will! What did you tell the man with the helicopter?”
“I said I would telephone him when I’m ready to leave. He can get here in about an hour.”
“Time enough, then, to ring him in the morning.” The abbot stood and took his oilskins and sou’wester from the hook behind the door. “Mind the step as you go down.”
At the foot of the staircase, a door led to the sacristy. They went through and emerged in the cloister. The abbot moved briskly, his hobnailed boots loud on the flags of the walk, turning up through a slype and into the refectory, a large bare room around the walls of which were rough refectory tables and benches. In the adjoining kitchen two old monks peel
ed potatoes from a huge pile. On the hearth hung an iron pot, big as a cartoon cannibal’s cook pot. The turf fire gave off a pleasant scent.
One of the old monks looked up and smiled at the visitor. He had two upper teeth, it seemed. “G’day,” said he. “’Twill clear, I would say.”
“Ah, yes,” said the other old monk.
“Where is Father Manus?”
“I hear tell he’s looking for a couple of fish,” one old monk said. The other giggled.
“Right, then,” the abbot said. “We’ll go and see what he’s got.”
A door, heavy and stiff on its iron hinges, swung open and they were outside, on a slope of field, looking down at those gray rocks, that splendor of sea. Below, a path led to a small cove. Four black curraghs lay upended on a shelf of rock. A man, in oilskins, carrying a fishing creel, could be seen trudging slowly along the strand. “Come on, down,” the abbot said to his guest. “I think that’s our fish.”
As they went down the path—“The man with that creel is Father Manus, a very good soul. He is the priest who said the Mass that Sunday when the television fellows came. The other monks make fun of him, now. The reporters tried to interview him on the television but he wouldn’t speak.” The abbot kicked a stone clear of the path. “He will speak to you, never fear. He’s dying to get a chance at you, I warn you. Still, that’s what you’re here for, I suppose. Explanations, wasn’t that what father general called them?”
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