by Brian Hodge
And I knew that those things we find most beautiful are made so by the brief span of their lives.
He had me sing for him that night, as most nights. Not so different from my very first night here, only now I did not retire to my own room once the song’s last breath was loosed. Julius lay down first, the lights off throughout the villa, the room bathed in a soft glow of candles on which our bed seemed to float like a raft.
I climbed onto the bed, knelt just behind him, the top of his head aligned between my parted knees. We had grown to favor the lullabies this way, because I could look down and see the full effect my voice was having on his body, and Julius could, in turn, gaze up to see me rising above him, like an angel, or a gargoyle.
I kept my fists closed, as I had for the past few minutes. And had I known when Francesca died that I would be singing Julius his final lullaby in a few nights? I must have. I only now wish I had sung one to her as she lay dying, something to carry with her into that blackest night.
I would not let her down now, for she too had loved Julius, as if the mother of an ancient son, a son handed down through many generations of mothers.
A son she had finally entrusted to his lover.
“Make it beautiful,” Julius whispered from below me, gray eyes sad and trusting in the candles’ glow. “Make it mourn the lost.”
“Yes,” I whispered, and emptied my right hand long enough to stroke the silken blond hair away from his forehead. The back of my hand caught a tear as it fell—but then why not mourn for myself? We would both be making sacrifices this night.
Then I sang, sang as I never before had, every note balanced on the edge of heartbreak. Long, slow, sustained notes of infinite sadness, Cherubini’s Requiem in C Minor. It was music to mourn the passing of anything, everything, from a friend to an age. All things end, for all things must, the beautiful most of all.
And when the requiem was finished, I opened my hands, gripped their contents with trembling fingers. I bowed my head, deeply, so that I could kiss Julius on unsuspecting lips.
“I love you,” I told him, so that he might, in years to come, think of it as the last thing he heard.
And then I plunged the nails into his ears, one through each eardrum, weeping but secure in the knowledge it was the only way. He screamed, he convulsed, but I held tight to those steel shafts, worked them like swabs, so that there could be nothing left of any membrane to grow back together. Only when I felt that deafness was assured, permanent, did I pull the nails free, hurling them across the room. Only I could hear the chime they made against the wall.
Julius was doubled in agony, his body perfect in the yellow-orange glow, and I looked, looked enough to last me a lifetime—I would never again see him any younger than he was this night. When would it begin, his descent into years that could never be turned back? When would I look upon him and see age needling its lines into his flesh, like scrimshaw carved into fine old ivory?
I did not know. But I would be there.
I fell beside him, my hand upon his hard shoulder while I spilled apologies he could never hear, and he pushed me away. I retreated to the edge of that vast bed, curled onto my side—and was Francesca watching from somewhere, proud?
After a time, Julius draped himself over my bare back. I felt the slow drip of his blood along my spine. Soon, our breathing fell into sync, and I looked to the years ahead with a fear that he might come to hate me, if he didn’t already. I imagined Julius strangling me in my sleep, as even now his hand reached over and around me, fingers lingering upon my lips before loosely clenching over my throat. But he bore no harder, as if all he wanted was to hold on to the one dear thing he would forever be denied.
I knew the feeling.
I had lost my audience of one.
But if I could not be heard, there was always love to fall back on, and tonight, at least, love seemed surer by far.
THE DRIPPING OF SUNDERED WINESKINS
I. Media vita in morte sumus
It’s said that William Blake spent nearly all of his life experiencing visitations by angels, or what he took to be angels, but my first time came when I was only seven, and I’d never heard of William Blake and was unaware that anything miraculous was happening. It may have been that my young age kept me from seeing her as anything other than entirely natural, much as I took for granted the checkpoints and the ever-present British soldiers who tried in vain to enforce peace in the Belfast of my childhood.
Or, more likely, I was in shock from the bomb blast.
It was years before I understood what was known as, with wry understatement, the Troubles: the politics and the hatreds between Protestants and Catholics, amongst Catholics ourselves, loyalists and republicans. As I later came to understand that day, the pub that had been targeted was regarded by the Provo I.R.A. as a nest of opposition, lovers of queen and crown. To those who planted the bomb that should have killed me, a few more dead fellow Irish were but part of the cumulative price of independence. Funny, that.
Belfast is working-class to its core, and made mostly of bricks. They rained from the blast erupting within the pub across the street from where two friends and I were walking home from school, late and chastised for some forgotten mischief we’d got up to. I knew the gray calm of an early autumn day, then fire and a roar, and suddenly I stood alone. One moment my friends had been walking one on either side of me, and in the next had disappeared.
“Don’t look at them,” she said, in a gentle voice not of the Emerald Isle, the first of two things I fully recall her telling me, even if I don’t know where she’d come from. It was only later, from the odd translucence of her otherwise light brown skin, that I realized she was unlike any woman I’d ever seen. “Don’t look.”
But look I did, and I remember the feel of her hand atop my head, although not to turn me from the sight; lighter, it was, as if even she were rendered powerless by my schoolboy’s curiosity. Well, now you’ve done it, her touch seemed to be telling me. Now you’ve sprung the lid on the last of that innocence.
They both lay where they’d been flung, behind me, cut down by bricks propelled with the velocity of cannonballs. Nothing have I seen since that’s looked any deader, with more tragic suddenness; and there I stood between them, untouched but for a scratch across my bare knee that trickled blood down my hairless shin.
I felt so cold my teeth chattered, and thought she then told me I must’ve been spared for a reason. It’s always made sense that she would. It’s what angels say. And whatever reason she had, in the midst of an afternoon’s chaos, for stooping to kiss away that blood from my knee, I felt sure it must’ve been a good one.
“Oh yes,” I think she said, her lips soft at my knee, as if something there had confirmed her suspicions that in my survival there lay design.
Even today I can’t say that the mysterious touch of her mouth didn’t inspire my first true erection, if stubby and immature.
She looked up, smiling at me with my young blood bright upon her mouth. She nodded once toward the smoking rubble of the pub, once at the pitiful bodies of my lads, then said the other thing I clearly recall: “Never forget—this is the kind of work you can expect from people who have God on their side.”
When I told my mother about her that night, how the smiling woman had come to me, I left out the part about her kissing away my blood. It had been one of those moments that children know instinctively to separate from the rest, and keep secret, for to share it would change the whole world. I saw no harm in sharing what she’d said to me, though, but when I did, my mother shook me by the shoulders as if I’d done something wrong.
“You mustn’t ever speak of it again, Patrick Kieran Malone,” she told me. Hearing my full name used meant no room for argument. “Talk like that sounds like something from your uncle Brendan, and a wonder it is he’s not been struck by lightning.”
The comparison shocked me. The way she normally spoke of her brother, Brendan was, if not the devil himself, at least one of hi
s most trusted servants. I protested; I was only repeating what the angel-lady said.
“Hush! Word of such a thing gets round, they’ll be showing up one day to sink us to the bottom of a bog, don’t you know.”
Of course I wondered whom she meant, and why they would feel so strongly about the matter, but as I think about it now I don’t believe she even fully knew herself. She knew only that she had one more reason to be afraid of something at which she couldn’t hit back.
There are all kinds of tyranny employed around us. Bombs are but the loudest.
* * *
To those things that shape us and decide the paths we take, there is no true beginning, not even with our birth, for many are in motion long before we draw our first breath. Ireland’s monastic tradition predates even the Dark Ages, when the saint I was named for returned to the island where he’d once been a slave, to win it for Christianity. While that tradition is now but a sliver of what it used to be, when thriving monasteries housed hundreds of monks and friars, on the day I joined the Franciscan order my whole life felt directed toward the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
For as long as I could recall, the mysteries of our Catholic faith had sparked my imagination, from the solemn liturgy of the priests, to the surviving architecture of our misty past, to the relics that had drawn veneration from centuries of believers. Ever thankful for my survival, my parents exposed me to as much of our faith as they could. They took me to visit the Purgatory of St. Patrick, and to his retreat on Cruachan Aigli in County Mayo. Down in County Kerry we undertook pilgrimages to Mount Brandon, and to the shrine of the Blessed Virgin in Kilmalkedar. I touched Celtic crosses that had been standing for a millennium, the weathered stone hard and sacred beneath my fingers.
Most mysterious of all to me was the 300-year-old head of the newly canonized Saint Oliver Plunkett, staring from the splendor of his reliquary in Saint Peter’s Church in Drogheda. Blackened skin stretched over his bald skull like leather; his upper lip had shriveled back from his teeth to give him the start of a smile, and I could stare at him in full expectation that those dry lips would continue to move, to whisper some message for me alone.
It held no terrors for me, that severed head of his. I’d seen the dead before, and a damn sight fresher than old Oliver was.
Of the ethereal woman who came and went unnoticed on that day death had come so close, for years I hoped she might show herself again so I could put to her the questions I was old enough now to ask, and felt a deep ache that she did not. The mind reevaluates what’s never validated, giving it the fuzzy edges of a dream, and as I grew taller, older, there were days I almost convinced myself that that was all she’d been; that I’d hallucinated a beautiful, compassionate adult because she was what I needed at the moment, since so many others around me were busy killing each other.
But on those nights I dreamt of her, I knew better. I could never have invented anything so radiant out of thin air. Every few months, a dream so crystalline would unfold inside me it felt as if she were in the same room, watching. Angel, phantom, whatever she was, she was as responsible as anything for my joining the Franciscans of Greyfriars Abbey in Kilkenny, for she had done so much to open my eyes to the things of the spirit, and inspire my hunger to let them fill me.
“Does it hurt to become a saint?” I asked the first time I set eyes on those sunken leathery sockets of Oliver’s.
“Some of them were hurt staying well true to the will of the Lord,” my mother answered. “But on that day they were made saints they felt only joy, because they’d already been in Heaven a long, long time, in the company of their angels.”
“Then that’s what I want to be,” I declared.
She smiled at such impudence, waiting until later to tell me that no saint had ever aspired to such, as the first thing they’d given up was ambition for themselves. Sainthood was something that happened later, usually decided by people who’d never known them in the flesh.
While I didn’t claim to understand why it had to be that way, I tried to put vanity behind me like the childish thing it was…and remember I was still alive for a reason that would be revealed in God’s own time.
II. Corpus antichristi
The greatest irony about what drove me from the Order of St. Francis is that it was nothing that hadn’t been experienced by the very founder himself, nearly 800 years before.
The first time it happened to me was a Sunday morning in the abbey chapel, near the close of Mass. The Host had been venerated and the brothers and I knelt along the railing before the altar as Abbot O’Riordan worked his way down the row of us.
“The body of Christ,” he would say, then rest a wafer upon a waiting tongue, while in our mouths the miracle would happen again and again—the bread become the actual flesh of our Lord, and the wine His Savior’s blood. “The body of Christ.”
Awaiting my turn, I often contemplated the crucifix hanging on the wall before us: life-size, a plaster Christ painted in the vivid colors of His suffering and passion. His dark eyes gazed heavenward, while from His brow and nail wounds blood streamed in the other direction. Every rib stood out clearly as He seemed to labor in agony for each breath.
“The body of Christ,” said the abbot, before me now.
Only when I drew my hands from the railing to cup them beneath my chin, to catch the Host should it fall by accident, did I notice my own blood flowing from each wrist, where a Roman executioner might have been driven a nail. Beneath my gray robe, my feet felt suddenly warm and wet.
And when the Host slipped from Abbot O’Riordan’s fingers, it fell all the way to the hard floor, with no hands there to catch it and spare it from defilement. There it chipped into crumbling fragments of proxy flesh, to mingle with drops of blood that were entirely real.
* * *
There was no pattern to the stigmata’s recurrence after the first time, just a gradual worsening of physical signs. Initially, blood only seeped like sweat through unbroken skin, but later the wounds themselves manifested in my flesh, deeper on each occasion, layer by layer—for scarcely a minute to begin with, until at last they lingered for as long as two hours before sealing up again.
I was examined over several months by a hierarchy of church representatives, all of them seeking a simple explanation, and I soon realized this was what they were hoping to find. The length and sharpness of my fingernails were checked repeatedly, and my routines became of intense fascination as they sought to discover some habit that might inflict deep blisters that would on occasion burst and bleed.
But Greyfriars was no reclusive monastery far from the modern world, where medieval-minded monks were turned out each sunrise to till the fields. In the quiet neighborhoods of Kilkenny I taught Latin in the parochial school adjacent to the friary. The closest I came to fieldwork was teaching the declensions of agricola.
At least until the day I bled in class, and was removed from active staff.
For a faith founded on the resurrection of the dead, and sustained by centuries of miracles accepted as historically real as wars and plagues, the Church of my era I found to be reluctant to admit to the possibility of modern miracles. Worse, I began to feel I’d become more of an embarrassment than anything, a smudge of unfortunate dust that may have been only dust, but that they weren’t yet willing to say was not divine, and therefore dust that they above all wished they might sweep aside so they wouldn’t have to debate what more to do with it.
I believe what unsettled them most was that the wounds opened on my wrists, an anatomical verisimilitude shared by no stigmatic I’d ever heard of. Centuries of art and sculpture have depicted a crucifixion that never would’ve taken place, not with any self-respecting Roman soldier on the scene with a hammer and a fistful of nails. Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small. Nailing through the wrists was the only way to support the weight of the body a
nd keep it on the cross without it tearing loose. But old images, fixed in the head and worn round the neck, are hard to die, although I should think they’d give anyone a handy means for weeding the miraculous from the merely hysterical: If Jesus were to go to all the trouble of manifesting through the flesh of another, you’d think He’d at least want to get the facts straight.
This, more than anything, was what seemed to keep my priestly examiners from comfortably dismissing the whole matter. It had been going on for nearly half a year before I was told, finally, that I was to be examined the next day by a tribunal arriving from Rome.
“I would ask you to spend the hours between now and then in prayer and fasting,” Abbot O’Riordan told me. We were alone in his office and the door that he almost never closed was shut tight.
“All due respect, Father,” I said, “I’ve been praying for a bit more insight ever since this started.”
“Not for insight, that’s not what I’m asking of you, but for how you’ll answer their questions tomorrow. What you send back to Rome with them…that’s what you need concern yourself with now.”
“I thought all I’d send them back with was the simple truth about what’s been happening.”
“Do you even know what’s happening to you, Patrick? Can you tell me the cause of it? There’s been no getting to the bottom of it for six months, and you don’t know how I prayed for an end to it before it got this far.”
He lowered his head to his hands for a moment, as if he’d said too much. Then, with those hands folded loosely together on his desk, he avoided my eyes and looked about the austere room.
“The Church,” he said in a slow hush, “is built on a solid foundation of miracles from the past. But it’s my belief—and I’m not alone in this—that the past is where they should stay. What’s in the past remains fixed and constant. There’s no reason to doubt it, no need to demand from it any greater explanation. There’s no need to question it. Only to believe in it. There it is and there it remains for all time, and it need never, ever, change…because it’s safely protected by time.”