by Paul Lynch
She aches to test her tongue with new words, his words inside her that speak the truth of things. Now she knows that her first life is over. That it was Father who brought you back into this second life to stand in His light, it must be true that he is at one with God and perhaps it is true that you were dead even though you cannot remember having died or the days before it, cannot remember what death is like, perhaps you cannot know it.
She begins to feel the opening of joy like light.
Soon she will be ready and yet he does not come.
Why does he not come? He said he would.
The door has been left unlocked and now Mary Eeshal seems to whisper through it or perhaps it is the murmur of her clothing. Mary Eeshal begins dressing her, a full black gown pulled to her feet just like the others. Grace stares at her own body, testament to so strange a life. Mary Eeshal takes her elbow, guides her out the threshold of the door she has not passed since she entered, her foot hovering over the plunging first step. They descend the staircase towards the light of an open doorway and she counts three clocks and notices how every one has been stilled. The day outside ranged with cold blue light. He will be here waiting, she thinks. Instead four women watch her step towards them. They stand in a field beside canvas tents, the grass lit with spring-flower, Mary Collan and three others. She turns and sees she has stepped out of a large farmhouse, a wide yard and outhouses behind it, a strange stooped man and a woman watching from the gable side of the house. She looks again for Father.
Mary Collan points to her hair. She says, you have taken the baptismal water. Now you must do like us and cut your hair.
Grace stares at the gray cold skin of the woman’s face and the gray cold eyes, cannot look at what is put before her. A knife. She stares at her feet and can feel inwards the rising of some black resistance. Hears herself think, no, not this again.
Mary Collan grabs Grace’s wrist and tries to put the knife into her hand but her hand has grown slippy and will not take the knife. Her eyes growing wet and her body trembling and it is then Mary Eeshal steps forward and bats the knife away.
She says, it does not have to be so, Mary Collan.
Mary Collan stares at Mary Eeshal. She says, for you he made an exception but not for her, not for the rest of us.
Mary Eeshal says, it was you, not Father, whom the others followed.
Grace becomes aware of Mary Eeshal stepping behind her. It is then that she wraps her hands about her own head, lets go again, for the touch of Mary Eeshal’s fingers is like breath through the long of her hair, her hair being combed and balled into a bun.
It is then that she sees him, the silhouette of Father on his knees, watching or not watching from the dark of a tent.
She worries about where she will sit, sends her eyes ahead of her body. This daily meal of soup and bread in the farmhouse’s kitchen, riches off the farmer’s land, and how today for the first time she will join them. She cannot take her eyes off Father, though he has not looked at her yet. Three saucered candles table-center reach their yellow towards each face taking seat without word or fuss because goodness is as goodness does, she thinks. They rest their hands upon the table waiting to be served and she watches their scrubbed pale faces, stares into their thoughts for what they do and do not, how to sit, perhaps, or how to hold your person, how to hold your hands, Mary Eeshal and Mary Collan on either side of Father, you hold your hands this way and not that. The other women like women undone, she thinks, their plain pious faces like boys’ faces quiet in thought, and who wants to look like that, better off with long hair.
And that is the farm owner, Robert Boyce, sitting with his eyes closed and his hands clasped muttering some prayer, he is stoopy even in sit. And that is his wife, Anne Boyce, with a servant-woman by the oven, each as meek as the other, Anne Boyce knifing at that bread smell, serving it up, and she surveys their faces and tries not to think what she thinks about them, that they are not people at all but effigies of wax, such a strange thought, she thinks, begins to admire her hands to make silent her thoughts because Father might be listening in, puts them prayerfully before her on the table, the whiteness that is scrubbed skin, her shining fingernails. She feels the weight of Mary Collan’s eyes, looks up to see Anne Boyce bringing a basket of bread to the table and all eyes rest on Father, who raises his hands so as to begin prayer and later she will think, who is it that is in each one of us, who is it that is there when you cease to be yourself, when you act without the thought of action, perhaps it is Satan’s worm inside you, perhaps it is another self, for suddenly she has leaped across the table and grabbed at the bread as if it were the very last of all bread.
She lies awake in the long of each night dreaming this second life. Mouth-feeling in silence the new name Father has given her. Mary Ezekiel. For you are reborn and your old name is gone. Mary Ezekiel. When she repeats her new name to herself she hears his voice and it is God’s voice also, although she wonders what God would really sound like. She thinks of thunder or great rocks being hewn and she thinks of silence. Your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth because I made it so. You have been struck dumb so as not to speak of the world’s deafness. She wonders what Father means by this, wonders if God will loosen her tongue when the world starts to listen and when might this be so? She lies awake imagining the world coming undone as he has spoken it, sees the mountains open, sees the vast armies of the great and the good coming together in war against Satan. She understands now that everything in her life until now has been evil, for how can you explain so much blight and hunger and plague as anything but reckoning? His words have entered her mind as rivers of blood surging from some high mountain of God, and now she dreams it, an angered rush that takes every man and animal soundless towards the sea, where in blood they meet the salted water that is both washing and forgetting.
Father has begun to look at her in a different manner. She knows the nature of the look and tells herself what is isn’t, that one type of looking can be confused for another and perhaps he can hear you right now, is reaching in to remind you of the worm turning in sin. Father’s eyes upon her during their daily meal in the farmhouse kitchen. Father’s eyes upon her in the cockerel dark as he calls the morning prayer, his eyes reaching for her eyes as his mouth reminds the others that the dead have been risen and walk here among us.
His always-asking eyes, saying, why is it, Mary Ezekiel, I have not confessed you yet and yet I have confessed all newcomers?
Her eyes cannot answer.
Is it that you are telling us you are without sin, that you stand in your own Godlight unlike the rest of us? Or is it that your sins remain hidden, that you are a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
She looks away from him.
She thinks, he has not yet confessed you because he knows the truth, the sins you have done, all the evil you have committed. You cannot speak it. That is why your tongue is stricken. And if you do not speak, how can it be true confession? And yet, and yet, she thinks. This ache inside her that is a wish for confession, for she would like to be among those asked by Father to his tent at night. Perhaps, she thinks, it is some form of penance, something to do with the amount of sin you accrue each day as the worm turns inside you. Perhaps he thinks it is Mary Eeshal who has the most sin inside her, for more nights than most it is she who goes to him.
Time has folded these clockless days into the one. She thinks, where have the months gone? The rhythm of a new life—prayers at dawn and dusk, the ablutions of the body, repasts in the kitchen. Ducking the strange stares of the men Father has brought to build the new wooden cabins. These daily walks with their baskets of alms, bread baked in the house and how the smell off it would bring down all the birds. Asking for nothing in return but for the forgiveness of God. They have been shouted at and called pietists by strangers and chased off farm paths that Father says belong to God and the common man. They have stepped into mud huts and cabins no doctor would dare enter and not one of them has caught the fever because Father
says the blessing of God is a protection.
She has seen the sleeping dead in the strangest of places, a woman awkward upon town steps, some father and his child propped against a shop door as if waiting for it to open. She has seen her own face in the faces of others and has given thanks to God, to Father, and to the mission. The world is in its last moments for sure, and yet, she thinks. How sometimes it seems that nature breathes a different breath, for amid these end days the earth has bestowed another spring and then a summer green with hope. And she has overheard Robert Boyce talk about matters in the newspaper, how the fields across Ireland have been returned to health and profit. That the potato stores are full this autumn. That the wintering has been brought to a stop. She thinks about this, how Father said there would be more teeth pulled by God’s hand but it seems that nature has defied God and given bounty instead. And now it is October and soon the Samhain and there are turnips hanging again even from some of the godless houses. Mary Collan says the only reason the fields did not rot this year is that their soil is already too rich with blood.
This rock where she likes to sit in private. She knows they think she comes here to pray but instead she comes to sin, to smoke a pipe she has found and keeps hidden knowing Father has forbidden it. She sits with her knees to her chest and pulls tobacco from her pocket. Tamps it and brings it to light. A look towards the trees watching for the gaze of Father.
She dragons smoke out her nose. This rock, she thinks, is a giant’s head jutting the field. There must be a great body buried beneath it, his nose overgrown with moss, an ear lopped off. Perhaps it was lost in some ferocious battle when he was captured in some forgotten century, tied down with rope, buried standing up to his neck, his face sun-baked slowly to rock. Left among an eternity of belling sheep. Watching the shadows of the field for what they might reveal, for sometimes shadows are not what they are but take the forms of what travels unseen, the dark matter of this world that lives in stealth and shapes your future and sometimes they are just what they are, the shadows of clouds, the shadows of tree branches, the shadow of someone coming along the track—it is Mary Warren, the newcomer. Ample Mary Warren, who never knew no trouble, it seems, big-shouldered beneath her shorn hair. Her black gown stretched and struggling to contain her. How her body ripples with all that worry within her. Grace quick-licks her finger to tamp out her pipe.
Breathless Mary Warren says, I dreamt last night of a crow with two black beaks. It was this field here beside the rock where you’re sitting. I’ve come to ask you, Mary Ezekiel, have you seen such a thing? Perhaps you have?
She plucks the lie out of Mary Warren’s piglet face. Something mournful and anguished in her expression.
Mary Warren says, so it is an omen. What do you think it means? Do you think it means the war is coming?
Her voice drops and she looks over her shoulder to where the mission sits obscured by trees.
Mary Warren says, Mary Trellick told Father last week she saw a picture fall from the wall in the house just as she was looking at it. But I was there and it didn’t happen. Father said it meant death was coming. Do you think he knew she wasn’t truth-telling?
Of late, Father has become obsessed with talk of omens, makes them tell of what they have seen. She is growing to hate the hushed voices after evening prayer that issue such lies. Signals in nature that speak of end times. A bird boldly pecking at a window. A dog that howls at an empty field. A green flame in fire. Father has tied Mary Warren to a tree for two wet days to make her see better, because you, Mary Warren, are blind to the signals, and if you don’t learn to see perhaps you will meet the deceiver himself come to tempt you, ask you to leave our mission.
So now she dreams omens instead.
Grace slides off the rock and they stroll hand in hand towards the mission, their arms swinging a lazy pendulum to the open time of the sky.
Mary Warren says, I hope tonight it is I and not Mary Eeshal who gets the call to marry my soul to God.
Of a sudden she lets go the hand of Mary Warren and walks away from her. Watches the gossiping ivy along the wall by the lane, how it leans towards her as if to listen to her thoughts of Father and his always-watching eyes that are also the eyes of hunger. This mystery of why he will not confess her after almost a year. It is because you do not speak, she thinks, because if you speak you will have to lie and he knows what lies hidden in your heart.
She abrades her face with cold water until she numbs the signals of hurt. Now Father has said one must wash twice daily. How can you be ready to meet God if your body is corrupted, clung with filth, God will turn his nose from you. The body should be kept spotless, odorless, the skin smooth, the dirt scrubbed out from under the fingernails, the dirt washed from between the toes, the crevices between the legs kept watered, because better to be clean when you meet God than to be the sinful woman who washes God’s feet with her tears.
She stands with her hair loose and washed to a squeak. Movement behind her and she will not turn to meet the look of Mary Collan, who spurns her still for her long hair, would see her into heaven with that loathsome look, Mary Collan, who has grown fat of late, who cut the hair of newcomer Mary Bunny to bleeding last week. But it is Mary Warren who pulls her by the elbow and stands as usual in her splayfoot and addled expression. She says, quick, the priest is coming up the road.
She turns and sees Robert Boyce goatlike upon the roof cleaning the gutters and how he becomes very still at sight of the priest, his stoop curving down the ladder. The women huddle and cluck but Grace steps past them bold towards the house and stands in the front yard watching the priest’s dark shape, the man spit-faced, fuming into his walk as if marching to face some slaughtering wind, marching through the yard without looking at her and then through the front door without so much as a knock. She ties up her hair and sees Mary Eeshal step into the house.
She knows the priest has come again to remonstrate with the Boyces. Knows what the priest has heard, how in Gort last week Father spoke of a priest who had eaten a child. Twice now she has watched the same priest come to the house, has listened at the window and imagined the shape of the man darkening through the room, gathering them in with his anger, the man’s glistening teeth as he shouts, this giving over your house and field and good name to a man who is nothing but a fraud and a sinner, a defamer, the great lies out his mouth, there is only one true church. You’ll not build a new town here, not a church or a school or a community house, without my say-so.
She watches the priest go back down the road flapping like some blackbird. Watches Robert Boyce stoop out of the house with his prayerful face as if nothing were the matter. Anne Boyce walking backwards through the farmyard fanning grain for the hens, a woman who lives in the shadow of the man, staring into some great loneliness of thought. She has heard whisper that their two boys left for America, that a daughter got the sickness and died soon after, wonders if it is the same priest who administered to her. And there is Father stepping out of the dark behind her eye, stepping towards Robert Boyce and taking his elbow, can hear his thoughts before they pass his mouth, the churches and how they will soon fall, the Satanists in nearby Shanaglish, where the priest drove the first mission out. How the priests and all their money are nothing but the price of sin.
Faint light from a flickering candle paints their faces out of dark. How they kneel and squeeze their eyes as if the closing of your eyes weren’t enough, she thinks, you must squeeze for the hurt that squeezes the worm out. Their hands templed to heaven while the great oven ticks its reminder of hellish warmth. She opens an eye and spies Mary Warren rubbing at a knee and then their eyes meet and share a glance that speaks the same thought, Mary Warren gesturing to where Mary Collan should be but isn’t.
She thinks, three days now since Mary Collan left the wooden cabins and has not been seen at all. It is tipped on every tongue, where she is and what she is doing. She has heard it said that Mary Collan is on a mission for Father. That she is doing penance for all thos
e secret dinners she has been eating. Though harelipped Mary Trellick says she saw her staring out the upstairs window of the farmhouse. Mary Collan, no doubt in the same room you first woke in, eating herself to fat. Woe to wash that woman’s face if you are asked.
The best days begin with a wounded sky, she thinks. The clouds soaked with His blood. She curses the heavy arc of the pump until two pails become seeing eyes of water. In her ears the screams from sleep and she knows what the dead think of her, the dead who by day will not be conjured, this heart full of sin, how you cannot expect to let the beast into your life without becoming a beast yourself. She picks up both pails and carries them across the yard and along the gable side of the house. The mission below in the sloping field seems in this early light to hold darkness and silence to itself as if it were a place of menace. Soon there will be a candle in the window and the women will rise and wash. The pails whisper of careless spillage and it is strange, she thinks, to hear the cart horses in the front yard early out before prayer and then she sees the particular shape of Robert Boyce’s horseman, Henry Good, walking towards the jarvey, which sits coupled to two horses. How the light always strikes Henry Good strangely as if to allow him something private of himself, climbing up onto the jarvey to sit hunched and waiting in the driving seat as if dreaming a painted chariot to war.
Not a sound from both pails as she rests them down, sliding her body to the wall. Reaching her eyes around the corner. The blood in the sky is running to water and the shadows in flight are coming alive out of the house and she knows them as Mary Eeshal and Mary Collan while the shape beside them is Father. They stop before the jarvey and Mary Collan stands with her hands upon her belly and how it is you can suddenly know the things that must remain hidden, and how this coach now will take Mary Collan down the road and into another life. Mary Collan begins to climb onto the jarvey but Mary Eeshal abruptly pulls her back and slaps her on the cheek, says, not before Father, Mary Collan’s mouth opening and closing until her sob is the only word said, a strange animal sound calling the dawn and Father is shushing her, helping her up into the jarvey, Mary Eeshal looking at them with folded arms, Henry Good raising the whip and clucking the horses forward. The face of Mary Collan shaped into grief.