by Anne Emery
I answer that Brennan Xavier Burke is fit to be a priest because of his penitence and true remorse for his failings; his devotion to his calling for over a quarter of a century; his love of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; his celebration of the Holy Eucharist; his ministry to the poor in spirit and body; his love for his fellow man, which, whilst not always self-evident, can be deduced from . . .
Reply to Objection 1: What objection? What? Am I awake now? Was I ever asleep?
Sleep overcame him again.
He tried to shake the whole thing off when he awoke for good. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over the fact that his Scholastic training was so deeply ingrained that he could not even escape it when he went into a dream state. What was it the Jesuits used to say? Give me the child for his first seven years, and I will give you the man.
He headed out for a bit of breakfast but was drawn instead to the Church of St. Augustine and St. John, locally known as the John’s Lane church because of the side street going by it. Brennan had also heard it called the Fenian church, in reference to all the Fenians who had worked on its construction. He was in awe of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe; this was a Gothic revival with soaring arches and brilliant stained-glass windows, some by the local man Harry Clarke. There were twelve statues in niches on the tower, made by James Pearse, father of Pádraig and Willie Pearse, who were numbered amongst the slain patriots of 1916. Brennan stood at the back and blessed himself, making an effort to ensure that his worship was directed to the Divine Architect and not to the architecture.
He approached the magnificent high altar and knelt before it. Bowing deeply, he recited the Confiteor over and over. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. He thought back over his life. Although he was the first of Declan Burke’s four sons, he was the last of those sons that anyone would have suspected of, or credited with, having a vocation. The call came in the form of a cross burned into his chest in the midst of a fire that claimed his closest friend at the time, in New York. Brennan had answered the call. And in spite of it all, after twenty-five years he was still here. He would not trade the priestly life for anything on earth, not the pleasures of the flesh, not the love of a wife, not even . . . a little black-haired, black-eyed baby boy.
Michael
On Thursday afternoon Michael was back at Christy’s. When he saw Eddie Madigan coming through the door, he got up and intercepted him before Madigan made it to the bar.
“How could you do it, Madigan? A brilliant young man like Tim Shanahan, a scholar, a teacher, a priest, now a helpless drug addict wallowing like an animal in his own filth. And others too, young people no doubt, all of them precious in the eyes of God. Peddling drugs to them, getting them hooked.”
“It’s not like that, Father O’Flaherty. That’s not the way it started and that’s not the way it is now.”
“I saw you with my own eyes, injecting the man with what must have been heroin.”
“It was.”
“Well?”
“You’ll have to hear it from Shanahan if you hear it at all. I’ll not be slandering the man in the process of exonerating myself.” Michael shook his head in disgust. “Now let me in so I can indulge my addiction to whiskey along with all the other addicts in this place.”
Michael stepped aside and then, on impulse, left the bar. He couldn’t bring himself to sit and drink with the likes of Madigan. Michael set out for home in Stoneybatter, anger punctuating his steps all the way.
When he got to his room, he sat down to read Chesterton. At first distracted, he finally got into his book. An hour or so passed, then he heard a knock on his door and got up to answer. Tim Shanahan was standing there, scrubbed and immaculate in a black golf shirt and grey pants. Shanahan’s mild blue eyes looked at Michael through his rimless spectacles.
“Tim!”
“Hello, Michael. I found you through Leo Killeen. May I come in?”
“Certainly! Please do.”
“I’d like to talk to you about yesterday.”
“Did Eddie Madigan send you to plead his case for him?”
Tim looked at him blankly, then caught on. “No, no, he didn’t. I haven’t seen him yet today. Though I will later. May I sit?”
“Yes, have a seat. Should I wet the tea?”
“That would be lovely, thank you. And I can’t thank you enough for your help and patience yesterday. You can imagine how ashamed I am, to be seen like that, filthy and disgusting. I’m sorry, Michael. More sorry than I can possibly say.”
“We all have our weaknesses, Tim. All of us. So much the worse when our fellow human beings prey on us for their own —”
Tim held up a hand. “Let me tell you a story, Michael.”
“All right. I’ll get the tea first.”
When they had mugs of tea in front of them at the table, Tim began to speak.
“I want to tell you about a girl I knew in Africa.”
Ah, here it comes, thought Michael. Cherchez la femme!
“She’s about this high.” He put his arm out, indicating a person about four and a half feet tall. “I was working in Togo, in western Africa, running a small parish there. I’m sure it’s dawned on you that I was — I am — a priest.” Michael nodded. “We built a tiny church, a wooden shed really, and the local men built us a steeple. They were great about pitching in and helping after I fell from the roof and broke my leg! It was obvious to everybody there I wasn’t much of a carpenter. Anyway, the church: it wasn’t Chartres, but it was ours! There was an adjoining building, made of corrugated steel, which served as a school for girls. There was already a local academy for the boys. I was the parish priest and principal of the girls’ school. There were two other teachers, a nun named Sister Josephine and a young woman named Rosalie who had completed part of her education degree at Alexandria University. Both were Togolese, as was Father Amegashie, a newly ordained priest who did sort of a circuit around the area. Wonderful young lad. Bright and fearless. Not afraid to stand his ground with the powers-that-be in the region.
“Anyway, the young girl. Sabine. Skin the colour of milk chocolate, great big dark eyes that stared in wonder at the world around her. She had a gap between her two front teeth that made her adorable whenever she had a grin on her face, which was often. She had her hair up in two pigtails high on her head, so they looked like horns. I made the mistake of saying to her, when one of my superiors was visiting, ‘I see you’ve got your devil horns on again today.’ Father Lafitte admonished me for comparing this African child to the fount of all evil. But she got a kick out of it when I said that. I started calling her Beelzebub, which cracked her up because of the sound of it.
“Not only was she sweet and funny, she was a top student at the school. She became a whiz at math, she had a flair for science and experimentation, and she wrote beautifully in her own language and in English. Her composition and her handwriting were excellent. We also taught the students life skills. As out of fashion as it sounds, the girls were taught to cook and sew and care for young children. But we also taught them some accounting, some carpentry, a lot of things that were considered the prerogative of the men and boys. We gave them a smattering of politics and economics. Had to tread carefully there. But the idea was to help the girls grow into capable, independent women who could fend for themselves and resist being dominated and exploited. We weren’t always popular.
“Sabine, as I say, was very good with words. She began to write poems and stories. Said she wanted to write a book. I thought we could put together the kids’ stories and poetry in a volume and publish it. Self-publish it, I mean. Send it away to a printer and then sell the copies to earn a bit of money for the school. The project was going well until it came time to choose an illustration for the cover. As bright as she was, Sabine had no talent as an artist. She was terrible. All the girls were asked to contribute a picture, done in paint or crayo
n, for the cover. We made a contest out of it. Their names were on the back, so you couldn’t tell by looking who had done which picture. Then the girls were to vote on the best one for the cover. Well, some were excellent, some mediocre, and Sabine’s was atrocious. The worst by far. We had them all spread out on a table, so the children could look them over and cast their votes. Sabine kept pointing to hers as the best, and she tried to convince the others. When another little one laughed at the picture and said it was horrible, Sabine pushed her down and ran out of the school.
“But later that day, Sabine came back and said to me, ‘My picture is bad-arsed, banjaxed, God-awful, isn’t it, Father?’
“I started to laugh, couldn’t help it, and made a mental note to be more careful in my speech around the students. Sabine started laughing too. Then she said, ‘But I’m good with letters, right?’ I allowed as how she was. ‘So can I write the title on the front?’ I said she could.
“Well, we got it ready for the printer. I looked it over, checked her title for spelling and all that, and sent it off. Only after it came back did I hold it in a certain light, and look at it a certain way, and discover that she’d scattered letters about that you could barely see. But if you did, they spelled out ‘Beelzebub.’ Jaysus and Mary be good to us, I thought, imagine if the bishop or the head of our mission or somebody sees that, I’ll be crucified. I waited in fear, but nothing happened. And the little divil never said a word, just gave me an angelic smile every time the book was mentioned or passed around. I loved her for it. I loved her anyway. I thought of her as a little sister, almost a daughter.
“Now skip ahead a year or so. I was lying in my bed one night, fast asleep, having a dream. The kind of dream we all have, I’m sure, Father, even — or especially — if we live a celibate life. There was a hand between my legs, and it wasn’t my own. It took me a few seconds to wake up and realize there really was somebody with me. A girl, stark naked. I jumped away from her and saw her face in the light. It was Sabine.”
“Stop right there!” Michael commanded. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. Hearing about this dear little child from a man who loved her as a father. Now the man turned out to be a child molester. And it sounded as if he was about to blame the victim! And he thought Michael would want to hear this pornographic story? He got to his feet and looked down at Shanahan.
“Bear with me, Michael, please!”
“I don’t want to hear any more of this filth. Have you no shame about yourself at all?”
Shanahan stared at him. He looked as if he was about to be sick. Then he got up and bolted from the room without looking again at Michael. He yanked the door open and fled down the stairs. Michael stood in the centre of his room, trembling with anger and disgust.
Michael wasn’t in the mood for the daily boozers at Christy Burke’s, or not for half the contingent anyway, but there was good news, and he didn’t want to be churlish enough not to celebrate it. Well, good news was a relative term in these circumstances. Finn Burke, he who was scheduled for trial several months down the road on charges of fraud and other criminal acts, had been released on bail. And he had invited the Halifax crowd to his house for dinner that evening. Brennan said he would pick up Michael at Christy’s for the party.
So Michael stopped and purchased a nice, though economical, bottle of red wine and proceeded to Christy’s to await Brennan’s arrival. He said hello to Jimmy O’Hearn. There was no sign of Frank Fanning, which was unusual, but it was the other pair — Shanahan and Madigan — that Michael was concerned about. And he was relieved to see they weren’t on the premises. Michael signalled to Sean that he wouldn’t be having anything, and he sat at a table by himself.
Oh. There at a table in the back was Tim Shanahan. Father Shanahan as he was and always would be. Ordination confers an indelible stamp on the man who becomes a priest; no matter what happens after that, no matter what shabby or evil deeds the man commits, that imprint is there for all time. Thou art a priest forever. In this case, it was a man who had taken advantage of a young girl in his care. It was almost incestuous. And if anything happened in that bed, given the child’s age, it was statutory rape. Had Shanahan blurted out his tawdry tale in the hearing of someone at Christy Burke’s? Had the listener been so revolted that he spray-painted lines about guilt and perpetrators on the walls of the pub? But even as low a specimen as he was, Shanahan could not be termed a killer. No doubt Shanahan had destroyed or killed the little girl’s spirit in a sense, but Michael could not imagine the graffiti artist being that sophisticated in his accusations. It was all beyond Michael at the moment, and he wished he could put it out of his mind. He would not be able to recount this squalid story to Brennan; he would feel soiled even repeating it. He’d tell Brennan that Shanahan had some kind of difficulty in Africa. Period.
And there he was, drinking whiskey, and he had obviously had a skinful. He was with a man and a woman. He spotted Michael. Would there now be a scene of drunken belligerence? Michael was all too familiar with that scenario, people who couldn’t hold their liquor and revealed themselves as mean drunks. Michael turned away and hoped for the best.
Things were quiet at the Shanahan table for a few minutes, then Michael heard Tim’s voice. He looked over, but Tim was not addressing Michael. He was regaling his companions with poetry, and Michael could see a pink bundle on the woman’s lap; a tiny fist emerged from a blanket. The woman brought it to her mouth and kissed it. In profile the woman bore a striking resemblance to Shanahan. A younger sister? As Michael tuned in to Tim’s words, he recognized the poem by Yeats, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” and Michael had to admit he had never heard it recited so beautifully:
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
How could a man like Shanahan make Yeats’s poetry come alive in such a way; how could he pray so eloquently for a little baby girl, when his own history with a young girl might be counted among the storms and screams that Yeats saw as threats to his daughter as she grew?
Michael decided to wait for Brennan outside. He got up and left the pub without a word to anyone.
Chapter 8
Brennan
Brennan borrowed his cousin’s car to transport the crowd to Finn’s house. After adjusting the radio to his liking — no sooner had he started than he had to come to a screeching halt to change channels and spare himself the unbearable sound of a singer whose voice cracked in a jarring attempt to switch to a falsetto — he made the short trip to Christy’s to pick up Michael O’Flaherty. Michael climbed aboard, and they headed for the convent, where they were to meet Monty, Maura MacNeil, and the children.
Mike was uncharacteristically quiet in the car. A few minutes passed before he said, “So, will you be reporting to Finn on your investigation tonight?”
“I’m not sure, Mike. I guess it will depend on whether the opportunity presents itself. Tonight or later; we’ll see. I’ve got all the bits of information stored in my head, such as they are. Have you picked up anything new since you spoke with Bill McAvity?”
“Em, no, well, not much of anything.”
One glance at his passenger told Brennan that Michael O’Flaherty had something on his mind.
“What is it?”
“Just something I heard. That Tim Shanahan had difficulties in Africa.”
“What sort of difficulties?”
“I don’t know. Not really.”
Whatever it was, Mike knew and didn’t want to discuss it. Well, Brennan was not about to interrogate the man on the way to a dinner pa
rty. It could wait.
But Mike spoke up again. “I got the impression there might be drugs involved.”
“How do you mean?”
“That Shanahan may have a drug problem.”
“What makes you think that?”
“It’s just that, em, you know what Bill McAvity told me about Madigan — that there are rumours he was taking payoffs from drug dealers.”
“Right.”
“It could be true, that he is involved in the drug trade.”
“I see. And Shanahan? Where does he fit in?”
“Could perhaps be using drugs.”
“Supplied by Madigan.”
“Could be.”
“What class of drugs are we talking about?” He looked over at Michael again. The man looked miserable. “Something more than a bit of weed on the weekends, I take it.”
“I suspect so, yes.”
The Collins-MacNeils were waiting outside when Brennan and Michael arrived, and little Normie waved excitedly when she spotted the two priests in the car. A dear little girl she was, with her auburn curls and beautiful hazel eyes. She wore a delicate pair of eyeglasses, and Brennan was well aware that it was considered indelicate to mention them. The baby, Dominic, was fast asleep in his mother’s arms.
Women and children were given priority for the available seat belts; Dominic had a special seat of his own, which his mother rigged up in the back. Michael and Monty squeezed into the car, and they proceeded to the dinner party.