He’d watched as his mother was given Last Rites, had held her hand and prayed silently along with the priest’s audible words. Had felt life pull slowly away, like the tide going out from the shore and finally retreating altogether.
In the years that followed he’d lost himself in the Church, been tutored by Jesuits ablaze with their faith. He’d even considered Holy Orders himself, had wanted to burn alive in the crucible of ecstasy and agony that love of God seemed to promise. Had found himself one night, in a fit of adolescent passion, clinging to the gates of a monastery, certain he’d found his destiny and aware on a level he couldn’t acknowledge that he did not possess the key nor the character to open those gates. Still, in the ignorance of youth, he’d pursued the star. His mentor, a gentle man named Father Lawrence Loyola O’Donnell, had told him to pray carefully, to fast and to receive an honest answer from God, even if it wasn’t the one he wanted.
He had done that, prayed from early morning until shadows of evening had crept across the chapel he knelt in and the flames of the candles seemed to stretch into a grotesque thinness. Had waited in the silence for God to answer, had searched the faces of the gaudy saints, John of God with his mad eyes, Christopher, figment of religious myth, Mother Mary with her blank face and Christ with the omnipresent streams of blood coating his pale body. Nausea, thick and cloying rose in him, bile tasting like hot, salted blood tinged the back of his throat and tongue, he’d run from the church, desperate for fresh air and anything to escape the pain that had risen and clenched like a vise around the breadth of his head. He’d thrown up outside, retching in the grass until the muscles in his throat and around his ribs felt torn and burning.
Father Lawrence had found him there and brought him cool water to drink and a cloth to wipe his face with. And told him gently, kindly that whatever destiny awaited him, it was not to be found within the walls of the Church. The Church was not, Father Lawrence had said, a place to hide from whatever it was about the world that scared you.
He had truly listened in the chapel, had stilled his heart and mind and cells and synapses to a whisper and had listened with every straining, yearning bit of humanity that was in him. Yes, he had prayed as well, carefully at first, softly, so as not to alarm God nor himself and then finally into a silence so terrifying it had made him dizzy with ardor. As the silence lengthened with the shadows, ardor became panic.
‘Why this yearning, why? How did molecules come to this, be they stardust or not? Be more,’ he had prayed, ‘be more than what I am, what earthly gods I serve, be more than the sum of my memories, hopes and fears. Be more than the sum of all that is. Remain the infinite mystery if you must, but BE MORE than the equation of simple human yearning. Sweet Jesus BE MORE.
Where, where was the mercy in loving that which was mortal, that which broke, for without the more there was no mercy, no sense, neither rhyme nor reason.
And yet where was the mercy in not loving that which was mortal? For a flame could burn in its moment even if seconds later there was only smoke to know it by.
‘What Lord,’ he’d cried silently, ‘what of pain and terror and loneliness?’ But if MORE than it would also be the more of difficult things, the unsightly, the unseemly, the lowly of heart and mind.
He wondered after if he had asked too much, or if to not ask these things was faith. There had been no still, small voice in the darkness, no gentle finger skimming his face. Was it so very much to want that whisper at the gate, to hear the leaves rustle and know the sound of God’s music in their dance? To want that simple voice in the night that Julian of Norwich had once heard, the one that gave no absolutes but neither took them away.
‘This I am. I am what you love. I am what you enjoy. I am what you serve. I am what you long for. I am what you desire. I am what you intend. I am all that is.’
He had learned that day in the chapel that to search for God was to break your heart again and again and again. To accept that healing would not come in this life.
He’d gone to ground after that, a fox searching for the hole that would make him safe. Tried for comfort in words, as he’d always done and found even the masters of pen and wit had no answers, only plaintive cries, swallowed on the universal wind as surely as his own.
Now years later, after the loss of children, wife, father, he no longer searched, for he was afraid that someday he might actually find an answer and would be unable to bear it. Rilke had been right, the pain had not outworn the garden, because the garden was built not to care, to encompass infinity and as much pain as man was capable of.
And now this girl, holding out hope in her hand, believing he’d the courage to take it. All angels are terrible, but this one was not fruit, she was flower, easily bruised, felled and blighted by winter’s frost. He could not partake of the blossom without destroying it. As much as it appalled him, he would have to open the cup of his hands and let the wind take her where it would. Even if it was to the heart of the fire.
He supposed, in the end that he was, indeed, still a good Catholic boy.
In the morning, they played a comedy of manners, all politeness, walking in measured circles around each other. There were a number of things that had to be done in order to make the place ready for another long absence. Pamela disappeared down to the village for the better part of the afternoon, coming back and finding him in the garden, shearing the heads off of the roses, knowing he’d not be back in the fall to do it.
She was, despite the heat of the day, pale and shaking with cold. He paused in his beheading, a chill radiating from the tip of his spine through the sweat his labors had produced.
“What is it?” he asked, knowing somehow that it had nothing to do with the events of the previous day.
She shook her head, mutely handing him a rolled up paper from underneath her arm. He took it and knew with every fiber of his being that he didn’t want to see what it said, that somehow the smoke he’d been smelling all summer was about to burst into a conflagration he wouldn’t be able to direct or control. He opened it.
Before him was a sight he’d become all too used to over the preceding months. A picture of the beatific Reverend Lucien Broughton, managing to gleam even from the grain of newsprint. It was, unusually though, a small picture, a posed headshot. It was the photo opposite that stilled his heart for a beat and when it resumed beating, it was in a jagged and painful rhythm. There stood his father, in one of the last photos taken, face turned away from the camera though not far enough to disguise the terrible melancholy that resided there. A picture he’d taken himself on the last Christmas they’d had together, two sad and lonely men trying to pretend holidays meant a thing to them anymore. He didn’t need to read the headlines, he already had a very good idea what they said, but of course he did.
‘Questionable Death? Coroner’s Office to Re-Open Investigation into the Death of Wealthy Businessman and Politician James Kirkpatrick III.’
‘Something about the whole situation seemed a bit funny from the start,’ says the Reverend Lucien Broughton, currently seeking to become member of Parliament in the district the deceased James Kirkpatrick had represented from April of 1962 until his untimely death in early March of this year. ‘It seems as if the public was never given an adequate explanation for his death, a man relatively young and in good health, tragic yes, but, accidental, well that remains to be seen,’ continued the Reverend Broughton. ‘He was a much loved public figure and I feel that the people of his district and this city deserve an honest answer to what actually happened.’
Questions about the death of James Kirkpatrick have been swirling since his death in a hunting accident; however his son, now Lord Kirkpatrick, assured the press and media that it was nothing more than an accident. Strange, perhaps, for a man whose skill with a gun was impressive but not entirely out of the range of possibility. Now, however, disturbing facts are coming to light that cast doubt on the story...’
> Jamie, body cold and rigid, scanned the rest of the story and saw that it gave details of his father’s life, medical and psychological history, relationships and then went on to chronicle his own woes. He felt a cold trickle begin to build into a hard ball of ice in his stomach. There were things in this article, half-hints and insinuations, which alluded to particulars no one outside of himself and his father could possibly have known about. Unless someone had done a lot of homework, had set out to lay a trap, had rifled his papers, fine-tooth combed their business dealings for the last three decades and searched his home. Someone who had bided their time until it was beyond his powers of damage control.
“Dear Christ,” he breathed out, head reeling, pruning shears slipping to the ground and rolling away into the soil.
“That’s not all, you’d best look at page three,” Pamela said miserably.
He flipped the page over, wondering what grimy detail they hadn’t thoroughly exhumed and examined on page one. His question was answered in a black and white, 3X5 picture. Taken on the night of his father’s funeral it showed he and Pamela by the fire, at the precise moment he’d leaned against her in exhaustion and despair. The pose, however, indicated anything but despair.
‘Mistress of the Castle?’ read the caption. The accompanying article made no pretense at being respectable and proceeded in five paragraphs to dissect his love life, his marriage, Colleen’s defection to a nunnery and speculated with outright lewdness about the whys and wherefores of the girl who’d taken up residence in his home. Including a bit on what was snidely referred to as the ‘summer love nest in Scotland’.
Fury and fear jostled for primacy in his head. The words themselves were bad enough, censure, ruination, defamation... and the list went on of the damages the tone of the article could and, he admitted, would wreak. But there was something else, a feeling sliding blackly under the words themselves that told him much more than business dealings and standing in the community were at stake. A fool, he knew, should have seen some of this coming. You couldn’t take a young, beautiful girl under your roof and expect people not to speculate and outright accuse you of a wide variety of perversities. There had been bound to be whispers about his father’s death as well, gunshots to the head caused supposition and suspicion by their very nature.
But the pictures—who on earth had taken one of Pamela and himself that night? And the other one of his father gave him real cause for worry as it had been in his desk, a private moment of memory, a melancholy father caught on film by an equally melancholy son. Someone had been through his home, had spied on him with malevolent intent for some months now it would seem. The question that begged to be answered was who? He thought, with a chill, dropping sensation in his stomach, that he might know the why all too well.
“What do we do?” Pamela, still pale but less visibly shaken, was looking at him with questioning eyes.
He took a moment before answering, but when at last he spoke his voice was calm and firm, “We go back to Belfast, find out who’s behind this and then dig in for a long and ugly fight.”
It was, at least, a place to start.
Chapter Thirteen
Journey Without a Map
Take a break Casey, there’s someone out back waitin’ to see ye.”
Casey, putting down a trayload of freshly cleaned glasses, nodded, paused behind the bar to get his cigarettes and with only a mild curiosity as to the identity of his guest headed out to the back of Declan O’Ryan’s pub.
The early evening light was bright in comparison to the dimly lit interior of the pub and he took a moment to adjust, sliding a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it by feel alone.
“Hello,” he heard a quiet voice say, a voice he’d spent all summer remembering and forgetting.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said gruffly, eyes adjusting and taking in the sight in front of him.
“Yes, it’s me,” Pamela said, voice in response to his own, less soft. “Pat told me I could find you here.”
“Come to say goodbye an’ fare thee well, have ye? Could have saved yerself the expense of bus money, the papers pretty much said it for ye.” He sat on an empty milk crate, eyeing her dispassionately through a haze of smoke.
“No,” she said warily, “I came to see you, I promised I would.”
“Aye well,” he took a long pull on his cigarette, the next words coming out in a slipstream of blue, “ye’ve kept yer promise, so ye can go back to the other side of the tracks with a clear conscience. Ye’ll have to excuse me I’ve inventory to do.” He stood grinding his cigarette out and disposing of the butt in a slimy looking bucket.
“Do you believe everything you read?” she asked as he turned his back to her and reached for the door handle.
He stopped, gripping the handle tightly wishing he could just open it and be done with her. Christ he needed this conversation like he needed a hole in the head. Another hole in the head he revised, as he turned to face her once more.
“Fools generally believe what they want to, whatever’s most handy to their own wants an’ needs,” he said coolly, “an’ I am no fool.”
“I never thought you were, though, I’m wondering,” her brows drew into two delicate lines, “if I’m going to have to amend that opinion.”
He stepped towards her, all the confusion of the last week coalescing itself into a tidy knot of anger. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“That if you allowed a bunch of half-baked suppositions and filthy innuendoes change your mind about me then perhaps you are a fool and not worth the fare it took to get me down here. What exactly did you learn from those stories that you didn’t already know?”
Throwing accusation into the fray didn’t help Casey’s anger. “Ye come here accusin’ me? Yer the talk of the town, you an’ yer gentleman friend on the hill. Ye told me ye came to this country because of childhood memories but ye came here for him, didn’t ye? He’s yer memories.”
She met his fury squarely, “Yes, I came here for him, because of him.”
“I knew it,” he said, shaking his head. “Well then I don’t see that there’s anymore to say.”
“No,” she said her voice suddenly sad, “perhaps there isn’t after all.”
“Well then,” he said awkwardly, “I’m busy as ye can see, I’d best get back in.”
“Yes, I’m busy myself,” she smiled, a bright, slivered fake smile, “I have to find a new place to live and I’ve only got started.”
He was at the entry, had the knob turned when she spoke her last words and he leaned his head against the door and closed his eyes.
“So that’s it, is it? Ye had yer summer with him, threw yerself at his head and got turned down stone cold. Am I gettin’ the picture clearly here?”
“Yes,” she said in a tight voice.
“An’ so now ye thought ye’d come an’ I’d welcome ye with open arms.” There was a resounding silence behind him. “Aye well isn’t that rich? Ye’d think I was no more than a dog on his doorstep for ye to kick or kiss dependin’ on yer whim,” he turned back to her, knowing his emotions were there for her to see plainly but not caring, “an’ ye know the saddest bit is that like that dog I’m happy to see ye, I’m grateful for whatever ye throw my way. I’m willin’ to take the scraps off someone else’s plate an’ make a meal of it.” He rubbed a hand over his face, bristles of his whiskers rasping against the palm. “This is what I’m reduced to an’ I can’t say I care much for the feel of it.”
“I came because of him, I’m still here because of you,” she said quietly, pale beneath the tan that dusted her skin gold in the fading light.
Casey let out a long and frustrated exhalation of breath, “Christ, girl what the hell do ye expect me to say to that?”
“I don’t expect you to say or do anything,” she responded, “only believe me when I say that I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you but I
had to know where I stood with him.”
“Is that meant to comfort me?” he asked, sarcasm heaped neatly over each syllable.
“No.”
“Well I’ll give ye top marks for honesty,” he gave a low laugh, “but not for much else.”
“Fair enough.”
He shook his head, nonplussed by this girl. Her honesty took him off guard, left him open to all sorts of confusion and doubt. Just her presence here was enough to give him all the signs he needed, to tell him the truth that was written on this particular page of his life. Pinwheeling senses, jellied knees, cascades of stars, difficulty breathing and a complete and utter lack of logic presiding in his brain.
“I really must get back to work,” he said, the words difficult and forced, feeling hard and stripping to his throat.
She nodded, not turning away, not walking off into the evening air the way she was supposed to.
“Alright,” he said in defeat, “I’ve got to make a short trip this Saturday, it’s a trip I meant to make alone, but if ye’d like to come, I think I can manage the company.” It was he knew, a less than gracious offer, but the rest of his suffering senses had made him angry.
“That would be grand,” she said, tipping forward on her toes and kissing him on the corner of his mouth.
He watched her walk off, mindlessly mesmerized by her thoroughly female undulations. He’d an uneasy feeling that she hadn’t had the slightest doubt of the outcome of their meeting.
Connemara sat by the sea. An ancient, misted landscape, marked, pitted, scored and scarred, an old woman settling down hard on her bones.
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