And they sang songs for her and Jim, and Jim wrote down the words and vowed he would sing them in Uncle Sharkey’s pub on Third Avenue in Manhattan.
That’s when they found out that Jim had a fine singing voice. A cousin went for his accordion and returned on the run, still strapping it on. Jim sang “The Rose of Tralee” for them to loud applause and then they wanted him to sing some American songs, ones that they didn’t know. So he sang “Shenandoah,” much to their delight, and they made him sing it over and over until they all had it by heart.
In that happy din, Kathleen was sitting by the fire to chase the chill, talking with the women about babies and drinking more tea, when an eight-year-old girl called Teresa put her guileless hands in Kathleen’s lap and said, “Will you name the baby Brendan if it’s a girl?” and two older girls behind her giggled with glee.
And as Kathleen laughed too, she felt another twinge, a sharp one, and for the first time fought back panic.
“They say you have the second sight and all,” said the girl.
“Who says I do?”
“Ah, they’re all talking about it, me ma and the others. Do you have the second sight?”
“I don’t know. What is it?”
“You can see things no one else can. You can see into the future and you can see pookas and fairies and hear the banshee and you can see the Magus, they say.”
“The Magus.” Kathleen put her hand on the girl’s coal-dark hair. “What’s the Magus?”
“He’s a—why, he’s the Magus … a spirit that looks like a priest with red hair and a big dog with big teeth that comes around if you don’t go to bed when you’re told.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
Teresa shook her head. “Oh, no, no. Only if you have the second sight.”
“What does the Magus do?”
“Why—he just goes around, that’s all.”
“Is he looking for something?”
Teresa looked at the fire for an answer. “Dunno. He just is, that’s all. They say he lost his map and can’t get home until he finds it. Did you ever hear the banshee wail?”
“No. Doesn’t the banshee wail when someone dies?”
“Yes.” Teresa shuddered and giggled.
“Did you ever hear the banshee wail, Teresa?”
The little girl shook her head. “Only if you have the second sight. No one else can hear the banshee. And she only wails for important people—kings and such.”
“I hope I don’t hear her.”
“You probably won’t. You have to be pure Irish to hear the banshee.”
“Well, I’m pure Irish.”
“No, no. You’re a Narrowback. You’re from America.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Can you sing a song for me? Something American with Indians in it?”
“They do go on, missus. The children, I mean.” He was a man in his late fifties, slight with thinning hair and a kind face and whiskery eyebrows.
Kathleen smiled at him. “Are you from the bus?”
“Oh, yes, missus. The bus.” A load of Irish tourists had crowded into the already packed pub and had immediately fallen into conversation with Jim’s relatives.
“Are you all off somewhere? On a holiday perhaps?” Kathleen could not help smiling at his mirthful face.
“Yes, missus. We’re all from a little village up the way a bit. We came to see the Burren here in County Clare. We were thinking about going out to Arans but the water was too rough. So we visited some of the old churches. You might say we’re amateur archaeologists.”
“Do you farm for a living?”
“Oh, no, missus. I’m a schoolteacher. I teach mathematics and Irish history.”
“Just Irish?”
“Is there any other kind?” He smiled at her again and the mirth was infectious. “Are these all your relatives, missus?”
“Yes.”
“You could start your own pub.”
“In a way we have. The pub keeper is my husband’s third cousin.”
“Dear God. An Irish gold mine. It’s better than a rich wife.”
He turned his head and looked down at the corner of the bar. Some of the men from the bus and the bus driver himself were talking politics in a huddle around an old man who spoke to the beat of his own forefinger. Each time he finished a sentence they would all raise truculent eyes to scan the other faces, then return again to the finger.
“There will be a quarrel soon if we don’t leave,” the man said.
Kathleen smiled at him. “Is this pub on your archaeological tour?”
The man, she realized, was quietly laughing at her question. “What a fine idea. I must make a note of that—a tour of all the historical pubs in Ireland.” He nodded at a woman chatting with the pub keeper. “Mrs. Garrity needed to use the public loo—and we all came into wait for her.”
Kathleen smiled at him. “But wasn’t that some time ago?”
“Depends on whose watch you’re using. I’d say we haven’t been here half long enough. Everyone’s in a hurry these days and old Ireland is in her winding sheet. We’re all very American now. Narrowbacks we’ve become. No more time for the amenities or for fun. Japanese factories all over the place. Everyone getting cars. Builders’ estates all over the country. Suburbs. In Ireland, suburbs. Dear, dear God.”
“I saw you listening to the little girl’s talk of the Magus. Do you know something about that?”
“Oh, yes, missus. The Magus is an eternal wanderer. He’s looking for a map that will take him back where he belongs.”
“Back? Back where?”
“Don’t know, missus. They say when he finds it, it will be the end of the world.”
She got to bed at last. The women had started it; they said the color had drained from her face and she had to rest for the baby’s sake, and finally they made Jim take her back to the cottage. That broke up the whole party, and pretty soon there was the sound of slamming car doors while other people ghosted away on bicycles. Inside, the yawning pub keeper counted the take in his till. A grand night entirely.
Then she lay in her bed while Jim, who was keyed up, wrote letters home. “Only four more days” was the last thing he said to her as she drifted off to sleep.
It had been a long day and she had made herself overtired, and as sleep claimed her her mind swarmed with the cries of the shrike, the babies’ tombstones, the Magus, the unsettling talk of the second sight and the banshee.
It was late, maybe three in the morning, when it woke her: the most unearthly shriek of grief she’d ever heard. Extraordinarily loud, outside the cottage. Even the loudest call of the shrike was just a faint suggestion of it. She turned her head and looked at Jim. In the streaming moonlight he was sound asleep.
The shriek came again. The terrible grief in it made tears spring to her eyes as the voice fell away into a low keening sob. It sounded as though it was closer. Jim never stirred.
Again it sounded, right under her window, a numbing, piercing cry that trailed off into a keen again. She slipped out from under the quilt and went to the window.
In full moonlight, below on the roadway, a gaunt woman with a starveling’s face, unkempt hair, bare feet and a tattered gown raised her head and looked grief-stricken into Kathleen’s eyes and emitted another heartbreaking cry. Then she stepped into the shadows of a tree. She was gone. As Kathleen settled down in the chair to watch for her, the first labor pangs doubled her over.
Agnes came up just after the water broke.
“She’ll never make it to the hospital,” she told Jim. “Dear God, it’s quick. She’ll have it right here in this bed.”
Kathleen tried to sit up. “Hospital. We have to get to the hospital.”
“You’ll be a mother long before you get there, darling,” Agnes said. “Lie back. I’ve delivered many a baby in my time. More than two dozen were born in this bed alone.”
Kathleen cried out with pain and pulled her hair.
“Easy does it,
” Agnes said, studying her watch. “Go with the contractions. You have to help.”
“Who died?” Kathleen asked suddenly.
“Who died where?” Agnes asked.
“Here. In the house.” Kathleen felt the cry of pain torn from her throat. There was a prolonged series of contractions now. “I heard the banshee wail.”
Agnes nervously went to the window and looked without hope for the doctor.
Brendan Davitt, weight six and a half American pounds, arrived twenty minutes before the doctor did.
Dr. Dunn was a smiling, red-faced man. “What was your hurry?” he asked Kathleen. “You should have waited to have him in the hospital. Did you know Ireland has the finest maternity hospitals in the world, bar none? It’s true, thanks to the Irish Sweepstakes.”
They put Baby Brendan naked on the quilt beside his mother and examined him.
“Oh, he’s beautiful, Kathleen,” Aunt Agnes said. “Tan as toast. Curly black hair like his father.”
“He’s a Davitt,” said Jim. “Look at those feet.”
“He should be baptized quick as spit,” Agnes murmured. “I never heard of a banshee wailing at a birth before.” Aunt Agnes held the baby in her arms. “Welcome to the world, Brendan Davitt. God knows, you will need all the luck you can get.”
Kathleen lay in the bed for five days. She had plenty of milk, and Baby Brendan took it in greedily as if he were in a race to grow up. The doctor visited her every afternoon, and Agnes came in and out all day as though she was watching for something. In the afternoons she took tea in the bedroom with Kathleen. And each afternoon she raised the question of baptism with Kathleen.
“When I get up,” Kathleen insisted. “What is the rush? He’s in good health, isn’t he?”
Aunt Agnes would only lapse into silence.
One afternoon, after tea, Aunt Agnes stood on the stair landing, holding Kathleen’s teacup to the sunlight, trying to read the leaves. And Kathleen saw her.
“What did you see?”
“Hmmmm?”
“In the cup. My tea leaves. What did you see?”
Agnes sat on the edge of the bed. “I knew a woman once in these parts who had the second sight and she would read tea leaves and she showed me a little about it. And for fun I can see some things, but these leaves, I can’t read them. And I shouldn’t even tell you about it for fear of frightening you. But, well, your baby—there’s shooting stars and these great upheavals in the universe. Some momentous event and I’m not competent to read it. Maybe you can … you’ve the second sight. Do you have any sense of seeing the future?”
“I don’t have the second sight.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t know it.”
Kathleen turned her face away and sobbed. “I saw the baby impaled on a thorn by a butcher-bird.”
“Oh, dear God.”
It was difficult to say who first thought of the monastery. Or even why. It just became accepted that the monks would baptize Brendan Davitt. And one fine Sunday, a few days before the Davitts flew back to America, several carloads trooped to the monastery for the baptism.
The monks were a strange order. They were mendicants who wandered the earth, solitaries who begged for their daily bread and spent their time meditating and praying. They slept wherever they were admitted, usually among the poor and the pariahs in the skid rows and tenderloins and cribs of Europe, America and Asia. Periodically they would return to their monastery in Ireland for communion, confession and moral restoration, and in the footsteps of Jesus, they vowed never to ride in any vehicle except ships. They wandered the earth on foot only. They wore distinctive cowled cassocks, made of heavy black wool with a white wool cross from shoulder to shoulder and chin to shoe tops.
They were said to still practice ancient Druid rituals, and because of their extensive travels over many years, they were adept at all the religious practices of India and China. The monks were regarded as religious knights-errant, doing battle with the spiritual evil that most men professed no longer to believe in. The Irish in the region said the monks could see into your soul and tell what kind of a person you were.
The monastery itself stood on a headland, high above the sea, where the wind never stopped blowing, a great craggy stone affair hammered and chiseled from the rocky cliff itself. The stones were constantly wetted by the bursting surf that thrashed without end against the base of the cliff—emerald-green water covered with white spume, rising and falling forever. Overhead, like a living crown, seabirds circled—gulls, guillemots and kittiwakes—constantly calling and diving.
The monks seemed quite pleased to be performing a baptism, delighted in fact with the visitors, and six of them came out of the monastery to greet the christening party. One, Brother Mark, took Brendan in his arms, and clucking his tongue, he carried him inside.
A monk asked Kathleen, “Truly, is it Brendan you’ll name him? Marvelous. Brendan was a monk and he’s a patron saint, a great adventurer. And although the Italians dispute it, Brendan sailed to America long before Columbus. And here’s another Brendan going to America. Such an appropriate name.”
How severely Oriental everything was inside. How compact and functional. There was no clutter anywhere. As the monks walked ahead of the baptism party along a dark corridor, they passed in and out of shafts of sunlight. Everything was pared down to the essentials—the perfect setting for a group of men lost in thought.
Brother Mark and another monk led them into the chapel, and beside the altar they laid Brendan on a hand-carved wooden table and opened his swaddlings.
“Oh, my,” murmured Brother Mark.
The other monk inhaled sharply. “A purple aura.”
“Fetch Father Joseph. Quickly.”
Brother Mark turned and looked at the baptismal font. There stood a silver bucket, holding holy water, and a silver aspergillum with a wooden handle. Then he glanced at the baptism party. “A moment more.” At the doorway, in silence, a knot of monks had hastily gathered as word spread through the monastery. They stared at the baby.
Father Joseph arrived, a middle-aged man whose shaven pate made his brown eyes stand out from his pale face. He crossed the chapel in long swinging strides to the baby and picked him up. “Who is the father? Please come with me. Brother Mark will take down the particulars from the mother.” And he strode out of the room, followed by several monks and Jim Davitt.
They entered a small room, with three narrow windows let into the stone wall. In the middle of the room was a round stone pillar with a flat top about three feet high. Hanging on the walls were sprays of mistletoe.
Father Joseph laid the baby on the stone table and opened the swaddling.
“It’s true!” the other monks said. “A purple aura!”
“Dear God in heaven. Such a beautiful creature.”
“It’s a miracle he’s still alive.”
“Satan will murder him in his sleep.”
“Shhhhhh!” Father Joseph held a silencing hand up. “Prepare the pentacle.” Then he turned to Jim Davitt. “Your son has a purple aura.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Every human being has an aura. Most are earth color, browns, tans, dark yellows. Yours is tan. Angels have a blue aura.” He watched Jim Davitt suppress a smirk. “The aura of demons is red. I see doubt on your face. I must tell you that your son is in grave danger. And that you can truly believe.”
Davitt stopped smirking. “How? What does a purple aura mean?”
“Enormous benevolence. A bonny happy child. Only one or two purple auras are born in a lifetime. But no child with such an aura has lived for more than a few days.”
“Why?”
“For reasons unknown to us, Satan cruelly kills infants born with a purple aura. It is a miracle he has not found this baby.”
Stunned, Jim Davitt stood turning this over in his mind as he watched two monks chalk a circle on the stone tabletop.
“There is a way to alter the color of an aura. But it is only
temporary. I can’t say how long, a few years, a decade. Possibly longer. But I don’t think the process can be repeated. We know so little about these matters. When Baby Brendan’s aura begins to turn purple again, you will have to cloister him from the world and hope that Satan doesn’t find him.”
“But how will I know when his aura is changing? I can’t see anything. How can you?”
“Training. We will keep watch over him. When the aura becomes purple again, we will take him to a cloister for concealment. I am sorry to present this tragedy to your family. If you’ll be guided by me in this matter, you should never mention a word of this to anyone, not even your wife. And I would not tell Brendan himself until he’s of an age to make mature judgments. Children have a way of telling secrets.”
Jim Davitt stood in a daze. “I’m not sure I can take all of this seriously.”
“If you don’t believe me, it is your son who will pay.”
Jim Davitt waited in the corridor as monks hurried in and out of the round room. Several times he heard Brendan cry, and he was tempted to push his way into the room and carry his son off. Finally, Father Joseph stepped into the corridor. “For the time being he is safe. Let’s baptize him now.”
The christening party was a great event. Everyone gathered at Aunt Agnes’s cottage. Cars crowded into the farmyard and lined both sides of the narrow road. The homemade poteen in jugs and the bottles of whiskey and stout flowed with pots of hot tea and the house was filled with the babble of Irish country talk. And the women gathered around the baby and admired his strong limbs and delicate features and the beautiful hand-crocheted christening dress that was at least a hundred years old. Aunt Agnes had put fresh green ribbons in it. But with furtive eyes and lowered voices, they stood in small groups and talked about the strange events, and their whole tone was more like a wake than a christening.
At last, when the accordion was brought into the large kitchen, people began to dance in their heavy shoes, while the women put out food on a long wooden trestle table in the yard behind the house.
And Jim Davitt looked down at his son in the cradle and put his forefinger into the baby’s small fist. He thought about facing death at any instant. Why would a fiend kill an infant?
The Monk Page 4