Easter

Easter

There where the water is as green as the green and blue as the blue of a child’s finger painted seascape. There where it laps against jagged rocks and shiny pebbles smoothed by ages of sea kissing earth. There where, in occasional calm pools, white foam slowly gathers and then just as slowly vanishes again. There where long slimy water weeds entangle and untangle and precariously hold to floating sticks, only to lose grip and be pulled away and under by restless currents. There where few would care to rest a moment or look or notice, for the sky is grey today and the horizon threatens storm, and this spot never was a’welcoming even on the best of days. There like a sudden birth the boy broke through the waters, his head thrown back in wild gasp to drink his fill of salty air and his eyes shot wide at the welcoming sky–a sky that seemed to laugh with him. He pushed his way towards the shore and began undressing himself of the sea: now his shoulders, now his chest, now his privates, now his knees, now the last licking of waves against his heel. Naked and shivering, he looked again at Clew Bay and all those islands, especially Clare. He felt the swell of peculiar joy.

He wondered if this was akin to what Reek Sunday pilgrims felt after climbing Croagh Patrick. What they felt just after reaching the chapel atop the mountain where at last they could rest their torn feet and be filled by the body and blood of the Lamb before descending again into the world reborn, even if just for a while. But no. This was different. Different as different could be.

He had come to reckon various sins as being of a kind together, falling somewhere on a spectrum ranged from dull ash to soot black. Each kind required a particular penance for the whitewash of the soul, and only a priest understood the mysterious calculating of it. But through a careful ledger of sin and assigned penance he managed on his own to unlock something of the secret to redemption. He’d easily figured the simple math of venal sins. No amount of adding to them troubled you so much that the subtraction of a confessional wouldn’t find you sleeping sound as a babe that very night. And he understood the complex algebra of mortal sin that left you restless and fearful to confess but more fearful still of eternal fire; these often had hidden variables that still needed balancing out after confession. Maybe in novenas, or mortifications, or fasting, or even crawling up a holy mountain on a holy day and praying to Ireland’s holiest saint to cast out the serpents and throw that silver bell to scare away the possessing demon.

But he had discovered in himself a worse sin still, one you couldn’t calculate around. A sin so unique in its kind that you had to search out its names, only to find that you dare not utter them for fear the priest might just die at the hearing or that fire might rain down or that you’d turn to a pillar of salt. And no novenas purged it, nor fastings, nor vigils, nor acts of contrition, nor even pilgrimages up Croagh Patrick.

His teeth grinned and chattered as the cold breeze began to act on his second skin of wet. He dried himself and briskly rubbed his hands together, but was yet unready to be completely warm. He enjoyed the ache of his clamoring jaw, and the sore of his arms and legs–his muscles a fire wrapped in ice. He wanted to remain a little longer just as he was and he didn’t care if a soul should stumble by and find him there, cold and naked as the sea. He hugged himself tight against the shake of his bones and watched as a group of frenzying gulls squabbled and pecked over a piece of scavenged flesh.

He thought about his many failed repentances, known to none save God and the similarly fallen–anonymous figures like himself mutually discovered in shadowy hidden places. The others only saw his increasingly strict observances, and his ever more mournful countenance. The mark, they believed, of some growing sanctity and a process of discernment that would end in holy orders. Already the nosier women of Saint John’s vied with one another to influence his choice of vocation. Mrs. McCormick has a brother who, God bless him, is now assistant to a Cardinal. Jesuit. Mrs. Doyle’s second cousin is a saintly man who has no small reputation in Cork for having the healing touch. Augustinian. And of course, Mrs. Flecky’s son, the pride of Lecanvey, missionary to Africa. Franciscan.

Even Father Mack had started hinting his preference. “How old are you now lad, near sixteen is it?” he’d begin each time. “Oh, but how well I recall it. I was that very age, you know, when the still small voice began to call me in service to Mother Church as a Dominican Brother.”

Every time he’d smile at Father Mack, nodding his head and trying to look ponderous, pretending along as though the hint wasn’t obvious, or hadn’t been offered a dozen times before. In truth he ached with his shameful secret, and the further guilt of wishing so hard that the good Father would just leave him well enough alone. His gut would twist and knot with the fear that maybe this time Father Mack would finally see right through the fakery, jerk the secret from him, and curse him to the world. Like a bitter old nun yanking the ear of a wicked child and announcing the wickedness to the whole class; or like the Cherub waving his fiery sword in disgust at sin-fouled Adam and Eve. Away with you. Away forever with you. There’s no place for you here. Walk the earth in shame. You are fallen. Cursed forever.

He fondled his Saint Thomas medal, and crossed himself: Name O’ the Father Son ‘n Holy Ghost Amen.  He thought on it, maybe for the first time. This was instinct. As Irish as drinking and cursing and dreaming of freedom. Not a moment passed on this island without a pair of lips offering up to the Holy Trinity. But what in the name of? What something was this constant beseeching after and warding against? Cross a threshold, Father. Pass a church, Son. See an omen, Holy. Remember the dead, Ghost. Almost anything would do as filler for the blanks between, because you had to be on guard. If some foul luck hadn’t already found you it surely would, in time.

It had found him. His eyes had gone dark underneath after. Like he’d been smudged with charcoal while asleep, one boy had mocked. His father, on the other hand, had suspected a specific ill behind the sleepless nights. He sat the boy down one Friday and solemnly, confusedly, set about to offer remedies for, and admonitions against, that ill he couldn’t bring himself to name. And the boy had never felt so embarrassed as he did that day, listening to the proud old Fenian stumble along and try to talk-not-talk about that through a baffling combination of tangential thoughts: Sleep with the hands tucked just so–Say Hail Mary unceasing until you finally fall off–Call the Archangel Michael to slay temptation–Think of your own angel a’watching–And your dear mother, God rest her, looking down from heaven–Avoid the wicked talk of boys who sport with sin, they won’t be laughing in hell, mind you, they won’t laugh–Certain men have taken mad after a time of it, and you can see it in their eyes–The devil is crafty so whatever you do don’t sleep facing down and when facing up don’t have the blankets pulled too snug against you.

But that wasn’t the thing leaving him sleepless, the sin that had brought him here to swim the islands and try the limits of his breath. No. He’d long before realized the secret to keeping that sin venal, or at least not-quite-mortal. The Lord commanded that you lust not in your heart after another, so he had banished lust from the act entirely. It became for him the mere scratch of an itch, with all wicked imaginings temporarily cleared away, and no object of thought other than the object of his touching.  Even this required confessing, however. But he comforted himself with the thought that no secrets behind the act needed revealing, and that absolution would be light if he walked The Fetcher’s Mile.

The Fetcher’s Mile. Invariably, before obligatory days, a handful of boys from his parish would slowly converge along the route to Saint Mary’s as though by coincidence. Most only offered a silent, recognizing tip of the cap and then continued on in silence. Though a few of the fouler sort would snicker at their own cunning, as though they had discovered some loophole in the Divine Justice. “Fetch away lads, fetch away,” they’d laugh. “Walk the Fetcher’s mile and, sure ’nuff, thirty Hail Mary’s will do ye.” And it was true, though they were hardly so cunning as they imagined. No doubt the young priest at St. Mary’s noticed the pattern of non-parish boys showing up at familiar times with confessions of the selfsame sin. What’s more, you’d almost think it a common thing and not just a local vice, given the Father’s dull reaction to the ugly revelations. From behind the grate he uh-hmed through the hurried postscripts to “Father forgive me,” and dispensed Ego absolvos as though trying to meet a quota. And whether you’d done it twice or a dozen times since last confession, it was, sure ’nuff, always the same thirty Hail Mary’s that did ye.

He looked at the distant mountain. There the pilgrims ascended and descended like so many ants. A funny thought, come to think it. Funny and sad. Just like ants they really are. Climbing up with their burdens, unloading them, climbing back down to find new burdens needing carrying. The things we carry with us. The pain we wear when it no longer fits. But no longer now.

There, rounding the path, appeared one of His Majesty’s finest, a young officer. The boy remembered his nakedness but resisted instinct to take up his clothes and skulk away. Ancestral memory flashed: naked warriors painted blue howling at invaders. In proud skin he’d remain. He’d stand firm and unrepentant. He’d look straight at those heathen Saxon eyes, come what may.

But the man didn’t offer the faintest startle when at last their eyes met. He simply smiled and sat down on a nearby rock.

The boy kept looking, confused but determined.

“You’ll catch yourself a death a cold like that,” the man said. He spoke as though they were familiar.

“Aye. Maybe I will” the boy answered.

“And that doesn’t frighten you? Death, that is.”

“It did once.”

The man nodded and looked out at the bay. “I gathered as much watching you swim.”

Again the feel of nakedness.

“Three weeks now you’ve been at it, swimming those islands. That was the last one, wasn’t it?” He pointed at Clare Island.

“Aye.”

The man took a cigarette from a silver case. He lit, and after a long exhale held the case out in offering to the boy.

Slowly, the boy began taking up his clothes. With steady eyes the two watched one another: the boy as he dressed, the man as he continued to hold out the silver case.  Clothed now, save for his feet, the boy walked over and sat next to the man. He took a cigarette. “Thank you,” he said.

“So why did you do it?” The man asked.

“I didn’t reckon I knew.”

Leaning over the man gave three flicks of his lighter before finding the flame.

The boy inhaled, relishing the burn and fighting the cough at exhale.

The man laughed. “First time, is it?”

Another memory had been stirring, older than ancestral. Before Craugh Patrick, before Clare Island, before Clew bay, it had been. The boy looked intently at the man for recognition, for remembering together. “Aye,” he said. “For everything a first.”