Cast A Cold Eye, page 14
“I am,” she said gently. “I must, I told you that. I’d stay if I were able, really I would.”
“Will you come back?”
Grainne dropped her eyes from his with a touch of the shyness that brought a twinge to his heart. “I will,” she said quietly, “if you’ll have me.”
“Please come back.”
“All right.”
“Grainne,” he said after a moment, “it’s true, something’s been bothering me. And I guess it still is. In fact, I know it still is. I’m afraid it’s been distracting me a bit, and this weekend hasn’t been quite the way I’d planned it. But when you come back, I’ll be in a better frame of mind, I promise.”
He put his cup down on the table but he was still toying with it, turning it around and around on the saucer.
“Is it the book?” Grainne asked. “Are you having some difficulty with it?”
“Yes, in part, it’s the book.”
Watching him closely, Grainne thought he seized on that as something to talk about, rather than the thing that bothered him most.
“I did some research on the Famine before I came here. I told you that. I’m writing a novel, not a history book, so most of what I read were secondary sources. And I came here—besides just coming for the trip itself—to get the local scene, the details, to find out how people here think and talk and live.”
He hesitated at that point and Grainne said, “And you don’t like what you’ve found.”
“No, that’s not it, not exactly. I do like it here. It’s beautiful, like nothing else I’ve ever seen, and in some ways I can even imagine myself living here. At least,” he added, attempting a smile, “I think that way on the rare occasions when the sun comes out.”
Then his face grew serious again. “But there are other things, other aspects of the place, that bother me.”
“Couldn’t it just be that it’s all so strange to you?”
“I suppose that’s part of it. But it’s not all.”
Grainne waited, and finally asked, “Do you want to tell me about it now?”
“No,” Jack said, and it was the only thing he’d sounded sure about in the whole conversation. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided that there’s no reason to bother you about it any more than I have already. It’s probably nothing anyway. I’ll figure it out or settle it in my mind or whatever, and that’ll be the end of it. It’ll be better the next time you come, Grainne, I promise.”
Grainne composed her face to make it clear that she was agreeing to drop the subject, whatever it was, only reluctantly.
“When can you come back?” Jack asked. “Can you come next weekend?”
“I don’t know. It depends on my friend Mary. I’ll have to see. I’ll tell you during the week.”
“Will you try? For next weekend, I mean.”
“I will. I promise.”
The conversation drifted along, slowly growing back toward a more normal, less anxious, tone. When Grainne said she’d make more tea, Jack insisted that it was his turn to get it.
“What did you think of Father Henning’s tale?” she asked when they were settled again.
Jack tasted his tea. “Sort of gloomy,” he said. “I thought pub tales were supposed to be, I don’t know, more jolly than that.”
“Oh, not always. And even less so, I suppose, in a country local like that. We’re a strange people, Jack, we Irish. We cry as much as we laugh.”
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, not looking at her. “I gather that.”
“Did the tale put you off somehow?”
“In a way. It was pretty gruesome, after all. And I wouldn’t have thought Father Henning would tell something like that. I would have thought he’d tell something more pleasant. And, for that matter, something that was rather less . . . well, less pagan than that. You have to admit, it was a pretty crude story.”
“Heathenish,” she said, a faint smile playing at her lips.
“Yes, exactly. That’s what it was. A primitive, heathen tale in a Christian setting.”
Grainne nodded in agreement.
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd, that a priest would tell a tale like that?”
“Not really, it doesn’t,” she said, her tone now as serious as Jack’s. “You know what the seanachie is, don’t you?”
“Yes. The storyteller.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that, really. And you must multiply everything all the more because this is such a small village and remote from the cities. The seanachie is the taleteller, yes, but it’s a very old, a very ancient, position in a village. In olden times, the seanachie was treated with all the highest regard and never lacked for a meal or a roof over his head. It was almost a sacred function he performed, preserving stories as he did. As he does. We still hold poets and writers and singers in that same way in Ireland, as if they were both a little blessed and a little mad, both. And there’s still a lot of the old ways alive in some of these more remote parts of the country. It was a hard and dark sort of a tale he told, that’s true, but you were probably the only one put off by it.”
“I wasn’t really put off by it. I was more surprised.” He was silent a few seconds. Then he said, “What did you make of the story?”
“Are you using me for research, Jack Quinlan?” Grainne said, offering her smile again to lighten the mood.
“A little,” Jack said very seriously. “What did you make of it?”
“Well, it was a little moralistic in its way,” she said slowly, “almost as if it was a truly Christian sort of story about obligations to keep promises, that sort of thing, and duty and responsibility, whatever the personal sacrifice you might have to make.”
“All right. But what about the rest of it? The primitive part?”
“You mean about the head speaking at the end?”
“Yes. And about the woman keeping it in a basket.”
Grainne thought about it. “This is a remote part of the country,” she said at last. “I guess I keep saying that, don’t I, as if you didn’t know it? But it is. That’s why you came here in the first place, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“The old ways linger long in a place like this. Jack, you’ve seen the people. They’re poor, for the most part, farmers with only a bit of land, and that bit more rocks than dirt. Or fishermen. Women who knit sweaters. The sweaters may sell in Grafton Street for forty pounds but don’t think the women are getting that. You’ve seen the way they live. Most of them have nothing more than stone cottages. They may have electricity and they may have plumbing, but you may bank on it that they’re living, most of them here, the same as they lived a hundred years ago or more, maybe two hundred. Jack, they haven’t come along very far, a lot of them. And the old, dark stories are in their blood.”
She smiled, a little ruefully. “Listen to me, will you?” she said. “I’m talking as if I’m different and not one of them myself. But I am, Jack. I’m just the same as them, and that despite my highly regarded university education. The city and the university polish off a lot of the roughness, but not all, by any means. I’ll warrant you, there’s many a banker in O’Connell Street who goes home of an evening and, with no one looking on but the wife, will rejoice to eat a baked potato out of his hand and sip at his tea from a saucer.”
She paused, glanced sideways at him. Jack said nothing, almost as if he knew what was coming.
“And you’re another, as the saying goes,” she went on. “You’re the same too. Maybe less so, for being born in America, but you were reared, you said, by a woman born here and you grew up surrounded by Irish. You know the rhythms of the language and the words of the songs and the taste of the food. I already know that you don’t think you’re eating a meal unless there’s a potato on your plate. That may be the least part of it, but it’s part of it, nonetheless. You know the habits of mind, the attitudes and assumptions. You may have less of it, but you have it, even so. You may have paid it no attention all your life up to now, but here you are, just the same, drawn back to the hills and the strand and the farms and the bogs. There’s no denying the blood, Jack. No denying the blood.”
They did not sleep together that night.
After Grainne’s lengthy speech, they sat on the couch in silence for a while, until finally Jack reached over and drew her close to him.
“Will you come to bed now?” she asked a little later.
Jack, without meeting her eyes, said he wanted to stay up a while longer. He started to explain, awkwardly, that he knew it was her last night there and that he wasn’t avoiding her, but she cut him off with a finger placed gently across his lips.
“That’s all right,” she said with a sad smile. “I understand, Jack. So long as you know I’ll be looking for a warmer welcome the next time I come. And so long as you understand that’s not an easy thing for an Irish girl to be saying.”
They kissed, held each other for a minute, and Grainne went in to bed.
Jack waited until she was quiet in the bedroom. Then he went to the window and stood there, looking out at the night and the storm that was still lashing the coast. After another while, he opened the door a few inches and listened, but the only sounds were the rain and the wind. He sat on the couch and tried to make sense of the things he’d seen and, now, the music he’d heard, and to put it together with what Grainne had said. She was right, of course, but that still didn’t account for the other things.
Without realizing it, he dozed off. When he stirred and woke for a minute—his watch told him it was four-thirty in the morning—he found that Grainne had come out to the living room and tucked a blanket all around him.
CHAPTER 8
The rain followed him into the church. He’d been bent over double, making a smaller target for the lashing anger of the storm, but his clothing was soaked through anyway and his hair was dripping. He could hear the wet squelch of his shoes on the stone floor and feel the icy coldness of his feet. He had not been heading for the church, certainly had not been heading for the church in the dark, in the middle of the night, but the storm had become too much for him out in the slippery road and the church had been right there, he’d pushed at the door and found it open and he’d ducked in at once, seeking shelter.
The church was in darkness and he cautiously slid his hand along the clammy stone wall, following it around the perimeter of the vestibule. Behind him, sighing with its own weary weight, the heavy door swung closed, and though it seemed impossible, the darkness of the church grew darker still.
He came to a halt, one hand still on the wall, and stood there, breathing deeply through his mouth. The cold and the rain and his dash for the door had taken away his breath. Water ran out of his hair and down the side of his face, down the back of his neck, and he shivered.
Then he heard the hollow shuffling of feet against ancient stone.
He stood still a moment longer, then cautiously, blindly, followed the wall around to the doors into the church proper. His hand groped for a moment, flailing in air, chilled by sudden panic, when the wall disappeared and left him nothing to hold. Then he realized that the inner doors must be open. He took a deep breath, felt the doorjamb and, beyond it, the door pushed back against the inner wall. He shuffled forward, thinking to sit in the church a few minutes and wait out the worst of the storm. He could hear it rattling furiously at the wooden door behind him.
They took hold of his elbows when he was three steps inside the doorway.
Firm hands gripped his arms in the darkness and silently led him forward toward the altar. He heard nothing, only his own unsteady steps on the stone floor and the rattly breath of someone wheezing in the dark. Gradually, as he was propelled forward, he began to hear other sounds—more breathing, something that might have been a cough or a catch in the throat, a sniffle, perhaps, and the stealthy movement of feet—but he could see nothing, nothing at all, and knew only that the hands that held him moved him forward and would brook no opposition.
They belonged here somehow, he knew that, but the fright and shock and confusion, abetted by the chill of the air and the cold stone floor beneath his feet, numbed his brain, his thoughts, as it numbed his knees and made them weaken with his weight. He would go with them for the moment—they insisted and, at least for the moment, he had no choice, hardly any will of his own—and then his mind would clear and he would know who they were and what they were doing and what it was they wanted of him.
The hands supported him toward the altar and, just before the stone step of the altar itself, they moved to his shoulders and gently but insistently pressed him downward to his knees. His weakness was suddenly so overpowering that he was grateful for the little rest the kneeling offered. He knelt and slumped heavily but the hands insisted that he kneel upright. His chin fell forward on his chest, in weariness, in vague fright at what he might see—as if, miraculously, he might be empowered to see in the hellish dark—but other hands, or the same hands, gripped his face with bony fingers cold as stone and lifted his head toward the altar. He could not tell if his eyes were open or closed. He knew only that the church and all those who moved in it were entombed in a darkness that was palpable—it pressed relentlessly at his back and shoulders and on the top of his head, pressing his weight against the stone—and that the night had made him blind.
“God save all here,” said a voice above him, and he looked with his blinded eyes and saw his father, long-dead, standing in priest’s vestments at the altar.
Behind him, in the hollow expanse of the church, a hundred voices murmured, “Amen.”
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,” his father intoned.
And they murmured again, “Amen.”
He closed his eyes, or thought he closed them, and opened them again, or thought so, and saw not his own father but the priest, Father Henning, and he was lifting the golden chalice in the consecration of the Mass.
“This is the cup of my blood,” he said, holding it aloft, “take and drink of it.”
They came forward all around him, great waves of people moving and breaking on either side of him, and the chalice fed them all. They drank deep from the cup, but it flowed with a bounty of blood that was endless, and when at last the priest stood before him, bent close to him and offered the chalice, the cup was still full to the brim. He took it from the priest’s hands—all this in the dark—and held it to his lips, feeling the warmth of the gold in the icy church, and drank to the bottom of the chalice, but when he handed it back to the priest, the chalice was once again filled to the brim with blood. The priest then drank himself—his throat moved clearly with each swallow—and as he drank a little blood ran from the corner of his mouth, down to his chin, and dripped onto his white vestments. It spattered there but left no visible stain.
The coppery taste lingered in Jack’s mouth and a muscle in his cheek would not stop twitching.
The church was still again, except for the breathing.
The priest was gone now and the tall old fellow from the village stood at the altar, holding aloft something that his strength would barely support. It was a child, an infant, and he saw the old man hold it forward, then turn from the altar and come toward him, holding out the bloody bundle.
He took it in his arms and cradled it against his chest. The infant was naked and filthy and smelled chokingly of earth and death, but he held it tight because there was nothing else to do. All around him there was only the breathing, though now it seemed tense and waiting. He lowered his unseeing eyes in the darkness and looked into the dead face of the infant and saw at once that it was Grainne.
They took the infant from him and turned him around. There was nothing to see, only the empty, pressing darkness, and nothing to hear, only the breathing. But they were all there, all the people of Doolin, every face he’d seen, every voice he’d heard, all watching him now as other hands propelled him from the altar and led him to the middle of the empty church.
They stood in a circle and he was one of them. The figure on his left—whether a man or a woman, he knew not—leaned heavily against him and kissed him coldly on the cheek. He turned to his right and there was Grainne beside him, waiting, her dark soft eyes searching his, waiting still, waiting forever, knowing he would come to her in time, and then he leaned forward and kissed her cheek in turn, and watched as her eyes lingered on his for a lovely, warm moment before turning away to pass the kiss of peace around the rest of the circle.
The crowd around him grew and he was lost in the midst of those he could not see. He caught only glimpses of faces that were familiar, the priest, his father, the old man, a child he thought he knew, and Grainne, her face drifting among the others and her eyes sometimes meeting his own.
Then Father Henning was in the middle of the circle, his black raincoat gleaming wet and flapping at his legs, and he was reading the prayers for the dead. At his feet was an open grave, here in the middle of the pitch-black church, and Jack could see water running down the sides of its crumbling dirt walls. The priest read aloud the names of the dead, naming every name in Doolin, and prayed that their souls, and the souls of all the faithful departed, would, through the mercy of God, rest in peace, amen.
But it was not a burial after all, because four old men went forward from the circle and knelt at the edges of the grave, leaned into it, almost hovering above the hole, and began hauling something out. It was an exhumation, Jack saw that now, and the memory of Grainne’s face on the infant in his arms made him seek her face now in the crowd. He did not see her and panic rushed through him for an instant, but then someone gently squeezed his hand and he looked and saw that it was her.
When he looked back at the grave, the body was almost in view. All around the circle, every one of the faces buried in the impenetrable dark was turned to him. He returned his gaze to the grave and they showed him the body now, its flesh rotted away in trailing wisps, its eyes deeply sunken in the skull, and of course the face was his own.
He peered through the pressing dark as the corpse was set on its feet and turned in his direction. He squeezed at Grainne’s fingers but found that she was no longer there. A space had opened up around him in the crowd, and now he was alone, the others all silent and watching.
