Gospel (29 page)

“And the list goes on,” Lucy said, before trailing off into thought. But everything now made sense, given how those tricky
real
Jesuits think. Who would look for the Ignatians off the coast of Protestant Northern Ireland on an inaccessible island? And those prayers through dinner: for a Catholic England, for a united Ireland, the homage to Mary, Queen of Ireland, the plans to turn Ireland into a Papal State with His Holiness as Priest-King …

The rabbi sighed. “We have got to get the Matthias scroll away from these clowns. Now what was all that talk at dinner? Paddy lost me once he hauled out the future perfect passive.”

“They're going to let us take the scroll away just for the purpose of photographing it, providing we're accompanied by one of the fathers here. And I must say, Rabbi, Father Creech didn't sound like he had any intention of returning it to Hebrew University. The scroll, he vowed at one point, would never leave his sight or protection.”

The rabbi stroked his chin. “The hell with that. That gospel is Hebrew University's property and we've got to swipe it.”

Lucy wrapped herself more tightly in her blanket. “The Ignatians may be everywhere, Rabbi. Even in Jerusalem. They'll just figure out a way to steal it back.”

Rabbi Hersch laughed. “If I get my hands on it, little girl, there's no chance they'll get it back. The Israeli Army will help me guard it, if necessary.” He slapped his knee. “Okay. First things first, we got to get off the island with it. Part two, we lose the priest bodyguard. Part three-A, Paddy and I escape to Jerusalem. Part three-B, you go home back to Chicago.”

Lucy was incensed. “Rabbi, I want to stay and help you guys. This would make my academic career! Why do I keep getting asked to leave?”

He looked steadily at her. “Rabbi Jacob Rosen, my predecessor in the Chair of Ancient Languages at Hebrew University.” He paused. “He was probably killed. The scroll disappeared the day he fell down a flight of stairs to his death. That's how Hebrew University lost it in the first place.”

Lucy's face went pale.

“So you see,” the rabbi said, standing to leave, “it's not that we don't adore you, but we don't want you kidnapped for ransom, we don't want you threatened, we don't want you dead. You'll want to sleep on these pleasant thoughts,” he added as he opened the door to leave.

Lucy decided she'd be lucky if she slept at all.

J
UNE
29
TH

The next morning Father Quinn knocked on her door to awaken Lucy.

“Pack up,” he said, “you will be leaving before eleven.”

Lucy had a headache and a cold nose. “I feel like I just got to sleep a few minutes ago,” she complained out loud to herself.

After stuffing her barely dry clothes into her knapsack and after being led to the refectory for some more overblessed dusty bread and hot, bitter tea, Lucy was informed Father Creech was in prayer for at least an hour and she might enjoy wandering around the island. The rabbi was in Father Creech's library trying to entertain himself; O'Hanrahan had gone out for a walk.

“In an hour,” said Father Quinn, “the Father General will bring the scroll from the vault. I am told you will be permitted to see it.”

Lucy nodded her bland gratitude.

No window was large enough in the dim monastery to confirm Lucy's suspicion that the sun was out, but as she stepped from the monastery door she saw that the winds of the preceding night had swept the sky clean and she turned her face to the warmth of pure white sunlight reflecting from a calm, sparkling sea. It was the first sunshine she had seen in Ireland and her impression of the country was transformed: the green hills of the mainland were incandescent, the Atlantic an array of deep, intermingling blues, the noisy sea gulls, diving and swooping, were virgin white, even the brown scrub of the moors leading down to the sea was invested with tiny purple and reddish flowers.

Lucy walked down the path they had followed up from the beach the day before and digressed to a small overlooking mount. From this vantage she could see a strip of sand below, the pier for boats, a few whitewashed cottages to the west—it was not so lonely or forbidding an island, after all—and O'Hanrahan walking in his priest's uniform along the strand.

“Hello, Dr. O'Hanrahan,” she called out some yards from him, startling him from his reverie.

O'Hanrahan acknowledged her presence with a brief smile.

Lucy, persuaded by the beauty of the scene, felt a personal question would not be out of place. “I didn't know you were a Jesuit, sir. When did you, uh, stop doing that?”

He paused and Lucy suddenly wondered whether she had offended him or, as bad, interrupted some private contemplation. O'Hanrahan said at last, “When I got married I renounced my vow. For some reason Ignatius Loyola preferred his orderlies to be unmarried.”

Lucy felt she could balance the importunity by volunteering information about herself: “You know, I was almost going to be a nun.”

“That's not too surprising,” he said, walking a little in front of her at the water's edge.

She detected his scorn, but decided it was a joke. “No, really. Gabriel and I had this plan. He was going to be a Franciscan and I was going to be a Poor Clare and we were going to undertake some worthy ghetto project in Chicago, or maybe go to South America.”

Trying to be as pleasant as possible, she had nonetheless wandered into unsafe territory by mentioning Gabriel. “Your pal Gabriel,” said O'Hanrahan, “doesn't know what the hell he wants to do. He changes his mind each week, priest, monk, actor, academic—
thief,
” he added.

Lucy tactically changed the subject. “Are we going to get the scroll, sir?”

“We?”
he wondered aloud. He heard his own rudeness and was immediately more conversational: “The plan is as follows. Father O'Reilly will accompany us to Ballymacross where we're gonna take some photographs of the scroll.”

“And then you're going to run off with it.”

“Morey will. I'll explain to Father Creech that Rabbi Hersch merely stole property stolen from his university and that I had no idea he was going to do such a thing. Something like that. Then I'll hook up with Morey in Jerusalem, I'll translate the thing, then publish my findings.”

“And then be world famous.”

“Yeah, that's the plan.”

Lucy deeply wished to be part of the team but she saw no opening in the scenario. She decided instead to impress Dr. O'Hanrahan with her deductions the previous night about the Ignatians. O'Hanrahan smiled as she recounted how she had deduced their identity from the year in Roman numerals on the dinner plate.

O'Hanrahan walked away from the shore. “You're a smart woman, Miss Dantan. Really wasted in grad school.” From that remark, he began climbing up the trail to the top of the island's main hill. O'Hanrahan became red-faced and winded ascending the slight rise; Lucy wasn't in much better physical shape.

“See that?” he pointed, once at the summit. “That is the Mull of Kintyre, about twenty-some miles away. Scotland.”

“Ireland and Scotland are that close?”

“In Bede's time the Irish used to be called the Scots. Long before Ulstermen had Protestantism and Catholicism to fight over, they fought here over other things, anything. One of the longest-running family squabbles in Europe.”

And O'Hanrahan told Lucy the story of the Giant's Causeway, a volcanic basalt formation, like an oversized stairway, that sloped into the sea some miles west of here. It was the stairway of Finn MacCool who learned science from the Druid Master Finegas, who drank from the River Boyne into which the Nuts of Wisdom fell from the trees above, who had eaten the Salmon of Knowledge. Finn and his enemy Benandonner would fierce battle wage along this very coast, hurling boulders at each other, and one of Benandonner's throws missed the mark and splashed down between England and Ireland and is the Isle of Man, named after Mananan, the sea god who conveniently adopted the rock as his throne—that is, when he's not stirring up the water around Ireland to keep invaders away. “More important,” O'Hanrahan added, “MacCool's house steward was converted to Christianity by St. Patrick.

(Patrick placed his hand on young Keelta's heart and it is what he said,
From myself to yourself, in the house or out of the house, in whatever place God will lay His hand on you, I give you Heaven.
)

Lucy was exhilarated. “Do you suppose Rathlin Island was a rock that missed?”

“Oh, there're legends for everything up here, every cove, every river. Much of it's lost thanks to my namesake. St. Patrick bragged that he burned thousands of volumes of legend and literature in bringing the One True Church to Ireland. That was 1600 years ago but it still steams me even now. What sin could this island have committed worse than that act?”

O'Hanrahan recounted his own favorite lore. How Ireland sainted three hundred different men named Colman in the 600s. How Colman of Kilmacduagh had a most blessed housefly to mark his pages for him in the Bible; and even unto his, O'Hanrahan's, grandfather's generation, it was believed that butterflies were souls waiting for an opening in Purgatory. St. Kenneth, who had to banish the mice from County Laoighis because they kept eating his shoes. St. Kieran of Saighir, who had a fox, a badger, and a wolf working for him, building his monastic cells and cooking the cabbage—until the fox ran off with his shoes.

“Shoes were apparently a major obsession,” said Lucy.

“Few Celtic saints don't have associations with the animal kingdom,” said O'Hanrahan. Poor St. Kieran of Clonmacnoise, who had a fox who carried his Latin lessons to his teacher until one day the fox ate the satchel. St. Kieran's wolf was a cousin of the she-wolf that suckled St. Ailbe as a child, before St. Ailbe, blessed adventurer, left for the Land of Promise, as did St. Brendan the Navigator of Tralee, who sailed amidst many tricks of the devil and jealous sea gods, and overcame many monsters. “As did dear St. Collen,” added O'Hanrahan with a light Irish brogue, “who had to go to Wales to slay a giantess that would no ways leave.”

(That tale is actually true, though.)

Lucy looked west over the cold Atlantic knowing the next land to be found was North America. She was then startled, turning back to see Father O'Reilly standing on the path before them, arms crossed, intolerant.

“It is time to view the scroll,” he said unwarmly, rounding immediately back to the monastery. Lucy watched the wind pull his robe back, revealing his skeletal body underneath. He probably, she figured, stood out in this cold with that flimsy robe so better to humiliate what's left of his body. Catholics and their love of suffering. Lucy wished she could found an order in which you
ate to excess
for God.

(We've already got the Benedictines, thank you.)

O'Hanrahan, Rabbi Hersch, and Lucy gathered around a table in Father Creech's library; the other fathers lurked behind awaiting further abasements. Father Creech opened a two-foot leather cylinder scrollcase and slid out an airtight bag containing the papyrus. The Father General stepped back, deferring to O'Hanrahan, who had put on surgeon's gloves to avoid leaving a residue of oil on anything he touched. He expertly removed the dry papyrus and ever so slowly unwound it.

“It's in great shape,” he whispered.

“I've got the spray back in Ballymacross,” said Rabbi Hersch, who had brought an expensive fixative from the Jerusalem Museum that would help keep the scroll from crumbling, though, from the look of it, the scroll had been treated several times by previous owners.

“Beautiful,” breathed O'Hanrahan as if he might cry.

Rabbi Hersch was reverent as well. “It's the one. I saw it only once in Rabbi Rosen's office but this is it, I'm sure.” Lucy thought she detected the rabbi's lip trembling slightly. “Forty years ago,” he added raspily.

Lucy eagerly edged her way between the two men to look over their shoulders.

Rabbi Hersch mused, “I have never seen anything quite like the script. Look at that,” he said, pointing to a backward E. “I can't think of many post-Phoenician languages, save Hebrew, in which an E doesn't look like some form of an E … and yet what could the word be? E, something, E, E, something, something, E?”

“Some of the characters look Semitic,” said O'Hanrahan. “This…” He pointed to what resembled a 4. “Bound to be an R, or maybe, like in Elephantine, a D. But what word would begin with two in a row like this?”

“Well, if it
is
Semitic, then the language has no vowels.”

“Then why are the units so long?” O'Hanrahan pointed out that each “word” or unit of characters had a colon between them to separate them, and were often of nine or ten letters in length—pretty long for a Semitic language, though maybe not an Ethiopian dialect. In some places one could find back-to-back colons, which in some African tongues marked the end of a sentence, but if that were the case, some of the scroll's sentences were endless. Also, where were the small words that surely must be “the” and “and,” that kind of thing? They stared at a line together: