Immaculate Heart (32 page)

“I remember him,” said Paudie as the electric kettle began to rumble. “Not well, but I do remember him. He was so tall he had to duck through most of the doorways in town.”

“And a fine-looking man, too, so all the ladies said. Jack was married to a lass called Mary, and though they'd no children they seemed to be very much in love. He tilled his own plot of land and Mary kept the house, and for a time all was right in their world.” Leo sighed. “Then came the sad day. He wasn't a very young man, but sure, he wasn't near old enough to be droppin' dead in the field.”

“Not a day past forty, if even that,” Paudie put in.

“Nearer to thirty-five,” Leo said. “In any case, someone sent for the doctor, but the doctor could do nothing for him. And so his wife and sisters washed the body and laid him out, and the priest came, too, and the next night everyone turned up for the wake.

“Now, you've been to Johnny's wake, but you'll never know how 'twas done in the old days. Everyone stayed up all night, dancin' and drinkin' and carryin' on, till they took the dearly departed to the church in the morning, said all the prayers and laid him to rest in the graveyard. Jack had a good many friends and family, and soon his cottage was packed to the rafters with all those in mourning.

“Night had fallen, and the only light there was to be had came from the candles and the peat fire, and so you might well find yourself dancing with a person when you couldn't quite make out his face. Jack's widow Mary had been sitting in a corner just starin' into the fire, until someone came up to her in the gloom, swept her up and made her dance, payin' no heed to her protests. And for a time the young widow forgot her grief.

“A whileen later, someone else—'twas one of Jack's sisters, if I remember—went into the bedroom to keep vigil with the corpse, and found the bed empty. She came boundin' back into the crowded front room, roarin' with panic because she feared he'd been snatched, though for what purpose she never could have told. When she cried out, the fiddler stopped his fiddlin', and the piper laid down his pipes, and the dancers stopped their dancin', and then another cry rose up from the crowd: it was poor Mary Brennan, who found herself in the arms of her dead husband.

“As soon as he was discovered, Jack gave a moan and crumpled to the floor, and they found this time that he was well and truly dead. And that,” Leo said, as his eyelids grew heavy, “is how Jack Brennan came to dance at his own wake.”

For a minute or two, we watched him doze. “I suppose you'd better be heading on to Dublin,” Paudie said finally. “But I'll tell you this—we'll miss you at the pub.”

I drew the unfinished pack of Player's out of my jacket pocket and left them on the bedside table. It would be a treat for Leo not to have to roll his own for once. Paudie watched me do it, but he made no comment.

“You'll miss me for a few nights,” I said. “After that, you'll hardly remember I was here.”

“Ah, now,” Paudie replied. “You're too young yet to be talkin' like that.”

*   *   *

The rain was coming down in sheets as I dropped Paudie off at the bookshop. He shook my hand and said he hoped I'd be back in a year or two, but as he eased himself out of the car, I felt the sinking certainty I'd never drink another pint with any of them.

I drove slowly toward Napper Tandy's on my way out of town, the wipers set to frantic, and through the rain I could make out a group of men huddled at the entrance smoking their cigarettes. I saw Hennessey there, and “Yeats,” they and all their friends wearing the same green football jersey. They hadn't come to the pub on their lunch break.

A dark-haired man took a step toward the curb as I passed them, the end of his cigarette glowing as he took one last, hungry suck. It wasn't a face I'd seen among the pack that night, but it was a face I knew, albeit with twenty more years on it. Declan Keaveney met my eye through the windshield, smiling insolently as he flicked his used-up cigarette into the road ahead of my car. Home at last? Really?

Another beat and I was past them, though for most of the way to Dublin I wanted very badly to punch something. For the first few miles, I thought of turning around—to see if it was really him or if I was seeing things—but if I did, I knew I'd regret it either way.

There isn't any point setting down the chain of encounters that led me to Kerala, nor can I say why I feel pressed to write again after all these years. I could have left this diary in the box under my bed at home; but then, I do know why. I packed it because She told me to.

I'd been in India nearly nine months when things began to unravel, as I ought to have known they would. At first the night trains and the rickshaws were exciting and new to me, and I felt that sense of adventure everywhere I went, saw the magic in everything I laid my eyes on; all the colours! And the colours were new, and hadn't they been invented especially for me? And aye, I'll admit there was a man, and for a while he made me feel as if no one in all the world had ever experienced any of these things before. We were like Shiva and Parvati, Shiva the god who never blinked and Parvati his consort who playfully showed her love by pressing her palms to his eyes, only to find the Universe plunged into darkness, no stars, no suns, as Shiva's sight was broken. Shiva, the god who could never sleep.

My love brought me to the ashram and I was welcomed, as he'd promised I would be, and within a day I'd settled into my place as if I'd always been there. There were friends there I felt as if I'd never not known. But my favourite place, my favourite time, was in the little temple the community had formed and grown up around. Before they arrived no one had tended it for a thousand years.

In the high heat of the afternoon when the others laid down to rest, I went to the temple, sat down on the cool stone and let my tired eyes rest upon the icons until the colours ran together and I was refreshed. Indians believe that the divine is not hidden from us, that it is to be seen everywhere we look, and that when they gaze into the painted eyes of the idol the god, the
real
god, gazes back.

But sure, the people put so much love and care into the painting and dressing of the icons—they treat them like precious dolls, or living babbies—that you'd almost wonder if it's the lavishing of the attention that brings the deity to life. I never felt as if anyone were looking out of the eyes of
our
statues, not in the church and certainly not on the hill. When the Light would go away and She took Her leave I'd look up at the statue in the grotto and wonder how they could have gotten Her so wrong.

I often thought of Our Lady on those sweltering afternoons, though I can't say I prayed to Her. I told myself that if She ever came to me again I'd ask Her about the gods of the Hindus, about Shiva and Parvati, and was there any truth in them at all.

And yet … and yet I knew for myself that there was, and I'll tell you how I knew. In the hut where we took our meals there was a statue of Hanuman. I'd been partial to him since that afternoon in Bangalore, when my love had taken me to his temple. There the priest's apprentice (a boy of nine) offered me a piece of coconut candy, and the monkey-god watched me from his perch on the roof as the sweetness filled my mouth. I'd never tasted anything so delicious in all my life.

On the evening before I left the community, I saw the statue as if for the first time. Hanuman was tearing his chest open, showing the gods Rama and Sita inside his heart, to prove the love he bore for them, and all I could think was I've seen this, I've seen this already, I've seen this somewhere before. That's when I knew I had to leave.

In the hour before sunrise the next morning I packed my things and walked the five miles to the nearest village, where I caught the bus to Madurai, and from there another bus to Munnar, though that bus never arrived. When it broke down none of the Indians were at all put out, and I watched from the roadside as they set off on foot. When another bus came along in an hour or two, someone said, they'd be picked up; and others were near enough to their homes that they could walk the rest of the way.

The road which eventually led to Munnar wound along a cliff, the tea plantations laid out below, lush and gleaming in the sunshine. I knew I shouldn't have set out that way, not on foot at least, and I can't say what propelled me, only that I was drawn by something, or someone. By the end of the first hour there was no one but me left on the road and I was down to my last sip of water, but sure, the next bus would come along any minute.

At some point I came upon a little shrine, and it was Kali, the goddess of destruction, dressed in blue, forever in the midst of devouring her own baby. The statue seemed to writhe in the heat, and I fell to my knees without intending to, and She came to me there, in that unfamiliar place.

—Blessed Mother, I said, and I noticed I was trembling, as if I weren't quite inside my own body.—How I've missed you!

—It isn't so long as it feels, She said.—And have you forgotten that I'm always with you? She bent over me, Her face hovering inches above mine, and I smelled that same sweet scent of Her, coconut candy and every other good thing I ever ate or breathed.—I bless you, child, She whispered, and I felt Her sweep the damp hair away from my face as the light around us grew dim.—I'll see you safe. No harm can ever come to you, not so long as I'm near.

That was the last thing I can recall before I woke up in hospital.

 

Orla has come all the way to Madurai to collect me. If I ever thought in years past that she would come round someday, if not to love me then at least to make her peace with my existence, well I know better now. She fumes at the doctor and I can see the nurses cringe whenever she walks in. I thanked her the day she arrived and she only said,—I'll never be free of you, will I?

 

December

 

I came home to an empty apartment, and just as I'd predicted, Laurel hadn't left a single dish in the sink. It had been my place to start with, she'd only moved in a couple years before, and yet the air in these four rooms was intolerable to me now—I'd lost something that hadn't felt essential until it was subtracted. It was all so ordinary and lonely that every time I thought of Síle, she seemed farther and farther away from me, remote and impossible. Where was she now? How could she have let me leave without her?

I'd told Andy about the poteen, and he wanted me to write about that instead. Secret histories of any sort of alcoholic beverage were a golden-ticket circulation booster. So the rest of November passed in a fog of late nights at the magazine, Chinese takeout, and catch-up drinks with college friends that wore on twice as long as I wanted them to. I just sat there and kept on drinking, laughing at the appropriate times, wishing I could slink quietly out of their lives. Sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of myself in a darkened mirror, my skin looking like a puddle of weather-worn cloth fallen from the rag tree, and I was afraid that if I looked any closer, I'd see that I was holding myself together with a length of blue yarn.

In early December, I got an e-mail from Tess.
I've decided to give up my place at the youth centre and do a bit of travelling. Not to volunteer, just to see more of the world and try to figure out my true place in it.
She said she hadn't heard anything from Síle.

So Ballymorris wasn't where you belonged after all,
I wrote back.
I wish you the very best, Tess. Let me know if you're ever in New York.
She didn't reply, not that I expected her to.

*   *   *

After Christmas I went down to Fort Lauderdale for a few days to visit my grandmother. It was the first time I'd seen her since my trip to Ireland, and she wanted to hear all the details of John's funeral I hadn't already told her over the phone, and how Brona was doing, and how had I liked the little town where she'd grown up. I told her I'd spent a good bit of time with Paudie and his niece, but I didn't mention the apparition or that I'd ever wanted to write about it. I did tell her every funny story about Leo that I could think of, but she never asked any more than I offered, not even when I told her I'd last seen him in the hospital. If there had been some great romance between them, I wondered if it had happened mostly in Leo's head.

My grandmother lived a little under an hour from Miami Beach. One afternoon I drove down to the museum with the Harry Clarke window Síle had told me about, taking her diary with me. I bought a ticket and rode the elevator to the fifth floor, walking past Art Deco posters and furniture until I came to the stained glass.

“The Geneva Window” was an awkward title for it, seeing as it was never installed there, but the window was still impressive enough to warrant the name. It deserved better than this concrete floor, the flimsy white partitions, and metal heating ducts overhead, but on the other hand, they'd never let you get this close to anything at the Met. You could go right up to it and examine every scene, each minuscule brushstroke adding depth to the flat planes of color. You could get near enough to fog the glass with your breath, and no one would say anything to you. I read the information panel putting the window in historical context, rubbing at the letters etched on my forearm. Mallory would have loved this.

Síle was right: the panels weren't that big, but there was a lot to look at inside each one, and even though I didn't know the stories behind them, it was easy to imagine what was going on. There was something lewd happening in almost every one. A yellow-haired girl, fireflies pulsing under her purple dress, danced with her elfin lover, who pressed her hand against his bare crotch as tiny green goblins danced on a hill above their heads; another blonde, this one naked, danced with a purple veil like Salome for a horrible fat old man, a cigar in one hand and a brandy glass in the other. That one I remembered from Síle's book.