Miracle Woman (16 page)

She remembered her grand-uncle John and her father's older brother Tim and the farm snug in the rolling West Cork countryside and a myriad cousins who bore the same names as themselves and a similar appearance.

‘Your father loved it there.'

Martha remembered being sick with excitement as the visit to Ireland drew nearer and nearer and her father making a big show of going on the dry and staying off alcohol for at least a month so he would look well and fit and not a bit like a
bowsie, and the pledge being broken after only a few days of being back where he belonged. One year there had barely been the fare for her father to go and her mother had feigned illness so only the and Brian had flown to Shannon and taken the hire car down the country. The rest of them made do with the hose and the paddling pool and pink ice-creams and sitting up till midnight out in the open air with Frances and her women friends, smoking and playing cards and listening to Frank Sinatra.

‘While the cat's away the mice can play,' was all her mother would say about that summer vacation in their own back yard.

‘They were good times,' murmured her mother now. ‘When you were all young and your father was still with us.'

Martha nodded and out of instinct squeezed her hand.

They made small talk with the waitress, and Martha watched as her mother drenched her meal in salt, scattering it partly on the Formica table top.

‘Why don't they season food properly any more! All those people on them faddy diets and allergic to every morsel they put in their mouth. When I was a girl we just ate what we were given and were grateful for it. Food didn't make us sick then.'

Martha toyed with her pieces of chicken, hiding some of it under a furl of lettuce leaf.

‘Kids and Mike OK?'

‘Yep.'

‘All doing OK?'

‘Mike's caught up in this new biotech project for the company, designing some kind of information systems.'

Her mother's eyes looked blank. Martha couldn't blame her, for if she herself had so little understanding of the work that occupied her husband for most of his waking hours you could hardly expect a woman in her seventies with little interest in the information highway to be interested.

‘Well, at least he likes what he does. In my time most men worked at jobs they hated. When I see Mike and your brothers it makes me realize how much things are changing.'

Frances Kelly speared three golden chips on to her fork asking, ‘And what about you, pet? How are you doing?'

‘I'm fine, Mom, honest.'

‘All this talk of miracles. There was something more about you again in the papers.'

‘Yeah, I know. Hopefully in time it will just blow over.'

‘You can't blame them, Martha darling, people are only human and are bound to be interested in talk of miracles and the like.'

‘I guess.'

‘Are they still phoning and coming to the house? I don't know how you cope with it at all, I honestly don't.'

‘Mike's going crazy about it.'

‘Lord rest your father, but he would have been the very same.'

‘He doesn't realize that I can't just pretend this whole Timmy thing hasn't happened. I can't turn my back on someone who asks for my help, I'm not like that! Mike doesn't seem to understand the need inside me to use this healing ability or whatever it is to help people.'

‘You were always like that. Good-natured and kind, Martha love, even when you were a small girl. Do you remember that time Sean had that desperate fall from his bike and split open his lip and you carried him most of the way home?'

‘For God's sake, Mom, I dropped him and he cut his knee and arm and I made things even worse!'

‘But your intentions were good, you just wanted to help your brother.'

‘He kept crying for you and wanting to get home, and then I went and dropped him on the pavement and he roared and roared.'

Frances Kelly laughed aloud. ‘You were always such a Girl Scout!'

‘Mom!' protested Martha.

‘I just mean you were always in tune with others. Why, the nuns at St Teresa's were forever telling your father and myself that we were blessed to have such a daughter. You had faith. A great faith and goodness – I remember Sister
Alexandra thought you might even have a vocation and want to join the order.'

Martha giggled, remembering the religious phase she went through, with a statue of Our Lady on her dressing table and the hours she spent praying and trying to be holy and good and glide around the polished wooden floors at home like the way the nuns in the convent moved.

‘It was just a phase, Mom, that's all!'

Frances Kelly raised her neatly pencilled grey eyebrows and the two of them burst into laughter.

‘To tell the truth, both your father and I were doing novenas that you'd get a bit of sense and were mighty relieved when it did pass.'

‘What about now?' Martha asked, hesitant. ‘What do you make of what's going on now? Honest to God, Mom, what do you think?'

‘I don't know what to make of it. I know that you're a good person and have always had a strong faith, and I suppose if the Lord wants to act through anyone, well, my daughter is as good as he'll find. The healing gift is a powerful one, mighty powerful. Perhaps it's in the family. Your great-grandmother had a way with her, and people used to come for miles looking for potions and cures. They didn't have fancy hospitals and pills and medicines in those days and I guess belief and faith came into it when a person got sick, for that was all they had! My mother told me she could close an open wound, staunch bleeding with just the touch of her hand, and the people in the
district used to send out a pony and trap for her whenever there was an accident or injury. Even her mother before her was rumoured to be a great one for sick and injured cattle.'

‘Mom, why in heaven's name didn't you mention any of this before?'

‘To be honest, I just didn't think about it. It's all so long ago, before my time. When I travelled across the Atlantic with my parents, all that stuff seemed like a lot of old talk and superstition, something we were trying to put behind us.'

Martha ordered coffee for the two of them, trying to make sense of the connections between generations of women.

‘Martha, I know you want to help people, heal them, whatever you call it, I'm not interfering but just be mindful of yourself, you have a husband and children, a family. I might be getting on a bit myself but I'm still your mother and I can't help worrying about you all.'

Martha understood her mother's genuine concern for her well-being and that of her family.

‘Don't worry, Mom. This healing is something strange and kind of exciting. I can't explain it but it seems to create an energy within me that makes me feel good.'

‘Energy or not, you just watch yourself – you're still my little girl and I can't help worrying about you,' declared Frances Kelly, standing up from the table.

The waitress, noticing their empty cups, came
over and offered them a refill. Afterwards Martha paid the bill while her mother visited the rest room.

On the way home they stopped off at a roadside stand piled high with orange pumpkins of every shape and size, dozens of them. Martha walked up and down, taking her time, picking out about five suitable for the kids to cut out and decorate. She added two pots of autumnal chrysanthemums to stand out on her front step, while her mother knowledgeably discussed pumpkin recipes with the chatty stall holder.

‘I didn't know you knew all those pumpkin dishes!' Martha teased as they carried her purchases to the car.

‘Ah, they're just out of my recipe books, sure you know I can't abide the smell or taste of those yokes!' laughed her mother, putting them in the trunk. The two of them automatically reached forward and hugged each other before setting off for home.

AS WORD OF
her gift of healing spread, Martha felt as if she and her family were under siege, their home and family life no longer their own. Absolute strangers approached her in the street, prepared to share the most intimate details of their life with her and ask for healing. They came up to her in the stores, outside school, at the local swimming pool, where she was trying to teach Alice the backstroke. Polite, she listened and talked to them, often at pains to point out that their own medical practitioners were far better qualified to help than she was.

Their home was inundated with local and long-distance phone calls; the callers would break down at the sound of her voice, confiding recently disgnosed illnesses and long battles with disease, telling of children who might never grow to adulthood, heavy crosses these unknown soldiers carried. Aware of their fears and quest for hope and answers, Martha listened and spoke softly to
them, making it clear that she could not possibly offer healing over the phone and recommending that perhaps they should talk to a counsellor in their area who might be able to help. Some were happy enough simply to have shared their problem, insisting that they had faith in her and believing they felt a little better already; others cursed her for wasting their time. Then there were the other calls, threatening and abusive, ranting and hurling insults, sly voices whispering, making her sick as these so called Bible-quoting, God-fearing Christians shouted and screamed abuse down the line at her and her family.

‘Filthy slut!'

‘Whore of the Devil!'

‘Blasphemer!'

‘Daughter of Satan! Sent to do his work!'

Furious, Mike had got on to the phone company and immediately demanded a new, unlisted number.

‘You might want to give those stupid people the time of day but the kids and I certainly don't! This is our home,' he argued, ‘and I'm not having Alice or the rest of the kids subjected to these calls. They don't need to listen to this kind of stuff.'

Martha, mightily relieved by her husband's protective action, gladly agreed that their new number was only to be distributed to close family and friends.

Then the letters came. At first a few stuffed in their blue-painted mailbox, bold handwriting, gentle curves, neat work-processed anonymous stationery, floral patterned and scented envelopes, vellum and rich parchment. But following the articles and interviews and word of mouth, more and more letters arrived, till Nolan their mailman was scarcely able to lift them and had to make special delivery arrangements.

‘Wow, look at all the mail you got!' chorused her kids as they rushed to help her open them as if they were birthday cards. Martha had to stop them when she found Alice kneeling in the breakfast room weeping over a letter from a teenage boy telling her of his mother's terminal illness.

Mostly she attended to the mail when the rest of them were out of the house or at school. The writers opened their hearts to her as if they were best friends. She pored over the letters, touched by the words and photos, deeply moved by the courage and spirit of those lives affected by the tragedy of illness and pain. One young woman, Teresa, had been out of school for three years, suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and now almost bed-bound had begun to write poetry; Martha was amazed by the power of her verse. They were the sad letters, and often made her cry, but it was the letters from those devoid of hope, depressed and despondent, dependent on alcohol and drugs and whose very spirit was lost to them, that affected her most. She worried about
those men, women and children, knowing they were the ones who needed help, who hungered for the spirit to raise them up and renew them. Some she wrote back to, others she called. Half afraid, she traced the photographic outline of some of their features and tried to transmit healing, asking the Holy Spirit to send them light in their darkness.

Many still came to the house in Mill Street in search of miracles, with immense faith and belief that she, a stranger, could somehow do what others had failed to do and heal them.

Patrick and Mary Rose and Alice were approached too. Martha was angry that her children were being dragged into something that was not their concern. One day Mary Rose broke down when an elderly man asked her to lay her hands on his stomach; the child sobbed hysterically for an hour when she got home.

‘It's all right, pet, I don't think he meant anything bad by it, honest I don't,' Martha reassured her.

Mike exploded with anger when he got in from work and accused her of being totally irresponsible.

‘Martha, I work darned hard in the Institute all day and I'll be damned if I come home to these lunatics and crackpots who seem to think they have some God-given right to intrude on our home and family. Let them fuck up their own lives if they want but tell them to keep out of mine!'

‘Calm down!' she pleaded.

‘You think you're some kind of bloody great earth mother that can heal the world, while the rest of us here at home can suffer! Well I'll tell you, I'm getting fed up of all these people in our lives. At the rate things are going if we want any privacy we'll have to sell this house and move somewhere else.'

‘I don't want to move to another house!' bawled Alice, tears running down her face.

‘Well, I'm not staying here to have my family threatened by a bunch of weirdos,' Mike said, storming out of the room.

‘Don't mind Dad, Alice,' explained Martha, trying to console her youngest daughter. ‘He doesn't mean it.'

Mike's temper and stubbornness had always got the better of him, his tendency to fly off the handle ensuring he never stayed long enough to argue a thing through and listen to anyone else's perspective. He'd been the exact same when they were dating.

‘But Dad's right. He's just trying to protect you and the rest of us,' added Patrick, taking his father's side. Martha realized that perhaps she was out of touch with how her children and husband were feeling.

Not wanting any more arguments and feeling stressed as hell she decided to put on her trainers and jacket and go out and get a bit of fresh air, giving all of them time to cool down before
she began to prepare dinner. Walking along the familiar neighbourhood paths she had to admit that the faults were as much hers as Mike's, and that neither of them were being exactly fair to the other. Something they would have to rectify if they wanted a happy marriage.