Of Irish Blood (19 page)

“Visit,” he says. “She’s a slow learner,” he adds.

Coco looks down at the ground.

A bully, I think. Hearty and all but a bit of Tim McShane under that polished exterior.

At that moment Peter walks up, his tweed jacket rumpled, his white shirt frayed at the collar yet somehow more elegant in his very spareness than Arthur Capel. He doesn’t acknowledge me.

“Any luck finding the manuscript, Keeley?” Capel says to Peter before he can even greet us.

“You’re pursuing a fantasy, Capel,” Peter says. And then to the rest of us, “He’s convinced that a seventeenth-century ancestor of his spent time at the college and left behind a priceless manuscript.”

“My uncle, Monsignor Thomas Capel, told me.”

“Oh, you have an uncle who’s a priest,” I say. “In England?”

“In America,” he says.

“Really? Not Chicago by any chance?”

“I’m not in touch with him,” Capel says, and turns back to Peter. “We had a nobleman ancestor in King James’s army. He was with the king at Trinity College and rescued an Irish manuscript. I believe it’s here. The family fell on rather hard times and my own father’s family came from, well, humble circumstances though he was blessed with a talent for business. But now I’d like to claim my heritage.”

“Of course there was Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex,” Peter says. “But he killed St. Oliver Plunkett so not a good man to be related to.”

Gabrielle speaks to Capel in French, and I catch
“mal du têtê
.
”

“My companion’s not feeling well,” Capel says. “We’ll be on our way. Keep looking, Keeley. I want to purchase that manuscript. Price is no object.”

*   *   *

“Not enough for the fellow to be rich. He wants to be noble too,” Peter says.

“Well he does have a priest uncle,” I say.

“Unfortunate story,” Father Kevin says. “Father Thomas Capel was a very popular priest in London. Lots of converts from the upper classes. Made a monsignor. A favorite of titled ladies. He was rather too devoted to them. Accusations of, well, bad behavior came from their husbands. Thomas called it a campaign against him and denied the accusations, anti-Catholic slurs, he said. Who knows? But Cardinal Manning sent him off to America. Thomas plays down his Irish roots. Though I believe he was born in Ireland as was Arthur’s father, I suspect, but the son’s an Englishman now and has enough money to be an aristocrat. Harmless, I suppose. Thomas had the same need for grandeur. Fancied himself a Renaissance bishop. There are times when I think we should return to a married clergy. A wife would have kept Thomas in line,” Father Kevin finishes.

“Where is he in America?” I ask.

“California, I believe.”

“Never been,” I say. “Chicago is my home.”

“Chicago?” Father Kevin says. “Some of my father’s people went there from Cork.”

Oh no. Lots of Cork people in Kilgubbin who could send him all the gossip about Nora Kelly by return mail.

“We lost touch with them a generation ago,” he says.

I feel my shoulders relax. Anyway, surely other scandals have replaced mine by now.

Father Kevin asks have I seen the gardens and starts walking.

Peter has still not spoken to me. So I follow the priest, still clutching my mug of tea.

We sit down on a bench under the trees in the back garden.

“So” is all he says to me. Nothing more.

I try to find a last sip of tea in the bottom of my cup.

“You didn’t seem pleased when I mentioned my Chicago connections.”

“Oh no, I think it’s great. It’s just—well I’m not in touch with Chicago these days.”

I keep looking down into my cup.

“So,” he says again after a pause. “And you came to Mass today because…?”

“Well, I had been going on Professor Keeley’s walking tours and…”

“Really? When he came up to us he didn’t seem to know you. I was going to introduce you but…”

“Look, Father, here’s what happened. I tried to hire Professor Keeley and May said I’d insulted him. But I want to straighten things out with him.”

“Well, that’s direct enough. I envy the way you Americans go straight to the point. We Irish tend to meander.”

“I’m Irish, Father.”

“Well, shall we say you grew up differently. And what is the position you offered Peter?”

“I only want him to talk about Paris to the ladies I guide around the city.”

“Why?”

“Because he knows so much, and I’m only showing them the tourist bits.”

“And they want more.”

“I don’t know, but they should.”

“Because you want more too. More than sitting in the back of the chapel or nibbling away at the edges of the Irish community here.”

“Yes,” I say. “I do.”

“Lonely, are you, Honora?” Using Granny’s name for me.

“Well, of course I miss home and my family, but…”

“I mean, are you lonely for yourself?”

“If you’re asking, do I miss the woman I was in Chicago, no. She, well … Not something I want to talk about, Father. Especially out here.”

“Matter for confession?” he says, and smiles at me.

Smiles! And I smile back. Couldn’t help it.

“I suppose,” I say. “Didn’t see any confessionals in the chapel.”

“We don’t have those boxes,” he says. “Can’t imagine Jesus asking people to mumble into the darkness in order to have their sins forgiven. Such a lover of nature, our Lord. ‘Consider the lilies of the field … The sower and his seed … My eye is on the sparrow…’ It was the parables helped Patrick to win the Irish. Those early monks loved the landscape of Ireland, so bleak and yet so beautiful. Now, Honora, I suppose it was a man.”

I nod.

“Who was not your husband?”

“I never married.”

“Was he someone else’s husband?”

“Not formally … In a relationship a bit like Capel and Mademoiselle Chanel. Only the woman had the money.”

“And you cared for the fellow?”

“I thought so. I was wrong. But I couldn’t stop. I didn’t dare tell anyone and when I tried to break it off…” I stop.

“Violent?” he asks.

I nod. “I ran.”

“Good for you,” he says.

And it all comes out. How afraid I still feel. How I blame myself for getting involved. How I regret all the years of lying. Why I hadn’t been to Mass. Father Kevin utters not a syllable, only keeps those blue eyes on me. And no one disturbs us. All by ourselves at the tip of the garden as I finish telling him how I am convinced that Tim would somehow find me if I wrote home, and now I say what I didn’t even know I was thinking.

“I’m afraid he’ll kill me, and in a way, I’ll deserve to die. There’s nothing I can do to escape. Sometimes I think I should just, well, save him the trouble. Get it over with.”

After a long silence Father Kevin speaks. “Generations of your ancestors stood against the oppressors and refused to die, Honora, so that you could live.”

I nod. “My grandmother would say, ‘We wouldn’t die, and that annoyed them.’”

“Well put! Can’t let guilt tear from you what they struggled to win.”

“Oh, I suppose I’d never really … though…”

“‘Half in love with easeful death’? I’ve always thought that was an aristocratic notion. Only someone who thinks death wouldn’t dare impinge on his comfort could write those words. The English might romanticize death, but we Irish know him too well. An ugly fellow who creeps up on children, turns their limbs black, makes them swell up, who uses poverty and war for help in destruction. We stand against death, Honora. Do you know that in ancient times, Irish kings were judged not by how many enemies they killed but by how well their people lived? A rollicking party was more admired than a well-fought battle. But I’m wandering.… You mustn’t lacerate yourself anymore. I apologize to you, Honora, on behalf of the priests who made Catholicism seem a religion that condemns us to guilt and shame.”

“You apologize to me?” I don’t know what to say.

I hear voices. The students are leaving. Very quiet in the courtyard. I start to stand.

“Must you leave?” Father Kevin says.

“I don’t want to keep you from your work,” I say.

He smiles. “Nothing more important than one of God’s children.”

Me, important? And he was sorry I felt shame?

Never met a priest like Father Kevin.

I sit down. Now he seems to be almost talking to himself.

“How sexual morality became the be-all and end-all of so much of Catholicism I don’t know. It’s been made more important than kindness or honesty or mercy. I remember my first pastor told me to get a good stout blackthorn stick and patrol the hedges. Find a young couple courting there and hit the fellow a good whack and that’ll terrorize the rest of them. Terrorize! Instilling fear was the mark of a good pastor. Sad that, when ‘pastor’ really means ‘shepherd.’ Imagine the Good Shepherd using his staff to beat his people.

“Our people love celebration—Christmas, saints’ days when the old traditions come alive again. But that pastor of mine saw our parishioners as pagans—partially subdued but ready to revolt at any moment. He forbade the ceremonies held each year on the Feast of St. Colmcille. Nonsense, he called them. The custom was to circle in procession the ancient carved stones that lined the path that led to the holy well. Walk around three times in the direction of the sun,” Father Kevin says, which does sound a bit pagan but I’m deep into the story now and don’t want him to stop.

“Then each person would pick up three small pebbles and the procession would move up the mountain toward the well. There was a huge cairn of stones at the top. Centuries’ worth, a memorial to those hundreds of years when Catholicism was forbidden and our people kept the faith alive with such practices. The procession would begin at midnight and slowly move upward following the flickering lights of two lanterns. Very beautiful, though eerie.”

“Sounds wonderful,” I say.

“If the truth be told, long before Jesus was born we were worshipping at holy wells and climbing sacred mountains. When Christianity came to ancient Ireland, nobody martyred those first converts. St. Patrick never condemned the old beliefs. He simply brought them into the new religion. The early monks, who were probably druids themselves, knew they couldn’t suppress the old tales, so they gave them a kind of Christian veneer.

“I joined the people in the Colmcille procession. We circled the cairn three times casting one of our pebbles on the great pile on every round. Each one represented some guilt or sin. Then we cupped our hands and dipped into St. Colmcille’s spring and drank the clear water. And then headed for the crossroads where we planned to dance until dawn. Very sound psychology. Really.

“Of course I knew the pastor objected. Hated every minute of it but I never thought …

“Well that night he was waiting by the side of the road for the pilgrims to pass. They came down the narrow path, laughing and talking, and didn’t the pastor jump out at them, swinging his stick and shouting that they were all going to hell. I stepped forward and grabbed for his arm. He hit me a clout, which in a way turned out to be a good thing. Bishops might be expert at turning a blind eye, but they can’t allow pastors to break a curate’s arm. Bad for vocations. Well, that old pastor started roaring and shouting about how God would punish them all. The blight would come again. God would show them. Now, this was one of his favorite themes—the Great Starvation as retribution. The Almighty killing one million to wean people away from their pagan ways.”

“Horrible,” I say.

“I agree, and yet such preaching wasn’t uncommon. Pure power politics. Remember, before the Great Starvation there were not that many priests in Ireland. We were only beginning to recover from penal days when merely being a Catholic was a crime.

“Just as the worst of the penal laws were lifted came the Great Starvation. After that less people, more priests. The Church wanted control. Always so complicated. Plenty of priests died helping our people through the worst of the Great Starvation, but still money was sent to Rome every year which could have fed … Now we’re all Catholics in our very bones but I wonder, did Jesus really want us to become such a bureaucracy? The Great Starvation tore the heart out of the Irish people. The very land had turned against us. For all the prayers and entreaties, a million had died. Two million more gone forever to America, England, Australia and millions more following that path year after year, decade after decade. It was a lucky Irish woman ever saw her own grandchildren. Maybe in some ways it was easier to think we somehow brought it on ourselves. A kind of explanation. And a way out. Because if being bad caused the horror, then maybe being good would keep disaster away. Lots of sins committed in the service of being good.

“And now here is this mad priest, their pastor, ready to beat the body to save the soul. Only God knows what went on inside his head. A farmer’s son himself and maybe not a man to be set apart and made to believe he alone had the answer to everything. Well, the other men moved in and subdued him and we brought him to the parish house. His sister was his housekeeper. A decent enough woman, though afraid of him too. ‘Drink,’ she said. ‘He was driven to it. Couldn’t help himself. It was the drink.’

“Now, I know for a fact he was a teetotaler and proud of it. But a man done in by drink gets sympathy in Ireland. Who of us hasn’t had one too many? The bishop sent the pastor away for a rest and found someone for Glencolmcille who understood the old ways. A decent fellow.”

“Why didn’t you become pastor?”

“Me? No. I was marked too. The bishops said I’d encouraged the people in their disobedience. But my own family are not short of a few shillings and very generous to the Church. So I was sent to Paris and the Irish College. Providence looking out for me after all.”

A bell rang. Two o’clock.

“Now, that was a longer story than I meant to tell. Sorry for boring you.”

“You didn’t … I mean, thank you. I think I’m…”

But he interrupts me. “Here’s Peter on his way toward us. Quick, Honora, are you sorry for anything you’ve done to separate yourself from Divine Love?”

I nod.

“Then,
ego te absolvo
in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. You’re forgiven.”