The Brothers' Lot (18 page)

“Okay, let’s take a look at these guys then,” continued Father Mulvey, and bent down to inspect the shards of terracotta statuettes. Did any of these little guys make it?”

“Well, all the ones in the nooks at the far end seem to be undamaged.”

That was not so good, thought Mulvey, but he could probably work with it. He continued to peer at all the shards on the floor while Brother Loughlin looked on in ex-asperated impatience.

“Any other witnesses?” asked Father Mulvey without looking up.

“I’m afraid not,” said Brother Loughlin sadly.

“Okay, let’s go see what Brother Boland has to say for himself,” said Mulvey, and abruptly slipped out of the oratory past Loughlin.

* * *

Brother Boland’s cell was dark except for the tired moon-light that came through the small window.

Father Mulvey turned to Brother Loughlin and brusquely motioned him to stay quiet.

As their eyes became accustomed to the dim light they saw Boland sitting on the edge of his cot. He was rocking to and fro and crooning to the small figure he held in his hands.

“Brother Boland, there’s a man from the Bishop here to see you,” announced Brother Loughlin.

Boland’s crooning took on a more urgent tone and his rocking grew faster.

Father Mulvey turned on Brother Loughlin. “Let me do the talking here, Brother,” he hissed, then waited for the sound Boland was making to return to a less urgent pitch. He felt an excitement grow inside him. This looked good. This looked very promising. This could really be it. This could be the one that would put him on the miracle map. Then there’d be no stopping him: seminars, lecture tours, maybe even a post in the Curia. Yep, this could be Martin Mulvey’s Momentous Miraculous Mother Lode. He took a deep breath to calm himself.

“Brother Boland? It’s okay,” he began softly. “You don’t have to talk right now. I’m Father Mulvey. My friends call me Martin. I’d like you to call me Martin. I’m here to be your friend. I’m here to help you. What do you think of that, Brother Boland?”

Boland made no reply though his crooning did stop for a moment to indicate he had at least heard what had been said to him.

“Good, Brother Boland. That’s very good,” purred Father Mulvey soothingly.

“Ah, for God Sake! Enough of this fecking around! Let the dog see the rabbit and get on with it!” cried Brother Loughlin, and turned on the light.

The crooning turned into a high-pitched shrieking and Boland curled himself up into a ball on the bed. Father Mulvey spun round and with one continuous motion turned off the light, opened the door, and pushed Brother Loughlin out into the corridor.

“Brother, I asked you not to interfere. Now I’m telling you! Don’t interfere with the vidente miraculus. I think you should just wait out here until I need you. Agreed?”

Brother Loughlin found himself in the corridor with the door closed in his face, surrounded by the Brothers.

“I thought I told you all to stay downstairs!” he barked at them, suddenly very conscious that he did not want Father Mulvey to come out and tell him to be quiet. “It’s got more official now. Father Mulvey needs me to wait here outside while he interviews the vidente miraculus.”

The Brothers murmured among themselves at this; slowly there emerged more concrete phrases.

“More official, is it?”

“Vidente miraculus, did you hear that?”

“That means it is a miracle.”

“Let them try to build a warehouse here now and the Pope himself will be down on the lot of them like a ton of bricks.”

“Holy ground.”

“Very important site.”

“Could be pilgrimages.”

“Tour buses even.”

Slowly the knot of Brothers was winding and tightening itself like some dynamic force. It was only a matter of time before this energy had to be released, and it would only take the tiniest spark, if it was the right one. Brother Loughlin watched in amazement as this group-hysteria event unfolded in front of him.

“Pope’s visit.”

“We’ll be on the news!”

“People from all over the world.”

There was a slight pause as the group trembled and teetered on the brink of explosion. Then it came.

“Relics!”

It was like a burning rag in a gasometer. The knot of Brothers tore apart and became a roiling fracas trying to get downstairs to the oratory as quickly as possible. Brother Loughlin watched them and smiled in the knowledge that
he
would have the profits generated from any relics and not those hapless drones.

“Are you okay there, Brother Boland? Can I get you anything? A cup of tea?”

The Brother’s crooning and humming continued but there was just the barely perceptible shaking of the head.

“Well, if you change your mind, just let me know, okay?”

Boland nodded slightly and continued to hum and croon.

Father Mulvey listened patiently to the tones and nuances. After a few minutes the crooning stabilized.

“A nice moon tonight. Funny how it clears up sometimes at night when it’s been cloudy all day. A bit frosty though. I cycled over here. It was already getting icy but I thought you might want to have a chat after what you saw.”

Brother Boland’s sounds momentarily caught in his throat and slowly took on the tones of being ready to speak.

“Do you think Venerable Saorseach is all right?” asked Father Mulvey gently.

“I don’t know,” whispered Brother Boland.

“Do you think I could see?”

“Mmm-hmm,” assented Boland hesitantly.

“I’m going to turn on the light, Brother Boland, okay? I can’t see Venerable Saorseach without the light. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” wheezed Boland.

Father Mulvey moved slowly to the door and turned the light on. Brother Boland flinched a little and brought his arms more tightly around the piece of statue he cradled.

Mulvey sat down on the bed about a foot from Boland. It was risky but it was time to move things along.

“You know I’m here to help, Brother. Can I see Venerable Saorseach, do you think?”

Boland looked up for the first time, then glanced around the cell as if it were some vast hall. He seemed to be searching inside and behind every floorboard and brick to make sure there were no malevolent presences in the room. He glared suspiciously at the door and then turned and stared at the priest. Mulvey had been expecting this and had composed his face into its most sympathetic and trustworthy configuration.

Brother Boland slowly lowered his eyes toward his lap where he gently opened his arms to reveal the half figurine cradled in his upturned hands.

Mulvey could see the blood on the broken edges of the statuette and had to exercise great self-restraint not to reach out for it. “Now, Brother, you know that if we are going to call this a miracle there will have to be an investigation. You understand that, don’t you, Brother?”

“I do,” said Boland confidently, and continued to stare lovingly at the statuette.

“So you have to trust me. You know I’m your friend, don’t you, Brother? And we trust our friends, don’t we?”

After a short pause Brother Boland nodded in agreement.

“Can I touch the statue?”

Boland looked up and stared hard at Father Mulvey.

“If we are going to get recognition for Venerable Saorseach, a lot of people are going to have to look at it. It may even have to go to Rome to the Holy Father himself,” said Father Mulvey gently while holding Boland’s gaze in his.

The Brother nodded again and slowly, almost painfully, moved his cradled hands toward Father Mulvey. As he lifted it gently out of Brother Boland’s hands, Mulvey caught sight of the long gash on the back of the Brother’s right hand. It took all his discipline and experience not to react to it. He focused his attention on the statue and inspected it while his mind raced. He had to hold on to this one. This was make or break. One false move here and the whole miracle was gone.

“Did you cut your hand there, Brother?” asked Father Mulvey softly.

Brother Boland glanced down, noticing for the first time the cut just below his wrist.

“Oh yes. I suppose I must have. Yes, cut my hand, I did.” Each word came out more hesitantly than the last as it took Boland closer to the same realization as was running through Father Mulvey’s mind.

In a flash the priest made up his mind: “Well, these things are bound to happen with so many broken pieces lying around the floor. But let’s have a good look at this, shall we? This is the important thing at the minute.” As if to reinforce his unadversarial stance, Father Mulvey set to examining the statuette with renewed interest.

“Now, Brother, can you remember if Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly spoke to you at all while you were in the oratory?”

“No, no, I don’t believe he did. No, no, he didn’t.”

“Are you sure now, Brother? It might have been very difficult to hear him with all the noise in there, what with everything falling and breaking like that.”

“No, I can’t say I heard anything. But there were communion hosts!”

“Right. But you heard nothing?” asked Father Mulvey softly and with benign incredulity. “There was nothing at all, not even a little voice in the silence after all the noise?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there was but I couldn’t hear it. What about the communion hosts I saw?”

“We’ll get to those in time. But there could have been a voice, couldn’t there?”

“Could have been. I don’t know.”

“All right, all right, Brother. No need to get yourself worked up now. It’s all fine. We’re all on your side here.” Mulvey glanced down at the statue. He bit his lip. He needed time to think about this. “Here you are, Brother, why don’t you take Venerable Saorseach back. I’ll close the light and leave you alone for a little while and maybe you might find Venerable Saorseach has something to say to you. What do you think about that?”

Brother Boland’s eyes lit up at the prospect of getting the statuette back and he held out his hands imploringly, almost greedily.

Mulvey turned off the light and gently opened the door as little as possible and stepped out into the corridor. He looked Brother Loughlin in the eye and then mustered a slight conciliatory smile.

“I think I might take you up on that offer of a ball of malt now, Brother.”

21

A
hhhhhh! That’s a fine drop of whiskey, Brother,” mused Father Mulvey as the mouthful of first-shot from the unmarked bottle teased and warmed him with its spicy fire.

“It is indeed. You wouldn’t get the like of it anywhere in the city, I can tell you. I have an old friend gets it for me at the distillery in Listowel.”

“Ah, it is a good thing to have friends in the right places.”

“It is, Father, it is.”

The pleasantries over, Father Mulvey leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. He stared deep into the glass of whiskey in his right hand. Loughlin tried hard to maintain a veneer of indifference.

“A holy man, your Brother Boland, would you say, Brother?” asked Father Mulvey carefully.

“I would have to say so, yes. He’s a pious man, a great devotion to Our Lady of Indefinite Duration and, of course, to Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly.”

“That is very commendable, very commendable indeed. But tell me this, would there be anything in Brother Boland’s character that might, how could I put this, be used to discredit him if, for example, he were to be investigated by the Regional Subcommittee of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints?”

Brother Loughlin peered at Father Mulvey. He knew these Jesuits and their tricky rhetorical ways. He was not going to be outflanked or hoodwinked. “I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re driving at, Father.”

“Let me put it this way. Every year the Subcommittee investigates about a hundred alleged miracles or apparitions. They keep as balanced a view as possible but they must play devil’s advocate to each case. My question is whether Brother Boland would stand up to the rigors of such an investigation?”

“How rigorous an investigation are we talking about?”

Father Mulvey took a long draught from his glass and allowed Brother Loughlin to refill it. He sat back in his chair and observed the Brother as if from a great distance. “The most rigorous. Here’s the thing, Brother: to a man on a galloping horse it all looks like a first-class miracle, but to an unfriendly eye there might appear certain facts that might seriously weaken our case.” On the word
our
, Father Mulvey again leaned forward in his seat.

Brother Loughlin sat forward in his too, placed his glass on the desk, and put his right hand gently over his left in a gesture of undivided attention. “And what might these unhelpful facts be?”

“Well, I couldn’t help noticing that Brother Boland had quite a cut on the back of his right hand. Now, the first thing an investigator would do—and don’t get me wrong here, he would be only doing his job—would be to check if the blood on the statuette was Brother Boland’s. If it turned out to be the same type then there would certainly be a temptation to take the blood on the statuette, the cut in Brother Boland’s hand, put them together, and
poof
! No more miracle.” Father Mulvey raised his left hand and spread his fingers wide in a gesture of evaporating dreams of beatification, fame, pilgrimages, papal visits, souvenir shops, and renown for the Brothers of Greater Little Werburgh Street, North.

“I see your point,” replied Brother Loughlin levelly.

“Now, of course, if the blood on the statue did not match Brother Boland’s, then we would have a much stronger case for a miracle. So, if you were to go and get the statuette and bring it here to me, then I could initiate the investigation, hopefully happy in the knowledge that the blood on it was not Brother Boland’s. And you know what, Brother? If Brother Boland could possibly remember anything that Venerable Saorseach said to him during the miracle, it would be all the better for us.”

“I see your point, Father.”

“Call me Martin.”

“Why don’t you help yourself to another dram of whiskey there, Martin, while I get the statue and have a little chat with Brother Boland.”

Father Mulvey smiled back winningly and poured himself another generous measure of Brother Loughlin’s whiskey.