Falling Idols Page 8

  “The body of Christ,” he would say, then rest a wafer upon a waiting tongue, while in our mouths the miracle would happen again and again — the bread become the actual flesh of our Lord, and the wine His Saviour’s blood. “The body of Christ.”

  Awaiting my turn, I often contemplated the crucifix hanging on the wall before us: life-size, a plaster Christ painted in the vivid colours of His suffering and passion. His dark eyes gazed heavenward, while from His brow and nail wounds blood streamed in the other direction. Every rib stood out clearly as He seemed to labor in agony for each breath.

  “The body of Christ,” said the abbot, before me now.

  Only when I drew my hands from the railing to cup them beneath my chin, to catch the Host should it fall by accident, did I notice my own blood flowing from each wrist, where a nail might have been driven by a Roman executioner. Beneath my grey robe, my feet felt suddenly warm and wet.

  And when the Host slipped from Abbot O’Riordan’s fingers, it fell all the way to the hard floor, with no hands there to catch it and spare it from defilement. There it chipped into crumbling fragments of proxy flesh, to mingle with drops of blood that were entirely real.

  *

  There was no pattern to the stigmata’s recurrence after the first time, just a gradual worsening of physical signs. Initially, blood only seeped like sweat through unbroken skin, but later the wounds themselves manifested in my flesh, deeper on each occasion, layer by layer — for scarcely a minute to begin with, until at last they lingered for as long as two hours before sealing up again.

  I was examined over several months by a hierarchy of church representatives, all of them seeking a simple explanation, and I soon realized this was what they were hoping to find. The length and sharpness of my fingernails were checked repeatedly, and my routines became of intense fascination as they sought to discover some habit that might inflict deep blisters which would on occasion burst and bleed.

  But Greyfriars was no reclusive monastery far from the modern world, where medieval-minded monks were turned out each sunrise to till the fields. In the quiet neighbourhoods of Kilkenny I taught Latin in the parochial school adjacent to the friary. The closest I came to fieldwork was teaching the declensions of agricola.

  At least until the day I bled in class, and was removed from active staff.

  For a faith founded on the resurrection of the dead, and sustained by centuries of miracles accepted as historically real as wars and plagues, the Church of my era I found to be reluctant to admit to the possibility of modern miracles. Worse, I began to feel I’d become more of an embarrassment than anything, a smudge of unfortunate dust that may have been only dust, but that they weren’t yet willing to say was not divine, and therefore dust that they above all wished they might sweep aside so they wouldn’t have to debate what more to do with it.

  I believe what unsettled them most was that the wounds opened on my wrists, an anatomical verisimilitude shared by no stigmatic I’d ever heard of. Centuries of art and sculpture have depicted a crucifixion that never would’ve taken place, not with any self-respecting Roman soldier on the scene with a hammer and a fistful of nails. Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small. Nailing through the wrists was the only way to support the weight of the body and keep it on the cross without its tearing loose. But old images, fixed in the head and worn round the neck, are hard to die, although I should think they’d give anyone a handy means for weeding the miraculous from the merely hysterical: If Jesus were to go to all the trouble of manifesting through the flesh of another, you’d think He’d at least want to get the facts straight.

  This, more than anything, was what seemed to keep my priestly examiners from comfortably dismissing the whole matter. It’d been going on for nearly half a year before I was told, finally, that I was to be examined the next day by a tribunal arriving from Rome.

  “I would ask you to spend the hours between now and then in prayer and fasting,” Abbot O’Riordan told me. We were alone in his office and the door that he almost never closed was shut tight.

  “All due respect, Father,” I said, “I’ve been praying for a bit more insight ever since this started.”

  “Not for insight, that’s not what I’m asking of you, but for how you’ll answer their questions tomorrow. What you send back to Rome with them … that’s what you need concern yourself with now.”

  “I thought all I’d send them back with was the simple truth about what’s been happening.”

  “Do you even know what’s happening to you, Patrick? Can you tell me the cause of it? There’s been no getting to the bottom of it for six months, and you don’t know how I prayed for an end to it before it got this far.”

  He lowered his head to his hands for a moment, as if he’d said too much. Then, with those hands folded loosely together on his desk, he avoided my eyes and looked about the austere room.

  “The Church,” he said in a slow hush, “is built on a solid foundation of miracles from the past. But it’s my belief — and I’m not alone in this — that the past is where they should stay. What’s in the past remains fixed and constant. There’s no reason to doubt it, no need to demand from it any greater explanation. There’s no need to question it … only to believe in it. There it is and there it remains for all time, and it need never, ever, change … because it’s safely protected by time.”

  I stepped closer to him, aghast. “What threat could I pose to any of that?”

  “Have you not yet understood why we’ve tried to keep this as quiet as we can? Spontaneous healings at shrines and apparitions of Mary are one thing. But give the laity another human being they see miracles in, and it opens up an entirely new channel for their faith. You don’t want it any more than I do … because they’ll want more from you. They will. No pun intended, Brother Patrick, they’ll bleed you dry, and in the end you can only disappoint them because you can’t possibly give them as much as they’ll want from you. And then they’ll doubt, because disappointment can lead to cracks in the foundation of their faith. Cracks that might never appear if we but leave well enough alone.”

  He looked as sad as any man I had ever seen. “I’d never tell you how to conduct yourself tomorrow, or how to answer their questions. But God gave us a mind, Patrick … and the ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. All I ask is that you go do that for me, and for the sake of the Church.”

  After the abbot sent me from his office, I paused in the cool empty hall, and stood before a painting that hung on the wall. I’d admired, even envied, it ever since first coming to the abbey.

  It showed the martyrdom of Saint Ignatius, having been brought from Antioch to Rome, to be tossed to the beasts in the Coliseum. Left hand on his heart, the right outstretched in glory, as if he were making a grand speech of his suffering, his transcendent old eyes looked wide to the heavens. Supposedly he’d been eaten by two lions, but the beasts set upon him in the painting more resembled savage dogs, although no dogs I’d ever seen, with piglike snouts and eyes human in their cunning. The paws of the one tearing into his shoulder were spread wide like clawed hands. Often I wondered if they weren’t subtly intended to portray demons, instead. But whatever they were, Ignatius had looked forward to meeting them. They were his transport to a Heaven he couldn’t wait to get to.

  “You were lucky,” I whispered. “When you knew what tomorrow was bringing, they hadn’t given you any choice in the matter.”

  *

  I ate nothing for the rest of the day, nor that night, hoping that a fast would clear my mind. Long after Compline, the rest of the brothers asleep in their cells, I remained on my knees before the altar rail in the chapel. The only eyes on me were those of the cruciform Christ hanging on the wall. The only light was cast from the rack of votive candles to my left, filling the sanctuary with a soft glow and warm, peaceful shadows.

  For hour
s I prayed for a resolution between my conflicting loyalties — to the mission of the Church, as well as the purpose of whatever had chosen to work through me. I couldn’t see why these two aims had to exclude one another.

  In the chapel’s hush, I heard the soft plink of drops as they began falling to the floor nearby. Distracted, I checked both wrists but found them dry. Probably some leak sprung in the roof, I told myself. I pushed it from my ears, and from my heart tried to push the pique I felt over that reflex to check for my own blood in the first place, that this ordeal had done such a thing to me.

  I prayed for the ugliness rising in me to recede like muddied waters. There should be no place within me for anger, I believed, but felt it more and more as the hours passed. Part of me raged toward Abbot O’Riordan and the others like him, so concerned with the status quo that they preferred to turn a blind eye on anything in their midst that threatened to disrupt their lives of routine.

  The dripping sound seemed to become more insistent, as if the flow had increased — or perhaps my growing annoyance with it, I reasoned, was only making it appear louder.

  There was more at work here than blood and transitory wounds, yet they all behaved as if what was happening through me happened mindlessly, devoid of purpose. Yet there had to be a logic behind it, and therefore a reason … else why should it occur at all?

  The dripping grew heavier still, like the thick spatter of rainwater on the ground beneath the clogged gutters of a house. It killed the last of my prayer on my lips. When the chapel’s broken hush was ripped by a scream that resounded from the chilly stone, at first I wasn’t sure it hadn’t come from me.

  But no — I hadn’t the lungs for any cry as terrible as this.

  I stood at the railing, faced the back of the chapel to see who might’ve walked in on me, but no one was there. The door hung motionless. From the shadows I heard the wet sound of something tearing, and a rustle, then a moist heavy thud, like that of an animal carcass collapsing to the killing floor, except with it came a grunt that sounded unmistakably human.

  When I turned round front again, to see if someone might have come through unnoticed from the sacristy, it took several moments for what I noticed to penetrate the layers of disbelief.

  The cross on the wall hung empty, no Christ nailed to it now. Blood ran darkly gleaming down the stones from the foot of the cross and from both sides, and from each of these points jutted a crooked spike shellacked with coagulating gore.

  From the deep shadows behind the altar there issued a rasp of breath, and a groan of agony. In none of it did I hear any hint of meekness — these were not the sounds of a man who’d gone willingly to his cross. And when from his concealment he began to rise, I started to back my trembling way down the aisle.

  By the time I reached the rear of the chapel, he was standing in shadow, little of him to see in the flickering votives but for wet reflections of flame. He doubled halfway over, quaking in pain beyond imagining, as he began to lurch out from behind the altar.

  My first impulse was to retreat all the way to my room — yet what if this truly was meant for me to see? I chose to seclude myself in the flimsy shelter of the confessional — remaining, but giving this apparition every chance to vanish. I drew the curtain behind me as I sat pressed against the far wall and hoped to be spared this sight, hoped that it was no more than a waking dream brought on by one night’s hunger and six months of stress.

  But closer it came, and even when I could not see it, I heard it. Down the aisle it moved, harsh breath growing more ragged as it neared me, each shuffling footstep louder than the one before, a meaty wet slap of torn flesh on stone.

  The Christ seemed to linger outside the confessional, then I heard the rattling of the door to the priest’s booth. On the other side of that thin wall the Christ settled heavily upon the seat, bringing with him a stifling reek of blood and sweat.

  I pushed the curtain back again and in the dim light thrown by the votives looked down at my wrists, unbloodied, then at the partition separating me from this Christ who’d ripped free of his cross. The panel between us scraped open. Through the screen I saw the outline of his head, misshapen with its wrapping of the crown of thorns. Fingers next — they clawed at the screen, then battered away until it buckled and fell out. The hand looked mangled beyond repair, and he held it up so I could see the damage it would never have sustained had that life-size crucifix been accurately rendered.

  “Do you understand now?” he asked, in Latin.

  “I’m … not sure,” I whispered, but suspected that I did. If sculptors couldn’t get anatomical details right, how much easier might it have been for scribes to propagate other fallacies?

  The Christ’s head tilted forward to fill the tiny window. I was spared the worst of his burning and pain-mad gaze, his eyes veiled by the hair straggling blood-caked from beneath the thorns.

  “Save me,” he begged, again in Latin. “Save me from that impotent, slaughtered lamb they have made of me.”

  “You mean … you never died?”

  “Everyone dies. Everyone and everything,” he said. “But there is no salvation in anyone’s death but your own … and sometimes not even then.”

  “What … what of your being the Son of God, then?”

  “There are many gods. There are many sons conceived by rape.” For a moment he was still, almost contemplative. Then he reached through the opening with a filthy arm, torn hand clamping upon my wrist. “The things I’ve seen, the secrets he keeps … if babies were born remembering these things, they would tear apart their mothers trying to return to the womb.”

  His hand felt hot and wet, the splintered bones as sharp as nails, gouging deep scratches where before my flesh had opened of its own accord. He held fast as our blood mingled.

  “Demon est Deus inversus,” he said, a phrase born of ancient heresy, yet coming now from the one I’d thought to be my Saviour.

  He released me then, his arm withdrawing like a serpent back to its lair. A moment later I heard him abandon the confessional, and hurriedly I drew my curtain again, so I wouldn’t have to see him passing before me, lacerated and limping.

  The footsteps receded into the chapel silence. For a moment I thought it might be safe to leave, but what I heard next persuaded me to remain until morning light had driven away every shadow:

  The pounding of hammers.

  *

  When I came awake a few hours later and left the booth, the dawn showed no blood upon the walls, nor sticky footprints along the aisle. But I don’t think I was expecting any, really.

  Later on in the day, I told the tribunal from Rome that I’d been causing the stigmata myself, and showed them the fresh wounds on my wrist as evidence. The matter was officially closed. Abbot O’Riordan seemed greatly relieved, and only mildly distressed when I informed him that I planned to leave Greyfriars.

  The prior night could have been a dream, and I might’ve found it easy to convince myself, as I’d nearly done with that spectral comforter who’d at least been substantial enough to kiss the blood from my knee. What evidence to the contrary did I have, except for some deep scratches on my wrist that I could’ve made myself?

  None, but for unshakable conviction … and the other thing.

  It went unnoticed until my last day with the order, as alone I stood in the chapel gazing silently up at the lurid crucifix and its Christ frozen in suffering like an ancient fly trapped in the amber of another epoch. The change in it was so subtle I doubted anyone else would even notice, and if they did, they’d merely dismiss their memories of how it had looked as being mistaken.

  Surely, they’d tell themselves, their Saviour had been nailed up there through the wrists all along.

  III. Excommunio sanctorum

  After the pinched faces and ectomorphic frames of most of my Franciscan brothers, the robust lumpiness of my Uncle Brendan came as a welcome change. He drove me away from Greyfriars with a ruddy scowl for the abbey, and only when we were rolling
west through that green and treeless countryside did he break into a relieved grin and slap his big hard hand upon my leg.

  “So. Which vow should we have you breaking first?” he asked.

  Penniless, I’d turned to Uncle Brendan for help in making my new life. By renouncing the order in disillusion, I had become a shame to my devout family in Belfast. As they’d regarded Brendan the same for as long as I could recall, it was inevitable that two such black sheep as ourselves throw in together. I’d long realized he was hardly the devil my mother — his older sister — had painted him to be, for refusing to set foot in a church since before I was born, and scoffing at nothing less than the Holy See itself.

  “Some choose to face the world with a rosary in their hands, and some get more out of holding a well-pulled pint of stout,” he said. “Not that one excludes the other, but at some point you do need to decide which is more fundamentally truthful.”

  I lived with him in Killaloe, northeast of Limerick, where at the southern tip of Lough Derg he rented out boats to tourists and wandering lovers. I helped him most days at the docks, on others motoring down to Limerick to earn a little extra money tutoring Latin. In this way I slowly opened up to a wider world.

  Early evenings, we’d often find ourselves in one of Brendan’s favourite pubs. Great pub country, Ireland, and Brendan had a great many favourites. Poor man’s universities, he called them, and we’d further our educations at tables near fires that crackled as warm and welcoming as any hearth in any home.

  Guinness for Brendan, always, and in the beginning, shandies for me. I was little accustomed to drinking and inclined to start slow. But they relaxed me, and this I needed, often feeling that I still didn’t belong outside cloistered walls. I would look at all these people who knew how to live their days without each hour predetermined as to how they’d pass it, and I’d wonder how they managed, if they knew how courageous they were. I’d listen to them laugh and would feel they had no more than to look at me to see that I was only pretending to be one of them.