Cripples All of Us

PUSHING DOWN HARD with his fists on the table-top he heaved himself up to where he was standing. For the first time we saw he wanted one leg. It was gone from the knee joint down. He was hopping sideways to reach for his stick in the corner when he lost his balance. He would have fallen in a heap if Brendan hadn't leapt forward and caught him.

"I'm as crippled as the dark world," Gildas said.

"If it comes to that, which one of us isn't, my dear?" Brendan said.

Gildas with but one leg. Brendan sure he'd misspent his whole life entirely. Me that had left my wife to follow him and buried our only boy. The truth of what Brendan said stopped all our mouths. We was cripples all of us. For a moment or two there was no sound but the bees.

"To lend each other a hand when we're falling," Brendan said. "Perhaps that's the only work that matters in the end."

-Originally published in Brendan

God's Grand Glory

"HIGGLEDY PIGGLEDY, WOMAN and man," she said, clapping her hands. "Is God either one of them, think you? Neither if you ask me. Or both. To my way of thinking God's more like the sun for the sun both brings forth like a mother and pierces deep like a father. Yet it's greater than either, look you, the way it draws all creatures under Heaven to its blessed light without raising so much as a thumb. Would Lough Dern itself was filled to the brim with beer so all the women and men in the land could drink to God's fiery grand glory!"

-Originally published in Brendan 

Like Flirting or Courting

BRENDAN BAPTIZED NO others on that journey but there was more than a few he softened up against the day another of the new faith should come by. They was poor folk mostly. They'd be gathering white-stalked wild garlic or nuts as might be or grazing their bony cows on some common pasturage. He'd give them a bit to eat out of our plump sacks and tell them news of Christ like it was no older than a day. Nor did he tell it with gull eyes like Jarlath nor grinding it down to a fine dust like Erc. He'd make them laugh instead at how Christ gulled the elders out of stoning to death the woman caught in the act of darkness. He'd drop their jaws telling them how he hailed Lazarus out of his green grave and walked on water without making holes. He'd bring a mist to their eyes spinning out the holy words Christ said on the hill and telling them the way he shared his last loaf with his friends the night the bullies come for him in the garden.

It was like flirting or courting the way Brendan did it. He'd tease them along till they was hot for more and then skitter off saying he'd be back one day soon or another like him to tell them another tale or two if they'd mend their ways in the meantime. Once in a while he'd get me to join him singing psalms back and forth though it sounded more like cows calling to be milked than monks.

-Originally published in Brendan

Tongue for Holy Things

FIRST HE LET Brendan baptize him all by himself in the deep bed of a stream with his whole kindred gawking from the banks. Then they all come wading in after him. They stood to their chests in the dark water. The children that was too small they took up in their arms. Me and Brendan sloshed among them soaking their heads one by one for an hour or more till at last the entire pack was done.

Then Brendan stood up in a grove of small-nutted branching green hazels and made them a grand speech. He told them how Christ was Prince of Light and King of the Stars and all such as that. He told them every nasty thing they ever did was washed clean away now so they wasn't to foul themselves ever doing the likes again. He told them the Holy Ghost was a gold-eyed milk-white dove would help them stay sweet as milk and true as gold. It was only Brendan with his big bottom and pointed red head talking. . . . Yet I had to own he cut a fine figure there by the river. Nor did any have a luckier tongue for holy things.

-Originally published in Brendan

The Holy in the Commonplace

IT HAPPENED ONE day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they'd slaughtered for it the day before. I'd been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle. We poured water on the carcase and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms. They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped round its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us. Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops—we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath's leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn't so much as know my name then.

"It's a smirchy sort of business you're at with that pig, some would say," she said. "There's many a monkish boy either he'd beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it's neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That's the deep truth of things too no matter or not if you know it."

Ita's eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.

"Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear," she said. " I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you've learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land."

-Originally published in Brendan