IT IS A SMALL SOMNOLENT VILLAGE with a limestone rock that sprawls irregularly over the village green, where sprouts a huge beech tree along with incidental saplings that meander out of it. Picturesque, you might say. Life has a quiet hum to it. You are passing through, on your way to somewhere livelier. You would never dream that so many restless souls reside here, dreaming of a different destiny. As you enter you see a stone, Roman-type church, one of the oldest in the land, a graveyard adjoining it and, on the tombstones, huge white lozenges of lichen that look bold, if not to say comic. In contrast a ball alley next door is green and oozes damp from years of rain. This is a rainy hamlet, being on the Gulf Stream. You would rarely come across anyone playing handball, except perhaps on Sundays, when a few youths, having trampled over grave plots and flower domes, take it into their heads to give themselves another bit of diversion by pegging a ball or some stones at the green lamenting cement. However, they soon tire of that and move on to amuse themselves with old cars or old motorcycles.
The effect when you first enter is of a backwater where souls and bodies have fallen prey to a stubborn tedium. You will find dogs, many of them mongrels, chasing each other over the ample green or snoozing in the sun. In the grocery shop the prevailing smell will be of flour and grain stuff, and if you are lucky you might find bananas or grapes, but most likely you will have to settle for apples. You could be tempted by a wide open-faced biscuit, like the face of a clock, studded with dark brown raisins. You would not suspect that in the big house with the wrought-iron gateway and the winding overgrown avenue a wife went a little peculiar, lost her marbles. It is said that it was her sister’s fault, her sister, Angela. After spending many years in a convent, Angela, to the chagrin of her order and her relatives, upped and left, and came to live with Margaret in the big house. At first she hid, even from Margaret’s husband, but gradually when her hair grew she emerged from her bedroom and eventually ventured down to the drawing room, to give a tinkle on the piano. It is said that it was there the husband, Ambrose, first saw her in a secular outfit, because of course he had seen her as a nun. Ambrose, who was something of a fop, was immediately captivated by her beauty and the slenderness of her frame inside a long brown velvet dress that buttoned down the center and had a flare. Anything can happen to three people who languish in a house, a big house, a damp house, a house with gongs on the kitchen wall and many dank passages which could do with a lick of paint but for a chronic shortage of money. People can drive each other mad in such circumstances. Angela ate like a bird, gardened, and played the piano in the evenings. Also she sang. She sang “Oft in the Stilly Night” and “There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall.” In the summer evenings, with the bow window open, her voice could be heard by children or people milking in the fields nearby and it was thought to be rather screeching. The gardener who went there once a week to do a bit of scything stole their gooseberries and refused to oil the hinges of the lych gate or do any extra favours because they never invited him indoors or offered him a cup of tea, being too stuck-up. Neighbours said he had every right to take the gooseberries and plagued him for a little can for themselves. They were very sweet gooseberries, yellow, translucent.
The sisters, Angela and Margaret, quarrelled a lot; at times so bitterly that Angela’s belongings were flung out the window—dresses, a corset, her prayer book and beads, and the fur tippet which she wore at Mass and which sported the narrow and knowing face of a little fox. Ambrose, however, always intervened and Angela was dragged back from the avenue or even beyond the gate if she had ventured so far. No one knew or could imagine how peace was restored, what strategies of sweetness or authority Ambrose had had to resort to. What was rumoured was that he and Angela cuddled in the kitchen garden. Many people had seen them or had boasted about seeing them, and many wondered why his wife did not throw him out, since it was she who owned the house. Ambrose was something of a gentleman and shunned work. Soon as he married Margaret—the plainer sister—he rented out the land for grazing and spent his time on more dilatory pursuits, such as keeping bees and making elder-flower wine. Ambrose knew so little about country matters that he was the butt of a standing joke. He had a sick beast which was too feeble to stir from its manger. He called on some locals, hoping to save himself the expense of a veterinary surgeon, and they simply turned the beast around to see if a bit of exercise might help. Ambrose, reentering the manger after a suitable interval, said to the two men, “Her eyes are brighter,” whereas in fact he was contemplating her rear. The two men drank liberally on the joke and, as time went by, embellished it.
Not long after Angela came to live there, tales of the unhappy trio began to trickle out and speculation was rife indeed, some locals even promising to steal over the high wall into the kitchen garden to get a gawk through the drawing room window. No one ever visited there, because Margaret was fiendishly thrifty and often returned to the shop with a package of bacon, to say there was one rasher short. Luck was not on their side. Angela grew ill, got thinner, was obliged to see a specialist, and learned that she was struck down with a wasting disease. Sympathies changed quite drastically, and her good points—her singing, her devoutness at Mass, and her taste in dressing—were now promulgated. She died in June and had a quite presentable funeral. Her brother-in-law followed her before a month was out and this, of course, substantiated the clandestine love story. Margaret became an object of pity, received gifts of jam and shortbread, and was invited to card games which she did not attend. Margaret herself was an invalid a few years later, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. At first she could move about with a stick and in the post office many were eager to discuss the pain with her and to suggest cures, all of which were useless. Eventually she was housebound.
The jubilee nurse called once a week and let herself in by the back kitchen door, which was on the latch. It was she who reported that Margaret had repaired to the bridal room, where a dormant love for her husband burgeoned and was reaching fantastic proportions. His name was constantly on her lips, stories about their courtship, the food he liked, and the idealization of her until the day of his death. Local women also called, but Margaret could not hear the knocker, which was rusty, and so she remained banished in that bridal room with the baize-covered shutters, unable to admit the visitors that she longed for, muttering prayers, saying her husband’s name, and at times getting confused in the day of the week, wondering if the jubilee nurse was due or not.
YOU WOULD NOT KNOW, either, that in the main street, in the row of imitation-Georgian houses, many fracases lurk. There is an unfortunate woman who scrubs and cleans for a living while her husband skulks in woods to assault girls and women. Some he does not have to assault, some wanton ones it is said go there, dally, and allow themselves to be hauled into thickets or bracken or verdure. A kindly girl, Oonagh, takes in washing, starches sheets and tablecloths to such a stiffness that they are like boards. Her clothesline is never free of sheets, tablecloths, serviettes, and even more private garments. Nearby a lady who has the audacity to keep tinkers actually admits them into her house and allows them up to her bedrooms, five or six to a room. Her hallway smells foul, and no wonder. Many a Monday morning she is shaking bedspreads and eiderdowns from a top window and neighbours shout caustic things, not directly to her, but to each other so that she can hear. The Flea Hotel is the nickname of her crumbling premises. A respectable lady who lives in the cut stone house with the bow window was the victim of one of those tinkers, who stole her shoes. They were tan brogue shoes which she had decided to dye brown. While they were drying, a hussy had come begging, but was not received despite incessant knocking and pleading about the babe in her arms. In pique she helped herself to the shoes. She was caught not long after, found by the sergeant at some sort of regatta where she was telling fortunes, squatting down on a bit of red velvet, giving the impression of an Eastern sage, and wearing the shoes. In the court her accuser, a married woman dressed in a black coat with Persian lamb trimming down the front, lost her heart for retribution, remembered somehow her own childhood, her dire poverty, her ancestors having been evicted from the fertile plains and having to flee to a mountain abode, repented having reported the thing at all, and asked the judge in tearful tones to overlook it and to exercise clemency. The judge, who did not like this sort of interruption on a busy day—there was an anteroom full of people with cases waiting to be heard—asked her tetchily to be a little more circumspect in the future about clemency and to save her contrition for the confessional. As the shoes were handed over, the married woman begged that the tinker woman be let keep them, but of course such a request was impossible and she left the court carrying them in her hand limply, as if she would drop them the moment she got outside. The tinker woman was given a sentence of seven days and nights in the country gaol, which could be reprieved if she paid a fine of fifty pounds. This of course was impossible and sent all the tinkers on a wild binge around the town, cursing and vowing vengeance.
IN ANOTHER HOUSE, a nervous priest who has been defrocked sits most of the day. The scandal is so great it can hardly be mentioned. His nerves are cited as the reason, but one who has travelled far has come back with a murky secret, in short, claiming that the priest had an eye for the ladies. Anyhow, he cannot say Mass, does not even serve at High Masses, and is seen on the hospital roads on Sundays walking with his mother. They gather branches to decorate their living room. They are the only people who call it by that name, as all others say parlour or drawing room, and they are the only people who put flowers and branches indoors. One small clemency meted to the young priest is that insanity runs in the family since a cousin hanged himself from a tree, years back.
YES, YOU WOULD PASS HOUSES where there are drunks, where husbands on the day they get their pay packets do not come home till well after midnight, their wives accosting them on the top of the stairs or at the bottom of the stairs or wherever; and there are houses with bachelors whose rooms have never had a woman’s hand to them and hence are dusty and somewhat inhospitable. You will pass various families with young children and another family which keeps horses and ponies and has had the misfortune to have one of its horses bolt out into the main road and be killed by a motorist, who then set out to sue the family for negligence. “Spliced her in half,” the young son of the family is fond of saying, as a pathetic reenactment of the restless mare—and her mad, bolting mare is described again and again.
You will find a former music teacher who no longer takes pupils but still keeps the sheet music on her piano to prove her former prowess, and who allows her little bantam hens the run of her house. Not far away, you will find a gentleman who was for a time like any common convict in Australia doing penal servitude, but has now returned to his roots. His crime was that he fired a shot at a barmaid who refused to serve him a drink after hours, and unfortunately was a good shot and killed her. He no longer drinks but lives in semi-solitude, playing patience in the evening. There is a doting couple too, because of course every village has a doting couple. These are a childless pair who make their own butterscotch and resort to the most extreme endearments at all hours, even at breakfast time. When the husband goes to work in the forestry his wife stealthily follows soon after on her bicycle, stationing herself behind the high limestone wall at the edge of the forest to make sure that her husband does not talk or mingle with any of these passing young wanton women.
THERE IS TOO, in the house with the gorgeous geraniums on the porch, a budding beauty, plump, not too plump, eyes navy and limpid, eye sockets like inkwells in which this enticing navy stuff swills about, eyes ready for love. She reads magazines and cuts out the tips about hair and beauty and figure and so forth. There are children galore, housed in the school most of the time and utter nuisances during holiday time. There is a saddler’s from whose doorway the pleasant smell of new leather and linseed oil drifts out, and not far away a shoemaker with the more fetid smell of sweat and old leather. That place is a jumble of old shoes heaped in an immemorial pyre. Then three mornings a week there is the heartening smell of fresh bread, when a van comes from the big city and trays of loaf bread, rock buns, and tea cakes are carried into the shop. Hunger grips the village—women in the middle of washing or ironing hurry across, often with their aprons still on, often without the money, eager to collar one of those long, soft loaves that are the food of life.
“I’ll pay you later” or “I’ll pay you Friday” is often heard as they hasten back to their own kitchens to devour the sacramental fare. In the snug room of the bar, there are already at that hour one or two early topers drinking slowly, methodically, recognizing that the day has just begun, and here too gossip is rife, but in more measured tones. In this dark precinct that smells of porter, old porter and freshly drawn porter, the light is dim because of the fawn blind being permanently drawn, for privacy’s sake, and the men, when they at length do decide to address each other, try to escape small matters of their own environment and discuss world topics from items they have gleaned in the newspapers. The furniture here is brown, the counter traced again and again with the circle of the glasses, circles that loop into one another like the circles in the core of a tree.
The loaves of bread that have been snapped up are devoured by housewives at home who lather them with jam or pickles or whatever, anything to give the morning a bit of zest, and soon it’s time to put on the dinner and women hurry into their back gardens to cut a head or two of cabbage, then wash it to free it of clay and slugs and put it on to boil for the dinner, which is served midday, usually with bacon. Nice big greasy dinners for some, for others scraps. Children in front gardens eating bits of bread and sugar, mild activity around lunchtime, people to-ing and fro-ing and the dogs on the village green yelping over a bone or territory or some distemper. Then a lull until teatime. Older people dozing, and from the school window, if it is open, the chants from the children either yelling or reciting in unison.
In the evenings the smell of the yew trees and the pine trees seems to be more pronounced, especially after rain. These grow in profusion in the church grounds, some that were planted many years ago and some that have seeded themselves. Across the road from the church you will see a two-storey stone house, you cannot avoid it. It was once painted blue but is now a dim replica of that colour. The garden is a disgrace. Everything is rampant: trees, shrubs, briars all meshed together in some mad knot, not only obscuring the path, but travelling right up along the windows, so that no one can see in. In there is Ita. Ita was once a paragon in this hamlet, the most admired devout person there. Along with looking after her brother and having a few hens and chickens and milking the cows, she looked after the church; she was the sacristan. The church was at once her sanctuary and her flower garden.
Outside, and due to the inclemency of the weather, the blue cut stone may have imparted a lugubriousness to passersby, but inside all was gleaming, as befits a place which houses God. The sanctuary lamp, perpetually alight, was of Paduan silver hanging low on lattice chains, its bowl pierced with holes, containing the inner red bowl in which the sacred oil first glugged, then swayed; here too floated the wick with its tongue of sacred flame bespeaking the presence of Christ. Each time that Ita McNamara stepped inside she not only genuflected, she fell in front of the altar and prayed to God to sweeten her bitter cup, and God did.
It is many years now, but the memory of it is lasting. The missioners were due. The altar had to be sumptuously decked. She did not despair, she knew she would not have to resort to bits of evergreen and shrub because the Protestant spinsters would leave a sheaf of flowers in the porch, ample as a sheaf of corn. They were the only people who gardened, others had not the time or the will for such fal-lalling; others grew potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, but not flowers or flowering trees; maybe a bit of wild honeysuckle might be found threading its way through the eaves or a few devil’s pokers defying the sodden aspect of a forlorn front garden, but a profusion of flowers, no. People had too much to do, trying to keep body and soul together, to eke out an existence. It was June when the catastrophe happened to Ita. “Satan’s net,” it was fancifully christened by the cookery teacher, who reminded the shocked faithful that many mystics in the Middle Ages had shown such symptoms and that Ita could have been saved had there been a sensible doctor in the place. Before her downfall was her rhapsody. The flowers that she had been expecting were indeed in the chapel porch, and a prodigal bunch it was. She ran back to her own house to get extra vases, possibly uttering a prayer for the poor heathens, hoping a bolt of lightning would strike them, as it did Saul of Tarsus. Her fears for their damnation were no secret. She confessed once that her own flesh scorched at the thought, that she itched under the armpits and in her joints, it was as if live coals had been placed there, off a tongs. She often asked people to remember them in their prayers, so that they would not be perpetually lost, banished behind the gates of Hell, among the self-loathing, howling hordes.
Ita’s brother, who was then alive, saw her pick up three empty jam jars, dump the remains of marmalade that had fungus on it from another jar, rinse it, then pick out the artificial flowers from the rainbow spiralled vase and run. She took a long time decking the altar. She put the blue and the purple flowers on the altar steps, reserving the white lilies, Mary’s flowers, for the altar itself, placing them on either side of the gold-crested tabernacle. The orange flaggers, being too flagrant, were put in the outer porch near the holy water font. She stood enraptured, surveying things—the altar cloth like a frosted banner, the white flowers spectral, satin, the pristine beeswax candles, and then other flowers along the steps, where alas those imps of altar boys could kick them or trample on them as they bustled about. She liked none of those boys, infidels at heart, making fun of the parish priest, trying on his vestments, imitating his singsong voice and the way his eyes rolled upwards of their own accord.
Next day she scrubbed the tiled floor, waxed the woodwork, even waxing the seats where people would plonk their backsides and their wet drapery. Not a cobweb remained in the high corners of the ceiling or in the window casements, no dust along the rim of the confessional doors and ledges and the church doors wide open to let the fresh air pour through. Later, she hauled across the two buckled stepladders, put a plank along the top, rested a chair on that, and climbed up, in order to fill the sanctity lamp with oil. Even her brother feared that she might have a seizure. He insisted that she rest, but no, she had a last chore. She had to make a sponge cake for the missioner, even though she did not know his taste in eats. The missioner the previous year had been elderly and had left them with a dire imprimatur, which was that when in bed they were to fold their arms in the form of a cross and recite:
I must die, I do not know when, nor how,
Nor where; but if I die in mortal sin
I am lost for ever;
Oh, Jesus, have mercy on me.
Yes, everything was at the ready, the chapel spick-and-span, the altar seraphic, the spongecake filled with lemon curd, sprinkled with sugar, propped on a cake plate, and Ita with her long hair drawn back and held with a brown slide. If she had any worry, it was the desecration, as such, that the local people would do to the church. She resented them trooping in, enjoying the sight of the flowers, soaking up the missioner’s words, lingering afterwards to have a word with him. Many of the farmers smelt awful, smelt of cow dung and things, but many of the town girls smelt worse, smelt of sin, and Ita knew it. If she had her way she would take these girls, lock them in a dark room, beat them, and then starve them to death. One such hussy had the audacity to ask if Ita wanted any help with the altar or if she could perhaps wash the linen. The linen! Her lewd hands touching it, her scrubbing board party to it, a scrubbing board on which filth had been pummelled. Ita slapped her face, slapped her smartly on both cheeks, so much so that word went round that Ita McNamara had gone insane, had lost her marbles.
She went to the parish priest’s house after dark, knocked on the side door, and spoke to a grump of a maid who did an “Indeed” as she went down the hall calling “Father, Father.” The priest met Ita without his stiff collar and was obviously nettled at being disturbed. There were crumbs on his lips, yellow cake crumbs. He listened to her explanation and accepted her offer for a Mass to be said as propitiation. It was a large donation, the money she had put aside to go to Dublin one day. She did not regret it. Her joy in her work was utter, and on the evening before the mission she knelt for a moment surveying her little palace, yielding to a moment of ecstasy. A child who was kneeling in the back of the chapel said she saw Ita McNamara wobble, then she saw her stagger as she held on to the altar rails, then she heard her talk either to herself or to Our Lord or to someone.
So perhaps it had begun then, although others insisted that it began the moment she laid eyes on the missioner himself. He was a young man and came upon her by surprise. He had come into the chapel softly, scarcely making any tread, in his thonged, well-worn sandals. He smiled when he saw what she was doing. From a glass perfume spray, Ita was bathing the faces of the flowers. This thin, delicate-looking priest introduced himself as Father Bonaventure and congratulated her on the beauty of the chapel. He said that one might be at Chartres or Lourdes, so exalting were the surroundings. She thanked him and shuffled away, having registered his rimless spectacles with a half-moon of thicker glass at the bottom of each lens, his commodious robes the colour of bulrushes, and his voice gentle yet so incisive, like a diamond cutter.
His sermon on the first evening of the mission began gently, ruminatively; yet no one was misled by that gentleness, least of all the wayward young girls, who sensed the sternness in his being, or the young men, who bristled at his scrutiny as he asked them to lift the veil and look into their souls and consider if by evil ways or evil thoughts they were crucifying afresh their loving Saviour, putting through the most holy soul of Mary the shaft of a sword, a shaft similar to that which passed through her in the hours of the Passion. His voice carried. It issued through the open windows, so that the Protestants doing a bit of gardening could hear it, as could the dumb beasts, the braying donkeys with gnats clotted on their eyelids, as could the little tufts of cowslips or primroses and every growing thing.
It was Ita who tended to him later, got some glucose and a glass of water. It seems he slumped on a bench in the sacristy, beads of sweat on his lips and on his temples, accusing himself of not having moved the faithful enough. He resembled some great performer who feared that he had lost his touch with his audience. His assistant, a far younger priest, Father Finbar, was outside in the chapel grounds, bidding the people good night. Father Finbar, who had pinkish skin rather like a girl’s, did not of course give sermons, but would be called on to assist at the Rosary and the Benediction and would probably hear some of the confessions. Later, the two priests left together, their horn rosaries swaying against the folds of their brown robes and their hoods pulled up because it had begun to spatter with rain. They walked in silence over the path where the trodon berries from the yew trees were like drops of blood, and then they went along the main road that was deserted now because of all the people having gone home. Ita watched them, and some children who were playing hide-and-seek saw what she did, then tattled about it. She picked up a cake box that was inside the gate to her house and ran after them, at a gallop. They had stopped at a bend on the road to look at a herd of fawn cattle, in a field. She thrust the box into Father Bonaventure’s hands and came away blushing. She put her finger to her lips by way of exacting secrecy from the children, and gave them a penny between them.
Confessions were heard each morning and the entire parish was enjoined to go. Ita watched them like a hawk each year, because some were bound to cheat. A wicked or a cunning person could go up, kneel down, but at the last moment refuse the Host, and yet return with eyes devoutly closed, as if the Host were dissolving. Just after the first two people had gone in to confess, an incident occurred. A girl by the name of Nancy fainted, fainted in high operatic manner, so that her arms slapped onto those next to her and her missal with all its contents scattered over the aisle; holy pictures with far from holy inscriptions were seen and read by several. The upshot was that this girl Nancy could not go in to confess, had to be carried to the harness maker’s nearby and be given a spoon of tonic wine in hot water. Ita, sensing foul play, commandeered the girl’s younger sister Della, brought Della out to the chapel grounds, and quizzed her inordinately about her sister’s behaviour. Was Nancy out late at night? Was Nancy seeing some boy? Was Nancy off her food in the morning and complaining of nausea? In short, was Nancy in a state of mortal sin and possibly having a baby? Another blight on their village.
The little girl Della got so frightened at this inquisition that to divert things she put the palm of her hand on the spear of the railing and threatened to gouge herself, to do penance for the whole world, her sister included. Ita gave her a sound thumping then and sent her back into the church. Many overheard it and wondered why Ita had become so officious. She quarrelled with several local people but particularly with the parish priest’s housekeeper, since the missioners were staying there, tackled her about menus, told her to buck up and give them something better than packet soup and synthetic jelly set with boiled milk to give it a bit of fuzz. Later, people were quick to insist that, yes, they had noticed it then, but they had thought it was a temporary aberration.
She spent far more hours than was necessary in the church, laying out several vestments for the priest, separating each of the altar breads in such a manner that when they were put in the chalice the priest could pick each one up separately and easily. She used the excuse to be in the church all the time by polishing the floor again and again, so much so that people skeetered over it, and once she was heard humming to herself and it was not a hymn, more like a refrain. Because of the crush in the church for the evening sermons—all were obliged to go and mostly all did—people had to be accommodated behind the altar rails, lined up along the altar steps, and usually it was children who were put there and usually it was the sacristan who organized it. No longer. Ita selected who would go in there and then sat among them, directly gazing up at the priest, catching the words, the incendiary words as they formed in his mouth just before he uttered them. Father Bonaventure, who had been gentle on the first evening, grew fiercer with each sermon, expatiating on the fires of Hell, the loss of the sight of God, the absence of grace, and reminding them of their last, perhaps their very last chance for redemption. At certain moments he foamed. He spared no one. He paused between words and sentences, to look into faces, the faces of those clustered around him including Ita, the gnarled faces of the older people in the pews with their heads bent, the shamed faces of the men standing at the back, and to each of them, it was as if he spoke directly and clairvoyantly. Then, fearing he had gone too far, he appealed to them. He softened his words and reminded them that if they persisted in their mortifications, God would respond, and His pent-up fountain of love and mercy would burst open to grant their wishes.
Emotion was rampant. People quaked with terror, others made vows out loud, others thumped their chests, others moaned, all except Ita, who gazed at him, glorious, beatific, triumphant, no longer the awkward creature, but now an almost presentable woman with a beret which she wore at an angle. People had remarked about this because Ita had always worn a headscarf and pulled it so far forward that it shelved on either side of her face. But here she was, inside the altar rails, gazing at the priest, her black angora beret at an angle, her cheeks adorned with rouge. At least some swore it was rouge, though others said it was flush from the blaze of the candles.
At his last sermon, so fervid was he, so resonant the vibrations of his words, that a lily, a white flute, fell stealthily off its stalk, onto the altar cloth. The people shivered, all harkening to his strictures. The “terrene affections,” as he called them, had to be crushed in favour of the love of the Almighty and the camaraderie of Christ. Many saw the lily, its white skin shrivelling in the heat, its yellow stamen specking the altar cloth, but then it was just a lily, a fallen inert thing.
When the faithful had gone, Ita had many tasks to do. She had to put away the cruets and the silver for the next year’s mission, throw out the withered flowers, and put the good ones on the tiled floor of the sacristy, far away from the fumes of the quenched candles. Moreover, people were pestering her with requests to have a word with Father Bonaventure, alone. Some thought that a private word with him would grant them unheard-of indulgences. The little nitwit Della asked if she could have her autograph book signed, and for her impertinence got a biff. All the while Father Bonaventure was behind the screen changing from his embroidered vestments into the brown robes of his Order. Sometime during that bustle, Ita must have taken the lily flute and put it in her pocket; maybe she thought to place it under her pillow, in the way that young girls put the crumbs of a wedding cake there, to dream of their betrothed. Della swears that Ita was crying, but then the mission made many people cry as they came face to face with the gravity of things. No one actually saw her and Father Bonaventure say goodbye. Many are divided about the hour of his departure. Some say he dallied, while others insist that he left almost immediately. The stall owners, who had tents outside the chapel gates, had already gone, and the mother-of-pearl rosaries, the fulsome leaflets, the blessed scapulars, and all the other sacred impedimenta were in boxes, waiting to be despatched to the seaside town where Father Bonaventure was due to preach.
Ita went home, and as her dismayed brother was later to attest, she behaved quite normally. He admitted to having been rather ratty with her on account of her being so late, he himself had driven a few crippled people home from the mission and was still back, half an hour before she appeared. The fire was out, as he said, and he had to coax it back to life with newspaper and paraffin. She seemed to him no different than usual, except that she refused to eat, vowing that she would be fasting from now on. Those hours mark the divide between the Ita that everyone knew and the lunatic that was to emerge and be dragged out of there at cockcrow.
Villagers were sunk in sleep, even dogs that barked and marauded on the green, had quietened down, when a roar followed by a volley of roars shook the village. It being summertime, most people had their windows open. Ita’s brother heard it, of course, as did the nearest neighbours, who jumped out of their beds believing there was a robbery or that the tinkers were on the rampage again. People with coats or cardigans flung over them were seen running, and soon they were in Ita’s room witnessing the crazed sight of her sitting up in bed, her nightdress bundled up around her middle as she wept copiously. Her brother asked if it was bats, as he lit a stump of a candle. Often on the summer nights bats came in, cleaved to the ceiling or the rim of an ewer, and then swooped about once it was dark. “Not bats … not bats,” she said, pointing to the lily, which was the cause of her dementia. It lay beside her on the bed, close to the calf of her leg, which was full of scratches. It had moved. It had taken flesh. It was dirty. They must get Father Bonaventure, because only he could exorcise it.
“Keep back … keep back,” she said as her brother tried to pluck it from her. She had now withdrawn to the head of the bed, her black hair splayed on the wrought iron. Her eyes were wild too. She got it into her head that they were all against her, and cursed them from the fortress of her bed. The cookery teacher tried to calm her, told her how much they all loved her, and asked if she would like a cup of tea. Then she reminded everyone of Ita’s trojan work during the mission and said that most likely she was exhausted. The praise softened her ire, and breaking into a childlike smile, Ita blessed herself and said, “Blessed is he that is not scandalized in me.” They knew now that it was in earnest; she was talking heresy. Her moods altered between states of near-beatitude and begging to be beaten, to be scourged alive. Her brother said that was what was needed and dashed out of the room to get his ash plant, but the neighbours remonstrated with him, said she must have the priest because she was possessed.
While he was gone, Ita treated them to some strange tales and used swearwords that they did not know were in her vocabulary. She described the assault of the lily, how it ran out from under the pillow, crawled all over her like a hairy Molly, and was impervious to grasp. Yes, it was the Devil, she knew that. Then she expressed a doubt and said it was not the Devil; then she tore at her flesh again, which was already full of cuts, and asked them to pray that she could be redeemed. Yet when Father Bonaventure arrived she acted like a courtesan, put her hand out to welcome him, said to excuse her “dishabille,” adding that her stockings were in flitters. Then she asked to be left alone with him and spoke in a whisper. She made mention of their days together, the promises they had made, and how they were going abroad as a team to convert heathens. Each time he accused her of imagining things she flared up and asked him to look at her body, to look at where Satan had been, to drive the serpent away, to crush it with his thumb or his sandalled foot or his beads. He did not wish to look at her body. With one hand she grabbed him and with the other held the candleholder slantwise over the thin matt of greying hair and asked did he not see it? She said he must see it. It was there. It was a blister of blood, Christ’s blood, and had blood as its essence. She had been with Christ. Oh yes, he knew, but he was jealous, wanting her for himself. Who now was the culprit clinging to “terrene affections,” begging for her love? Who now but him? Immediately he began to pray rapidly and summoned the others in from the landing to pray with him, and so great was her rage at his calling for witnesses that she put the candle first to the sleeve of her nightdress, then to the matt of hair where she had been taken in adultery. But who were they to throw stones? Quick to smell the scorching, a youngster came from the kitchen with a pitcher of water, which was poured over her. Ita laughed and said she felt like a little girl, remembered her youth, the daisy chains she had made, and a game she played tracing a penny onto a page.
Very early, she was brought to the asylum, where she spent the best part of a year and took to sucking in her cheeks, refusing to speak to anyone and having to be barred from the chapel because the sight of flowers drove her into a frenzy. She took up smoking too, and the authorities indulged her in that, thinking it would take her mind off her troubles. She cadged cigarettes off visitors and told some very tall tales about travels she had made in the Far East, where she was a nursing sister and where she had contracted malaria. In about a year, when she was numb from tablets and shock treatment, they brought her home, and from then on she avoided people, growling at anyone who spoke to her, even the priest or the doctor. Being alone now, she does the farm work and has taken to wearing her brother’s old clothes and Wellington boots. She is always forking manure, or washing out the cow house, or carrying buckets of feed and water up the hills to the store cattle. “There goes the one with the roastings,” people say. She is like a landmark, one bucket in either hand, either going up the hill or returning to have them refilled. Children say that she curses them, and those who knock on her door are likely to be met with a pitchfork or a saucepan of hot stirabout.
Now I ask you, what would you do? Would you comfort Ita, would you tell her that her sins were of her own imagining? Then might you visit the budding beauty and set her dreaming of the metropolis? Would you loiter with the drunkards and laugh with the women gorging the white bread; would you perhaps visit the grave to say an Ave where Angela, her sister, and the errant husband lie close together, morsels for the maggots, or would you drive on helter-skelter, the radio at full blast? Perhaps your own village is much the same, perhaps everywhere is, perhaps pity is a luxury and deliverance a thing of the past.