The Translation of the Bones (16 page)

There are alternative words for lots of things, Stella said, distractedly. She did not much like to talk when she was
driving. Local words, or old ones, especially for animals and plants. Think of
brock
and
badger.
Emmet
and
ant.
Stinking iris
or
roast-beef plant.

Stinking iris! I’ve never heard of those. That would be a cool name for a band. I suppose, two words for one thing, that’s all right for flowers and stuff because you can actually see them, you can show the other person what you are talking about even if you don’t know the word. Like you could if they were German. But when there are two words for a thing that can’t be seen, that’s a bit confusing, don’t you think?

It can be, Stella agreed. But mostly those words which seem to be almost the same have different shades of meaning. Like
adore
and
love.

Felix glanced at his mother’s profile. Adore and love. Trust and faith. I’ve never heard anyone call an ant an emmet, he said. Or a badger, brock. They only say that sort of thing in books.

Thursday evening, almost six o’clock. For the past hour Father Diamond had been hearing confessions. Before that he had prepared the church for a solemn mass and made ready the place of reposition in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel. He had already mustered as many male parishioners as he could for the foot washing.

The faithful were arriving. After the purples and tallows of Lent, the whiteness of the vestments, the altar hangings and the candles pierced the eyes with the sharpness of light at the end of a long journey through a tunnel. Father Diamond had covered the crucifix on the altar with a white
cloth but left the other crosses and the statues in their purple. Behind the altar the tabernacle was empty, open and unveiled, shocking as an accident, the space revealed within it a space that should never be seen.

Glory be to Jesus,

Who in bitter pains

Poured for me the lifeblood

From his sacred veins!

the congregation sang. We are gathered here to share in the supper, Father Diamond said in the opening prayer. He put his hands flat on the altar for a moment, to steady himself, to derive some strength from the stone beneath the linen cloth. Comforter, where is thy comforting? Miss Daly stepped up to the lectern for the readings. In her voice was the confidence earned from years of addressing schoolgirls in assembly and understanding the word of the Lord. “It must be an animal without blemish,” she read, “a male one-year-old. . . . That night I will go through the land of Egypt and strike down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, man and beast alike, and I shall deal out punishment to all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord.”

From the pulpit Father Diamond looked down across the upturned faces. He searched for Stella but did not see her. No surprise. He closed his eyes a moment. Self-sacrifice, he said. Self-giving. He does not ask for holocaust and victim but an open ear, an open heart. Love one another as I have loved you. And yes, it’s hard.

Seamus and Major Wetherby had both turned out, praise be. There was also Xavier, an occasional Sunday
server. Major Wetherby took charge. After the sermon he gestured to the men sitting in the front pew to come forward. Larry Armitage, Mr. Kalinowski, the pale youth who had intimations of a vocation, Danny and Kafui, other regulars. They could not make the twelve. Shuffling a little, looking sheepish, they filed into the sanctuary and sat down on the chairs placed for them. At Major Wetherby’s signal, they stooped to take off their right shoes and socks. Mr. Kalinowski, bending, found suddenly he could not reach. Larry, seeing this, took his shoe off for him.

Major Wetherby held a ewer, Seamus a basin, Xavier a stack of towels. Father Diamond knelt down before Kafui, the first man in the row: Kafui raised his foot. Major Wetherby passed the ewer to Father Diamond, who poured water over the foot into the basin, held by Seamus on his left. Xavier passed him a towel. Carefully Father Diamond dried Kafui’s foot. He stood up and bowed to the next man, and knelt again, eight feet in a line. The pale boy’s toes were long and bony, Danny’s as hairy as a goat’s, Mr. Kalinowski’s twisted and his toenails gnarled.

After Communion Father Diamond, escorted by Seamus and Major Wetherby bearing candles, transferred the Holy Eucharist to the tabernacle in the place of reposition, while the faithful sang:

Word made Flesh, by word he maketh

Very bread his Flesh to be;

Man in wine Christ’s Blood partaketh;

And if senses fail to see,

Faith alone the true heart waketh

To behold the mystery.

And, when the mass was ended and he had disrobed, Father Diamond stripped the altar. He extinguished all the candles and the lamps. He emptied the Holy Water stoups. The only light left in the church came from the candles in the place of reposition. A few of the faithful stayed there to watch awhile, and pray. But long before midnight, one by one, they drifted quietly away. Father Diamond snuffed the candles out. Among the shrouded figures, before the naked altars, in the silence, Father Diamond kept vigil by on his own. Facedown on the floor he lay the whole night long, in the darkness of the empty church.

Good Friday. Confessions in the morning in the church. Mary-Margaret O’Reilly was among the early penitents. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, she whispered through the grille. I have had unkind thoughts about my mother. I have been proud. I have failed to keep my Lenten resolution.

What was your Lenten resolution? Father Diamond asked. To take my tea without milk and sugar, Mary-Margaret said. And so I did, most of the time. But lately . . . tea without is shocking bitter.

Say one Hail Mary, Father Diamond said. And pray for me.

Pray for me, that this bitter cup should pass. He was caught in the inexorable progress of the days. Good Friday. After the penitents had left, the church would empty again and stay silent till the ninth hour, when there was darkness over the whole land. Then the church would fill. The Litany of the Word. The Veneration of the Cross. Holy Communion.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow. To the last syllable, the last leaden syllable, of recorded time.

How to bear the reiterated story? The thorns, the whips, the wounds, the broken reed, the broken man stumbling over cobblestones under the weight of his own crossbar, vinegar and hyssop, blood and water spilling from his side.
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,
why have you forsaken me, O Lord?

The faithful would listen, kneel, sing mournful songs and process one by one to kiss the feet of the corpus on the cross, which Major Wetherby and Seamus would prop against a stool, and guard, taking turns to wipe the lip marks off. I opened the sea before you, but you opened my side with a spear. I am forgotten as a dead man, out of mind, I am like a broken vessel, my bones are wasted away.

I go mourning all the day long.

For my loins are filled with burning;

And there is no soundness in my flesh.

On Friday night Father Diamond slept the sleep of the dead and woke early the next morning, more refreshed. Felix Morrison woke early too and went in search of food for his pet wood lice. Yesterday he had researched their needs. It had been good to learn that they did not require a lid on their container because they could not crawl up the plastic sides. He liked to think that although they were actually captive they would feel free in their well-provisioned world, with the open sky above them. He had also discovered they had lots of other names, apart from slater. And deeply satisfactory they were, these names:
bibble bugs, monkey peas, penny bugs, roly-polys, tiggy hogs. Cud worms and coffin cutters.

Stella woke later to the gentleness of a house shared only with a child. She could hear Felix pottering about downstairs, talking to his wood lice, humming. This enchanting, eccentric child, with his quick imagination and his empathy—it was so good to have him home. And, later today, his brother. Rufus was staying in New York for a party but would be back first thing tomorrow, in time for the feast-day celebration. Meanwhile, there was this peaceful day, and Felix, and nothing much to do but bake a cake and pick up Father Diamond’s flowers.

When Felix was a tiny baby, less than a month old, the family had spent a few days in Cornwall, in a hotel by the sea. There had been some confusion with the booking so that the interconnecting rooms they had requested were already taken. To Rufus’s annoyance, they had ended up with two rooms on separate floors. Having ruled against leaving the older children on their own, Rufus went in crossly with them. Stella, pretending disappointment that she could not sleep with Rufus, was secretly pleased. Her room faced the sea. She left the curtains undrawn and the windows open; all night the wind blew in, lifting the hair off her face where she lay on the pillow, making billowing white sails of the curtains, blessing the swaddled baby in his cot beside her. The nights were a journey across water and the little room a vessel; sleeping the half sleep of the mother of a newborn child Stella drowsed and woke and dreamed to the rhythm of the sea and the kiss of the wind, feeling there was no one but the two of them in the entire world. Almost it was as if she had been returned with Felix
to an airy womb, to complete safety, self-containment, absolute fulfillment. The baby woke and suckled himself back to peaceful sleep; in the morning he was next to her, as warm as a new egg, perfect as apple blossom.

A cake, and flowers. A pistachio cake, she thought, with orange flower icing; green for Easter, green for new life, now the green blade riseth from the buried grain. Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been. Felix would help her bake it, and they could paint hard-boiled eggs together. She had promised Father Diamond she would arrange the flowers for the church this afternoon: white roses, yellow mimosa, white broom, lilies.

Alice Armitage slept badly. As a woman who did not think of herself as over-imaginative, it disturbed her that her dreams were out of her control. Last night she dreamed that she’d come home from the Good Friday service to find a man in uniform standing on her doorstep. From a distance she thought that it was Fraser. But, coming closer, she’d seen the shoulder flashes and the cap badge; she’d known the uniform was not her son’s, and at once she knew what the man had come to tell her. The shock of grief was so intense that it woke her clean out of sleep and left her unsure for a while if she’d been dreaming or awake. The pain left real traces, as if its origin were physical and factual; it was like a promise, or a foretaste, of what Alice would endure if Fraser were to die in Afghanistan. Her firstborn son. Her love and her delight.

A dream is not a premonition, Mrs. Armitage assured herself. It is a dream, and nothing else. Only the ignorant
hold with omens. It’s natural for a mother to be anxious. But still, but still. Men did die in battlefields on the eve of their return, as they died on their first day of deployment. A twist of fate or, as Fraser would say, sod’s law. But not God’s law, Alice prayed. Holy Mary, mother of God, who had to watch your own son die, watch over mine and bring him back unharmed in soul or body.

There were different accounts, as Mrs. Armitage was aware, of exactly who was standing at the foot of the cross while the man Jesus died His agonizing, drawn-out death. A plethora of Marys, and mothers of sons, Johns and James, it seems. Mary, blessed among women. There could not be a grief more unendurable than to watch your own child suffer. How could Mary not have hated God when she saw the broken carcass of her son being hauled down from a stick like the tatters of a superseded flag? Who so loved the world that He sent His own son to die upon a cross?

And where was Joseph, while Mary bore the hours of pain? Or the other fathers, come to that? In the end, then as always, women had to take the burden, pick up the broken pieces, wipe away the tears and blood. In sorrow they shall bring forth children and in utter loneliness they shall lay those children in their graves. This night I shall go through the land of Egypt and strike down all the firstborn in the land. But let me not bury my child, please God, not mine, not Fraser, my firstborn son.

Mrs. Armitage sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Larry was asleep beside her, lying on his back, his mouth a little open, a glaze of dribble in its corner. He stirred in the sudden light and muttered something. Alice? It’s nothing,
love, she said, and turned the light back off. Lying down again, she wriggled across the bed. Still asleep, he stretched out an arm and drew her closer in. Eventually she slept also, and when she woke in the morning it was with a faint ache only, a memory of pain, as if a migraine suffered in the night had ebbed or an old wound surfaced briefly before burying itself beneath her skin again.

Mary-Margaret was woken by the thudding of her heart. Today, today, today it beat, like a panicked dream, fast as fury, urgent as alarm. She leapt up at once; no time to waste, no slugabed hours, no daydreaming in the warmth and tangle of her sheets this morning. All hands on deck, Mrs. Armitage had said on Thursday, when she was telling everybody what they had to do for Easter. All hands. Mary-Margaret took that to mean she would be expected. Which was to the good, given how peculiar Father Diamond had been since the accident, and Mrs. A so nasty and suspicious. Even though on Thursday Mary-Margaret and Mrs. Armitage had polished, swept and dusted as if their lives depended on the cleanness of the church, it would still need another go this morning. All those people toing and froing—Thursday evening, Friday afternoon—would have left their trails of rubbish. There would be fingerprints on the brass. On this day, of all days, for this holy Vigil, all must be perfect and every inch must shine.

And more than this, much more than this, the statues and the pictures. The moment Mary-Margaret had been waiting for since she fell off the altar had come at last.
Alleluia, at long last. The perfect dress she had found yesterday was hanging from a hook behind the door. Oh God, the waiting had been hard. But now the truth would be revealed and the faithful bathed in radiant light. At last. All hands on deck, Mary-Margaret said out loud. To make ready the way of the Lord. For this is the day the Lord has made. My day. And the Lord’s.