Immaculate Heart (6 page)

“I see,” he said. “I see.”

I didn't like the way he was saying that, so I went on: “I don't want to take up too much of your time, Father, but I was wondering if you could share your impressions of the four young people who saw her.” I only allowed him a second's pause before I added, “I've only spoken with Tess so far.”

“Aye,” he said. “Louise mentioned it was Tess who brought you round.”

I'd had a feeling her name was currency, and I was right. I took out my voice recorder and notebook. “Like I said, Father, I know you're busy, and I really want to respect your time. But if you could spare maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, no more than twenty, I'd be very grateful to you.”

He nodded. “Louise?” he called again over my shoulder. “Could you put the kettle on?”

“I'm makin' the tea now, Father,” she called.

“Ah, bless you!” Father Lynch turned back to me and rubbed his hands together. “They say a good secretary knows what you need before you do. Did you ever hear that?”

I shook my head. “I've never had one.”

“Ah, sure. You take your own notes.” He gave me a genuinely friendly smile. “We'll just leave the door open till she brings in the tea.”

We spoke of the rotten weather, Gaelic football, and my uncle John being the local postmaster until Louise carried in the tea tray with a plate of store-bought cookies. “Ginger bickies!” Father Lynch exclaimed with satisfaction—“They're a local delicacy for all they come out of a package”—and Louise closed the door softly behind her.

The priest took a sip from his steaming teacup as I reached forward and pressed the
RECORD
button. “Now,” he began, “to be perfectly frank with you, most of what I can tell you I learned through the local gossip. I wasn't born in this parish—I'm from Meath originally—so of course when I arrived here, I picked up bits and pieces about the local history as time went on.”

“The Marian apparition being one of the more colorful chapters in that history?”

“Oh, aye. And by now I'm sure you've noticed that we don't see many people from other parts. I've no doubt your visit is the talk of the town at the minute. So you can just imagine what it would've been like with the reporters and pilgrims running around. There were all sorts of new shops opening along the high street, and every widow from here to Carrick opening her doors for B and B.”

“Everyone saw an opportunity,” I said.

“And who could blame them, when the history of Ireland was a history of leaving?” He sighed. “Anything to keep the young ones here at home where they belonged, all the new jobs—they could only be good for this community.”

I couldn't let myself ask the most obvious follow-up—not yet, anyway. “So there were four people who said they saw the apparition?”

“Aye, there were four involved: the Gallagher sisters, Síle and Orla, and Declan Keaveney, and Tess, whom you know. I'll tell you I was surprised when Louise said you'd talked with her. Seems to me she goes out of her way not to speak of it.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Tess is terribly hard on herself. Always has been, for all the years I've known her. It's what drives her to do all the good she's done for this town, but it also drives her to doubt.”

“You think she doubts what she saw?”

“Now, that's a question you'd have to ask her.” The priest gave me a hard look. “If you haven't already.”

“We're working up to that.” I responded, with what I hoped was a disarming smile. “I've heard and read about the miracle, too.”

Father Lynch shook his head. “I wouldn't be able to speak to that, now.”

“It's powerful stuff, though, isn't it?” I asked. “Wasn't Mrs. McGowan scheduled to have her leg amputated the next day?”

“It's a powerful story, aye,” he replied. “But I wouldn't be able to speak to that.”

I made a mental note to reframe the question later on in the interview. “Tess says she and Orla were close friends growing up. Do you know Orla at all?”

“I do. I see her every Sunday.”

“She's still quite devout, then?”

“More so than most. She occasionally volunteers her time as a teacher's aide in the Sunday school, which isn't easy to do, I imagine, having the three wee ones at home to care for.”

“Do you know her well, then?”

The priest glanced out the window beside his desk. “Not well, no.”

“Tess tells me Orla and Declan were dating at the time of the apparitions.”

“Is that so? I never heard that, now.”

“Tess said he was on his way to Australia, so I imagine you've never met him.”

“You'd be right about that,” he sighed. “I know his mother quite well, poor lady—very devout, in the second pew at Mass each and every morning, you know the way—but as I say, all I can tell you is the bits and pieces I've heard over time.”

“What kind of bits and pieces?”

“By all accounts, the boy was a bad influence. Sucking down the Buckfast, rolling his own cigarettes from the age of nine, marijuana, and who knows what else.” The priest shook his head. “Your typical waster, so they tell me.”

“What about his father? Is he still around?”

“He left when Declan was small. It happened quite often among the men of that generation, and the one before it: they left for work in England and never returned.”

I thought of Leo, with no one to come home for—but he'd returned just the same. “Was Declan's father from Ballymorris?”

The priest shook his head. “He wasn't, no. They say he was a Dublin man. Who knows what brought him here? I don't suppose even Mrs. Keaveney could tell us now, poor woman.”

“You speak of Mrs. Keaveney as if she were—”

He caught my meaning, and nodded. “Mrs. Keaveney, it pains me to say, goes about her days under the tragic misapprehension that Declan is coming home any day now. Sometimes it's tomorrow, she tells me, and other times it's sure to be next week. He's a very busy man, she says. Up to something important down in Australia, something so important that he hasn't yet found the time to come home and visit his poor old mam, not once in twenty years.

“But then,” he sighed, “mothers can never be brought to think ill of their sons. If only they could, then perhaps the boys would behave better.”

I felt my mother's arms like a lead weight around my neck, murmuring words like
kind
and
sweet
as if they applied to me, and I reminded myself that the priest was speaking only of Declan. “It must surprise you, then, to hear that he and Orla were dating.”

Father Lynch shrugged as he drained his cup. “Sure, people change.” Then something occurred to him. “It's a strange thing, though: in all these years, I've never met Orla's husband.”

I tapped my pen on my open notebook. “What about her sister?”

“Síle?” He looked almost startled. “Surely Tess told you about Síle.”

“I heard she's living in a home. Do you know what's wrong with her?”

“Now, that would be something you'd have to talk to the family about.”

“Do you know her at all?”

“I've never met her, no, though I do know the Gallaghers quite well.”

“How did they react when their daughters told them about the apparition?”

“Oh, I suppose it's safe to say they were concerned. But they'd known Tess all her life, and as I say, Tess has always been the sort of lass you can set your faith in. If Tess saw it, then no one could've been telling tales.”

“So you think the apparition was real?”

I thought we'd geared up for this, but I'd miscalculated. The priest leaned back in his chair and eyed me coolly. “I believe Tess saw what she claimed to have seen.”

“Ah, but Father,” I said, “that's not the same thing. Was it real?”

He crossed his arms and glanced at the calendar on the wall to his right. “Now, that is a question I can't answer.”

I reached over and switched off the recorder. “Can't, or won't?”

“Won't,” he conceded. “Surely you understand. I couldn't have my parishioners reading in your magazine that I believe their children were seeing things, or healing an ailment that may never have been there to begin with.”

“But you've just admitted that's what you think.”

The priest gave me a grim smile. “You can't print it if I haven't said it.” He sighed. “Look, I'm not trying to give you the runaround here. No one was playing tricks or telling tales. I understand your interest; I just don't see how any good can come of encouraging it.”

Then, all too conveniently, there came a gentle knock on the office door. “Father?” Louise called. “Mrs. Moloney is here.”

“It seems your twenty minutes are up, young man,” the priest said dryly.

John's phone beeped as I was leaving the rectory. It was a text message from Tess.
Louise tells me you were asking for the tapes,
she wrote.
I'll leave them with Paudie at the shop, so you can listen to them before we speak next.

*   *   *

It was early afternoon by the time I finished with Father Lynch, and Brona had promised me dinner at six, so I decided to get some work done and save Sligo for the following day. I didn't want to feel rushed when I went to visit Síle.

I typed out everything I could recall from the unrecorded portions of that morning's interviews, taking pride in setting the gems down pretty much verbatim.
She said I found it easier to love the poor and afflicted on a distant continent than the people I professed to love in my own home.
I wanted to show the town as it was and the people as I found them, and a line like that would add just the right tenor, subtly unnerving. I needed this to be the best thing I'd ever done.

Afterward I put in a couple hours on a story I had due at the end of the month, and then I powered down my laptop and went out. It wasn't raining, but Shop Street was deserted apart from a few people coming in and out of the SuperValu. Through the bookstore window, I spotted Paudie behind the counter with a cup of tea and his nose in a hardcover. I drew out my pocket notebook, ducking into vacant entryways to jot down my thoughts as they occurred to me.

Manorview Hotel shut since 1992. Redevelopment notice looks almost as old. Carvery menu (roast beef & turkey, baked sole in lemon & white wine sauce, banoffee pie—?) still posted in front window.

Get numbers on towns near other main apparition sites (Bosnia, et al). Numbers for Ballymorris early 1988–c. 1993?

Town's economic fortunes hinged on Rome's stamp of approval. Mysticism meets Church politics/bureaucracy (& commerce)
=
inevitable paradox. Play up “purity” of visionaries' initial experience. Faith of Irish Catholics—quaint, peculiar—how they see the world & their place in it. Compare/contrast with American Catholicism.

Web search: pilgrims (from Ireland & elsewhere) who may have written about their experiences here. Any international press?

“Hartigan's House of Devotions”—dust on window is an inch thick. Front door padlocked, but someone got inside to write “Owen is a wanker” backward to be read from the street. Through cleared parts, can see there is still some stock on the shelves (including 4-foot toddler Jesus with scepter, mantle & crown). Same sort of junk as Old Mag's. Have Paudie introduce me to Hartigan & other former shopkeepers if they're still around.

I reached the intersection of Shop Street and Milk Lane, and thought of Tess.

Find someone at hospital who might talk to me? Nurses/orderlies? (The more devout they are, the more they'll be willing to talk?)

Then I remembered the look on Tess's face as she said, “I need to gather my thoughts.” Maybe not.

*   *   *

After dinner we met Paudie and Leo at Napper Tandy's for the third night running. “Did you have anything for supper, Leo?” Brona was saying as I laid the first round on the table and took my seat in the snug.

The old man shrugged as he brought the pint to his lips. “Sure, I've a meal in a glass.”

Brona clucked her tongue. “He's lucky to be alive, that one,” she said to me out of the corner of her mouth.

“You've been a busy man, I hear,” Leo said blithely, ignoring what was perfectly audible to all. “Spoke to Father Jack, did you?”

“I didn't realize we're allowed to call him Father Jack.”

“Not to his face.” Leo laughed. “He's a clever one, that Father Jack. No time for nicknames when you've an eye on the bishop's chair.”

Paudie turned to me and patted an old black shoebox on the seat beside him. “I've a package for you, lad.”

“Thanks for bringing it over. And for setting it up so Tess and I could talk.”

Paudie fiddled with his beer mat. “She rang me after you left today.”

I braced myself. “Oh?”

The old folks traded a three-way look. “I'm beginning to think you've a certain effect on people,” Paudie ventured. “She was livelier than I've heard her in a long while.”

“What do you mean by ‘lively'?”

“She isn't the sort to open up to strangers, Tess.” Paudie sighed. “She never has been.”

I'd found a fossil on the beach, and we'd pretended to examine it, but it was just an excuse to come closer.
Like a ghost trapped in stone,
she'd said, and that was when I'd kissed her.

“But she spoke to you today?” Brona asked.

“She started to. I'm hoping she'll let me interview her again at some point before I leave.”

“Ah, she will,” Leo replied. “Twenty years is a long time to be keepin' your own counsel.”