Chapter 4 #15
On the table, Tomás whimpers and thrashes his head from side to side, because there comes something unthinkable, the worst of all, and he needs to fend it off, shield himself from it.
He has spent all the days since keeping it out of his mind, away from his thoughts, but this priest has forced it there, he has summoned it, and Tomás fights against it, he rails at the storm, he tries to hold it off.
He is a strong man, he can do it, so he can, but it comes anyway: a noise reaching through the darkness of perhaps their last night under the cabin’s roof, a strange scuffling and snorting, a tussle just outside the window.
He had raised himself up to look out—and how he wishes he never had, how he wishes he had lain there, like the others—and there in the moonlight were the earl’s pigs, broken out of their pen and through the walls of the family’s yard.
Hefty, bristling creatures they were, digging insistently at the soil with fleshy snouts, displacing the stones with their filthy grubbing, and they had in their mouths, their slavering and horrible jaws—they had—they had—and Tomás was unable to look away—his mother and his sister saying, Whatever is it?
from the floor by the hearth, stirring as if they too would stand and come to the window, so Tomás had said—he had said—Nothing, nothing at all, go back to sleep.
Peculiar gasping noises are coming from his throat, and he seems to have no control over them, no way of stopping them, and a slick of sweat is breaking out of his brow, down his back, and he doesn’t know how there is moisture enough in him for that, but the body is a curious thing, what it can survive, how it continues to breathe and exist despite everything.
He lunges against his bindings, letting out a shout from behind his gag.
He wants this priest to know he cannot be broken, that he will never give in.
He survived the eviction; he survived, unlike his brothers and sisters and mother, the terrible trudge along the road in search of relief that wasn’t given; he survived the workhouse when many others did not; he survived his apprenticeship; he survived—that.
Look at him now. A wife, children, a job where he is not at the mercy of landlords or crops and their failures or the vicious whips of the gombeen men.
He would say to this person beside him, if he could, Look at me, man, I survived the worst thing you might possibly imagine, and I will not be felled by the likes of you.
The half-door opens and a hand reaches in again with a bowl, and even from the table, Tomás can catch the scent of baked apple, fragrant and hot, filtering into his nasal cavity: sweet and blistered peel, the floral scorch of honey.
He turns his head away quickly but perhaps not quickly enough for, against his will, he finds a string of words coming from behind the gag: Please, please, mister, can you spare a morsel?
Somehow these words strike against him like a flint.
They shame him, and he knows his mouth and tongue have spoken them before, and this thought forces a deep gouge through him; it seeks out the weaknesses in him and blasts them apart.
He sees again the reflection of his father’s face in the surface of the pool; he sees the beautiful wall he had to dismantle, stone by stone; he hears the unholy slabbering of pigs fighting over something.
He sees, unbelievably, over by the hearth, that his father is standing there, in the room with them, dressed in his smock and britches, looking straight at him, and his face is bruised and rueful, and Tomás thinks he has come to ask him why he didn’t do better at the job of covering his grave, why he didn’t drag more stones over it or stamp down the earth.
I’m sorry, he gasps, I’m so sorry. Smithereens, is what Tomás thinks. I am smithereens.
The black-garbed one leans close, the plate in his hand. Tomás can see the steam curling up off it.
“Do you repent, my child?” he says, still chewing.
“Can you spare a morsel?” The words force their way out of Tomás’s throat. He shuts his eyes, tight, in case his father is still there at the fireplace, watching him plead like a beggar.
The priest smiles. He is all forgiveness, all heart. He holds the plate above Tomás. The apples, two of them, filled in their empty cores with hazelnuts and honey, crowned with a spoonful of the widow’s cream and a scattering of—
“Repent, my child. Repent and then we may cast out the darkness, the—”
Something in Tomás snaps. He almost hears it go, like the breaking of a cart’s axle or the snapping of a bootlace.
He rears up, straining against his bindings—he possesses great physical strength, he can bear two children on his shoulders, he can pick up a sack of grain and carry it a mile, he can lift his wife off her feet and across the room, even after all their years together, so surely, surely, he can break these bonds—and from somewhere near his belly, he roars: “I am not your child! You are not my father! Give me some food, man, for the love of God!”
Next door in the byre, his finger moving from word to word in the name book, Liam hears the roar, but not the words, and his head swivels around on his neck, fear rising up in him like floodwater.
Father Joseph stands, arms aloft, face lifted to the heavens, sacred words flowing from his mouth.
The moment is close, he senses, when he will triumph over the Devil, when he will cast him out of this poor unwitting sinner, for the man is speaking now, in hoarse and unintelligible noises, and in them he hears the unmistakable note of regret.
His first exorcism! Father Joseph feels invincible, bathed in glory, filled with light.
He is a vessel for God, his representative on earth.
Running through him like fibres of gold in cloth is the Holy Spirit, the glorious work of the Lord.
He is brimming with love and forgiveness.
He will triumph, he will win, and this sinner will be saved.
As soon as possible, he will write to the bishop; he will pen a moving yet modest report of what has occurred here, in this rude dwelling, in which he will appear as the humble country priest doing battle with Beelzebub.
The bishop will surely be impressed, perhaps might even consider a visit to the site of this miracle and reward him with— But, no, he mustn’t get ahead of himself, all in good time.
With a tremulous breath, he opens his eyes and is a little dismayed to see not heavenly ladders descending from the sky or visions of the Holy Virgin, but smoke-blackened rafters, the sleeves of his robe, smattered with food stains, the dirt of this place and his bitten-down fingernails.
No matter.
Father Joseph allows his gaze to fall on the object of his prayers and impassioned pleas, the focus of his and divine love. A simple working-man, is how he will describe him in his letter to the bishop, educated but unspiritual.
“Do you,” he says, in the sonorous voice he learned at the seminary, “repent?”
Words—or at least the approximation of them—emerge from behind the spittle-dark gag, rattling like stones in a bucket.
Father Joseph smiles down at the poor sinner before him: the moment of conquest is nigh, he is certain.
Far from easy was the task, he will say, but I persevered in the face of evil.
He will drive out the devils within this poor man—he will hook them out, as a farmer pulls worms from the hoofs of cattle.
There surges within him a thrum of excitement at what form the Devil has chosen to take this time.
Beelzebub appeared to me there as a—Father Joseph’s mind teems with possibilities—a scaled and fanged serpent, a hideous half-man and half-goat, a legged eel, a raven, a large and furless cat.
“Do you repent?” he asks again, with a tinge of impatience.
As he looks down upon the man on the table, held there by bonds of love and forgiveness, it happens. He, Father Joseph, witnesses good prevailing over evil, sees proof of God’s goodness and righteousness.
The man begins to cry.
Tears pool in his eyes. He attempts to blink them away, tries to deny their existence, even to himself, but Father Joseph sees them slide out of the corners of the man’s eyes, cutting clean paths through the sweat and grime coating his skin.
And then, just as Father Joseph had hoped, the full release takes hold.
The sinner broke down, he will say, and sobbed like a child.
The map-maker’s fists are curled, great gouts of repentance wrenched out from deep within.
The noise of his weeping spirals up towards the thatch, and Father Joseph, all the while, is darting looks this way and that, hoping to see the devils, for he has heard that it is possible to see them leave the body at this moment.
Disappointingly, his gaze is met by a row of iron spoons on a shelf, a cup hanging from a hook, a faded wooden chest by the window, a nimbus of blow-back smoke sliding about the room, seeking exit.
He rallies himself: he has succeeded; he has triumphed; he has cast out the evil.
He is able to lay consoling hands on the man and he has every hope that this man will confide in him now, will tell him exactly how the Devil appeared to him, what he offered as a bargain for his soul, and he, Father Joseph, can write it down, word for word, in his letter.
His heart swells and lifts with what he knows is the will of God, the force of Him, not pride, never that, and he holds out his arms again, this time in victory.
Liam has tried his best with the maps. He has completed the draft sheets, as well as he can. Any remaining pencilled notations he has copied over with ink. He has done what he can with the mathematical calculations. He hopes, fervently, that the redcoats won’t notice anything amiss.