Chapter 8 #9
“Will I help you there, Da?” Rose says softly, biting her lip, because it is a sight past bearing, her father, a man of such coiled strength and strange talents, brought so low, his light so diminished.
She steps forward but Eugene is already at Tomás’s side.
At nearly thirteen, he is catching up in height with his father, and he reaches out with hands that are gentle and capable, working his way down the buttons and easing the shirt off, taking great care not to touch the amputation.
Rose watches, dazed: in the midst of all this panic and uproar, she is struck by the sense that she is seeing the adult in her brother for the first time, the grown man he will be.
Eugene folds the shirt neatly and lays it on the table, then turns back to Tomás.
He seems to understand what their father needs, which is for him to examine his body and what has been done to it.
Tomás stands unsteadily in his cottage, by the ladder, his breath coming in rasps, looking down at his bandages, his stump, his chest, the remaining arm.
“Gone,” he whispers hoarsely, as if trying to make sense of the word.
“They’d to cut it off,” Rose says, “to save your life. They thought you mightn’t live, but here you are.”
Tomás, in only his underclothes, lifts both arms, trembling, holding them out, as if comparing their lengths.
The left hand curls and opens, fingers flexing.
He turns it palm-up, then circles it at the wrist. He stares at it, then at the vacancy of its missing counterpart.
The forefinger and thumb on his left hand come together, as if grasping something, then stretch apart, as if letting whatever it was fall.
Then he turns and looks about the room, and his face is frightened, like that of a scolded child.
He sways dangerously on his feet and Eugene steps forward, grips his shoulder, helps him to a chair.
Tomás is muttering something about punishment, at last, retribution, comeuppance, it all being his own fault.
“Don’t be saying that now,” Rose says soothingly, as she tucks a blanket around his legs. “Punishment indeed. You’ll have done nothing wrong, sure, and—”
“A lifetime of working for the enemy,” Tomás mutters, letting his head fall back to the wall, his face ghastly pale. “I told your mother, I told her, I told Liam, I told them all that I was finished with it, and now look where it’s got me.”
Rose goes off to fetch breakfast, a cup of water, a warm jersey.
When she comes back, she finds Eugene sitting on a stool at Tomás’s feet, holding his hand, as if he is still a young boy.
Tomás is rambling, incoherently and disjointedly, with long hesitations and gaps, about a grave and not enough stones or stones that were too heavy and some hungry swine and a child at a window and a person long ago who lost an arm or was it a leg?
Rose doesn’t catch it all. She assumes it is something he heard in hospital or a type of delirium caused by the shock and perhaps the medicine.
Eugene, however, listens intently, his gaze fixed on his father, and he nods gravely at intervals, still holding his father’s hand in both of his, as if he understands the story Tomás is telling, or as if he’d known it all along.
The novices have fasted all day. They have taken only water while going about their duties and devotions.
Liam’s stomach has gone through cycles of growling and rumbling, then silence, then darts of pain.
He has felt weak and enervated, almost as if he couldn’t manage the allotted walk around the cultivated woodland, still less up to the compulsory task of conversing in Latin with the other novices.
Now, as he sits on the long bench in the refectory, he feels filled with nothing but an impatient fury.
The novice master, Father Byrne, stands at the lectern, reading aloud to them from some tract or other—Liam screws up his eyes to see that the title is Practice of Perfection—while all the time wafts of their dinner come through the open door to the kitchen.
Liam folds his hands in his lap, one cupped inside the other.
He tries to breathe in only through his mouth.
The reading will be finished soon, he tells himself.
Father Byrne’s sonorous, measured voice can go on only so long.
And then their collation will be brought, they will pick up their cutlery, they will be permitted to eat.
Baked eggs, he has heard, are what is permitted after a day of fasting, the purpose of which is to teach them humility and obedience.
That he feels neither—only rage and hunger—Liam endeavours to ignore.
He tries to set his face in an expression of humility, even obedience, but all the while such thoughts are rattling about inside him: what is the purpose of making us fast, and for so long?
Why does Father Byrne speak so slowly? Why does he pronounce the word “Christ” as if it’s tri-syllabic?
How are we to stand it? That fella opposite me, Cox is his name, what a peculiar face he has, as long as a boot.
Is it eggs I can smell or something else, and who was it told me we’d be getting eggs? How much longer, how much longer?
At the sight of Father Byrne removing his spectacles, carefully, and closing the cover of the book, Liam feels himself straighten up. It will be now, it has to be. A sign will be given to the kitchen and out of that door will come trays bearing food, any minute, any—
But what is this? One of the novices, an older man called McGrath, is getting to his feet and mumbling something. Liam leans forward to catch what is being said, what is holding up their meal now.
“Reverend Father and loving brothers,” McGrath recites, “by order of holy obedience, I tell my fault—”
It is too much. Liam trembles with the effort of not burying his head in his hands, not laying his forehead on the table in despair. They are to speak their faults and receive their penances? Now? When the food is so near, yet so far?
McGrath admits to breaking two plates yesterday, and Father Byrne nods, saying that this is indeed a fault, albeit minor, against their religious poverty.
McGrath is asked to kiss the feet of the reverend fathers at the nearest table.
The novice next to McGrath stands. He says he did not clear the ashes from the fire grates as well as he might.
He is duly told to eat his meal in the corner on bended knee.
On it goes: someone folded down the corners of a book, someone else failed to clean all the wax from the chapel candlesticks.
When it comes to Liam’s turn to stand, he gets through the part about order of holy obedience, but when he says, “I tell my fault,” he cannot go on. His speech dries up. His mind is a grey blank, a desperate hollow, filled only with a crazed longing for food.
“I tell my fault,” he says again, swaying slightly, “and…and…” what comes next?
He must say something about a defect or a failing in himself, he must indicate that he wishes to learn obedience, that he wishes to grow in virtue, but all he can think about is eggs.
Eggs from the little islet out in the lough, his mother wading through the waters to fetch them for their breakfast, boiled on the fire.
Their thin carapace, then the white casing, which would yield to a spoon-tip, inside which was the molten yellow core, slightly crystallised at the edges, and—
“If I may,” comes a voice from across the table, and Liam sees that Cox, the man at whose face he had been staring, is getting to his feet.
“Reverend Father,” Cox is saying, his head bowed in humility, but under his brow his eyes are darting to Liam with a calculated beadiness, “forgive me for speaking out but I wish only to aid my brother here. I speak in the spirit of charity when I say that I have observed a fault in him, and my own holy obedience enjoins me to bring it to his notice.”
“Go on,” Father Byrne says, leaning with one elbow on the lectern. “What fault have you observed?”
“That of impatience. And inattention. And lack of humility.”
Anger sweeps through Liam, like fire through field stubble. He may leap across the table and strike Cox about his lugubrious face. How dare this man say of him that he is—
“Twice during mass today, I saw him yawn. During meditations yesterday, I saw him gaze for a long time out of the window. When he was asked by a reverend father to polish his shoes, he was heard to sigh.”
Father Byrne turns to Liam. He tells him that the word “obedience” comes from the Latin, ob-audientia, and they, as novices, must therefore take it to mean not only the following of a rule, but also the aspect of listening or, more specifically, the desire to hear the voice of God.
To be obedient is to be listening to God.
Father Byrne tells Liam that his penance is to go shoeless for the rest of the week.
They sit. Grace is said. Food is brought. It is not eggs but a thin soup the colour of pondwater. Liam is made to remove his shoes with all eyes upon him before he is permitted to eat his soup, hands shaking, head lowered.