At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [209]
Strength that is in his hands, truth that is on his lips, purity that is in his heart: the words returned of the schoolmaster Pearse, spoken in her garden so long ago. This serving lad, so dazzling he stood, might be such as they of the Fianna of old.
It no longer seemed any ordinary Mass: no common rubric was told. The priest took a book whereof was read some circumstance regarding a tomb. The server listened with an interested curiosity. There was a sense of his waiting, of his being long prepared for this coming event. A god would be brought down to the altar. An extraordinary notion: a god to come down before Eva’s eyes. Though it seemed to Eva it was the server now, not the priest, who was the center of this mystery.
She sensed the hush from the benches behind, their occupants tilted forward so that her neck bristled with suspected touch. The suspense, a crowded silent bating, told rather pity and wonder than any approval of the boy. Who was he? What was this little thing he would do?
Casement and Pearse: now came, unseemingly, the image of her nephew, his languorous vigor roused while he knelt beside her, this women’s aisle of the nave, watching this lad. She recalled his face upon their last interview, soul-pained and doomed, there too a shade of Casement. And then, this love he had not blushed to avow: some bathing boy, he too perhaps in the joy of his youth; a love which tomorrow would send him, her nephew, to the trenches.
And it seemed of a sudden inevitable that his love should be so. Inevitable that such love should send him to war. Inevitable as war was inevitably male. It was a preserve she had struggled all her life to touch, yet never had reached. Nor had any woman touched it, Kathleen nor Rosaleen nor the Shan Van Vocht, for all their summons and goad. They knelt beside her, Casement and Pearse and her nephew, each feasting upon this lad, and this lad performing with a significance secret to their eyes: and she felt a little ashamed, feminine, a folly.
Came the Offertory, and a heathen withershin rite it presented. A silver plate, a gold cup, cruets of wine and water—she watched astonished as the server surrendered these treasures to the priest. And now he had nothing left in this world to give, and he knelt again to pray. His face was offered full to the window, whose light in glory round him shone. How frail the linen that pulled upon the tough green cloth.
The air dinned in Eva’s ears while the priest obscurely muttered. There was something very wrong about this, altogether wrong that this child should fascinate so. But she could not bear to remove her eyes. A sacrifice, she thought: a chosen lad. So intense was her gaze, his eyes turned a second time in response. They flashed again, and in that flash she glimpsed the ferocious wish of his courage. A hand-bell sounded: in his hands the priest some nick-nack elevated. Abruptly the youth bowed his head. With a shine on his neck the window-light played, with a glint of metal on the soft bared skin. She felt a tear in her heart. She believed she cried out. Outside, the bells tolled from every steeple. Every steeple in the land tolled noon high Mass.
Later, she knelt at the rail waiting for communion. She felt her age in her hands that trembled to join; in their tiny form she remembered her beauty. Her heart heaved on the hollow air, as though physically they had torn it from her, that spirit, that flame. And what more, bar shriek, might she have done? A woman could not shame men to arms who every day saw women subject. Nor Kathleen nor Rosaleen nor the Shan Van Vocht. Now came the golden youth. And when he came, holding the paten, she felt his breath when she lifted her veil, a nothing, the brush of a tassel, his given life, Ireland.
She waited at her place while the people left. Soon she was alone in the chapel. She waited, certain of his coming, as she was certain now of the rising to come. But a rising not as Eva had hoped nor any sane person would hope. Rather