The Brothers' Lot - Kevin Holohan [56]
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something glisten.
He lurched toward it and stared aghast. On the floor in front of him was the severed trunk of one of the O’Rahilly miniatures. It was like all the others except that this one was bleeding copiously where it had been broken. Brother Boland looked heavenward in awe and glimpsed a few more flakes of paint drifting down from the ceiling. As they floated and turned, he saw them transform into perfect miniature communion hosts. A lightning flash of spiritual revelation engulfed him and before he knew what was happening he was standing at the head of the stairs, clutching the shattered figurine, his voice echoing shrilly through the quietness of the monastery: “It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! The second miracle of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly!”
From the common room below he could hear the muted sounds of the ten o’clock news on the radio. Its quotidian normality clashed horribly with the laden silence oozing out of the oratory. Gathering up the hem of his cassock in his empty left hand, he propelled himself down the stairs with a clattering of slippers on the polished steps.
“It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle! It’s a miracle!”
20
Father Martin Mulvey, S.J., paused in his reading and closed his eyes. The Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth gripped him and he surrendered himself to its slow, tragic swelling. It brought to his mind’s eye the paintings of El Greco he had seen when he traveled to Toledo after his ordination almost thirty years before. The strings soared and glided and he felt his eyes strain upward in their sockets as they followed the music. Behind the rich fabric of sound emerged a distant, insistent discordance, at first barely there, but once noticed, more evident and disruptive with each passing second.
“Bloody phone!” huffed Father Mulvey, and stood up suddenly. The Maltese Falcon fell out of his lap onto the floor as he hurried out to the hall.
“2402,” he said gruffly into the receiver. “Ah yes, good evening, Father Sheehan,” he continued, his voice gliding into a more respectful lilt.
He listened intently and his face darkened, not with fear but with the soot of determination accrued from the almost forgotten flame of passion that now flared up anew within him. This was what he had been waiting for all his life. This was it. This had to be it.
After twenty years of being dragged out to the middle of nowhere in the small hours of the morning to look at two-headed calves; afternoons drinking stewed tea while he listened to old women tell him how they had lost their keys only to find them in their sleeve or handbag after praying to Saint Anthony; numerous tortuous examinations and cross-examinations of eye witnesses to apparitions who would turn out to have been on a poteen binge for the best part of a week before the supposed apparition, this finally sounded like a real chance. No more sitting in drafty country churches waiting for statues to weep. No more perfunctory investigations of supposed Immaculate Conceptions before mother and child were bundled off to the nearest Jezebel Laundry and Herod’s Orphanage respectively. This was the one. This was the one that would pluck him out of obscurity and take him to Rome to form part of the beatification process of Venerable Saorseach O’Rahilly. Father Mulvey did not hold the Brothers of Godly Coercion in great esteem but a miracle was a miracle, no matter where it came from.
“I’ll be over there in a flash, Father,” he told Sheehan, and dashed upstairs to get his boots. He bounded down the stairs and flailed around in the hallstand drawer looking for his bicycle clips. Despairing of finding them, he tucked his pants into his socks as best he could and ran out the front door, cramming his hat onto his head as he went.
“Father Mulvey, S.J., Diocesan Investigator,” announced Mulvey portentously as he held open his wallet with his identification.
“Ah, Father, wasn’t it very good of you to