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.They’d scarcely tipped their glasses before she ran from the house and demanded he take her back to Limerick.Brendan first came in to see what had upset her so, and found me sitting on the bed with my wounds freshly opened.“Oh suffering Christ,” he said, weary and beaten.“Ordinarily it’s the woman who bleeds the first time.”For days I felt stung by the humiliation, and the loneliness of what I was, and tried to pull the world as tight around me as it had been at the friary.Once a cloister, now a boat.I’d leave the docks early in the morning, rowing out onto Lough Derg until I could see nothing of what I’d left behind, and there I’d drift for hours.Chilled by misty rains or cold Atlantic winds, I didn’t care how cruelly the elements conspired against my comfort.The dark, peaty waters lapped inches away like a liquid grave.I often dwelt upon Saint Francis, whose life I’d once vowed to emulate.He too had suffered stigmata, had beheld visions of Jesus.Francesco, repair my falling house, his Jesus had commanded him, or so he’d believed, and so he’d stolen many of his father’s belongings to sell for the money it would take to get him started.Repair my falling house.Whose Jesus was more true? Mine appeared to want from me nothing less than that I tear it down.But always, my reflections would turn to that which to me was most real: she who had come on the day of the bomb.Who had smiled reassuringly at me with my blood on her lips, then never seen fit to visit again.A poor guardian she’d made, abandoning me.Since I’d been a child kneeling beside my bed at night, I had prayed to every evolving concept of God I’d held.I’d prayed to Saviour and Virgin and more saints than I could recall, and now, adrift on the dark rippling lake, I added her to those canonical ranks, praying that she come to my aid once more, to show me what was wanted of me.“You loved me once,” I called to her, into the wind.“Did I lose that too, along with all the blood?”But the wind said nothing, nor the waters, nor the hills, nor the skies whence I imagined that she’d come.They were as silent as dead gods who’d never risen again.In the nights that followed these restless days, I learned to drink at the elbow of a master.No more shandies for me — the foamy black stout now became the water of life.Women, too, lost much of their mystery, thanks to a couple of encounters, the greater part of which I managed to remember.And when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I broke down and told my uncle the secrets that had been eating away at me — the one for only a few weeks, the other since I was seven.It surprised me to see it was the latter that seemed to affect him most.Brendan grew deathly quiet as he listened to the story of that day, his fleshy, ruddy cheeks going pale.He was very keen on my recounting exactly how she’d looked — black hair shimmering nearly to her waist, her skin a translucent brown, not like that of any native I’d ever seen, not even those called the Black Irish.“It’s true, they really do exist,” Brendan murmured after I’d finished, then turned away, face strained between envy and dread, with no clear victor.“Goddamn you boy,” he finally said.“You’ve no idea what’s been dogging your life, have you?”Apparently I did not.He sought out the clock, then in sullen silence appeared to think things over for a while.When at last he moved again, it was to snatch up his automobile keys and nod toward the door.Of the envy and dread upon his face, the latter had clearly won out.IV.De contemptu mundi“Somebody once said — I’ve forgot who — said you can take away a man’s gods … but only to give him others in return.”Uncle Brendan told me this on our late-night drive, southwest through the countryside, past hedgerows and farms, along desolate lanes that may well have been better traveled after midnight.A corner rounded by day could have put us square in the middle of a flock of sheep nagged along by nipping dogs.Or maybe we traveled by the meager luster of a slivered moon because, of those things that Brendan wished to tell me, he didn’t wish to do so by the light of day, or bulb, or fire.“Wasn’t until after I’d left seminary that I understood what that really meant.You don’t walk away from a thing you’d thought you believed your whole life through without the loss of it leaving a hole in you, hungering to be filled.You’ve still a need to believe in something … it’s just a question of what.”Sometimes he talked, sometimes he fell silent, collecting his remembrances of days long gone.“I tried some things, Patrick.Things I’d rather not discuss in detail.Tried some things, and saw others … heard still other things beyond those.You can’t always trust your own senses, much less the things that get whispered about by people you can’t be sure haven’t themselves gone daft before you’ve ever met them.But some things…“That woman you saw? One of three, she is, if she’s who I think she was.There’s some say they’ve always been here, long as there’s been an Ireland, and long before that.All the legends that got born on this island, they’re not all about little people.There’s some say that from the earliest times, the Celts knew of them, and worshipped them because the Celts knew that the most powerful goddesses were three-in-one.”We’d driven as far down as the Dingle Peninsula, one of the desolate and beautiful spits of coastal land that reached out like fingers to test the cold Atlantic waters.The land rolled with low peaks, and waves pounded sea cliffs to churn up mists that trapped the dawn’s light in spectral iridescence, and the countryside was littered with ancient rock — standing stones and the beehive-shaped huts that had housed early Christian monks.Here hermits found the desolation they’d craved, thinking they’d come to know God better.“There’s some say,” Uncle Brendan went on, “they were still around after Saint Patrick came
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