Thomas P. Lynch

The one who pulled the trigger with his toe, spread-eagled on his girlfriend’s parents’ bed, and split his face in halves above his nose, so that one eye looked east, the other west; sometimes that sad boy’s bifurcation seems to replicate the math of love and grief — that zero sum of holding on and letting go by which we split the differences with those with whom we occupy the present moment. Sometimes I see that poor corpse as a token of doubt’s sure twin and double-mindedness, of certainty, the countervailing guess, the swithering, the dither, righteousness, like Libra’s starry arms outstretched in love or supplication or, at last, surrender to the scales forever tipped in the cold sky.

On shanks’ mare Argyle talked to himself. Alone, he’d carry on whole colloquies en route to some poor corpse’s obsequies— these dialogues, the way he kept his wits about him, body and soul together, fit for the wretched work of sin-eating. Sometimes he counted words or parts of words as if they amounted to something more than sound and sense attuned between his ears, as, for example, how coincident: the way grace and gratis, wherefore gratitude partook a kinship such as cousins do, singing the same tune in different voices, much as grave and gravitas, then gravity kept one earthbound, grounded, humble as the mud— the humus, so-called, God wrought humans from. Or how from Adam’s rib was fashioned Eve— bone of his own bone, flesh of his flesh— whom he got gravid by implanting seed, in her unfathomably fecund Eden. The memory of a woman’s company would bring his ambulations to a halt to aim his gaping face due heavenward, the dewy air her touch, her taste, sweet salt.

He’ll have been the last of his kind here then. The flagstones, dry-stone walls, the slumping thatch, out-offices and cow cabins, the patch of haggard he sowed spuds and onions in— all of it a century out of fashion— all giving way to the quiet rising damp of hush and vacancy once he is gone. Those long contemplations at the fire, cats curling at the door, the dog’s lame waltzing, the kettle, the candle and the lamp— all still, all quenched, all darkened— the votives and rosaries and novenas, the pope and Kennedy and Sacred Heart, the bucket, the basket, the latch and lock, the tractor that took him into town and back for the pension cheque and messages and pub, the chair, the bedstead and the chamber pot, everything will amount to nothing much. Everything will slowly disappear. And some grandniece, a sister’s daughter’s daughter, one blue August in ten or fifteen years will marry well and will inherit it: the cottage ruins, the brown abandoned land. They’ll come to see it in a hired car. The kindly Liverpudlian she’s wed, in concert with a local auctioneer, will post a sign to offer Site for Sale. The acres that he labored in will merge with a neighbor’s growing pasturage and all the decades of him will begin to blur, easing, as the far fields of his holding did, up the hill, over the cliff, into the sea.

The body of the boy who took his flight off the cliff at Kilcloher into the sea was hauled up by curragh-men, out at first light fishing mackerel in the estuary. “No requiem or rosary” said the priest, “nor consecrated ground for burial,” as if the boy had flown outside the pale of mercy or redemption or God’s love. “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” quoth Argyle to the corpse’s people, who heard in what he said a sort of riddle, as if he meant their coreligionists and not their sodden, sadly broken boy. Either way, they took some comfort in it and readied better than accustomed fare of food and spirits; by their own reckoning: the greater sin, the greater so the toll. But Argyle refused their shilling coin and helped them build a box and dig a grave. “Your boy’s no profligate or prodigal,” he said, “only a wounded pilgrim like us all. What say his leaping was a leap of faith, into his father’s beckoning embrace?” They killed no fatted calf.  They filled the hole.

Thin gruel, shallow graves, whiskey watered down, the ne’er-do-well and good-for-nothing crowd of cornerboys and gobshites were among Argyle’s manifold perturbations. Worse still, the episcopal vexations: their excellencies, eminence and graces, red-cassocked dandies and mitered wankers, the croziered posers in their bishoprics with their Easter duties and Peter’s pence, their ledgers full of mortal, venial sins— keepers of the till and tally, bankers of indulgences and dispensations; their bulls and bans and excommunications, nothing but contumely and bamboozles. For all their vestiture, rings and unctions, preaching to bishops, like farting at skunks, was nothing but a mug’s game to the sin-eater, so in earshot of them mum is what he kept. Still, he thought there might be something to it: a life apart from this life where the souls long dead and gone were neither dead nor gone. Some days he felt so happily haunted, by loving ghosts and gods upholding him. Some days he felt entirely alone.

Because he barely heard the voice of God above the hum of other choristers— batwing and bird-whistle, gathering thunder, the hiss of tides retreating, children, cattle; because he could not readily discern the plan Whoever Is In Charge Here has, he wondered about those who claimed to have blessed assurances or certainty: a One and Only Way and Truth and Life, as if Whatever Breathes in Everything mightn’t speak in every wondrous tongue; as if, of all creations, only one made any sense. It made no sense to him. Hunger he understood, touch, desire. He knew the tenderness humans could do, no less brutalities.  He knew the cold morning, the broad meadow, the gold sunset. One evening on the hill of Knocknagaroon, the Atlantic on one side, the Shannon on the other, the narrowing headlands of the peninsula out behind him, the broad green palm of Moveen before him, it seemed he occupied the hand of God: open, upturned, outstretched, uplifting him.