Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (66 page)

His breath was coming in uneven savage bursts and David saw the capability for quick, brutal murder deep in his eyes. “Ye took our language, our schools, our priests had to flee or die, ye took our culture, an’ even after ye’d stripped us of everything we’d ever been or known, ye mocked us— stupid Paddy, with his backward ways. Oh aye, look away, there’s a thousand Irish jokes an’ don’t tell me ye haven’t laughed at them yerself. An’ then when we’ve the temerity to stand up against ye, when we rise from the fire an’ say enough, ye call us terrorists. The goddamn Irish, they say, all they know is hate. Well I ask ye, Corporal, who taught it to us, who made sure it was bred deep into the bone an’ blood of us?”

“Do you hate me, then?” David asked quietly, frightened by how deeply the answer mattered to him.

Pat gave him a long look and shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose I do, hardly matters in the broader picture here, though, does it?”

“It matters to me,” David said, knowing his face showed all he was feeling and suddenly not giving a damn.

Pat braced his hands against the sink, lashes dark against the hollows under his eyes. Despair was evident in his lines. “All I wanted,” he whispered as though he spoke only for himself, “was to do good work, to help find and provide housing for people who have come to see such a thing as not a right, but a luxury. I went about it as quietly as I could, I never wanted to stir up trouble. I’m a simple man with simple dreams, but history will not leave me be. That’s the curse of bein’ an Irishman who stays in his own country, though, history will not leave any of us be.”

Emotion, David was to reflect later, always made him foolhardy—a fact his father had pointed out to him a number of times. Managing to infer that emotion was a particularly undesirable quality in a son. But his father was not present, and neither, apparently, was his own common sense. There was only the air, heavy with the last of night, and the soft light of the man’s skin and the pain that seemed to reach across the space dividing them. He reached out and touched Pat just below the shoulder, in the shadowed groove of the backbone.

The man moved like lightning, there was no time for thought between the half second during which David touched his back and the next when he found himself smashed against the wall, arm halfway up his spine, his own gun pressed tight to the corner of his mouth.

David felt the muzzle of the gun click sharply against his teeth as hysterical laughter rose in the back of his throat, his commanding officer’s words ringing in his head. ‘Rule number one of any tour of duty in Northern Ireland is don’t let down your guard around the bastards.’

“Do they not teach ye to never to turn yer back, Englishman? Do they not say how unpredictable an’ untrustworthy the lot of us are? How an Irishman will cut yer throat as soon as look at ye? Or were ye absent from psyops that day? Hmm David?”

The muzzle had insinuated itself between his teeth, the gunmetal tasting oddly like blood against his tongue, sharp and salty. The man’s forearm was like a bolt of steel across his throat, already things were going black and fuzzy about their edges. Despite several tricks he’d been taught, he knew he’d never be able to get the jump on him. There were worse ways to die, he knew for he’d seen many of them, than at the hands of a blackly murderous Irishman. He thought, in his proper British way, that he ought to pray, tried for the doxologist version of the Lord’s Prayer and found he’d an incomplete recollection of it.

“Here’s history for ye, Englishman, my daddy died because of this silly little eight hundred year war, my brother spent five years in one of yer prisons an’ will never be the same because of it. My granddad was shot like a dog in the street in front of his own son, an’ I’ve been ripped from my home an’ my woman merely because I’m tryin’ to change the status quo in a system that’s kept me an’ mine on our knees for centuries. That’s Irish history.” The hammer of the gun clicked neatly, reverberating with the force of thunder in David’s ear. Then suddenly it was gone—gun, arm and man, the voice behind him no longer angry, just very weary. “Ye’ll not touch me again.”

David, gasping in equal parts oxygen and relief, slid to the floor, knees having turned the consistency of unset jelly.

“Oh Christ—Christ—I’m sorry man, I don’t what possessed me. Oh God, what am I becomin’?” Beside him Pat slid to the floor, the pistol laying slick on the tile.

“It’s o-kay,” David managed to wheeze out.

“No it’s not,” Pat said wearily, “ye’ve shown me nothin’ but kindness an’ at great risk to yerself, an’ this is how I repay ye.”

David merely shook his head, too exhausted to even reach for his gun and not caring a great deal at the present moment. The silence between them was heavy, laden with the apologies for which neither knew the words. Feeling he had little to lose, David put himself into the breach.

“What did you want,” he swallowed, his throat swollen and thick, “before all this?”

Pat turned his head to the side, exhaustion pulling at the corners of his mouth and eyes.

“Sometimes I don’t remember, the present seems so all occupyin’. But what I really wanted, I suppose, was to be an astronomer. Wanted to be somewhere that it didn’t rain nine days out of ten, an’ just study the sky at night. I wanted a quiet life, y’know, a wife an’ kids an’ a house with a bit of a yard.”

“What happened to make that so impossible?” David asked gently, aware that outside the barred window, night was releasing its hold on the planet.

Pat shrugged. “My daddy died an’ my brother went to prison for five years, an’ I couldn’t seem to dream proper for a long while after, if that makes any sense.”

“It makes a great deal of sense,” David responded quietly, Eddie’s face swimming up, unbidden, in his consciousness. “My brother shot himself a few years back. Things seemed meaningless for a long time after that.”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said simply, surprising David with the calm sincerity of his words.

“An astronomer, is it? I’ve always thought they were rather romantic souls, spending their lives searching the heavens, leading an uncomplicated life.”

“Told ye I was a simple man with simple dreams.”

“I don’t think,” David said in a strained voice, still wiping blood off the corner of his mouth, “there’s anything simple about you, Patrick Riordan.”

Pat shrugged, as if to say the designs of his character were of little concern to him anymore.

They sat there for a moment, both weary, while morning gathered behind them in gray slipstreams of cloud and the faint whisper of rain against the window.

“It’s gettin’ light,” Pat said finally, as the room around them turned the color of ashes.

“Yes it is,” David said, trying for some modicum of dignity in his tone. “I suppose we’d best get you back to your cell before they realize you’re gone.” He took a deep breath, hoping his shaking legs would bear him up onto his feet. In front of him, however, broad and strong in the heavy light, a hand held itself out. He hesitated, uncertain of the meaning of it.

“Take it, yer still shakin’,” Pat said gruffly.

David took the hand, and allowed himself for a moment to rely upon the strength whose natural bent was to help not harm, and wished fervently they’d met in another time and another country.

Pat was clad again in the overalls, the hood held loosely in his other hand.

“I’m sorry,” David said, not knowing clearly just what he was sorry for, just knowing that he was.

Pat nodded, dark eyes inscrutable as he turned again into the Irish prisoner who could not allow himself the weakness of human flaws. He put the hood back on himself, voice slightly muffled through the two layers of thick material.

“Tie it for me, will ye?” he asked, and by these words David knew he had been given a fragile gift, which must be held carefully.

Forgiveness.

IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since Pamela had sought the comfort of the church. In Boston she had been tempted, but had not felt worthy to seek solace in the arms of her childhood religion.

The prayers and articles of faith were so deeply ingrained in her that she knew she still, on a daily basis, lived as a Catholic. And someone raised Catholic could never quite shake the fear of Purgatory. Nor the knowledge that to commit such an act as she had those last days in Boston might well condemn her unequivocally to hell.

To cross the threshold of a church made her feel like a scarlet hypocrite and she was quite certain that all who saw her would see her sin writ large across her face.

Father Jim however, had made it easy, by asking her several times to come and help with various projects he was instituting in his parish neighborhood. The man wasn’t above using guilt as an inducement either, for he’d remarked on more than one occasion that Lawrence could well use the moral ground which the church could provide, as an underpinning for his new life.

Thus many of their weekends were now spent here, within the building of the church itself where assistance was meted out to those most in need. Basic necessities such as food and clothing were attended to and for those in search of temporary shelter, be it of the temporal or spiritual variety, the church was a place to lay their heads.

Father Jim took his particular brand of spirituality to the streets as well, for he believed in walking amongst those to whom he preached. In living and working in understanding of their lives, loves, and circumstances—even those who might well consider themselves beyond the boundaries of salvation.

Over the weeks, the small parish had become a shelter to Pamela. The violence of the streets ceased at its doors. Inside was sanctuary in the finest sense, where the peace could be felt as a softness, as a quiet difficult to find outside its doors.

So she found herself in the dim confines of the church on a Saturday morning in early October, after a night of arguing herself near senseless—had she committed this sin in free will? Yes, and yet what other choice had she been given? It was Love or Casey. One life in exchange for another. So was her contrition perfect when she did not regret that the act had saved her husband’s life? The Church might argue that she could not know that Love would kill to keep her, but of that one fact she was certain, he had meant to kill Casey in order to claim her for his own. These thoughts would give her no rest and she determined to find a way in which to broach the subject with Father Jim.

It took the entire morning, as the two of them sat putting together hygiene packages for the local orphanage, for her to gird up the courage to ask him the question that had burned within her for months now.

Father Jim had just held up a small bottle with a wry smile and said, “Seems a bit foolish to be handing out socks and tooth polish when the wee fiends are out stoning soldiers and lighting tanks on fire.”

Then she simply blurted it out, as was often the way when she’d carefully planned what she would say.

“Do you believe there are sins that are unforgivable?”

Father Jim looked up sharply from the washrag he was tucking around a small pamphlet on the care of the adolescent body.

“I mean rather,” she stuttered, “that what I’m asking is—is what if a person had felt they’d no choice but to commit a sin, that someone else was in grave danger had they not committed this sin. Do such circumstances expiate the need for perfect contrition?”

Father Jim placed a bar of soap in the box and put the lid on, putting it to one side with all the other completed boxes, before answering.

“It’s a bit hard for me to give you an answer without knowing the exact circumstances around the commission of the sin. All I can tell you with surety is that there is no sin so great that it cannot be forgiven by God. You know that surely.”

She trembled suddenly, afraid now that she had broached this subject that had been like a great stone sitting on her chest for months now.

"If your sins be as scarlet, they shall be made white as snow; and if they be red as crimson, they shall be white as wool.”
Father Jim quoted, his brown eyes soft with compassion.

“Do you really believe that? I mean
really
. That there is no sin too grievous for God to forgive? You don’t think He exacts some earthly price for sin? For mortal sin,” she added, feeling a wave of panic as soon as the words left her lips.

Father Jim’s brow furrowed into three distinct lines, as it did when he gave all his attention to a matter. She held his gaze, though it made her shake, it was too important to hear his answer, to know what he really thought, to look away now.

Her own pulse sounded loud and ragged in her ears. Minutes uncounted passed, a small eternity as she awaited his answer. In the distance she could hear the soft chatter of tea cups meeting saucers, as the ladies who polished the oak pews took their break in the rectory.

“Perhaps Pamela,” Father Jim finally said, “it’s more a matter of forgiving yourself, rather than needing God’s forgiveness. The two things are, many times, one and the same.”

“You don’t think there are some sins that cannot be forgiven? Don’t quote me Church doctrine, tell me what you yourself believe.”

Again there was the searching gaze, and the wrinkled forehead. At long last, he shook his head.

“My thoughts and the Church’s are one on this matter; a sin is only unforgivable if there’s no repentance in your heart, and even then I don’t presume to understand what the measure of God’s forgiveness might be. Neither should you.”

She nodded, and knew that he could see she remained unconvinced.

“Perhaps confession would help to unburden you of whatever it is that’s haunting you.”

“Haunting me?”

“Yes, haunting you. It would be good for you to lay it down, however terrible you think it is. I don’t need to remind you that the confessional is sacrosanct.”

“I know.”

In the eyes of the Church life was sacred, a gift from God to be used well, to be spent on good works and lived in faith. Did the fact that Love Hagerty had committed few good works, and had lived only by his faith in the ultimate corruptibility of man, make his life less sacred? And how could she ask Father Jim these things, without leading him to understand just what the demon was that haunted both her sleeping and waking hours?