Very Old Bones (30 page)

To test himself against nature he sought out the woman known to the canalers and lumber handlers as the Whore of Limerick, her reputation as an overused fuckboat appealing to Malachi’s
free-floating concupiscence. After several iniquitous successes that proved the problem existed wholly in Lizzie, Malachi abandoned the fuckboat and sought solace again in Lizzie’s embrace,
which cuddled his passion and put it to sleep. He entered heavily into the drink then, not only the ale that so relieved and enlivened him, but also the potsheen that Crip Devlin brewed in his
shed.

Drink in such quantity, a departure for Malachi, moved him to exotic behavior. He lay on his marriage bed and contemplated the encunted life. Cunt
was
life, he decided. Lizzie came to him
as he entered into a spermatic frenzy, naked before her and God, ready to ride forever into the moist black depths of venery indeed even now riding the newly arrived body of a woman he had never
seen, whose cunt changed color and shape with every nuance of the light, whose lewd postures brimmed his vessel. Ah love, ah fuckery how you enhance the imperial power of sin! When he was done with
her, the woman begged for another ride, and he rode her with new frenzy; and when he was done again she begged again and he did her again, and then a fourth ride, and a fifth; and, as he gave her
all the lift and pull that was left to him, his member grew bloody in his hand. When the woman saw this she vanished, and Lizzie wept.

The following morning, when he awoke, Malachi found not only his wife already gone from the house, he found himself also bereft of his privities, all facets of them, the groin of his stomach and
thighs as hairless, seamless, and flat as those groins on the heavenly angels that adorned the walls of Sacred Heart Church. Here was a curse on a man, if ever a curse was. God was down on Malachi
now—God, or the devil, one.

Malachi clothed himself, drained half a jug of potsheen, all he had, then pulled the bedcovers over his head. He would hide himself while he considered what manner of force would deprive a man
not only of his blood kin, his strength, his labor, and his cow, but now, also, his only privities. He would hide himself and contemplate how a man was to go about living without privities; more
important, he would think about ways of launching a counterattack on God, or the devil, or whoever had taken them, and he would fight that thief of life with all his strength to put those privities
back where they belonged.

In the painting he called
The Conspiracy
, Peter Phelan created the faces of Malachi and Crip Devlin as they sit in Malachi’s primitive kitchen with their noses a
foot apart, the condiments and implements of their plan on the table in front of them, or on the floor, or hanging over the fireplace. The bed is visible in the background, a crucifix on the wall
above it.

Malachi is in a collarless shirt, waistcoat and trousers of the same gray tweed, and heavy brogans, his left arm hanging limp. Crip Devlin wears a cutaway coat in tatters, a wing collar too
large for his neck, a bow tie awkwardly tied.

These men are only thirty-four and forty, Malachi the younger of the two, but they are portraits of psychic and physical trouble. Malachi’s face is heavily furrowed, his head an unruly
mass of black curls, his black eyes and brows with the look of the wild dog in them. Crip is bald, with a perpetual frown of intensity behind his spectacles, a half-gray mustache, and sallow flesh.
He is moving toward emaciation from the illness to which he has paid scant attention, for at this time he considers all trouble and trauma to be the lot of every man born to walk among devils.

Crip was in a late stage of his pox veneris, not knowing how close he was to death, when he brought his mystical prowess to bear on the lives of Lizzie and Malachi. He had studied for the
priesthood briefly as a young man, and later taught primary school, but was unsuited for it, lacking in patience toward eight-year-old children who could not perceive the truth. In recent years he
had worked as a lumber handler with Malachi, and in the winter they cut ice together on the river. But his disease in late months kept him from working and he lived off the sale of his homemade
liquor, which, by common standards, was undrinkable, but had the redeeming quality of being cheap.

Crip had brought the recipe for the potsheen with him from Ireland, as he had brought his wisdom about the Good Neighbors, those wee folk who, he insisted, inhabited a hilly grove of sycamore
trees and hawthorn bushes not far from Malachi’s cottage. Crip was a widower who lived with his nine-year-old daughter, Mab; and he taught her all the lore of the Good Neighbors that he
himself had learned from his mother, who once kept one of the wee creatures (a flute player) in the house for six months, fed it bread and milk on a spoon, and let it sleep in the drawer with the
knives and forks. And didn’t Crip’s mother have good luck the rest of her life for her generous act? Indeed she did.

When Malachi listened to Crip Devlin talk, something happened to his mind. He saw things he knew he’d never seen before, understood mysteries he had no conscious key to. When Crip stopped
talking Malachi also felt eased, relieved to be back in his own world, but felt also a new effulgence of spirit, a potential for vigorous action that just might give back a bit of its own to the
foul beast that was skulking so relentlessly after his body and his soul.

In Ireland, Crip boasted, he’d been called the Wizard, the Cunningman who could outwit the Good Neighbors. And when Malachi heard this he confided to Crip that he had lost his
privities.

“Did you ever lose them before?” Crip asked Malachi.

“Never.”

“Was there pain when they went?”

“None. I didn’t know they were gone till I looked.”

“It’s a shocking thing.”

“I’m more shocked than others,” Malachi said.

“I’ve heard of this,” said Crip. “Somebody has put the glamour on you.”

“Glamour, is it?”

“A spell of a kind. The Neighbors could do it. I read of a man who lost his privities and thought he knew who did it, and it was a witch and he went to her. He told her his trouble and
also told her she had the most beautiful bosoms in the village, for he knew how witches love flattery. And she took him out to a tree and told him to climb up it and he’d find what he needed.
When he did that he found a great nest full of hay and oats in the treetop, and two dozen privities of one size and the other lying in it. And the man says I’ll take this big one, and the
witch says no, that belongs to the bishop. So the man took the next-smaller size and put it in his pocket, and when he got to the bottom of the tree and touched the ground with his foot, the witch
disappeared and his privity was on him. And he never lost it again.”

“You’re thinkin’, is it, that a witch did this to me?” Malachi asked.

“It well could be. Do you know any witches yourself?”

“None.”

“Have you had any in the family?”

“None that I know of.”

“And your wife’s family?”

“I’ve never heard it spoken of.”

“They don’t speak of it, don’t you know.”

“I’ll ask her,” said Malachi.

“I saw her up on the Neighbors’ hill two days ago.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s so, and she was dancing.”

“Dancing, you say.”

“I do. Dancing with her skirts in the air.”

“No.”

“Didn’t I see it myself, and the shape of a man in the woods watching her?”

“The shape of a man?”

“Not a man atall, I’d say.”

“Then what?”

“One of the Neighbors. A creature, I’d call it.”

“Lizzie dancing with a creature? You saw that. And were you at the potsheen?”

“I was not.”

“Did you go to her?”

“I did not. You don’t go near them when they’re in that mood.”

“What mood?”

“The mood to capture. That’s how they carry on, capturing people like us to fatten their population. They like to cozy up to them that come near them, and before you know it
somebody’s gone and you don’t even know they’re gone, for the creatures leave changelings in place of the ones they take. But there’s no worth atall to
them
things.
They melt, they die, they fly away, and if they don’t, you have to know how to be rid of them.”

“You know how to do that, do you?”

“I’ve heard how it’s done. I have the recipes.”

Two books lie on the table in Peter’s
Conspiracy
painting.

The first is the
Malleus Maleficarum.
Its subtitle, not visible in the painting, is
The Hammer of Witches Which Destroyeth Witches and Their Heresy as with a Two-edged Sword.
The
book is a fifteenth-century theological analysis of the anarchical political forces that for centuries sought the overthrow of civilization through witchcraft, plus abundant remedies for this evil;
and it is a work that had motivated Crip Devlin since the days of his priestly intent, for its divinely inspired misogyny conformed to Crip’s own outlook, especially after his infection with
the pox by his wife. And did she give it to him, the witch? Well, she did. Didn’t she die of it herself, and die before Crip? Was that proof or was it not?

Malachi, when he listened to Crip’s wisdom, handed down from the sages of history, felt like a chosen man, one who would yet again do battle with the dark spirits, the lot of the true
warrior in every age. Malachi accepted the role without complaint, for its rules and its goals were as familiar to him as the streets and the fields of Albany. He agreed with them, he understood
them, and he knew from his wound that he had been singled out for this challenge. As the
Malleus
pointed out so clearly, devils existed only with God’s permission, and Malachi
perceived that God had allowed these devilish things to happen to him, allowed his life to be taken away piece by piece, in the same way He had allowed Job and Jesus and the martyred saints to be
warrior sufferers for His sake.

Without ever having heard the phrase, and with small capacity for understanding it if he had, Malachi had become an ascetic idealist, as obsessed by his enemy as Peter would be by his art; and
when you look at the eyes Peter gave the man, you know that both Malachi and Peter understood that the world was inimical to them and to their plans of order and harmony, that their lives existed
at the edge of disaster, madness, and betrayal, and that a man of strength and honor would struggle with the dark armies until he triumphed or died on the battlefield.

Malachi truly believed he would win this struggle with the black villain. He had done as the
Malleus
counseled, had said his Aves and his Our Fathers, had made the Stations of the Cross
on his knees, had talked to the priest and confessed his sins (not his loss for that was an affliction, not a sin), and had gone to mass so often that the women of the parish thought he must be
either very guilty, or dying. But, in truth, he was coming to understand that some sort of action that went beyond heavenly recourse was called for, action beyond what was known on
earth—except by a chosen few whose courage was boundless and whose weapons were mighty.

The second book on the table in the painting is a slim volume that is open to a sketch of a plant with leaves and berries that any herbalist would recognize as foxglove. Also in the painting
Crip is holding a chicken by the neck with his left hand and from its anus is receiving droppings in his right palm, some of these already floating in a bowl of new milk on the table.

Crip, before the moment shown in the painting, has enlightened Malachi on the things witches fear most, things that cure enchantment and banish the witch back to her own devilish world: foxglove
and mugwort, white mullen and spearwort, verbena and elf grass, the four-leaf clover and the scarlet berries of the rowan oak, green and yellow flowers, cow parsnip and docken, a drawn sword, the
gall of a crow, the tooth of a dead man, rusty nails and pins, the music of a Jew’s harp, a red string around the neck, the smoke of burned elder and ash wood, the smoke of a burned fish
liver, spirting into your own shirt, pissing through a wedding ring, and fire.

Crip mixed half a dozen potions for Malachi and he drank them; the two men burned ash wood and fish liver; they found foxglove and cow parsnip and made a paste of it and Malachi went off by
himself and rubbed that on his groin. He thought of pissing through his mother’s wedding ring, but then he remembered he had nothing to piss with. More things were done, all of them failing
to restore Malachi’s privities.

Crip then moved to the next logical step: an inquiry into the behavior and the physical properties of the women around Malachi (his sister Kathryn, the Whore of Limerick, Lizzie), for it was
well known that witches sometimes assumed the shape of living people, especially women. Even so, they could be found out, for they always had marks and traits that were not human. Crip knew of one
witch who had an extra nipple on her stomach, and another with nipples on each buttock. A third witch always lived with two creatures sucking her, a red one at her left breast, a white one at the
inward walls of her secrets.

When Malachi heard these revelations he immediately undertook a thorough but surreptitious study of his wife, and for the first time he realized that she had shrunk in height by four inches,
that the mark on her left thigh could well be an extra nipple. He remembered that she brought a succubus to their bed and encouraged him to copulate with it until he was bloody. Also, Crip swore to
him that, on the night he watched Lizzie dancing on the Neighbors’ hill, her partner, the shadowy creature, had the webbed feet of a goose.

And so Malachi made ready to launch his counterattack against the demon (and all its hellish consorts) that inhabited his wife’s body.