William H. Hallahan - (6 page)

The monks were a strange order. They were mendicants who wandered
the earth, solitaries who begged for their daily bread and spent
their time meditating and praying. They slept wherever they were
admitted, usually among the poor and the pariahs in the skid rows and
tenderloins and cribs of Europe, America and Asia. Periodically they
would return to their monastery in Ireland for communion, confession
and moral restoration, and in the footsteps of Jesus, they vowed
never to ride in any vehicle except ships. They wandered the earth on
foot only. They wore distinctive cowled cassocks, made of heavy black
wool with a white wool cross from shoulder to shoulder and chin to
shoe tops.

They were said to still practice ancient Druid rituals, and
because of their extensive travels over many years, they were adept
at all the religious practices of India and China. The monks were
regarded as religious knights-errant, doing battle with the spiritual
evil that most men professed no longer to believe in. The Irish in
the region said the monks could see into your soul and tell what kind
of a person you were.

The monastery itself stood on a headland, high above the sea,
where the wind never stopped blowing, a great craggy stone affair
hammered and chiseled from the rocky cliff itself.

The stones were constantly wetted by the bursting surf that
thrashed without end against the base of the cliff--emerald-green
water covered with white spume, rising and falling forever. Overhead,
like a living crown, seabirds circled--gulls, guillemots and
kittiwakes--constantly calling and diving.

The monks seemed quite pleased to be performing a baptism,
delighted in fact with the visitors, and six of them came out of the
monastery to greet the christening party. One, Brother Mark, took
Brendan in his arms, and clucking his tongue, he carried him inside.

A monk asked Kathleen, "Truly, is it Brendan you'll name him?
Marvelous. Brendan was a monk and he's a patron saint, a great
adventurer. And although the Italians dispute it, Brendan sailed to
America long before Columbus. And here's another Brendan going to
America. Such an appropriate name."

How severely Oriental everything was inside. How compact and
functional. There was no clutter anywhere. As the monks walked ahead
of the baptism party along a dark corridor, they passed in and out of
shafts of sunlight. Everything was pared down to the essentials--the
perfect setting for a group of men lost in thought.

Brother Mark and another monk led them into the chapel, and beside
the altar they laid Brendan on a hand-carved wooden table and opened
his swaddlings.

"Oh, my," murmured Brother Mark.

The other monk inhaled sharply. "A purple aura."

"Fetch Father Joseph. Quickly."

Brother Mark turned and looked at the baptismal font. There stood
a silver bucket, holding holy water, and a silver aspergillum with a
wooden handle. Then he glanced at the baptism party. "A moment
more." At the doorway, in silence, a knot of monks had hastily
gathered as word spread through the monastery. They stared at the
baby.

Father Joseph arrived, a middle-aged man whose shaven pate made
his brown eyes stand out from his pale face. He crossed the chapel in
long swinging strides to the baby and picked him up. "Who is the
father? Please come with me. Brother Mark will take down the
particulars from the mother." And he strode out of the room,
followed by several monks and Jim Davitt.

They entered a small room, with three narrow windows let into the
stone wall. In the middle of the room was a round stone pillar with a
flat top about three feet high. Hanging on the walls were sprays of
mistletoe.

Father Joseph laid the baby on the stone table and opened the
swaddling.

"It's true!" the other monks said. "A purple aura!"

"Dear God in heaven. Such a beautiful creature."

"It's a miracle he's still alive."

"Satan will murder him in his sleep."

"Shhhhhh!" Father Joseph held a silencing hand up.
"Prepare the pentacle." Then he turned to Jim Davitt. "Your
son has a purple aura."

"What's that mean?"

"Every human being has an aura. Most are earth color, browns,
tans, dark yellows. Yours is tan. Angels have a blue aura." He
watched Jim Davitt suppress a smirk. "The aura of demons is red.
I see doubt on your face. I must tell you that your son is in grave
danger. And that you can truly believe."

Davitt stopped smirking. "How? What does a purple aura mean?"

"Enormous benevolence. A bonny happy child. Only one or two
purple auras are born in a lifetime. But no child with such an aura
has lived for more than a few days."

"Why?"

"For reasons unknown to us, Satan cruelly kills infants born
with a purple aura. It is a miracle he has not found this baby."

Stunned, Jim Davitt stood turning this over in his mind as he
watched two monks chalk a circle on the stone tabletop.

"There is a way to alter the color of an aura. But it is only
temporary. I can't say how long, a few years, a decade. Possibly
longer. But I don't think the process can be repeated. We know so
little about these matters. When Baby Brendan's aura begins to turn
purple again, you will have to cloister him from the world and hope
that Satan doesn't find him."

"But how will I know when his aura is changing? I can't see
anything. How can you?"

"Training. We will keep watch over him. When the aura becomes
purple again, we will take him to a cloister for concealment. I am
sorry to present this tragedy to your family. If you'll be guided by
me in this matter, you should never mention a word of this to anyone,
not even your wife. And I would not tell Brendan himself until he's
of an age to make mature judgments. Children have a way of telling
secrets."

Jim Davitt stood in a daze. "I'm not sure I can take all of
this seriously."

"If you don't believe me, it is your son who will pay."

Jim Davitt waited in the corridor as monks hurried in and out of
the round room. Several times he heard Brendan cry, and he was
tempted to push his way into the room and carry his son off. Finally,
Father Joseph stepped into the corridor. "For the time being he
is safe. Let's baptize him now."

The christening party was a great event. Everyone gathered at Aunt
Agnes's cottage. Cars crowded into the farmyard and lined both sides
of the narrow road. The homemade poteen in jugs and the bottles of
whiskey and stout flowed with pots of hot tea and the house was
filled with the babble of Irish country talk. And the women gathered
around the baby and admired his strong limbs and delicate features
and the beautiful hand-crocheted christening dress that was at least
a hundred years old. Aunt Agnes had put fresh green ribbons in it.
But with furtive eyes and lowered voices, they stood in small groups
and talked about the strange events, and their whole tone was more
like a wake than a christening.

At last, when the accordion was brought into the large kitchen,
people began to dance in their heavy shoes, while the women put out
food on a long wooden trestle table in the yard behind the house.

And Jim Davitt looked down at his son in the cradle and put his
forefinger into the baby's small fist. He thought about facing death
at any instant. Why would a fiend kill an infant?

"Ah, Brendan, what have we given
you--life or death? What's to become of you?"

There was a black-clad rider and he rode a black horse and he came
a great distance. Long before Brendan could see him, he heard the
horse's hooves:
clippity clip, clippity clip
.

Brendan was four and he had a fever and that day he didn't go to
nursery school. And all day and into the evening he heard the horse's
hooves and he told no one. He pressed his hot forehead against the
cool windowpane of his bedroom and listened to the
clippity clip
.
At eight that evening there was talk of taking him to the hospital
because his fever was so high and because the teddy bear had an even
higher temperature and it was nice and cool in the hospital--and they
could put him in a bathtub packed with ice there. Lovely cool ice.

Brendan fell into the deep sleep, and the hoofbeats grew, louder
and louder, and the earth shook from them. The rider arrived. He was
all in black with a black hood over his head and black lusterless
eyes looking at Brendan through the two holes in the hood. And the
horse had a mask over his eyes too, and a black plume standing on his
forehead.
Clippity clip
.

And on the horse behind the rider was Grandfather Davitt in his
banker's suit and his angry glasses. He looked very severe. And when
Brendan woke, his fever had broken, and he and the teddy bear and bed
were all wet with his perspiration. And his mother hugged him and
cried and said he didn't have to go to the hospital.

But his mother looked very anxious when he told her about
Grandfather Davitt on the black horse and she made him promise not to
tell anyone; it was a family secret. In the morning his mother told
him that Grandfather Davitt had died the evening before in his sleep.

Somehow the story got out and the rest of the family looked
askance at Brendan. He had the second sight from his mother, the
family said.

When he was nine, he was eating cornflakes at breakfast, he
remembered clearly, and he heard hoofbeats very far away. At
lunchtime he told his mother. At dinnertime she began to prepare his
memory for the black horseman. And gradually he remembered the fever
and the rider and his grandfather mounted on back and looking very
angry.

At two o'clock in the morning he roused the family with his
shouts. The horseman was terrifying, mounted on an enormous stallion
with a black plume who made the earth shake with his stamping hooves,
and the horse pranced and kicked his legs in the air, then rode off
with Grandmother Davitt on his back behind the rider with the
terrifying, dead black eyes.

Twice when he was thirteen the terrible rider visited him and
carried off Grandfather Davitt's twin sisters. They died within three
weeks of each other, and his mother inherited a houseful of Waterford
glassware, Belleek china and other household impedimenta.

His mother then sat with him and carefully explained about his
second sight. He didn't like it; he didn't want it. The horseman
terrified him. She counseled acceptance: God had given him the gift
for a reason and he had to accept it without complaint. He talked
earnestly with her after that and sought her consolation and
reassurance. She told him she too had the second sight, only it
appeared much later in her life and it was not nearly as strong as
his. He confessed that he often could tell things about
people--secret things, just by touching something of theirs.
 
 

The next time he heard the hoofbeats, Brendan was fifteen. He was
down at the Jersey shore for Labor Day week and he had just fallen in
love.

Her name was Annie O'Casey. She was a cousin to his cousins, the
Larkins, but no relation to him. He'd hardly paid any attention to
her in past summers. But this year was different. She was fifteen
too, with a merry laugh he'd never noticed before. Nor had he noticed
in past summers her gift of mimicking people; she made Brendan laugh
even when she imitated him. She had long legs, and a way of talking
with her hands, and long slim fingers that fascinated him. Her hands
were mimes that acted out her words. He couldn't take his eyes off
her. Best of all she would look sidewise at him and see him staring
and she'd smile and make a face.

He dreamed it would be a wonderful week but on Friday he woke and
thought he heard hoofbeats. He lay in his cot in the attic of the
seashore house, hearing the surf spilling on the beach, but during
the silence between waves he heard a very faint
clippity clip,
clippity clip
.

He rolled over on his cot and wanted to shout, "Go away!
Don't tell me! I don't want to know!" But he looked around at
the four sleeping boys who shared the attic with him and he kept his
angry shouts to himself.

He decided this time to fight the rider--to refuse to hear him or
see him. He got up and looked down from the attic balcony. An
early-autumn fog had rolled in. It was so thick it hid the beach and
it muffled the sound of the invisible surf that was calling to him a
few hundred feet away. The waves said, Brennnndannnn. Brennnndannnn.
The eaves of the house dripped.

It was late August and eleven cousins had gathered at Uncle Matty
Larkin's beach house in Loveladies on Long Beach Island, off the
Jersey shore. Every year for the past six years, during the week
before Labor Day, Matty had opened up his house to his two children
and all their cousins of the same approximate age; eleven cousins in
all--Davitts and Larkins and Sharkeys and O'Caseys.

Brendan pulled on his clothes and slipped down the attic stairs,
then past the bedrooms where the girls and his aunt and uncle slept,
and down the main stairs cluttered with piles of books.

Uncle Matty Larkin was a freelance writer, book reviewer, literary
critic, editor and teacher of writing in the night school of City
University in New York. It was said he never slept: He wrote all day,
taught all evening and read all night. He attracted books like banks
attract money. Indeed the beach house, like Matty's house in
Brooklyn, was stuffed with books. They were stacked on the floor, on
tables, on chairs, on stairs, stuffed beyond capacity into
bookshelves that lined the walls of every room. The garage here and
in Brooklyn both contained bulging cartons piled to the crossbeams.
Matty's wife, Gloria, said the only exercise he ever got was making
more bookshelves. Brendan stepped past the low piles that surrounded
Uncle Matty's favorite reading chair and went out on the beach.