Ken Bruen
Callous
Mary Casey, seventy-nine years old, a tough Galway woman.
Her home was her absolute pride.
A small house in Claddagh, one of the rare, precious, coveted original fishermen’s cottages. You had to be intimately connected to procure one of these sought-after homes.
Alone in her own home, she was trying to get accustomed to the silence. Her late husband, Tom, would have been proud of her, but then, he most always was.
A fisherman, he had been drowned during the great storm of 2009.
The sea giveth
The sea taketh away.
Another pride of possession was a cross from the penal times, carefully framed in a heavy wood.
A picture of Tom, alongside.
Late on the first evening, she was in the kitchen, having a wee dram of poitín to ease the solitary air.
An almighty crash came from the sitting room.
Not a woman easily spooked, she went to investigate. The frame containing the cross was in three broken pieces on the floor; the cross itself was high on the wall.
Inverted.
She blessed herself.
On the mantel was a photograph of a young woman, Kate Mitchell, her only niece, living in Brooklyn. After Tom passed, she had had what the Irish call a dark premonition, so she’d made a will, leaving her only possession, her home, to the girl.
A faint sound came from upstairs.
Giggling?
No.
Couldn’t be.
Kids?
She sat in the kitchen for hours, her rosary beads moving through her frail fingers. But there were no further occurrences and she went to bed, slowly, with a sense of unease.
Midnight, a horrendous scream woke her, Mary sat up, rigid with fear.
A man at the foot of her bed. He said,
“We gave you a chance to move.”
He pointed to three huge water bottles, said,
“Uisce beatha.” (Holy water)
Mary was discovered two days later, sitting upright in bed, the cross from the beads embedded in her eye.
An autopsy
Dismayed the pathologist.
He redid it four times, muttered,
“What in God’s name...?”
Reluctantly, very, he gave the results to the Guards, said,
“This is very odd.”
The commissioner, cynical in a fashion that passed for banter, said,
“Odd we can handle.”
The pathologist thought,
Oh, yeah?
Said,
“She was drowned.”
An American tourist exclaimed,
“Gee, I love Galway in the fall!”
They were having a drink in McSwiggan’s, where a tree is growing in the center of the bar (don’t even ask; it’s an Irish thing, i.e., beyond explanation)
A local, barely concealing his scorn, inquired,
“You mean, ’tis autumn.”
The visitor, taken aback, said,
“Yeah, I guess, right.”
The local pushed,
“You’d like it a whole lot better if you spoke right.”
The visitor turned to his wife, a hardy lady from Salt Lake City, asked,
“Did he just, like, diss me?”
His wife, a diplomat, tried,
“Maybe it’s that Irish irony.”
She didn’t believe that for a second, but as a Mormon, she was experienced in verbal abuse, leaned over to the local, suddenly pinched his cheek, said
“Cheeky devil, aren’t you?”
The Irish dismiss hauntings
As
Too much drink
Or
Not enough
I became a priest
Because of Naïveté.
I stopped being a priest
Because of Despair.
If you saw my CV
It would read like this:
Ex-priest.
Ex-cop.
Ex-ile.
My father was a cop.
And one of the 9/11 first responders.
My mother was Irish.
A seamstress.
Who works at that anymore, outside of the Eastern sweatshops?
My sister, Kate, part-time junkie, full-time missing person.
She was the much-loved niece of her aunt who lived in Galway, and she was heartbroken to learn of this lady’s horrible death.
My dead brother, Patrick, had Down syndrome.
My elder brother, Colin, was a marine and deployed in Afghanistan.
I don’t believe in ghosts.
I do believe in hauntings.
My name is Tommy Mitchell, but I’ve always been called Mitch. Even in my time as a priest, I was Father Mitch. I was born, raised in Brooklyn, with my mother’s heavy emphasis on Ireland riding point.
Shamrock cushions, stew for Sunday dinner, spuds and cabbage most every day, John F. Kennedy, interchangeable popes in tired frames on the tired wallpapered walls.
The Clancy Brothers on the turntable.
Irish dancing for my sister, hurling for the boys. The soft t barely lurking in our Brooklynese, a tiny lilt in our narrative.
Alongside hurling, we played baseball. Hurling gives you an edge for that, except no Irish sport focuses on throwing the ball so we washed out automatically as pitchers. But boy, I could bat like a banshee.
And did.
My father, he’d been attached to Brooklyn South and his squad was in Manhattan on 9/11 as a team-building exercise. When the North Tower came down and that maelstrom of dust came rushing up the street, people fleeing in terror from it, my dad and his buddies rushed
Into
It.
Years later, he developed the respiratory disease from the gases, fumes, toxic waste, and he and the other responders had their benefits stopped. The heroes were forgotten.
The day we buried him was the day I joined the cops.
Came out of the academy near top of my class, got assigned to a beat in Williamsburg.
I lasted barely a year, my final call-out a domestic, a man was bent over his wife, who was lying on the floor. First, I thought, He’s applying CPR.
He wasn’t.
Using a blunt tin opener, an old-fashioned one, he had managed to sever most of her head, turned to me, wailed,
“I can’t cut through the bone.”
I had my Glock out, fired point-blank into his face.
It jammed.
The force had long complained of this weapon being likely to do just that. My partner pulled me away, screaming at me to
“Get a grip.”
The man got off the floor, sunk the tin opener in my partner’s carotid. He bled out in minutes. My Glock worked on the next try and I emptied it into the man.
End of my career.
From a cop to a priest?
I mean
Really?
Like this:
Kate, my beloved sister, recently weaned from heroin, simply disappeared.
Colin, my elder brother, was MIA in Fallujah. Patrick, my Down syndrome younger brother, died of a heart defect and my mother lost the plot.
Utterly.
Spun off into a madness consisting of leprechauns, Jameson, séances, hysteria, and a dark fundamental Catholicism. In one moment of rare clarity, she lamented,
“Oh, Mitch, if only you’d been a priest.”
I became a priest.
Madness?
Or perhaps the great Irish tradition of sons joining the priesthood to please mothers who could never truly be appeased.
Those days, the hierarchy was having a serious shortage of recruits. The scandals had seriously battered the usual influx of novitiates.
So they literally fast-tracked my, let’s be sarcastic and call it vocation, and, in jig time I was a curate in the small parish of my neighborhood.
I was a lousy priest.
Lack of belief.
Though that has hardly been much of a stumbling block to the high-flyers in the Church.
Confessions.