The corpse that was himself, unburied, denied its eternal peace, came toward him, stretching out a yellowed hand toward his arm. It took hold of his elbow and pressed it, held him in place, and he thought that, somehow, its touch was gentle. The corpse of himself came closer still, stood for a moment before him, searching his eyes, then leaned forward slowly and tenderly kissed him on the cheek.

  Jack stared back at his own dead face, searched it in turn as the corpse had searched his. He moved his gaze away and scanned the other watching faces. They were solemn, all watching him closely—he saw Grainne among them, and the priest, and the four old men—and as he looked at their eyes in the dark he knew that they were waiting to see if he would—that they wanted him to—return the kiss to the corpse of himself.

  CHAPTER 9

  The church was in the valley, on the far side of the hill, and the sound of the bells ringing for Mass on Sunday morning reached the house only dimly in waves, on the caprice of the wind, like the tolling of the bell of a ship in danger at sea.

  The storm had eased off but it was still raining at dawn, a slow, steady drizzle that could keep up all day. A heavy layer of gray clouds hung low above the hills, threatening them with its weight.

  Jack awoke first, stiff from sleeping on the couch, and went out to the kitchen to fix breakfast. When he finally went into the bedroom, carrying a tray to surprise Grainne with breakfast in bed, he found her sitting up and wide awake.

  “You knew I was getting breakfast,” he said, trying to sound accusing.

  “I did,” she said, grinning and reaching for the tray. “Far be it from me to interfere with a man in his kitchen.”

  They ate together in the bedroom, talking about the sights they hadn’t visited but would definitely get to next time Grainne came.

  “Do you know what time is the Mass?” she asked.

  “Ten.”

  “We’d best hurry, then. And I must be off right after it, Jack.”

  When he carried her bag to the car, she held an umbrella over his head while he tossed it into the back seat. Grainne drove. Jack still had to retrieve his car from where they’d left it in the village.

  “This should be interesting,” he said as they drew near the church. “I imagine we’ll turn a few heads, if not cause an outright scandal. Here we are, obviously sleeping together, as far as anyone knows, and then boldly walking into the church. We’ll be the talk of the town.”

  “Well, it could go either way,” Grainne said, a hint of a smile touching her lips. “One of two things could happen. For one, Father Henning, for all that he seems a nice enough man, could point his finger and denounce us by name from the altar. They used to do it all the time in the old days, you know. Or for another, he could offer up a special prayer of thanks. Here’s Jack Quinlan coming to Mass, you see, after being in Doolin a couple of Sundays already and never a foot set inside the church. And who’s to thank for it? I am. I’ve taken upon myself the salvation of your soul. All you’d have to do to settle it once and for all is go up and receive Holy Communion with the rest. Do that, and Father Henning will be putting in for canonization for the both of us.”

  By the time the priest appeared and the Mass began, they were all there in the church, all the people of Doolin, it seemed, all the familiar faces from the shops and the roads and the town’s three pubs.

  The people from the grocery store where Grainne had done her shopping were there, and the three owners of the pubs, two of them with their wives and three children apiece, only Liam Nolan appearing by himself in the company of some of his cronies.

  Deirdre Corcoran was there, head bowed as she said her beads up near the front, as if she had a proprietary interest in being close to the altar and the priest. Peggy Mullen came in, followed by her two big sons who kept their eyes on the floor before them as they genuflected and took seats on either side of their mother.

  Eddie Toner was there with his family, a skinny, dark-skinned wife and two matching children, a boy and a girl. And there was the man Jack recognized from the town’s one garage, and several farmers he’d seen in front of their houses or barns as he’d driven around the area, and some of the blue-capped fishermen he’d seen sitting in a doorway near the inlet just beyond Doolin Point, waiting for calmer seas before taking out a boat.

  Jack and Grainne had taken seats on the left side of the church, near the back, silently agreeing not to draw too much attention to themselves. The church was built of gray local stone, damp and cold and drafty—Jack noted that some of the windows were broken and covered over with tin in a few places and only sodden cardboard in some others—and they sat with their coats on and their collars turned up high against their necks. They had a view from there, with only a little turning of the head and craning of the neck, of most of the people in the church ahead of them and those who followed after. Hard, dour faces they were, almost all of them, pinched by poverty and wet weather.

  When the four old men came in together, Jack recognized them at once as the same four the priest had been sitting with in the pub, the same four he’d seen that other day at the grave.

  They moved slowly, feet shuffling beneath them on the worn stone floor of the church. Two of them, one with great gray tufts of hair projecting from his ears, were trying unobtrusively to lend a supporting hand beneath the elbows of the one who appeared to be the eldest, the one Jack recalled thinking was the leader each time he’d seen them. The old fellow was long-limbed and tall and brittle as a bone, and was clearly making his best effort to walk upright without help and get into the seat by himself. But when he was seated, Jack clearly saw him puff out his thin lips with a sigh of relief.

  Then a bell was rung at the altar and Father Henning appeared from the sacristy, followed by two little boys.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” intoned the priest, and the Mass had begun.

  Jack noted that the old women and many of the old men rattled their rosaries, which had nothing at all to do with the Mass, just as loudly and devoutly as their counterparts in the parish church of his childhood in New York. It was only a rare and brave-hearted priest, he recalled, who had ever dared to challenge them on that point and try to get them to pay attention to the ceremony itself. The old folks liked and needed the firm and weighty feel of the talisman in their hands.

  Jack had not been a regular churchgoer in more than a dozen years, except for Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, which he liked, he readily admitted to himself, for the traditional hymns and the convivial spirit. His failure to attend church and actually belong to a neighborhood parish was one of the things that had long kept him from taking an active part in the Irish community at home.

  But as he looked around him, while Father Henning said the prayers of the Mass up at the altar and the people murmured the responses that Jack no longer knew, he was struck with the vivid reality of something he’d only been aware of intellectually until now. For these people, the Catholic faith was at the center of their lives. For them, being Irish and being Catholic were one and the same thing, so central an element of life that it required no thought at all. The church and its priests had long held Ireland together, forced the people to survive, in the face of invasion, disruption, oppression, and famine. And, perhaps most important of all, their faith promised them a life hereafter that was endless and joyous and rich, a fine and grand reward for a lifetime of hardship and struggle in a land as harsh as it was beautiful.

  He stole a look at Grainne beside him. For all of her liberated modernism and free-thinking attitudes, unfettered by old morality, here she was, sitting in rapt attention at Mass, listening to the priest. Father Henning was coming near the consecration of the Mass, and Grainne’s eyes were fixed on his face and hands. When he raised the chalice aloft for all to see and spoke the words that transformed the wine it contained into the blood of Jesus Christ—“For this is the cup of my blood; take and drink of it.”—Grainne rapped her fisted knuckles lightly over her heart with the ringing of the bell along with everyone else in the church.

  Contradictions, he thought, and—

  Something else, a chilling wave of cold, swept suddenly through him, a memory buried deep in his mind, far beyond recalling, but in his thoughts nonetheless. What was it? Something triggered by the words of the consecration. No, he couldn’t retrieve it. He shivered and pushed it from his mind.

  Contradictions, the Irish are nothing but contradictions, and Grainne Clarkin—with her milk-white skin and jet black hair—not least among them.

  And you’re another, he heard her saying again as she’d told him last night. . . . You may have less of it, but you have it, even so. . . . There’s no denying the blood, Jack.

  When Father Henning walked over to the stone pulpit at the side of the altar, Jack expected a lengthy sermon. Well, at least, he thought, it’ll be better than the ungrammatical ramblings of the priests he’d always heard at home. But Father Henning was brief—Jack surreptitiously timed him at a little over four minutes—and said, in effect, only that the oncoming cold and wetness of the winter should serve always to remind the faithful of the welcome warmth of God’s love.

  Almost everyone in the church climbed out of their seats and shuffled up to the altar to receive Holy Communion. Jack and Grainne remained where they were, heads bowed in prayer or, at least in Jack’s case, a reasonable imitation of prayer.

  After that, the remainder of the Mass went quickly.

  “Go in peace,” said Father Henning at the end, and blessed them. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

  Head bowed, and followed by the two little altar boys, the priest disappeared into the sacristy.

  Jack and Grainne had to wait a few minutes at the side of the church for the rest of the people to move out slowly through the doors. When they finally got outside, they saw that the rain had eased off further, leaving only a chill dampness in the air and a lowering sky that was struggling grimly toward brightness. Almost everyone from the church was still standing around outside, the women gathering in the roadway and the men near the side of the church. This was the great social event of the week and they weren’t about to see it end any sooner than they had to. As Jack and Grainne emerged from the church, Father Malcolm Henning came around the corner of the building, wearing a black overcoat now, and began greeting people. He knew everyone by name.

  “We’d best wait and say hello,” Grainne whispered. “It wouldn’t be polite just to go off without saying a word.”

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God, and all that.”

  “Don’t be disrespectful. And by the way, it’s very irreligious of you to be timing the priest at the pulpit.”

  “I didn’t think you saw me.”

  “I did,” she said, and shook her head in mock irritation.

  While they waited for the priest, Mrs. Mullen bobbed her head at them from where she stood talking with some other women, and they both smiled and nodded at her in return.

  Father Henning was gradually moving toward them. When at last he turned to face them, he came forward with his hand extended to Jack.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. “And Miss Clarkin,” he added warmly, looking at her. “I hope we’ll be seeing more of you from now on.”

  Jack felt Grainne’s hand digging at his back. “Thank you, Father,” he said. “You will.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said the priest. “And I’m sure it’ll all work out fine for you with Peggy Mullen. She’ll take good care of you, she will.” He took hold of Jack’s arm for a moment. “Come and see me,” he said confidentially. “Anytime at all. I’d be glad of a visit.”

  He smiled at them both again and moved on to another little group.

  Jack and Grainne moved away toward where they’d left her car, within sight of his own, a little distance down the road. Grainne got into hers and waited while he walked to the Escort. As Jack walked around it, making a long detour to avoid a monstrous puddle, he glanced back toward the church. Father Henning was standing near the doorway, deep in conversation with the eldest of the group of old men who had sat with him in the pub and who had sat this morning at the back of the church. Just at that moment, another old fellow with the look of a farmer about him joined the others. The six old men, in their dark clothes, stood like hunched black ravens against the light gray stone of the wall.

  Jack thought for an instant that the priest and the tall old fellow glanced in his direction at the same time. He could almost have thought their eyes met. He got into the car and closed the door.

  “Well, I’m off, then,” Grainne said.

  “I’m sorry to see you go.”

  “I’ll come again.”

  “Next week.”

  “If I can.”

  “Will you try?”

  “I will.”

  “Please try.”

  “I will. You get your work done.”

  “Yes.”

  They held each other for a minute and kissed, standing there in front of the house, with the motor of her car running and the door open, waiting for her.

  “Drive carefully.”

  And she was gone. Jack watched the car as it went down the hill toward the water, diminishing in size, then disappeared around an outcropping of rock.

  He stood for a while, with his hands shoved deep in his pockets, near the concrete steps to his door. It was almost as if she’d never been.

  He hardly knew her.

  And he hardly knew this place. He’d come here to be a part of it, at least for a while, to get to know it. But he was still the outsider, the mere observer.

  And he was still that with Grainne too.

  His hand felt oddly cold where she’d squeezed his fingers.

  Contradictions everywhere, he thought.

  He stepped up to the door, unlocked it, and pushed it open. Behind him, as if it floated on the damp wind from the ocean, came the same faint tune the old fellow had played in the pub and that had followed him across the hills the night before.

  PART THREE

  The battle is not as fearsome as the waiting for it, nor is the sword as terrible as the fire in the eye that guides it.

  —Liam O’Flaherty,

  The Black Soul

  CHAPTER 10

  But things looked better to him on Monday morning.

  He’d spent the rest of Sunday, after Grainne’s departure, reading a book he’d promised himself he’d read for almost a year. He told himself grimly that he was giving himself a treat, a treat, and he should be glad of it and take advantage of it. For the first hour, he had to force himself, remind himself constantly to concentrate, but then he got into it and it was better.

  He’d thought, as soon as he was in the house with the door shut stoutly on that melody that came out of nowhere—nowhere but his head, he told himself firmly—that he’d call Grainne that night. Give her time to make the long drive back to Dublin, get into the house, have a cup of tea and something to eat, and then he’d call her.

  But then the music got to him. He didn’t hear it any more from outside, but it was fixed clearly in his head now, almost as natural and normal as the rhythm of his own breathing. On and on it went, lamenting lost loves and early deaths and painful partings, as if it spoke a language he’d never heard before but that now came to him with perfect clarity, rich in concrete meanings and subtle connotation. And he decided to deal with it himself.

  He’d deal with it himself—whether he made sense of it somehow or just managed to banish it from his thoughts—and not lay the weight of it on Grainne. He’d made the weekend difficult enough, a weekend that should have been wonderful for them both, and he wouldn’t start that same shit on the phone. He wouldn’t do it. He would not.

  He read the book. At some time in the evening, he went out to the kitchen to get something to eat, and found that, when he wasn’t watching, Grainne had laid in a supply of eggs and cheese and some other things that were easy to whip up into a meal. Until then, he’d been a little worried, beneath the surface of his thoughts, that she had no intention of coming back, that she’d probably be out every time he called from now on, that she was put off by the strange way he’d been acting and he’d never see her again. The food in the refrigerator changed that. He relaxed, ate a meal, felt better, finished the book, and went to bed early.

  He slept for nine and a half hours and in the morning, Monday morning, viewed the whole world differently. The sun was shining brightly, the air looked crisp and fresh, and he was going to call Grainne in the evening to see if she’d checked with her friend about next weekend. A scene in the book that had been troubling him for a month, just not taking shape in his mind, suddenly jumped into place, out of nowhere, while he was shaving. If he worked all morning, he could have lunch at McGlynn’s, maybe, or the Seafoam, and spend the afternoon exploring. He’d hardly seen anything of the area since he’d gotten here, and that was one of the things he’d come for. It was high time he started doing it. Maybe he’d even call on Father Henning around teatime, just for a chat. Yes, maybe he would. And Mrs. Mullen was due today—thank you very much, Father—so he wouldn’t have to give any more thought, for the most part, to cooking and shopping and cleaning and laundry. Work, work, work, a three-month tax-deductible vacation, and a beautiful girl coming to visit again in just a few days. Okay. Yessir, okay.

  Mrs. Mullen arrived at a quarter to ten.

  She came in carrying a net bag filled with packages of cleaning items, soaps and sponges and various specialized cleaners, all with names he didn’t recognize and functions he didn’t understand, and an itemized receipt for her purchases.

  She’d only gone ahead and bought them, she said, so as to save them both the time. Jack agreed that it was an excellent idea and immediately paid her what he owed her for the things. He gave her a quick tour of the house by way of orientation. He could tell from the look on her face that she was marveling at the number of books he’d brought—it occurred to Jack that he should make up a list of more titles and ask Grainne to bring them on Friday if she could—and she regarded the computer with a combination of respect and silent suspicion. She inspected the kitchen by herself, obviously relieved to be in her own domain again, took inventory of the refrigerator and the cabinets, and enquired about his eating habits and preferences.