Falling out of Heaven. John Lynch

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СКАЧАТЬ been trying to halt a spring flood; God was in her as surely as there was breath in her body. One of her mother’s friends followed them out to the hall and tried to reason with her, telling her that this was a sign that the Lord’s own hand was behind this. But our grandmother wouldn’t listen, telling her friend to mind her own, that this was family business and didn’t concern her.

      Mother said she was saddened by this and that when they buried her father two days later she felt God knocking on the door of her heart again, but this time she had to refuse Him entry for fear of angering her mother. She said that as she stood there in the new soil of the opened grave she vowed never to betray Him again.

      When she met my father, he told her that God was his friend and had steered him through many lonely periods in his life. He had been a sickly child who disappointed his father, and had spent his childhood toughening his body and building muscle so that he would be accepted by him, of course he never was, his father died still cursing him for being frail. So when he met my mother he became what she wanted him to be, he presented her with a caring, Godfearing man. He was used to being what he wasn’t.

      She got married in the butterfly dress. She had it altered slightly to fit the occasion. It was her way of staying committed to her calling, she said. Her mother, by then broken by old age and a failing memory, didn’t put up much of a fight; she wasn’t able to, she said. Some people thought that it was inappropriate, that a good Catholic bride should get married in virginal white not in a faded mauve dress with the butterflies of the world dotted all over it.

      My father, she said, never objected, he wanted her and would do anything to get her, even betraying his own nature. It was all done so he could possess her, and when she accepted the wedding band he offered her he changed almost overnight it seemed and the world darkened. Later she would have to hide the dress from him. God was now a threat to my father. He resented his hold on my mother’s spirit. He began to taunt her belief and hunt down the goodness that she was trying to bring to their home. He began to ridicule the butterfly dress saying that my mother was cracked in the head and that if he had his way he would have them married again properly this time, in a white wedding dress, like normal people. We are a laughing stock, he would say in later years, the whole place is laughing at us. When he was drunk he would rifle the drawers and the cupboards of our house searching for that dress. He would grab her by the shoulders and shake her, his eyes locking with hers. Where is it? he would say, where did you put it? She would never tell him.

      ‘I will ask God to guide you, Johnny.’

      ‘Don’t. Don’t,’ he would say.

      I would see fear in his eyes, and sometimes his anger would subside.

      ‘God loves you, Johnny…’

      ‘Don’t.’

      ‘He wants you to put down your anger towards him…’

      ‘No. Stop…’

      ‘It doesn’t have to be this way…’

      I would watch from the top of the stairs as this big man was made small by my mother’s words. His arms would fall from my mother’s shoulders and he would stand there like someone under a hypnotist’s spell, his body swaying from the booze, and the soft murmur of my mother’s speech.

      ‘He knows you try to be good…He knows your heart is wounded…Just as He was, Johnny…Just as He was…’

      ‘I’m no good…I’m no good.’

      ‘There is goodness in everyone…’

      ‘No.’

      I remember sitting there in the dark, drawn by the noise, watching as my father struggled with the blackness that sat across his soul. I saw how my mother’s heart was reaching out to his, asking it to join her in the sunlight that she had found. There was something else in that moment when they held each other’s eyes, a moment when something hung in the air between them. It was as if my mother was waiting for him to complete a sentence he had started, to get to the bloody meat of what was bothering him. He never did. Those moments when he let her in were rare, and then he only did it partway. Most of the time though he would tear himself away from her gaze and stumble away like a man who had just been blinded by the truth of something.

      ‘God’s love is stronger than any metal,’ she would say. ‘Stronger than stone…Stronger than pain…’

      She had to choose her moment to work her way around my father’s moods. Once he picked up a glass full of milk and hurled it at the kitchen wall as we were seated for dinner one night. My mother had suggested that she help out at the church on Sunday mornings, handing out communion. Without a word my father had stood and lifted the glass and smashed it above the heads of my sister and me and then calmly sat down again and continued eating.

      Sometimes she would come and sit with me, and pray over me as I drifted off to sleep.

      ‘Close your eyes,’ she would say. ‘They are all around us…The saints…God…Can you feel Him?’

      I would nod, but it was a lie.

      ‘He loves you, Gabriel…He loves you…God adores you.’

      I would squeeze my eyes shut and beg my mind to make them appear to send them from her heart to mine, these warriors, these guardians from the gates of heaven.

      ‘Close your eyes, Gabriel…See them there the host and soldiers of our Lord.’

      Try as I might, wish as hard as I could, all I could see was darkness; a black endless emptiness that I knew was waiting for me when my time on this earth was done.

      ‘Your father doesn’t understand…He said he did…Once…He told me many things…Soft things…That make a woman feel special…’ she said almost to herself. ‘He’s had a hard life…It was tough for him…’

      ‘Mammy…’

      ‘Ssh…Concentrate…God needs patience…needs gentleness.’

      She had been beautiful my mother, but belief in God had made her ugly. There was plainness to her, and greyness in her eyes as if she was weary beyond words. She became smaller when my father was around; she shrank as if his presence ate into her spirit. I watched her skirt him, trying to double-guess his moods from the shape of his shoulders or the look in his eye. It took me a long time to realise that my sister Ciara and I did the same thing, that we were stunted, that our hearts cowered when he was in the house.

      I knew that the black dot of pain that lay in the centre of his eyes also lay in mine, and that it was a stain that no amount of washing or praying could shift. I think of my loneliness, how it coils around the centre of my being like a long thread of steel and realise that he must have been the same, he stood on the outside of our family condemned as an ogre, just as I do now.

       The Horizon

      They were telling me to calm down. I watched as they moved about me. It was my second or third night there, I can’t be sure. I was doing quite well until I dreamt about you. There was sorrow in your eyes and you turned me away. I stood there and pleaded with you but you walked away and kept walking until the horizon claimed you and you were gone forever. I woke up screaming and in a moment I was surrounded by nurses and СКАЧАТЬ