So it was: That after leaving Manchester
Cathedral, on our way to celebrate my exam results, Padre Godfrey paused
beneath a towering Madonna, and supposed in his ponderous Texan drawl that my
journalism career would be defined by what I did, or did not do, with the
privileged information likely to come my way.
He waved his walking stick toward each
gravestone, indicating where the cross wind had driven snow against the larger
tombs on a shallow angle, so that the outline of their adorning iconography
recurred - stretched according to wind strength - in the bare grass beyond
their leeward edges.
Like a low sun’s long shadows, could you just
about make out the stenciled shape of cherubs, saints and crucifixes, where else
the gale sharpened curved headstones to a series of green spikes.
The wind worsened, and I hurried to Godfrey’s
right, beneath Mary’s assumption. The snow shelved off the feathers of her
attendant angels, and we looked out through the cascade as if stood in the
undercut of a waterfall – or an atrocious garden feature, said Godfrey.
He unpinned a dog-eared poppy from the breast
of his large, green overcoat; backhand hooking either lapel shut with the
curved ebony nuzzle of his horse-handled walking stick, which he swore to
replace each time he straightened up to show me an open left palm, and two
small indents imparted by the colt carving’s ear detail, after little more that
ten minutes use.
Looks like a spider has had me. Big ones in
the desert where he was from, he said. And if he’d the chance to choose again
he might have overlooked its allegory and plumped for the smooth, featureless
nape of a serpent, rather than this damned waste of money, whose use was
limited to a prop with which to embellish the most demonstrative parts of his
story, whirling it in slow circles or prodding the air when he said things like
‘in the whole wide world’, or ‘somewhere around here’.
Godfrey ran through the drill of securing his
coat; battening down the flaps and hatches of the caped old thing, whose
original shade and function could be discerned by the un-sewn outline of
chevron and shield-shaped insignia along his chest and arms.
It was always enough to suggest his coat was
a castle that he could mobilize at short notice; its many well worn folds the
great doors and drawbridges of a mighty keep that he was angry at himself for
having left ajar and vulnerable again – trusting too well this damned maritime
climate. A straight-faced routine he performed often, usually accompanied by
whooped goddamnits that drew a laugh from anyone in earshot.
But today there was nothing. He turned his
poppy in his hand.
I set off into the snow before Godfrey
motioned me back beneath Mary to explain, suddenly angry, that since the law of
our respective homelands had seen fit to dismiss the Seal of the Confessional,
he could see no damned reason not to inform me of what he’d gleaned from many a
good man all those years ago.
I nodded, despite not understanding, and to
cover his suddenly breaking voice said something loud and unconvincing about
today’s afternoon kick off, and how it might be cancelled if this weather kept
up.
He stepped forward and looked at the grey
sky. I noticed he was allowing the snowfall to dilute his tears.
We’d left the Remembrance Day service early,
during the first stanza of Our God, Our Help in Ages Past; Godfrey ushering me
along the back pew and into the graveyard, our hymn sheets still in hand, under
whispered insistence of his suddenly needing a beer. And taking, he said, the
words of the always-omitted sixth and best stanza as his cue, he’d decided to
forget this same old blasted commemoration in favour of something inaugural.
Godfrey pointed between two verses on his
hymn sheet. Here, he said, should be sung about those busy tribes of flesh and
blood, with all their lives and cares, being carried downwards by the flood,
and lost in following years. They always miss that bit, he said.
Several short gusts were enough to part the
heavy knave doors behind us; the hymn within spilled out in intermittent bursts
like a skipping record, before two vergers hauled the way shut with a clunk.
Now only a muffle within.
Godfrey smiled at me gratefully. My
impression of ignorance was gallant, he said, but the keen perception that
served me well as a reporter also made of me a woeful actor.
As such, he would be thankful if I might
tolerate the potential of such melancholy for the next few days, and accept a
role as the unspecified person to whom – for the sake of his health - he’d been
advised, by some dammed shrink, to recount his troubling memories.
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