Selected Stories

The Virgin’s Gift

A gentle autumn had slipped away, sunny to the end, the last of the butterflies still there in December, dozing in the crevices of the rocks. The lingering petals of the rock flowers had months before faded and fallen from their stems; the heather was in bloom, the yellow of the gorse had quietened. It was a miracle, Michael often thought, a summer marvel that the butterflies came to his place at all.

Feeling that he had walked all Ireland – an expression used often in the very distant past that was his time – Michael had arrived at Ireland’s most ragged edge. He knew well that there was land to the north, and to the west and east, which he had not travelled, that no man could walk all Ireland’s riverbanks and tracks, its peaks and plains, through every spinney, along every cliff, through every gorge. But the exaggeration of the expression offered something in the way of sense; his journey, for him, had been what the words implied. Such entanglements of truth and falsity - and of good and evil, God and the devil – Michael dwelt upon in the hermitage he had created, while the seasons changed and the days of his life were one by one extinguished.

The seasons announced themselves, but for the days he kept a calendar - as by rule they had at the abbey – his existence shaped by feast days and fasting days, by days of penance and of rest. Among the rocks of his island, time was neither enemy nor friend, its passing no more than an element that belonged with the sea and the shores, the garden of vegetables he had cultivated, the habitation he had made, the gulls, the solitude. He sensed the character of each one of the seven days and kept alive the different feeling that each inspired, knowing when he awoke which one it was.

When the fourth day in December came it was St Peter Chrysologus’s. There was more dark than light now, and soon rain and wind would take possession of the craggy landscape. At first, in winter, he had lost his way in the mists that came at this time too, when all that was familiar to him became distorted; now, he knew better than to venture far. In December each day that was not damp, each bitter morning, each starry night, was as welcome as the summer flowers and butterflies.

When he was eighteen Michael’s vocation had been revealed to him, an instruction coming in a dream that he should leave the farm and offer himself at the abbey. He hardly knew about the abbey then, having heard it mentioned only once or twice in conversation, and was hazy as to its purpose or its nature. ‘Oh, you’d never want to,’ Fódla said when he told her, for ever since they’d first embraced he had told her everything. ‘You’d go there when you’re old,’ she hopefully conjectured, but her dark eyes were sad already, a finger twisting a loop of hair, the way she did when she was unhappy. ‘A dream’s no more’n a dream,’ she whispered in useless protestation when he repeated how the Virgin had appeared, bearing God’s message.

Cutting new sods for his roof on the morning of St Peter Chrysologus’s day, Michael remembered Fódla’s tears. They had played together since they were infants – on the earthen floor of the outside house where the feed was boiled, on the dug-out turf bogs while the donkeys patiently waited to have their panniers filled, on the stubble of the cornfield where her father and his worked together to raise the stooks, their mothers too, her brothers when they were old enough. ‘I have to,’ he said when Fódla wept, and near to where they walked a bird warbled for a moment, as if to mock her sorrow. Her hand slipped out of his, their friendship over. Her life, too, she said.

‘God has spoken for you.’ His father took a different view that same evening. ‘And by that He has honoured you. Do not have doubt, Michael.’

He did not have doubt, only concern that God’s honouring of him would one day mean the farm’s decline: he was an only child.

‘He will provide,’ his father reassured, sturdy and confident, in the prime of his life. ‘He surely will.’

Michael carried from the other side of his island the first sods of scrappy grass he had cut. Back and forth he went all morning, until he had a stack beside his shelter. Then he lifted the sods into place, twelve rows of six on the two slight inclines of the roof, beating them together with the long, flat stone he kept for the purpose. Three sides of his shelter were constructed as he had long ago learned to build a field wall, the stones set at an angle. The fourth was a natural hollow in the rock-face, and the frame on which he laid the sods was of branches lashed together, door and door-frame made similarly.

He had soothed with dock leaves Fódla’s arms when they were stung. When she was frightened of the orchard geese he had taken her from them and soon after that she was frightened of nothing. She would be married now, children and grandchildren born to her, the friendship of so far back forgotten: he accepted that. His mother would be eighty years old, his father older still. Or they would not be there at all, which was more likely.

Michael saved the salt of the sea, and in summer preserved with it the fish he caught. The grain he had first cultivated from the seed he brought from the abbey continued year by year. There were the hurtleberries, the patch of nettles he had encouraged and extended, the mossy seaweed that ripened in the sun, the spring that never failed, the herbs he’d grown from roots brought from the abbey also. ‘Find solitude,’ the Virgin had instructed the second time, after he had been seventeen years at the abbey, and again it seemed like punishment, as it had on the morning of Fódla’s tears.

When it was twilight and the task of repairing his roof was complete, Michael climbed to the highest crag of the island to look across at the mainland cliffs he had so long ago waded away from, with all he had brought with him held above his head. From the sky he predicted tomorrow’s weather; it would still be fine. Skimpy tails of cloud did not disturb the trail of amber left behind after the sun had slipped away. The sea was placid as a lake.

Often on evenings as tranquil as this Michael imagined he could hear the Angelus bell at the abbey, although he knew that was impossible. In his time there he had come to love the discipline and the order, the simplicity of the few pleasures there had been, the companionship. The dawn processing from the cloisters to the high cross in the pasture, the evening lamps lit, the chanting of the psalter, the murmur of the Mass – all that, even now, he missed. Brother Luchan knew the saints and told their stories: how St Mellitus refused to give the Blessed Sacrament to the king’s sons, how wolves and bears were obedient to St Marcian, how St Simeon scourged himself on pillars. In their cells Cronan and Murtagh illuminated the Scriptures, compounding inks and cutting pens. Ioin had a lazy eye, Bernard was as tubby as a barrel, Fintan fresh-cheeked and happy. Diarmaid was the tallest, Conor the best at conversation, Tomás the most forgetful, Cathal the practical one. ‘Never lose your piece of glass,’ Cathal warned in his farewell. ‘Never be without the means of fire.’

Did they see him, as he could still see them – his tattered habit, his tonsure gone, beard trimmed as well as he could manage, bare feet? Did they imagine the cross scratched on the stone above the ledge that was his bed? Did they hear in their mind’s ear the waves, and the wailing of the gulls while he hauled over the rocks the seaweed to his garden plot? Did they guess he still visited in his thoughts the little pond beyond the coppice, and watched the decorating of a verse, the play of creatures arrested by Cronan’s pen, fish and birds, snakes coiled about a letter’s stem?

It was as Murtagh had represented her that the Virgin came to him the second time, not as she had been before, which was in a likeness that was almost his mother’s. He had not understood, that second time, why there should again be disruption in his life. He understood now. At the abbey he had learned piety, had practised patience, been humbled by his companions’ talents, strengthened by their friendship. But in his solitude he was closer to God.

Still standing on the crag that rose above the others, he knew that with a certainty that came freshly to him in the evening of every day. During all his time here he had not seen another person, had spoken only to God and to himself, to animals and birds and the butterflies that so strangely arrived, occasionally to an insect. The figments that congregated in his imagination did not create an alien mood; nostalgia was always checked. This evening, as he prepared his food and ate it, it pleased him that he had cut the roof sods and settled them into place while it was fine. That was a satisfaction, and he took it with him when he lay down to rest.

Colour came from nowhere, brightening to a vividness. There was a fluttering of wings closing after flight, scarlet birds of paradise, yellow-breasted, green. Archways receded into landscape; faint brown and pink were washed through the marble tracery of a floor. Rays of sunlight were like arrows in the sky.

The Virgin’s dress was two shades of blue, her lacy halo hardly there. This time her features were not reminiscent of what Michael’s mother’s once had been, nor of a gospel illumination: there was such beauty as Michael had never before beheld in a human face or anywhere in nature - not in the rock flowers or the heather, not in the delicacy of the seashore shells. Pale, slender hands were raised in a gesture of affection.

‘Michael,’ the Virgin said and there was a stillness until, unkempt and ragged, he stood before her, until he said:

‘I am content here.’

‘Because you have come to love your solitude, Michael.’

‘Yes.’

‘In this month of the year you must leave it.’

‘I was content on my father’s farm. I was content at the abbey. This is my place now.’

Through denial and deprivation he had been led to peace, a destination had been reached. These words were not spoken but were there, a thought passing through the conversation.

‘I have come to you the last time now,’ the Virgin said.

She did not smile and yet was not severe in the serenity that seemed to spread about her. Delicately, the fingers of her hands touched and parted, and then were raised in blessing.

‘I cannot understand,’ Michael said, struggling to find other words and remaining silent when he could not. Then it was dark again, until he woke at dawn.

It was a Thursday. Michael sensed that in nervous irritation. The day of the week was irrelevant when, this morning, there was so much else. ‘Blessed among women,’ he beseeched. ‘Our Lady of grace, hear me.’

He begged that his melancholy might be lifted, that the confusion which had come in the night might be lightened with revelation. These were the days of the year when his spirits were most joyful, when each hour that passed brought closer the celebration of the Saviour’s birth. Why had this honouring of a season been so brutally upset?

‘Blessed among women,’ Michael murmured again, but when he rose from his knees he was still alone.

The greyness of early morning made his island greyer than it often was, and the images of the dream – brightly lingering – made it greyer still. ‘A dream’s no more’n a dream,’ Fódla’s young voíce echoed from the faraway past, and Michael saw his own head shaking a denial. Though feeling punished after the previous occasions of the Virgin’s presence, he had not experienced the unease of irritation. He had not, in all his life, experienced it often. At the abbey there had been the dragging walk of Brother Andrew, his sandals flapping, a slow, repetitive sound that made you close your eyes and silently urge him to hurry. Every time Brother Justus stood up from the refectory table he shook the crumbs from the lap of his habit, scattering them so that the floor would have to be swept again. There was old Nessan’s cough.

This morning, though, Michael’s distress was bleaker than any mood engendered by such pinpricks of annoyance. The prospect of moving out of his solitude was fearful. This was his place and he had made it so. In his fifty-ninth year, it would enfeeble him to travel purposelessly. He would not bear a journey with the fortitude he had possessed in his boyhood and in his middle age. If he was being called to his death, why might he not die here, among his stones, close to his heather and his gorse, close to his little garden of lettuces and roots?

Slowly, when a little more time had passed, he made his way to the different shores of the island. He stood in the mouth of the cave where he had lived before he built his shelter. Then – twenty-one years ago – he had thought he would not survive. He had failed when he tried to trap the fish, had not yet developed a taste for the sloes that were the nourishment his fastness offered. He had tried to attract bees, but no bees came. He had hoped a bramble might yield blackberries, but it was not the kind to do so. Before he found the spring he drank from a pool in the bog.

From the cave he could see the stunted oak trees of the island’s head-land, bent back to the ground, and he remembered how at first they had seemed sinister, the wind that shaped them hostile. But this morning they were friendly and the breeze that blew in from the sea was so slight it still did not disturb the water’s surface. The waves lapped softly on the shingle. For years the gulls had not feared him and they alighted near him now, strutting a little on the rocks and then becoming still.

‘I am content here,’ Michael said aloud, saying it again because it was the truth. Head bent in shame, shoulders hunched beneath the habit that no longer offered much warmth or protection, eyes closed and seeing nothing, Michael struggled with his anger. Had his obedience not been enough? Had he been vain, or proud? Should he not have taken even one egg from the gulls’ nests?

No answer came, none spoken, none felt, and he was surly when he sought forgiveness for questions that were presumptuous.

He crossed to the cliffs when the tide was low enough, wading through the icy water that soaked him up to his breast. He took his habit off and shivered as he squeezed the sea out of it, laying it on a rock to catch the sun. He beat at his body with his arms and clenched his fingers into his palms to restore the circulation.

He waited an hour, then dressed again, all he put on still damp. He felt himself watched by the gulls, and wondered if they sensed that something was different about the place he’d shared with them. He climbed the cliff-face, finding footholds easily, hauling himself up by grasping the spiky rock. At the top there was a ridge of bitten grass and then the gorse began, and became so dense he thought at first he would not be able to make a way through it. The thorns tore at his legs and feet, drawing blood, until he came upon a clearing where the vegetation had failed. It narrowed, then snaked on ahead of him, like a track.

He walked until it was dark, stopping only to pick crabapples and to drink from a stream. He lay down to rest on a growth of ferns, placing over him for warmth those he had rooted up. He slept easily and deeply, although he had thought he would not.

The next morning he passed a tower that was deserted, with nothing left of its one-time habitation. He passed a dwelling outside which a jennet was tethered. In a field a young man and woman were weeding a winter crop. They told him where he was, but he had never heard of the neighbourhood they mentioned, nor of a town two hours further on. He asked for water and they gave him milk, the first he had tasted since he left the abbey. They gave him bread and black pudding that had a herb in it, marjoram, they said. They guessed he was a seanchaí but he said no, not adding that the only story he had to tell was his own, wondering how they would respond if he revealed that Our Lady had three times appeared to him in a dream.

‘Are you walking all Ireland?’ the young man asked, making conversation with that familiar expression. Their hoes laid down, the two sat with him on a verge of grass while he ate and drank.

‘I have walked it before,’ he replied. ‘In the way you mean.’

‘Not many pass us here.’

They spoke between themselves, establishing when last there had been a visitor on the way that was close to them. They had the field and the jennet, they said when he asked. It wouldn’t be long before an infant was born to them.

‘You are prosperous so.’

‘Thanks be to God, we are.’

He was a wandering beggar: they could not tell that what he wore had been a monk’s habit once, or that a tonsure had further marked his calling. They would have considered him blasphemous if he had divulged that he was angry with Our Lady, that he resented the mockery of this reward for his compliance in the past, that on his journey bitterness had spread in him. ‘Am I your plaything?’ he gruffly demanded as he trudged on and, hearing himself, was again ashamed.

He passed through a forest, so dark at its heart it might have been night. Hour upon hour it took before the trees began to dwindle and the faint light of another evening dappled the gloom. He passed that night on the forest’s edge, covering himself again with undergrowth.

‘I will go back,’ he muttered in the morning, but knew immediately that this petulance was an empty threat: he would not find the way if he attempted to return; wild boars and wolves would come at night. Even though the gorse had drawn blood, he knew he was protected while he was obedient, for in the dark of the forest he had not once suffered from a broken branch spiking his head or face, had not once stumbled on a root.

So, testily, he went on. The hoar-frost that whitened grass and vegetation was lost within an hour each morning to the sun. St Sabas’s day came, St Finnian’s, St Lucy’s, St Ammon’s. In other years they had occurred in all weathers, but on Michael’s journey it still did not rain. He cracked open nuts, searched where there was water for cresses and wild parsley. He remembered, on St Thomas’s day, Luchan telling of Thomas’s finger placed on the wound and of his cry of anguish as his doubt was exposed, and his Saviour’s chiding. ‘It is only that I cannot understand,’ Michael pleaded, again begging for the solace of forgiveness.

Often he did not rest but walked on when darkness fell, and sometimes he did not eat. The strength to walk remained, but there was a lightness in his head and, going on, he wondered about his life, whether or not he had wasted the time given to him on earth. He begged at the door of a great house and was brought in, to warmth and food. The lady of the house came to the kitchen to pour wine for him and ask if he’d seen badgers and foxes the way he had come. He said he had. Her dark hair and the olive skin of her face put him in mind of Fódla once and that night, when he lay in a bed as comfortable as he had ever known, he thought about his childhood friend: her skin would be rough now, and lined, her hands ingrained from a lifetime’s work. More anger was kindled in him; he was no longer penitent. Why should it have been that Fódla bore the children of another man, that she had come to belong to someone else, that he had been drawn away from her? His melancholy thoughts frightened him, seeming like a madness almost. Since first he had dreamed his holy dreams had there been some folly that controlled him, a silliness in his credulity? Had he been led into what Cathal called confusion’s dance? Cathal would have spoken on that, Diarmaid too, and Ioin. There would have been their arguments and their concern, and the wisdom of Brother Beocca. But alone and lost in nowhere there was only a nagging that did not cease, a mystery that mocked and taunted, that made of him in his fifty-ninth year a bad-tempered child.

Mass was said in the house in the morning, and the lady of the house came to him when he was given breakfast.

‘Do not hasten on,’ she begged, ‘if you do not have to. These days of the year, we would not wish to see you without a roof.’

Stay, she urged, until St Stephen’s day, offering her hospitality with a smile touched by sorrow. She was a widow, he had heard in the kitchen.

They would clothe him, although it was not said. They would burn the old habit that was no longer recognizable as to its origin. He had told them nothing about himself; they had not asked.

‘You are welcome in my house,’ he heard the invitation repeated. ‘And the weather may turn bitter.’

It would be pleasant to stay. There was the bed, the kitchen fireside. He had watched the spicing of beef the evening before; he had seen poultry hanging in the cold rooms, and fruits laid out in jars.

‘I am not allowed to stay,’ he said, and shook his head and was not pressed.

It was soon after he left the house, still in the same hour, that his cheerless mood slipped from him. As he walked away in the boots he had been given, he sensed with startling abruptness – not knowing why he did – that he had not failed himself, either as the young man he once had been or the old man he had become; and he knew that this journey was not the way to his death. Faithful to her prediction, the Virgin had not come to him again, but in a different way he saw her as she might have been before she was holy. He saw her taken aback by the angel’s annunciation, and plunged into a confusion such as he had experienced himself. For her, there had been a journey too. For her, there had been tiredness and apprehension, and unkind mystery. And who could say there had not been crossness also?

Like blood flowing again, trust trickled back and Michael felt as he had when first he was aware he would survive among the rocks of his island. There was atonement in the urgency of his weary travail for three more days; and when the fourth day lightened he knew where he was.

The abbey was somewhere to the east, the pasture land ahead of him he had once walked. And closer, there was the hill on which so often he had watched over his father’s sheep. There was the stream along which the alders grew, their branches empty of leaves now. No flock grazed the slopes of the hill, nor were there geese in the orchard, nor pigs rooting beneath the beech tree. But the small stone farmhouse was hardly changed.

There was no sound when he went nearer, and he stood for a moment in the yard, glancing about him at the closed doors of the outside houses, at the well and the empty byre. Grass grew among the roughly hewn stones that cobbled the surface beneath his feet. Ragwort and nettles withered in a corner. A roof had fallen in.

They answered his knock and did not know him. They gave him bread and water, two decrepit people he would not have recognized had he met them somewhere else. The windows of their kitchen were stuffed with straw to keep the warmth in. The smoke from the hearth made them cough. Their clothes were rags.

‘It is Michael,’ suddenly she said.

His father, blind, reached out his hand, feeling in the air. ‘Michael,’ he said also.

There was elation in their faces, joy such as Michael had never seen in faces anywhere before. The years fell back from them, their eyes were lit again with vigour in their happiness. A single candle burned in celebration of the day, its grease congealed, holding it to the shelf above the hearth.

Their land would not again be tilled; he was not here for that. Geese would not cry again in the orchard, nor pigs grub beneath the beech trees. For much less, and yet for more, he had been disturbed in the contentment of his solitude. So often he had considered the butterflies of his rocky fastness his summer angels, but if there were winter angels also they were here now, formless and unseen. No choirs sang, there was no sudden splendour, only limbs racked by toil in a smoky hovel, a hand that blindly searched the air. Yet angels surely held the cobweb of this mercy, the gift of a son given again.