He emptied his glass and choked. Stern ordered two more.
Miserable stuff, said Joe, but it does clean your teeth. You know, Stern, this old article I was just telling you about, the Arab who thinks he was there watching when Mohammed made his move once upon a time, he's something like you in a way. I mean not because he was born both an Arab and a Jew, physical fact, but because he's gotten it into his head he's been living in Jerusalem since before people had such names, since before they were divided into this and that, know what I mean? So thinking the way he does he can play all kinds of tricks with reality the same as you do, pretend it doesn't exist or whatever, only his tastes don't run to politics and that kind of shit.
Joe drank and made a face.
I'm rambling too much, it's this poison seeping into my brain. Anyway there's also this Franciscan I know, the baking priest I call him because he's been spending the last sixty years here baking the same four loaves of bread. I ask him if he thinks he's following in the footsteps of our Savior with all this multiplication and if so shouldn't he be working with five loaves instead of four, and what does he do but put a twinkle in his eye and say No, nothing so grand for me, I wouldn't presume as much as that, I just bake four in order to have the parameters of life. Jaysus, know what I mean? Everybody's daft around here what with holy horses and muttering to themselves and too much incense cutting off the oxygen supply and too much rocking back and forth for sixty years baking heavenly bread. Daft, that's all.
Dreaming up crazy impossible things like you. It's in the air or lack of it. No bog gas up here to keep a man in touch with the good slippery muck under his feet.
Stern smiled in a kindly way.
You seem depressed this evening.
Me? Go on you say. Jaysus why would I be down just because I'm in a crazy city twelve hundred years or two thousand miles or four loaves of bread away from home on Christmas Eve? Why?
He gulped the cognac and coughed.
You got one of those awful cigarettes you carry?
Stern gave him one. The first wisps of snow were blowing across the windows, the darkness outside was deeper. Stern watched him fidget nervously with the Victoria Cross, then with his beard.
You know Joe, you've changed a lot in the last year.
Sure I suppose I have, why not, I'm at the changing age. Not so long ago I was a true believer like one of those items you see around here on street corners mumbling over a pile of stones. Sixteen I was at the Dublin post office and then I went into training with an old U.S. cavalry musketoon for three years waiting for the day to come and come it did, calling itself the Black and Tans, so I went on the run in the mountains and it went all right for a while, but do you know what that means being on the run up there?
Joe's voice was rising in anger. Stern watched him.
Being cold and wet every minute of the day and night, that's what, and being alone and alone. Those mountains aren't meant for running, there's nothing but rain and sinking in up to your knee every step you take but I kept running because I had to, ran all night to surprise the bloody Blacks and Tans. You can't run up there but I did, just did is all, there was no other way to be doing what I was doing and do you know where it bloody well got me?
Joe slammed his fist on the table. He was shaking. He grabbed Stern's sleeve and twisted it.
To a vacant lot in Cork that's where, barefoot in rags because the people were starving and some of them were willing to turn a pound by turning informer to keep their children from starving to death. So they informed and the mountains shrank until I had no place to hide and ended up in Cork on the banks of the River Lee listening to shrieking sea gulls, an Easter Monday it was and me exhausted leaning against a ruined tannery wall with nothing to eat in three days, knowing it was all over, the three spires of St Finnbar's up there against the sky and me not smart enough then to ask myself what that Trinity in front of me really meant.
But I'll tell you something else now. While those mountains were shrinking I was growing, I was taking those soggy heaps and putting them inside me and getting bigger, and that abandoned churchyard where I buried the old musketoon in the rain, that mud was consecrated by me and nobody else.
You talk about your kingdom come to be, Stern. Well I fought for mine, I've done that and it threw me out, just kept pushing on me until hope was gone and everything was gone in that vacant lot across from St Finnbar's beside the River Lee and I had to escape my Ireland as a Poor Clare, Jaysus, me on the run as a nun do you see it. One frightened nun quiet as a mouse on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, that's what was left of me at the age of twenty.
Joe let go of his sleeve and banged the table. Bloody motherlands and bloody causes, the hell with them all I say. I never want to see one again.
Stern sat back and waited. There's more, he said after a moment.
What's more? What are you talking about? This resentment and anger, the way you've changed. It's not really Ireland, you know that. That was over before you got here. It's something that's happened since then.
Joe's eyes softened and all at once his lips began to tremble. He quickly covered his face with his hands but not before Stern saw the tears welling up. Stern reached out and held his arm.
Joe, you don't always have to hide things in front of people, nobody's going to respect you more for that.
Sometimes it's better to let the feelings out. Why don't you tell me about it?
He kept his hands up. The quiet sobbing lasted a minute or two and then he spoke in an unsteady voice.
What's to tell? There was a woman that's all and she left me. You see I just never imagined such a thing could happen, not when you loved someone and they loved you. I thought once you were together like that you just went on loving each other and being together, that's the way it is where I come from. Sure it was dumb of me, sure it was simpleminded not to think it could be another way but I just didn't know. If I wasn't a man in the Dublin post office I damn well became one during those next four years in the mountains, but women, I didn't know anything about women. Nothing. I loved her and I thought she loved me but she just fooled me, just tricked me and did me in like the fool I was.
Stern shook his head sadly.
Don't keep telling yourself that, it only makes you bitter and it might not have been that way at all. It could have been something else altogether. Was she older than you?
Ten years, your age. How'd you know that?
Just a guess. But look Joe, ten years is a long time. Perhaps something happened to her during those ten years that separated you, something she was afraid of, still afraid of, something that had hurt her so much she didn't dare face it again. People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else. So it might have had nothing to do with you at all. Some experience from the past, who knows.
Joe looked up. The anger had returned.
But I trusted her don't you see, I loved her and it never even crossed my mind not to trust her, not once, never, I was too simpleminded for that. I just trusted her and loved her and thought it would go on forever and ever because I loved her, as if that were enough reason for anything to last. Well from now on there's no bloody room in me anymore for believing in things and fooling myself about them lasting forever. The baking priest has been baking the four boundaries of his life for sixty years, laying out his map, and sure you've got to do that, sure you've got to find the four walls of your own chances and I've done that now, they include me and no one else, just me.
But Joe, where will that lead you?
To what I want, being in charge of myself. What do you mean?