Кен Бруен - Galway Girl

He was in his late sixties and seemed like every single year had been of note.

His suit was just the biz, the kind you could throw in a ball and it would bounce right back to pristine shape, a suit that declared,

“It may have cost the earth but, I mean, just fucking feel the quality .”

He had a well-trimmed beard, a substantial belly, tiny feet, and his hair was that salt-and-pepper style not seen since the TV show Dynasty.

As I shrugged into my jacket, Sheridan came blustering in, snarled,

“Who the fuck are you?”

He made the mistake of seeing Brett-Shaw’s small stature as something to exploit.

Phew-oh.

Brett-Shaw drew himself up to all of his five-foot, five-inch height and the energy emanating appeared to increase his stature.

Righteous indignation has its uses.

He hissed,

“Sheridan, I believe, the so-called supercop?”

He paused as if to savor the taste of what was coming.

Continued,

“Honest to god Guards, real cops, are out searching for a cop killer and you, ”

Venom dripped from his lips,

“Are instead harassing a local legend, a bona fide hero who saved the swans of Galway, you... ”

He looked like he was going to spit.

Didn’t, quite.

“ You, who didn’t even take the blooming time to check a rock solid alibi.”

Sheridan, momentarily lost, rallied,

“Alibi? Fucking alibi? I’d bet a week’s salary to hear that.”

Brett-Shaw rocked back on his heels, said,

“Nun.”

Sheridan was orgasmic, shouted,

“None. I fucking knew it, you sniveling ambulance chaser, none, fucking beautiful.”

Brett-Shaw held out his hand, asked,

“The week’s salary? All major credit cards acceptable.”

Sheridan, confused, near stammered,

“But you said none.”

Brett-Shaw with exaggerated care fixed the knot in his Masonic tie, said,

“Nun. My esteemed client was with a nun.”

The Poor Clares are as much a part of the tapestry of Galway as the swans.

They are a secluded order,

But they’ve recently gone online!

Go figure.

And they have an outreach program, in the form of Sister Maeve.

A dote of a woman if such can be said of a nun without provocation.

She wasn’t quite yet part of the

Me Too movement but early days.

’Tis a shame but true that in the manic years of the Celtic Tiger the bells of the Poor Clares rang out, a plea for alms.

I cringe to think they might have been hungry.

When you’ve been raised in and to poverty, you are keenly sensitive to the very dread of people without their dinner.

On special days, there is a Mass in the Poor Clares’ convent and the public can attend. They usually have a chorister who’d make you believe in love, such is the beauty of the singing.

The church is lit with candles and has a subdued golden glow, like you’d think a medieval service might have appeared.

It is uplifting in a fashion that is just nigh on impossible to articulate.

Sister Maeve had invited me.

She was my friend.

How weird is that?

Me and the nun.

Believe that?

Years back, I had been of some small service to her and her convent — nothing trailblazing but it dazzled her and thus our unlikely friendship.

The bricks

To raise funds for a renovation to the convent, the public were invited to

“Buy a brick.”

To my disappointment, you didn’t actually get a brick; you got a parchment saying you had donated, so I took a brick from the building site, placed a cross made from horseshoe nails on it, and that did for me.

Looked kind of a piece with the crystal skull some intruder had left for me.

So, the evening that the boy was murdered, I was singing in the choir, so to say,

With Maeve by my side.

Afterward, I took Maeve for a drink to Garavan’s.

Like a date.

Seriously?

We got the snug and I treated her to hot toddies.

She protested,

“I really shouldn’t.”

I said,

“’Tis the glory of it, not being the right thing.”

She took a deep wallop, purred,

“Ah, that is wicked.”

From a nun?

Is there higher endorsement?

The days after my daughter was murdered right before my eyes,

I was beyond

Briste.

Broken, in Irish,

But it means oh so much more,

An utter annihilation of every ounce of your beating, bedraggled heart.

And Maeve came to me

Like a vision, almost.

She fed me,

Doled out rationed amounts of Jay,

Held my trembling palms.

And, I will never quite know why,

She recited a section of what I can only term

The Jesuit poem

“The

  Wreck

     of

      the

        Deutschland.”

Serendipity that his poem was dedicated

To the happy memory

Of five Franciscan nuns ...

Drowned

Between midnight and morning

Of Dec. 7th, 1875.

Did Maeve select this because my daughter was born in Germany?

Or because those poor nuns were drowned?

As if reading my very thought, she intoned softly,

“Your girl is, and always will be, The Galway Girl.”

Made me weep like a banshee.

Later, when I read about the poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins, I learned he was

An academic

Scholar

Poet

And fiercely unsuccessful with his poetry in his lifetime.

Now, of course, when it’s of precious little value to him, they rave about him being

“One of the very greatest Victorian poets.”

Fuck ’em.

Of the many odd places I end up,

The Protestant Church is unlikely to be one of them.

Not that I have a grudge against the Protestants, it’s just an instinct of not belonging,

Like King Charles on the throne of England.

But here I was

In St. Nicholas.

You can see the imprints of hooves, they say, at the door, supposedly from when Christopher Columbus prayed here before setting off to find America.

They are not the devil’s mark, that’s for sure. He has no business here.

I sat at a back pew, found a modicum of fragile peace, my hand with the mutilated fingers found a sheet of frayed parchment.

It was a fragment of a poem by Robert Bridges,

And the title—

     Oh,

      Sweet

        Jesus

That is not the title, that was my reaction to this:

“On

  a

   Dead

     Child.”

Phew-oh.

Riddle me that?

Perfect little body, without fault or stain on thee....

Thy mother’s treasure wert thou....

Thy hand clasps, as ‘twas wont, my finger, and holds it:

But the grasp is the clasp of death....

Unwilling, alone we embark,

And the things we have seen

And have known

And have heard of

(A long pause is vital here before the killer words.)

Fail us

Here’s the odd thing

I have never been entirely comfortable with the big hitters of poetry,

The

  Yeatses

    Eliots

      Heaneys.

Always more in sync with the minors

         Louis MacNeice

            Anne Sexton

               Francis Thompson.

And among my dark favorites is the leader of the minor league

Totally unknown

Weldon Kees.

Could it be that in 1955, his car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate Bridge and he was never seen again, and