John Hawks - The Dark River

“Don’t worry. He’ll come back.” Maya took Gabriel’s arm and coaxed him out of the room. It was cold outside and the sun was falling toward the horizon. They walked down the path together and entered the cooking hut. It was warm and friendly there-like someone’s home. A plump Irish nun named Joan had just finished baking a dozen scones, and she placed them on a serving tray along with different kinds of homemade jam and marmalade. Sister Ruth, an older woman with thick eyeglasses, bustled around the room putting away the supplies they had just brought up from the dock. She opened the stove and tossed a few chunks of peat into the fire. The compressed vegetation glowed with a dark orange light.

Vicki hurried down the staircase from the upper floor. “So what happened, Gabriel?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Maya said. “Right now, we’d like some tea.”

Gabriel unzipped his jacket and sat down on a bench near the wall. The two nuns were staring at him.

“Matthew Corrigan is your father?” Sister Ruth asked.

“That’s right.”

“It was an honor to meet him.”

“He’s a great man,” Sister Joan said. “A great-”

“Some tea,” Maya snapped, and everyone stopped talking. A moment later, Gabriel was holding a cup of hot tea in his cold hands. There was a tense silence until the two other nuns entered the hut carrying one of the storage boxes. Sister Maura was the small nun who had been praying outside the chapel; Sister Faustina was from Poland and had a strong accent. As they unpacked the supplies and inspected the mail, the nuns forgot about Gabriel and chatted happily.

The Poor Clares owned nothing but the crosses dangling from their necks. They lived without modern plumbing, refrigeration, or electricity, but they seemed to find great joy in the small pleasures of life. On the way back from the dock Sister Faustina had gathered some pink heather. She put it on the edge of each blue china plate like a splash of beauty, along with a dollop of Irish butter and a hot scone. Everything looked perfectly arranged-as if in a gourmet restaurant-but there was nothing artificial about this gesture. The world was beautiful to the Poor Clares; to ignore that fact was to deny God.

Alice Chen came down from the sleeping room and ate three scones with a great deal of strawberry jam. Vicki and Maya sat in a corner, whispering to each other and occasionally glancing in Gabriel’s direction. The nuns drank their tea and discussed the mail that had just arrived with Captain Foley. They were praying for dozens of people all over the world, and they talked about these strangers-the woman with leukemia, the man with the shattered legs-as if they were close friends. Bad news was received solemnly. Good news was cause for laughter and celebration; it felt like it had become someone’s birthday.

Gabriel kept thinking about his father’s body and the white muslin sheet that reminded him of cobwebs covering an ancient tomb. Why was his father still in another realm? There was no way he could answer this question, but he remembered Mother Blessing telling them why his father had first come to this particular island.

“Excuse me,” Gabriel said. “I’d like to understand why my father decided to come here. Mother Blessing said something about a manuscript written by Saint Columba.”

“The manuscript is in the chapel,” Sister Ruth said. “It used to be in Scotland, but it was returned to the island about fifty years ago.”

“And what did Columba write about?”

“It’s a narrative of faith-a confession. The saint gave a detailed description of his journey to hell.”

“The First Realm.”

“We don’t believe in your particular system, and we certainly don’t believe that Jesus was a Traveler.”

“He’s the Son of God,” Sister Joan said.

Sister Ruth nodded. “Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. He was crucified, died, and was buried-and then he rose from the dead.” She glanced at the other nuns. “All that is the foundation of our faith as Christians. But we don’t feel that this contradicts the idea that God has allowed some people to become Travelers and that these Travelers can become visionaries or prophets-or saints.”

“So Columba was a Traveler?”

“I don’t know the answer to that question. But his spirit went to a place of damnation, and then he came back and wrote about it. Your father spent a great deal of time translating the manuscript. And when he wasn’t in the chapel-”

“He walked all over the island,” Sister Faustina said with a strong Polish accent. “He climbed up the mountain and looked at the sea.”

“Can I go to the chapel?” Gabriel asked. “I’d like to see the manuscript.”

“There’s no electricity,” Sister Ruth said. “You’d have to use candles.”

“I just want to see what my father was reading.”

The four nuns glanced at one another and appeared to make a common decision. Sister Maura stood up and walked over to a chest of drawers. “There are enough candles on the altar, but you’ll need some matches. Keep the door closed or the wind will blow the flames out.”

Gabriel zipped up his jacket and left the cooking hut. The only light came from the stars and a three-quarter moon. At night, the four beehive huts and the chapel looked like dark mounds of rock and dirt, tombs for Bronze Age kings. Trying not to trip on the uneven pathway, he walked past the nuns’ dormitory and the hut called the saint’s cell where Mother Blessing was living. A faint bluish light glowed from an upstairs window of this building, and Gabriel wondered if the Irish Harlequin had a computer attached to a sat phone.

He climbed down the steps to the lower terrace and opened the unlocked chapel door. It was hard to see until he lit three large beeswax candles that burned with a dark yellow flame.

The chapel’s altar was a rectangular box about the size of a small chest of drawers. A large wooden cross was attached to the top, and the rest of the box was decorated with carvings of mermaids, sea monsters, and a man with ivy growing out of his mouth. Kneeling in front of the altar, Gabriel found a crack that outlined a central drawer, but couldn’t find a latch or a handle. He pulled and pushed each carving, but none of these pagan decorations opened the drawer. He was about to give up and return to the cooking hut for instructions when he tugged the wooden cross an inch forward. Instantly, there was a clicking sound and the drawer slid open.

Inside was a large object wrapped in a black cloth, a small college notebook with a cardboard cover, and two books. Gabriel unwrapped the cloth and found a manuscript with a heavy calfskin cover and vellum pages. The first page had a painted illustration of Saint Columba standing on the bank of a river. Although the book was very old, the colors were still bright. On the page opposite the picture was the beginning of the Irish saint’s confession written in Latin.

Returning to the drawer, Gabriel inspected the other books. One was a worn English/Latin dictionary; another was a battered textbook for first-year Latin students. He opened the notebook and discovered his father’s translation of the manuscript. The meticulous handwriting reminded Gabriel of the shopping lists his father used to pin onto a bulletin board in the farmhouse kitchen. Both he and Michael would check the list every morning to see if their parents had decided to buy store candy or some other treat for supper.

Holding the notebook close to a candle, Gabriel began to read about the saint’s experience in the First Realm.

Four days after our celebration of the Virgin’s ascension into heaven, my soul left my body and I descended into this cursed place .