T. Boyle - If the River Was Whiskey

Even now, in the crowd of humble countrymen in shit-smeared boots and knit skullcaps, McGahee can detect a certain number of Teutonic or Manhattanite faces above cableknit sweaters and pendant cameras. Drunk and in debt, on the run from a bad marriage, two DWI convictions, and the wheezy expiring gasps of his moribund mother, McGahee pays them no heed. His powers of concentration run deep. He is forty years old, as lithe as a boxer though he’s done no hard physical labor since he took a construction job between semesters at college twenty years back, and he has the watery eyes and doleful, doglike expression of the saint. Twelve hours ago he was in New York, at Paddy Flynn’s, pouring out his heart and enumerating his woes for McCarey, when McCarey said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Ireland.” And now here he is at Ballinspittle, wearing the rumpled Levi’s and Taiwanese sportcoat he’d pulled on in his apartment yesterday morning, three hours off the plane from Kennedy and flush with warmth from the venerable Irish distillates washing through his veins.

McCarey — plump, stately McCarey — stands beside him, bleary-eyed and impatient, disdainfully scanning the crowd. Heads are bowed. Infants snuffle. From somewhere in the distance come the bleat of a lamb and the mechanical call of the cuckoo. McGahee checks his watch: they’ve been here seven minutes already and nothing’s happened. His mind begins to wander. He’s thinking about orthodontia — thinking an orthodontist could make a fortune in this country — when he looks up and spots her, Nuala Nolan, a scarecrow of a girl, an anorectic, bones-in-a-sack sort of girl, kneeling in front of the queue and reciting the Mysteries in a voice parched for food and drink. Since the statue moved she has stuck to her diet of Marmite and soda water until the very synapses of her brain have become encrusted with salt and she raves like a mariner lost at sea. McGahee regards her with awe. A light rain has begun to fall.

And then suddenly, before he knows what’s come over him, McGahee goes limp. He feels lightheaded, transported, feels himself sinking into another realm, as helpless and cut adrift as when Dr. Beibelman put him under for his gallbladder operation. He breaks out in a sweat. His vision goes dim. The murmur of the crowd, the call of the cuckoo, and the bleat of the lamb all meld into a single sound — a voice — and that voice, ubiquitous, timeless, all-embracing, permeates his every cell and fiber. It seems to speak through him, through the broad-beamed old hag beside him, through McCarey, Nuala Nolan, the stones and birds and fishes of the sea. “Davey,” the voice calls in the sweetest tones he ever heard, “Davey McGahee, come to me, come to my embrace.”

As one, the crowd parts, a hundred stupefied faces turned toward him, and there she is, the Virgin, snotgreen no longer but radiant with the aquamarine of actuality, her eyes glowing, arms beckoning. McGahee casts a quick glance around him. McCarey looks as if he’s been punched in the gut, Nuala Nolan’s skeletal face is clenched with hate and jealousy, the humble countrymen and farmwives stare numbly from him to the statue and back again…and then, as if in response to a subconscious signal, they drop to their knees in a human wave so that only he, Davey McGahee, remains standing. “Come to me,” the figure implores, and slowly, as if his feet were encased in cement, his head reeling and his stomach sour, he begins to move forward, his own arms outstretched in ecstasy.

The words of his catechism, forgotten these thirty years, echo in his head: “Mother Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our—”

“Yesssss!” the statue suddenly shrieks, the upturned palm curled into a fist, a fist like a weapon. “And you think it’s as easy as that, do you?”

McGahee stops cold, hovering over the tiny effigy like a giant, a troglodyte, a naked barbarian. Three feet high, grotesque, shaking its fists up at him, the thing changes before his eyes. Gone is the beatific smile, gone the grace of the eyes and the faintly mad and indulgent look of the transported saint. The face is a gargoyle’s, a shrew’s, and the voice, sharpening, probing like a dental tool, suddenly bears an uncanny resemblance to his ex-wife’s. “Sinner!” the gargoyle hisses. “Fall on your knees!”

The crowd gasps. McGahee, his bowels turned to ice, pitches forward into the turf. “No, no, no!” he cries, clutching at the grass and squeezing his eyes shut. “Hush,” a new voice whispers in his ear, “look. You must look.” There’s a hand on his neck, bony and cold. He winks open an eye. The statue is gone and Nuala Nolan leans over him, her hair gone in patches, the death’s-head of her face and suffering eyes, her breath like the loam of the grave. “Look, up there,” she whispers.

High above them, receding into the heavens like a kite loosed from a string, is the statue. Its voice comes to him faint and distant—“Behold…now…your sins…and excesses…”—and then it dwindles away like a fading echo.

Suddenly, behind the naked pedestal, a bright sunlit vista appears, grapevines marshaled in rows, fields of barley, corn, and hops, and then, falling from the sky with thunderous crashes, a succession of vats, kegs, hogsheads, and buckets mounting up in the foreground as if on some phantom pier piled high with freight. Boom, boom, ka-boom, boom , down they come till the vista is obscured and the kegs mount to the tops of the trees. McGahee pushes himself up to his knees and looks around him. The crowd is regarding him steadily, jaws set, the inclemency of the hanging judge sunk into their eyes. McCarey, kneeling too now and looking as if he’s just lurched up out of a drunken snooze to find himself on a subway car on another planet, has gone steely-eyed with the rest of them. And Nuala Nolan, poised over him, grins till the long naked roots of her teeth gleam beneath the skirts of her rotten gums.

“Your drinking!” shrieks a voice from the back of the throng, his wife’s voice, and there she is, Fredda, barefoot and in a snotgreen robe and hood, wafting her way through the crowd and pointing her long accusatory finger at his poor miserable shrinking self. “Every drop,” she booms, and the vasty array of vats and kegs and tumblers swivels to reveal the signs hung from their sweating slats — GIN, BOURBON, BEER, WHISKEY, SCHNAPPS, PERNOD — and the crowd lets out a long exhalation of shock and lament.

The keg of gin. Tall it is and huge, its contents vaguely sloshing. You could throw cars into it, buses, tractor trailers. But no, never, he couldn’t have drunk that much gin, no man could. And beside it the beer, frothy and bubbling, a cauldron the size of a rest home. “No!” he cries in protest. “I don’t even like the taste of the stuff.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” chants a voice beside him. The statue is back, Fredda gone. It speaks in a voice he recognizes, though the wheezy, rheumy deathbed rasp of it has been wiped clean. “Ma?” he says, turning to the thing.

Three feet tall, slick as a seal, the robes flowing like the sea, the effigy looks up at him out of his mother’s face drawn in miniature. “I warned you,” the voice leaps out at him, high and querulous, “out behind the 7-11 with Ricky Reitbauer and that criminal Tommy Capistrano, cheap wine and all the rest.”

“But Mom, Pernod?” He peers into the little pot of it, a pot so small you couldn’t boil a good Safeway chicken in it. There it is. Pernod. Milky and unclean. It turns his stomach even to look at it.

“Your liver, son,” the statue murmurs with a resignation that brings tears to his eyes, “just look at it.”

He feels a prick in his side and there it is, his liver — a poor piece of cheesy meat, stippled and striped and purple — dangling from the plaster fingers. “God,” he moans, “God Almighty.”