Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

I don’t mind what you do with me, when I’m dead I’m dead and the dead don’t care so

you’d want to be checking your rosaries now and saying your prayers because time is

I’m not afraid to die, she countered, I’ve made my peace with God so I have no fear of meeting him and

Darragh’s face knitted into an expression of complex surprise, but he held off on any comment till we were driving home that evening, shaking his head to underline his bewilderment when he wondered aloud

what sort of a life would you need to have lived in order to be able to say something like that without sounding foolish or arrogant

I doubt Onnie ever gave much thought to the sort of life she lived, she just lived it, got on with it and now

Darragh’s voice broke up with a dry laugh

I can see her now, standing before God on the floor of heaven, saying, is that all you got bitch, is that your best shot

you think she’d adopt that tone

she can adopt any tone she likes, that’s the gist of what she is going to say, she is going to kick ass, laugh judge and jury out of his own court

I hope their meeting won’t be that combative

that’s what God hopes also but He won’t know what hit him, she’ll flatten Him and then moonwalk out of there with the keys of the kingdom in her blue housecoat

that would be worth seeing, granny moonwalking with her stick

no, come the resurrection Onnie will be restored to the full of her health, throwing away her stick will be part of the deal, she’ll probably be reborn as an action movie heroine, telling Him you can kiss my arse, her parting words and

even if Darragh’s admiration was delivered in a language I could hardly understand, his grasp of my mother’s proud humility and her fearless assessment of her own life was hopefully a lesson of some kind to him, certainly it had made some sort of impression as his face was still fixed in such an expression of wonderment when he got home that Mairead took a look at him as he passed through the kitchen, asking

what happened to that lad and

it was only when I opened my mouth to explain that I had any clear idea myself of what had come to pass, telling her that

Darragh was shown that there are more things in heaven and earth than he has dreamt of, Onnie broadened his mind for him, she broadened mine as well so she did

she was in one of her philosophical moods

she was a lot more plain-spoken than that, she gave him something to chew on for the rest of his days

good god, all that in one short visit

all that in two sentences with

the Angelus bell still ringing in my ear

the last reverb of its tolling vibrating within me a full twenty minutes after it sounded and

why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium, the light superimposed on itself so that all things are out of synch and kilter, things as themselves but slightly different from themselves also, every edge and outline blurred or warped and each passing moment belated, lagging a single beat behind its proper measure, the here-and-now beside itself, slightly off by a degree as in

a kind of waking dream in which all things come adrift in their own anxiety so that sitting here now fills me with

a crying sense of loneliness for my family — Mairead, Darragh and Agnes — their absence sweeping through me like ashes

sitting here at the table and

something in me would be soothed now if, at this moment, Mairead or one of the kids were to walk through the door and smile or say hello to me, something in me would be calmed by this, a word or a smile or a glance from my wife or children, to find myself in their gaze and know that I was beheld then, this would be something to believe in, another of those articles of faith that seem so important today, a look or a word, enough to hang a whole life on, something to believe in during

these grey days after Samhain when the souls of the dead are bailed from purgatory for a while by the prayers of the faithful so that they can return to their homes and

the light is awash with ghouls and ghosts and the mearing between this world and the next is so blurred we might easily find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with the dead, the world fuller than at any other time of the year, as if some sort of spiritual sediment had been stirred up and things set adrift which properly lie at rest, the light swarming with those unquiet souls whose tormented drift through these sunlit hours we might sense out of the corner of our eye or on the margins of our consciousness where

you need to have faith in these things, a willingness to believe and elaborate on them so that

it always gladdened me to find that the part of me that was always a true believer has not died, that part of me Mairead calls the altar boy and who, after all these years, is still alive within me and clutching his catechism, still holding to the truths which were laid out in its pages

who made the world

God made the world

and who is God

God is our father in heaven

and so on and so on

to infinity

the whole world built up from first principles, towering and rigid as any structural engineer might wish, each line following necessarily from the previous one to link heaven and earth step by step, from the first grain of the first moment to the last waning scintilla of light in which everything is engulfed in darkness, the engineer’s dream of structured ascent and stability bolted into every line of its fifty pages, so carefully laid out that any attentive reading of it should enable a man to find his place with some certainty in the broadest reaches of the world, a tower of prayer to span heaven and earth and something which a part of me has never grown out of or developed beyond

the altar boy with his catechism

instead of

the man of faith I tried to become at one time

that difficult, comic interlude in my life, which I spoke of

four or five years ago — hard to recall the exact context in which the subject arose or why I chose to bring it up, but it was probably something Darragh said that panicked me into revealing it, the subject welling up inside me before it came blurting out one evening when we were alone in the sitting room, my two years in the seminary sounding incredible in the father-son intimacy of the moment — incredible in any circumstance — and being seized upon with a clinching spasm of fear when I saw the shock immobilise Darragh’s face for an instant as a long frozen moment stalled between us before he paled further and tipped sideways on the couch like a large doll, hooting and guffawing with genuine laughter for a full minute before he could pull himself up and give the news a more considered reaction, finally saying

it makes sense though, that explains a lot

does it

yes, you’re an engineer, maths and physics and suchlike, but it was always a bit of a mystery where all your references came from, all the poetry and philosophy that overtakes you from time to time, but now I know, it was all part of the old ecclesial schooling, am I right

yes, the great books were part of the training

and you had two full years of that

yes

so what caused you to throw it up, was it the dark night of the soul, Christ no longer visible and –

it would be nice to think it was something that heroic, that my soul had been put to the test, but it wasn’t like that, it was more a gradual leaking away of conviction

maybe it was a mother’s vocation, that’s why it didn’t stick

no, it wasn’t a mother’s vocation, it was all my own doing

and were you a pious child, your little face always turned to the heavens

I was an altar boy

every rural lad was an altar boy, surpliced and soutaned and swinging a thurible, it didn’t always grow to a vocation