The Wonder(45)

But the one that troubled Lib most showed a little girl floating on a raft in the shape of a broad cross, stretched out asleep, unaware of the wild waves rising around her. Je voguerai en paix sous la garde de Marie, it said. I something in something under the guard of Mary? Only then did Lib notice a sorrowful woman’s face in the clouds, watching the little girl.

She closed the book and put it back. Then thought to look at the card again, to see what passage it was marking. She couldn’t find anything about Mary, or the sea. Vessels was the only word that caught her eye: For the Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where he findeth the vessels empty. Empty of what, exactly? Lib wondered. Food? Thought? Individuality? On the next page, near a picture of a bilious-looking angel, Thou art willing to give me heavenly food and bread of angels to eat. A few pages farther on, marked with a picture of the Last Supper: How sweet and pleasant the banquet, when thou gavest thyself to be our food! Or perhaps that card went with thou alone art my meat and drink, my love.

Lib could see how a child could misread such flowery phrases. If these were Anna’s only books, and she’d been kept home from school ever since her illness, mulling over them without proper guidance…

Of course some children couldn’t grasp what metaphor was. She remembered a girl at school, a stony character with no small talk who for all her scholarliness was idiotic about everyday things. Anna didn’t seem like that. What else could you call it but stupidity, though, to take poetic language at face value? Lib felt like shaking the child awake again: Jesus is not actual meat, you dunderhead!

No, not a dunderhead. Anna had excellent wits; they’d just gone astray.

One of the nurses at the hospital had a cousin, Lib remembered now, who’d become convinced that the commas and full stops of the Daily Telegraph contained coded messages for him.

Almost five in the morning when Kitty put her head in and watched the sleeping girl for a long moment.

Perhaps Anna was Kitty’s last surviving cousin, it struck Lib now. The O’Donnells never mentioned any other relations. Did Anna ever confide in her cousin?

“Sister Michael’s here,” said the slavey.

“Thank you, Kitty.”

But it was Rosaleen O’Donnell who came in next.

Leave her be, Lib wanted to say. But she held her tongue while Rosaleen bent down to rouse her daughter with a long embrace and murmured prayers. Like something out of grand opera, the way she barged in to make a show of her maternal feelings twice a day.

The nun came in and nodded a greeting, her mouth sealed shut. Lib picked up her things and left.

Outside the cabin, the slavey was pouring an iron bucket of water into a gigantic tub that stood over a fire.

“What are you doing, Kitty?”

“Wash day.”

The laundry tub was set too near the dung heap for Lib’s liking.

“It’d be Monday, usually, not Friday,” said Kitty, “only ’tisn’t Monday Lá Fhéile Muire Mór?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Blessed Virgin Mary’s feast.”

“Ah, really?”

Kitty rested her hands on her hips, staring at Lib. “’Twas on the fifteenth of August that Our Lady was taken up.”

Lib couldn’t bring herself to ask what that meant.

“Lifted up bodily to heaven.” Miming it with the bucket.

“She died?”

“She did not,” Kitty scoffed. “Didn’t her loving son spare her that?”

There was no talking to this creature. With a nod, Lib turned towards the village.

Lib walked back to the spirit grocery in the dregs of the darkness, a nibbled-looking moon low on the horizon. Before she lurched up the stairs to her bed above the grocery, she remembered to beg Maggie Ryan to keep some breakfast for her.

She woke at nine, having slept just enough to befuddle herself but not enough to clear her head. Rain was tapping the roof like the fingers of a blind man.

No sign of William Byrne in the dining room. Could he have gone back to Dublin already, even though he’d urged Lib to find out more about the possible involvement of the priest in the hoax?

The girl served her cold griddle cakes. Cooked—Lib deduced from the faint crunch—directly on the embers. Did the Irish hate food? She was about to ask after the journalist, then was struck by how such a question might sound.

Lib thought of Anna O’Donnell, waking up even emptier on the fifth day. Suddenly sickened, she pushed her plate away and went up to her room.

She read for several hours—a volume of miscellaneous essays—but found she was retaining nothing.

Lib set off down a lane behind the spirit grocery despite the rain pattering on her umbrella; anything to be outside. A few disconsolate cows in a field. The soil seemed to be getting poorer as she walked towards the only elevated land, Anna’s whale, a long ridge with one thick end and one pointed one. She followed a path until it petered out in bogland. She tried to stick to the higher, drier-looking areas, purpled with heather. She saw something move out of the corner of her eye; a hare? There were depressions full of what looked like hot cocoa and others glinting with dirty water.

To avoid soaking her boots, Lib jumped from one mushroom-shaped hummock to the next. Occasionally she swung her umbrella point downwards and poked the ground to check its firmness. She picked her way along a wide ribbon of sedge grass for a while, though it made her nervous to hear a trickling below, an underground stream, perhaps; was the whole landscape honeycombed?