Michael Kelly

Sacrament, 1968.

I wake up to a rare, blue, Irish August day. 

        I am alone in the front bedroom. My pyjama jacket is open. My arms and chest have itchy bumps called hives. Mom covered them in calamine lotion last night. This morning the lotion is dry and cracked, like chalky make up. It looks like snow on the moon. P.J. has the hives worse than me. It’s the change of air, Dad says. I swing my legs out of the bed and my feet touch cold lino over concrete. The sun is high in the window frame, and I feel guilty. They will be sitting in the kitchen, laughing when I enter. 

        They are not waiting in the kitchen, they have gone to cut the turf, except for Auntie Kate. She looks at me with eyes that know all my sins and the ones I’m going to commit, but wish they were more interesting. There is a dead chicken in her lap, and she is pulling feathers from it. 

        “Well, the dead arose and appeared to many,” says Kate. “This chicken died, and you within in the bed asleep.” Kate tugs each feather and the poor skin resists until it loses its modesty. Purple bruises and raw red holes mark the naked breast. Everything here has just died, or has just been born, or has just done a poo.  

        P.J. is not old enough for confession, so I am dropped alone in Ballygar Market Square on Saturday morning. Dad says that one day I’ll serve mass for him the way he did here when he was a boy. He says his uncle Figary was the local artist commissioned by the Canon to paint the Stations of the Cross. The Canon reared up when he got a bill for 15 Stations. Dad eyebrows slide up his forehead, but it’s a story that asks too much of me, and besides, I’m too nervous to reply. He’ll be in the Forest Hotel when I’m finished, he tells me. Then we’ll go to the bog to cut turf with the others. 

        The town square is packed with children and nobody looks like me. My hair is long and falls to my collar. I have a fringe that mom makes into a wave with a wet comb. She sings, ‘The sailor with the navy-blue eyes’ to me when she combs my hair. I do not like waves in my hair because I am a boy. I stand near the edge of the square. I am soft and lost, a see-through skin of feelings. The local children are all thin, fast, and assured. Their games tease, pinch, and test each other, and they kick up red dust around me. At some invisible signal, the square drains of children. I walk towards the church, where the last one of them has already entered. There are three doors. One is for boys and one for girls. I don’t know which one to use, so I go in the middle door. The boys are on the left side of the church. I go into the last pew, kneel and practice my confession.

        An hour later I have a perfect confession ready to swap for forgiveness, and there is nobody left on either side of the church. I have moved forwards so that I am level with the confessional booth. I push open the door and go inside. It is dark and cool and restful with an old dry smell. The booth is square, with a kneeler to the right beneath a black enamelled grille at face level. On a ledge under the grille is a copy of the Confiteor.

        ‘Oh my God, because Thou art so good, I am heartily sorry that I have offended thee, and with the help of Thy most gracious mercy, I will never offend Thee again.’

        At first, I cannot see or hear anyone behind the partition, so I wait a bit. Then there is a far away murmur, and I begin.

        “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It is four weeks since my last confession, and these are my sins.”

        The voice behind the grille becomes a little louder, then it stops. I continue:

        “Not saying morning prayers, not helping my mom with the washing up …”

        This time the voice is different. Sharp and serious. It’s closer, but I can’t hear the words. They fade away, and I begin again.

        “Not tidying up my room, thinking bad thoughts …”

        The grille rattles back with force and the head of an elderly man thrusts out and shouts,

        “WILL YOU SHUT UP!!!”

        The grille slams shut again. The silence that follows is big enough to hide the Summer Holidays in. I stare at the grille, which slowly emerges in detail, as my eyes become accustomed to the darkness. There is muttering and deep sighing on the other side. 

        The grille opens again, slowly this time. The same elderly man looks at me. He has a scarlet scarf around his shoulders. He looks tired.

        “Well, now,” he says. “On yeer holidays are ye?”

        “Yes, Father,” I say.

        “Good boy, good boy. I was hearing confession on the other side. Off ye go now … Bless me Father …”

        “Bless me Father, for I have sinned …”

#

After confession Dad is waiting in the Zephyr. I sit next to him in the front. Our drive follows a boreen by the River Suck.

        “There was a time,” Dad says to me, “when I was the only one of my classmates still studying. I was 15 years of age, when Marty and I went down with Jack Keane and the Lomas twins to cut the turf. I drove the cart across the ford and the donkey shied up when it saw an eel in the water. The cart heeled over and myself within it. Marty had good sport that day on the bankside. He didn’t lift a finger to right the cart. But Jack Keane put a shoulder to it and, whatever happened, but we got the cart across.”

        When I hear Dad telling a story, something happens to me. My mind starts working in a different way: it relaxes and grows bigger, softer, further away. And a small version of me is lowered through the coils of the story and slides into the centre of it. And I confess that I am different, and I don’t understand Ireland, until the moment in Dad’s story when I am the donkey seeing the strange silver eel out of the corner of my eye, or I am Dad losing control of the cart in front of mocking Uncle Marty, who is chewing hay seeds on the river bank. The donkey shies, but not like shy on my birthday or shy like a coconut. And the eel heels the cart over, because if my heel turns over I will be upside down.  

        “We began to clear the heather with billhooks to expose the turf beneath. The older one of the Lomas twins was impatient, his mind was on the dance that night at Newcross, and didn’t he put a match to the heather. The ground was dry and there was a breeze. The fire leaped across the bushes and we couldn’t put it out. The bog blazed and we ran away. That night the Guards called at the house and they asked Marty did we know who did it. We said we didn’t know. We told a lie. But the whole night long you could hear the birds over the bog, caoining for their young. If my eyes ever closed that night, I dreamed I was awake.”

        The boreen leads us to a track which winds over the bog. The ground is rooty and dark. I see Ellen, P.J. and the cousins bending before a low bank of earth. No trees or bushes mark the place. Wiry heather endures, but there are no birds. A donkey stands in front of a little wooden cart. I see ridges and lines in the bog from the last harvest. My cousin Cian winks at me and slides the leading edge of a cutting tool into the bog, lifting out dense, wet bricks of springy turf. 

        “Here, take the sleán, cuz.” Cian hands me the tool, but I can’t make it cut. He holds it with me, pretending I am doing most of the work. The bog slices like the liver we eat every Tuesday for school dinners, snicking through roots and nerves. 

        Ellen wobbles past in her high-heeled sandals and leather effect pinafore that she has sewn herself. She holds the turf at arm’s length between finger and thumb, keeping hands and holiday clothes clean as each sod is lobbed into the cart. Maire and Grainne stay close to her, touching the pinafore with the back of their hands as Dad takes photographs with his plastic Kodak that has a hole in the side. Later, he finds a white stripe across every photo, like an asteroid landing in the bog. 

        On the ferry home, Ellen says it’s her last family holiday. She is arguing with Mom. I’m not ready for the end of family holidays. I’m 9. I’m not ready for the end of anything. I fall asleep on a bench next to Mom, as the seagulls wheel and cry across the deck.

Michael Kelly has been an Advanced Skills EAL teacher in London, a teacher trainer/ book illustrator in Bangladesh, a volunteer at Chiswick Women’s Refuge, a programme manager at ‘The Ministry of Stories’, and a stained-glass artist. He completed a Writer /Teacher M.A. in 2016 and now writes full time.