Gregor held more tightly to the seat in front of his. He was leaning so far over, he was nearly suspended in space. Andy Walsh was consecrating the wine.
“‘…this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant…’”
Andy Walsh raised the chalice in the air. He brought it down again. He took a long sip of it and put it on the altar. Then he looked out across the congregation and sang, in some of the most perfect plainchant Gregor had ever heard,
“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.”
That was when it happened. Right then, with the notes of the plainchant still hanging in the air and Andy Walsh’s arms outspread as if he were being crucified and his head thrown back as if he were about to laugh, everything changed.
It started as a tremor in Andy Walsh’s chin. It became first a stiffening and then a snapped rigidity, as if someone had electrocuted him from behind.
Gregor was out of his seat and in the aisle before he knew what he was doing. He was halfway to the little table where the pitchers had been when Andy Walsh fell.
In death, as in life, Andy Walsh created a scene.
He crashed backward, overturned a chair, and hit the great crucifix hanging on the back wall. The crucifix had been hung and not fastened, with iron rings that slipped over hooks mortared into the wall.
After Andy hit it, it came crashing down after him.
PART TWO
Holy Thursday to Good Friday
Jesus was led away, and carrying the cross by himself, went out to what is called the Place of the Skull (in Hebrew, Golgotha). There they crucified him, and two others with him…
—from the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Friday; taken from John 18:1-19
ONE
[1]
LATER, GREGOR DEMARKIAN WOULD think of the things that had happened immediately after Andy Walsh died, and consider himself witness to a miracle. There should have been panic, pandemonium, and stampede. The church was crammed full. The only breathing space in the room was around the altar. The crucifix had glanced against Andy Walsh’s back and fallen to the side, smashing through the seat of a chair and overturning a small table of candles. The candles had been lit, and one or two of them stayed that way after they hit the carpet. From his vantage point in the center aisle, Gregor could see a tiny flame working to take hold in the brown rayon nap.
The crowd’s first reaction was shock. If it had been allowed to wear off, there would have been a disaster. That it hadn’t been was due entirely to John Cardinal O’Bannion. While everyone else—even Gregor—stayed frozen in place, O’Bannion rose majestically from his pew, strode down the center aisle, climbed the few short steps to the altar and positioned himself behind the lecturn. In his red robes and heavy gold cross he looked, not like a prince of the Church, but simply like a prince, the reigning sovereign of this particular monarchy. It was, Gregor thought, an object lesson in the nature of authority. John O’Bannion was a short, fat, coarse-looking man. Out of uniform, he could be mistaken for the kind of Irish-American workman who thought of his labor union as an eighth sacrament. Faced with a crowd on the edge of hysteria, there was nothing left of that face.
There was a microphone attached to the lecturn, but O’Bannion didn’t use it. He had a good strong bass, resonant and clear, and he used that instead.
“My brothers and sisters in Christ,” he said, leaning as far over the lecturn’s angled shelf as his short body would allow, “as all of you must realize, we have a very serious situation here. Father Walsh has been taken ill. He is at least hurt. He may be in danger of his life. It is extremely important, for Father’s Walsh’s sake and your own, that you keep your seats. Father Dolan, Father Boyd, Sister Mary Scholastica, and I will work out a way to get you out of here as quickly and painlessly as possible. We will endeavor to get the children out first. Until then, I beg of you, sit still and do nothing.”
There was a buzzing in the pews, and a small sob from the ranks of the parochial-school children at the front. There was nothing else, even though the children in the first pews must have been able to see what Gregor could from his place in the aisle: the tiny candle flame had finally got its bite into the carpet. A tiny circle of black had formed near the fallen table and was growing, slowly, retarded not at all by the sea of melted wax around it.
O’Bannion had seen it, too. When Tom Dolan, Declan Boyd, and Sister Scholastica got to him, he whispered into Scholastica’s ear and pointed at the flame. She looked at it, flushed, and ran to put it out. Moments later, Declan Boyd was off in the direction of the anteroom where everyone had been going frantic before the Mass. Scholastica, having put out the fire, had gone to kneel over the body of Andy Walsh. John O’Bannion spoke again to Tom Dolan and then looked down the center aisle at Gregor.