Reading Online Novel

Precious Blood(75)



“Wonderful.”

“In the beginning, I thought the allusion might be straightforward. A reference to what happened in Black Bock Park. But John Smith told me there hadn’t been a goat, or the carcass of a goat, at the scene.”

“Of course there wasn’t. It was all stray cats and dogs. Animals going to wild. What was close at hand. I don’t think what happened was premeditated.”

Gregor nodded. “That’s the impression I get, too. Something innocuous that went very haywire. Possibly under the influence of drugs.”

The Cardinal’s suspicion was back, and his bristling edge-of-anger voice. “Why drugs? There was never any evidence of drugs.”

“There wouldn’t have been, if they were the kind of drugs I’m thinking of. LSD, peyote, psilocybin. Hallucinogens.”

“There was never any evidence of drugs,” the Cardinal repeated firmly.

Right, Gregor thought. “After a while I thought of something else,” he went on. “I was wondering if a goat might mean something, in a religious sense. If it might be part of some standard symbolic system.”

“Standard symbolic system?”

“I took an art course in college where they told us all about the symbolism in religious paintings,” Gregor said. “Eyes on a plate for St.—Lucy was it?”

“That’s right,” the Cardinal said. “Because St. Lucy had her eyes put out as part of her martyrdom for the Lord. There are things like that. St. Agnes is often represented by a lamb, because her name means lamb, like in the Agnus Dei.”

“What does a goat mean?”

The Cardinal threw up his hands. “I’ve never heard of a goat used as religious symbolism for anything,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Isn’t there a list of this kind of thing?”

“There are probably a couple of hundred lists of this land of thing,” the Cardinal said. “This isn’t like—like the teams in a baseball league or the fifty United States, where everybody agrees on what they are. There are dozens of systems of symbols of the kind you’re talking about. And some saints have more than one symbol even in the same system, and some symbols serve for two or three or six saints. Then there are the various categories—”

“Categories?”

“The saints as saints. The saints as patron saints. The saints as martyrs.”

“Patron saints,” Gregor said. He liked that. A patron saint would serve double duty, saying who but also saying what. Maybe there was a St. Margaret, patron saint of euthanasia. Or a St. Declan, patron saint of associate pastors being driven relentlessly insane by their parish priests. Gregor decided he must be tired. He was getting silly.

“Patron saints,” he repeated firmly. “I’d like to start with those. There must be a list of those, surely?”

“There’s an official list,” the Cardinal said pleasantly, “because to be a real patron saint, you have to be designated as such by Rome. However—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I might as well. The middle ages, you know, were both highly religious and highly disorganized. In church terms, I mean. The procedures for canonization weren’t in place. A lot of times, localities circumvented what procedures there were and just declared some recently dead worthy to be committing miracles, and there you were. The same is true of patron saints. There’s an official list, but there are also other lists.”

“Would Andy Walsh have known anything about these other lists?”

“Probably quite a bit. About some of them, at any rate. Because of the nuns. You probably don’t know much about the history of Catholic education in this country, Mr. Demarkian, but I can tell you it was mostly an exercise in crisis response. There’s a lot about separation of Church and State these days, in the schools as in every other place, but it wasn’t like that then, in the nineteenth century. There were plenty of prayers in the public schools in those days, and those prayers were Protestant. Aggressively Protestant. The Church’s response was to build the largest private school system on earth and build it first.”

“But what—”

“Fast is the important word. We needed teachers, and we needed those teachers to be nuns. Lay teachers would have cost too much and made the tuitions too high for parishioners to afford. So we got ourselves a lot of nuns, we trained them in no time flat, and we sent them out to teach. The problem was, they were trained and not educated. A few of them were marvels of intelligence. A lot of them were essentially uneducated peasant girls who hung onto “the superstitions of their native Ireland—most of them, in the beginning, came from Ireland—with all ten fingers. They passed those superstitions, and their more conventional but still unorthodox traditions, down to generation after generation of students.”