Those Gorgeous Ghosts: Prize-winning Stories with a Catholic Flavor.

Those Gorgeous Ghosts

Prize-winning Stories with a Catholic Flavour

Leo Madigan

For Mary Shepley

Copyright 2013 by Leo Madigan

Published by Fatima-Ophel Books on Smashwords

Contents.

1. Those Gorgeous Ghosts

2. The Siberian Swimmer

3. The Will of Quintus Kirkwood

4. A Coven of Cowls

5. The Protest of Abel

6. The Seduction of Fausto Batista

7. Our Lady of the Icehouse

8. The Death of Father Appleston

9. Golden Gloves

10. The Exorcising of St. Anton

11. The Falkland Twins

12. The Other Two

13. The Kambala Buffaloes

14. The Bogus Confession

Author’s Page

Those Gorgeous Ghosts.

Well, young Toby, born 1882, died 1904 after a fall from a horse, I’ll have to clean your tombstone soon or these facts will be lost to posterity.

I have some children for you. There were no deceased for the retort for two days. Retort is the word we use for the furnace box where the dead are cremated. You won’t have seen one. It’s like a big washing machine, but you won’t have seen one of those either, so you’ll have to take my word for it. These infants have been waiting in my freezer. When Burt smuggles them around from the clinic I baptize each one and then wrap him, or her, in a strip of linen. I don’t know if I should, but I baptize them. I asked the priest years ago and he said the Church teaches that baptism can only be administered to the living, but he added that I should continue the practice if I felt moved to. It couldn’t do any harm, he said, and who knew that the Lord wasn’t using me to tag the precious wee victims for the nurseries of heaven.

*

Hello Dimitri, who passed into eternal glory at the age of 72, and hello Agnes, his spouse of 50 years. It’s me again, Nat Turquel. Eight embryos yesterday. I entrusted them to old Sarah Wilkes, sprinkled their ashes among the flowers that her daughter keeps so tidy at the foot of her grave.

We have a new President. I haven’t noticed any changes and I don’t suppose you will either.

*

Maria Sacrabelli, whose voice thrilled opera lovers on all five continents, R.I.P. Where are you from, Maria Sacrabelli? There’s no record of you in the Ranfurly library or the district archives. I guess you were too busy on the five continents to give a thought to our town. The puzzle is, how did you finish up here? Why weren’t those five continents vying for your remains to grace their pantheons? Or did you die here, in the clinic? Did the knife that killed the unborn kill you too? The five continents could do without that sort of publicity. Opera lovers probably have no stomach for real tragedy. Anyway, here is a little girl for you to love with lullabies. Burt says she screamed when they plucked her from the womb. Cherish her.

*

Geraldine Skinner, much loved. Twenty years ago today they laid you here. I remember it well. The Women’s Services Clinic had just opened as an annex to the Ranfurly Public Hospital. Burt, the hospital janitor, had brought me the first batch of little victims and I entrusted their ashes to you. I worked it out this morning that at a conservative estimate of 5 a day I’ve managed to baptize and honourably dispose of the remains of 365,000 to date. Quite an army of innocents.

Here are 23 more for you. Teach them to pray for their mothers. Those mothers arrived yesterday on a bus. Apparently there was a cut-price deal to mark the anniversary.

*

Mr Lacey. Washed marble! Fresh flowers! I see someone has been tending your grave. I’ll wager it wasn’t your grandsons. They are up to their old tricks, throwing stones at me, calling me names. It’s Bone Burner now. More I wish there was some way to communicate to them the sort of man you were, the quality blood that flows in their veins. Do you remember when I was 9 and used to deliver the newspaper to your house. You gave me a medal and told me it had belonged to your father. You hinted then, with masterful tact, that when I was being equipped for life, heaven had withheld physical beauty– all right, I am a bit of a Quasimodo – but that if I lived up to the teachings that the medal represented I would be more beautiful in eternity than I could imagine. I still have the medal, Mr. Lacey. Here it is around my neck. Still hoping, still praying. It’s a long slog to eternity though, isn’t it?

Here’s another little one for you to care for. There’s more ash in a cigarette, I reckon. The mother was 13.

*

Simon, 6, Vivienne, 5, and Rory, 2, who perished in fire, 1917, sorely missed, here are 10 companions. Look after them and teach them all you know. They weren’t as fortunate as you. They didn’t have the advantage of your years, indeed they had no years at all. They weren’t missed; they were a nuisance.

*

Wanda Brodowski, my godmother. No more adoptions, Mrs. Brodowski! No more little refugees! I was sacked from the crematorium last month. Using company fuel and facilities for my own purposes. Burt was fired from the hospital too. His charge was misappropriating material from the disposal bins. Finding another job isn’t easy for a man over 40 – and he’s got seven children. Dismissal is not so traumatic for me. I’m older and I feel the end is near anyway. In fact, I know it is. My little ones tell me so in lovely, subtle ways. They have celebrations planned but they won’t tell me what form they’ll take.

*

On Friday, 13th June, Nat Turquel was buried from Holy Rosary Church on Sycamore Street, Ranfurly, an event which would have passed unnoticed except for a phenomenon which suspended the town’s activities for the day.

At dawn a murmur was heard like a zephyr through aspens, and all at once infants, in gowns brighter than new coins, slid down sunbeams to emerge from beyond the hills, the woods, the river, dozens, hundreds, thousands of them their faces aglow with majesty.

Pedestrians were stunned to immobility. Traffic stalled against invisible walls.

The gentle invaders entered the church where Nat’s body lay and sang with such joy that it seemed a nuptial rather than a requiem.

Afterwards they carried Nat’s coffin through the streets, not on their tiny shoulders like conventional pallbearers, but from a hundred tiny hands to a hundred tiny hands. The progress was slow and reverent. They would often pause near people who had terminated lives to acknowledge them with a sad, but not unkindly, solemnity

At 3pm they laid the coffin in front of the Clinic entrance and, like a field of grain bowed by a breeze, they knelt and prayed for three mesmerizing hours. Then they took up their cargo and bore it on to the cemetery.

At dusk the sun sent thick beams of light through the horizon clouds. The little ones, still alert and luminous with joy, moved quickly off the streets. Those gorgeous ghosts, with a resplendently transfigured Nat Turquel in their midst, jumped onto the beams, and moved upwards. It was as if sunlight was an escalator returning them to the Kingdom from which they had come to take their benefactor, transformed into a being of ethereal beauty, back with them to the Source of Life.

The Siberian Swimmer.

When he came to think of it, Jack hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of words with Ivan Potopov until their post-graduate year at Oxford – Anselm College. Then, as they were two of the three Excelsior candidates, tradition allotted them one of the splendid mahogany chambers with their own street entrance in the East Tower.

Ivan was the intellectual, the poet, the Slavic sage. He was working in some obscure branch of theology, biblical exegesis or something, and Jack’s physics cliques didn’t have occasion to socialize with his. Furthermore, he belonged to no team. He had the build for sport. His frame invited athletic expression and his appearance – skin and hair virtually the same colour, a sort of oatmeal white – would have boosted Anselm’s prestige on the tennis courts, or on the cricket pitch, but he was never seen on these, not even as a spectator. To Jack d’Evelyn, in those days, the game, any game, defined and justified existence.

He was aware of Ivan’s popularity, of course, and privately admired him. Being Russian gave him an air of mystery, and his placid nonchalance suggested he was spared the upheaval of human passions. The young are drawn to peers who seem to be immune to the tides of insecurity.

Tough luck, d’Evelyn! Richard Bezant said when he learned Jack would be sharing the chambers with Ivan. It’ll be like living with Rasputin. Jack remembered thinking at the time that even Rasputin’s company would be more congenial than Bezant’s.

Jack arrived a day late that term. When he entered with his cases Ivan was at his desk, intent on his books and taking notes. Among the icons, tutorial schedules and lecture items pinned to his pegboard was a large print of an old master; a naked Susanna steeping out of her garden pool, spied on from the thickets by lust-seized elders. That’s brazen, Jack thought. Ivan didn’t look up. Jack mumbled something about being sorry for disturbing him.

Not! Ivan muttered. Then, as Jack was unpacking, the Russian slowly raised his head. His eyes were trained in Jack’s direction but his speech seemed independent of his gaze. Of all men you are the most handsome, he said. Your lips are moist with grace, for God has blessed you forever.

Jack stepped back. He couldn’t remember if he’d said anything, but he was sure disconcerted.

Then, as if struck by rogue inspiration, Ivan returned to his papers.

Jack had finished unpacking and was arranging my own books when, without preamble, Ivan said, That’s the Jerusalem version. The Russian isn’t near as dramatic. The Latin – speciósus forma – is too staid. Want a cigarette? At that point his tiger-green eyes made contact with Jack’s. They were like barrels of a loaded shotgun, steady and silent and commanding. Jack was alarmed at the sensation that perhaps it was he, Jack d’Evelyn, who was the wimp.

I don’t…well…I guess…!

Try one of these. Soviet military issue. You’ll need fire-proof lungs, but they’re cheap. He fumbled it between his lips and Ivan lit it.

The cigarette all but sabotaged Jack’s respiratory system yet he recalled the experience with something like affection for the impressionable, arrogant youth who was himself all those years ago, and admiration for a fellow who, he was to learn, was an innocent, so innately noble that kings might pay him homage.

***

Jack was shaken out of his reveries by the flight officer, uniformed in black and gold like a quality cigar, introducing himself. Seems all of our first class passengers are at the bar, the officer said.

Jack explained that he was taking advantage of the solitude to record a few notes.

For your Stockholm speech, is it? – congratulations, by the way.

Something more demanding than that. A college reunion. Anselm. I’ve had no contact in 30 years. I’m trying to recall what I can. The pilot said he was sure Dr. d’Evelyn would be the shining star on the alumni roll. Jack pulled a wry face. I doubt it. Their web site speaks of ambassadors, umpteen knighthoods, and any number of M.P.’s. Richard Bezant, too.

Sir Richard Bezant who is Chairman of this airline, and practically every company in the City?

I reckon it’s him. He’s standing for University Chancellor soon, I believe. Top dog Dickey, we used to call him.

Top dog Dickey, the flight officer repeated with amusement as he made his way to the bar to continue his in-flight hospitality routine.

***

Indeed, that post graduate year Richard Bezant was elected Excelsior. He was pompous, Jack recalled, and with a monumental compulsion to be centre stage, commanding operations.

Excelsior was the name given to Anselm’s top student, the college version of head prefect, third in moral command under God and the Provost. As a lesson in democracy, each year’s Excelsior was voted for during the final days of the graduating term. Everyone, students, faculty and even the senior domestic staff, could cast a ballot. That year Bezant, Potopov and Jack were the nominees. Jack couldn’t figure out at the time how Bezant got to be Excelsior. He couldn’t have been the students’ natural choice. Perhaps his Coriolanus mien intimidated the freshers into voting for him. And, of course, he was the faculty’s Blue Ribbon boy. He was never out of step with authority and could be relied on to set a standard. He was intelligent, a superb swimmer, a nimble bowler and presentable, if you were impressed with the sharp, drill-sergeant look. Jack felt, though, that he would end up a traitor, or an art collector or something. In fact, until the last elections he had been a cabinet minister.

The Excelsior’s Chamber was next to Jack and Ivan’s. On Bezant’s first visit he detected the decorously naked Susannah whereupon his letterbox lips formed the sentence, I’d remove that if I were you! It was almost a command, and as such exceeded his remit, yet Ivan obliged, and handed the poster to Bezant who proceeded to instruct them in their responsibilities and his expectations of them. From his desk Ivan listened dutifully but as Bezant was leaving the room he sighed, Ah, why are you not my brother, nursed at my mother’s breast! Then, if I met you outdoors, I could kiss you without people thinking ill of me. One couldn’t be sure if he was addressing the abducted Susannah or the righteous Richard, but there was a tense moment such as follows an earthquake.

Canticum Canticorum, Ivan explained. 8.1. More lucid than the Hebrew, wouldn’t you say?

Jack soon found that Ivan was forever quoting scripture like that, always a pertinent quote, faintly suggestive and spoken with dignity veiling humour.

It’s my thesis. He explained when Jack questioned the habit. The Erotic