Pope Patrick by Peter De Rosa

Author:Peter De Rosa [Rosa, Peter De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80449-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

This was to be the longest night of Cardinal Burns’s life. He’d not thought of Flick of Boston for weeks but now he saw Knife’s heart attack as a blessing from God.

The night was a chloroformed blur of unending prayers, kneeling, moving along the benches, standing. He felt alternatively drugged and delirious.

The fourth station began at 12:30. At 1:30, some went outside to the shelter for a smoke. Burns and Sapieha crept away to the lakeside for a cigar and a swig from Burns’s hip flask. As Burns slapped a swarm of midges that were eating him alive, the flask slipped out of his hand. As he tried to catch it he lost his balance and went into the water. Only the lower part of him got wet but that was bad enough because, when he returned to the hostel to dry off, he found it locked for the night.

“For Chrissake,” he roared, as he banged the door to no avail, “don’t they trust even a cardinal around here?”

The bell rang for the fifth station. It was 2:00 A.M. Burns shivered until the break at 3:00. The sixth station followed at 3:30 with a break an hour later.

Pope, Frank and Charley went out to see the birth of the morning. In lettuce-crisp air, the last bats were skimming the water. In the west, the moon was ready for milking while eastward, over the rim of the hills, the sun was signaling its presence, a pearly light hovered over Kinnagoe.

As they watched, a wind arose. Waves tossed and beat against the shore. Yet the sky was clear and God re-created the world in front of their eyes. Out of chaos and dark night distant mountain ranges appeared, treeless except for a few stunted pines on the lower slopes.

The Pope absorbed everything, drank in the remoteness of the place and its desolation. How he loved the brown bogs, the moorlands, the wet gray mountains, the remote yet strangely familiar farmhouses.

Frank groaned, “No sleep for another seventeen and a half hours.”

At five, they went inside to find the light beginning to reveal the colors in the windows. It was time for the seventh station. This hour, spanning the dawn, was the most difficult. The Pope had to dig Dr. Gadda in the ribs constantly and stop Charley from disturbing everyone with his snoring.

Many a bishop claimed he was killed dead. One confessed he would sell his soul for half a plate of porridge. “Mephistopheles, where are you?”

For morning prayers at 6:30, they were joined by the other pilgrims, who, after a good night’s sleep, looked like members of a different race. Sapieha declared he would like personally to strike a match and burn every procking one of them.

Priests sat on chairs behind the altar rails, and pilgrims went up and knelt beside them for confession while the organ softly played.

The Pope took his turn at confessing, with Charley, as ever, beside him, listening attentively but without surprise.

Cardinal Burns, too, confessed; all he remembered was calling himself a lump of purple shit who deserved to be in purgatory till the place shut.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.