Moment in time -1947

ARMAGH, NORTHERN IRELAND  - 14th November 1947

SNOW CAME EARLY that year. The Irish valley was content to snuggle beneath its white quilt. Its slumber was disturbed only by the cawing crows as they ripped into the body that had been casually strung on a part of the wire fence that surrounded the old Abbey. 

Soon their frenzied activity would disappear from sight for darkness was falling although it was only three in the afternoon. Someone had prepared their meal for them by considerately gutting the body like one would a fish, festooning its entrails around its neck. The bacchanalian feast provided by the contents of the belly thoughtfully wrapped in stomach membrane, washed down by gastric and intestinal juices had proved irresistible to the bird life that flocked in from Lough Leigh’s south shore. The crows following in their wake were now picking over the remains of the carrion meat. 

The man trudging along the road that led to the Abbey passed within a hundred feet of the cadaver without being aware of it. Liam Finegan had other things on his mind and his eyes were firmly focussed ahead on the structure that stood out forbidding and silent against the darkening sky. He started to rasp as the incline to the Abbey’s front porch steepened; his icy breath giving him the appearance of an ice dragon. Stopping for a moment to quieten his breathing, he listened. 

Satisfied that nothing was stirring from within, he quickly covered the remaining few yards to the large oak door and hastily deposited the bundle he had been carrying on the doorstep. Instinctively, he went to press the doorbell and paused, his finger hovering. Looking behind him, he could see his footprints clearly visible in the snow for all to see. 

"Not yet!" he thought. 

Mary Finegan’s brother made his way back down the path to the main road where he had parked his car and drove away in search of a telephone. 

"Now who could that be?" she thought as the telephone beside her shrilled. Mrs. Cleary had been a housekeeper at St. Brendan’s Abbey for as long as anyone could remember. Her sixty-eight years had done nothing to diminish her vigor or her temper, which seemed to become shorter as the years rolled on. The Abbey’s books lay before her and she was attempting to balance them, a job she found particularly odious. She could do without this interruption.  

“Yes!” she snapped into the receiver. 

“You’ll find something I have left for you on the doorstep!” 

Before she could ask who it was the phone went dead in her ear. 

“Damn!” she exclaimed aloud as she pushed her chair back and made her way to the front door. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! What kind of a delivery service is that?” 

She flung open the door ready to confront anyone standing there. That was the moment when the banshee announced himself to her with an anguished cry and she stepped back in astonishment. The infant lying before her on the doorstep was in need of sustenance and sought her attention in the only way it knew how. 

Meanwhile, some distance away, Liam Finegan was now checking on the other child that lay in the backseat of his car. He too, like his brother, was hungry and was crying for his milk.

“Soon! Little man! Soon!” Liam whispered soothingly as he pulled the blanket tighter around the baby. “Nothing as grand as an Abbey for you, I’m afraid!” The uncomprehending child smiled up at him and gurgled in anticipation. 

 “But who knows? Perhaps you’ll be happier in an orphanage anyway?” 

He started the car and drove off being careful to drive slowly for fear of skidding on the frozen surface.

The finding of the infant on the doorstep was one of two memorable events in the life of St. Brendan’s Abbey that month. The second was the finding of the body on the fence. The pathologist performing the postmortem surmised that the young man had still been alive when the birds had started to peck and rip away at his viscera. The trauma the boy suffered when he had been hung up on the fence and disemboweled was not the thing that killed him though. No, the thing that killed him, the pathologist concluded, was having his heart ripped out shortly thereafter. The coroner at the inquest in consideration of the man’s family omitted that snippet of information though. It also saved him the tricky problem of explaining why the boy’s heart could not be found. 

Only his parents mourned Patrick Grogan’s passing. 

“When he ran away from home, I never thought he would end up this way!” Mrs. Grogan sobbed to anyone that would listen.  

Patrick’s father could only comment disbelievingly over and over, “What in God’s name was he doing in Northern Ireland?” 

Lucy Reardon attended the funeral of the boy who had buggered her at school. The shame she had felt ever since the day he had cornered her in the toilets seemed to lift from her shoulders as she knelt in the church and stared at his coffin. Inside was her tormentor, the boy that had done that 'dirty thing' to her. Could she ever forgive him? Her silent affirmation was proof enough; her sincerity was unmistakable in its intent. Over and over, the same mantra whirled around in her brain,  

“Please, God! Let him roast in Hell forever!”