short story

St John of the Miraculous Lake

Rebecca O’Connor

For fear of the sound of his own voice. This nettle-eyed child won’t open his mouth for fear of the sound. He goes up to the old hospital and throws seven boys names, six girls names, five fruit at the wall, jumping and spinning each time before catching the ball. But the words stay in his head.
Sometimes he plays nurses with the girl next door. He lies still as a doll while she jabs him with lolly pop sticks until his willy stiffens in his trousers. In his head he is saying ‘Yes nurse,’ ‘It hurts just there,’ ‘Thank you nurse.’
He is like St Bernadette of Lourdes. Except that he is a boy. And he hasn’t seen the Virgin Mary. And he doesn’t live in France or even speak French. But he is a saint, he knows that much for sure. Heard people say he was touched, people who thought he might be deaf as well as mute. It’s only one ear is deaf. The other one can hear just fine. He feels most holy when he stands at the window at dusk looking down at the lake. It is a lake of blessed water, healing water. Oh, to go down there, but there is no going down anymore. Not even when the weather changes. Not even when he is grown.
That lake never got warm. But they used to go there, he and his older brother – as often as they could, and as soon as they could – not long after you could see your own breath, and before the air was abuzz with midges. Swimming near to the jetty was the thing, where you could feel the tadpoles nibble at your skin. It was a peculiar sensation, skin burning with the cold and them nibbling. They scooped the jelly into buckets and brought it home, to watch the mystery of it turn. But they always just missed that moment when the spawn became full-grown frogs – too careless, too preoccupied, or too subtle a change to see, whatever it was.
It was down there he had one of his visions, only he saw nothing. There was a moment when suddenly it got warmer, suddenly the birds were making more noise, more flutter, when the air became visible like a swarm, and he looked up at the chinks of sky between the trees as if they were blue bees. His head back until his neck cricked, his feet slowly sinking into the pine needles. The insects humming, whirring. And the sound of Ben thwacking branches to either side of him with a stick. It was the sound of a small wood fire, but it wasn’t. It was Ben saying ‘Come on, we’ve got to find him,’ and pushing through the undergrowth. Then the noise stopped. He stooped to flit a stone across the lake. It sputtered, made a single ripple, and sank.
He even went back and looked for Jake in the shed. As if they’d forgotten him, as if their wee brother hadn’t been with them only a few minutes before. It was that kind of vision: though he saw nothing, he could feel time running him round like a headless chicken. He looked in the old tumble drier – Jake’s favourite hiding place – but he wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. He was with Ben. But he wasn’t with Ben. He went down again to the jetty and found Ben on his hunkers looking for perfect skimming stones. ‘He’s about here somewhere,’ he said, ‘the little shite. He’s hiding.’ That was the sort of thing could make you laugh, Ben talking like he was grown up. But he started to cry instead.
They hid in the shed, looking at the pictures in their children’s bible and in Ben’s comics, eating cola bottles and space ships. They said nothing. Wasps flittered in and out of their paper nest on the ceiling. Then Ben went behind the upturned table with the broken leg and John into the tumble drier. Soon his legs went dead. He liked it, and he liked the smell of dust and turpentine and unwashed vegetables. But he was scared too. Then he heard his father’s voice calling, and that was when he had his second vision. It was a smaller one than the first: he only got a kind of ringing in his ears, and the inside of the tumble drier went white with light for a second and then was dark again, darker than before. His father was calling ‘Be-en! Jo-ohn! Ja-ake!’, his voice all odd and tinny. Then the lid was off, and he was lifted free of the drier, his legs frozen and a horrible swelling pain in them that made him want to knock his knees from their sockets. ‘Where’s Jake?’ his father was saying. ‘Where’s Jake, where’s Jake, where’s Jake,’ and shaking him. Then shaking Ben.

He never spoke after that. His mother went like a baby, like Jake used to be, with swollen eyelids and blubbery lips. Her tongue grew enormous, and her skin was scorch-marked with tears. His father was jaundiced looking. They both terrified him, as did the neighbours with their freshly laundered hankies and soapy hands, lifting him off the ground, lifting him on to their unfamiliar warm laps with tears swilling in their eyes. Ben was too old for sitting on laps. He didn’t want them touching him. He sat away from them – near their mother, always near her – and watched. It was after he had told them we only wanted to show Jake the frogs, only wanted to show him where they lived, take them grown up frogs back home. And after they’d gone to look, and then found Jake in the holy water, and sent him to the hospital, the one that’s closed now, and left him there for good.
Then the bottom bunk was empty. John carried on talking to Jake anyway, just like he always did, except in his head. Words flooded through him, drowned him. Then his mother removed the bunk and replaced it with a single bed.

He isn’t used to sleeping so close to the ground so he’s started bedwetting and falling out. Now he has a dark green plastic sheet he sleeps on so when he pees himself it doesn’t go down into the mattress. He hates the smell of his own pee. He hates the cold mackintosh feel of the undersheet. It reminds him of this one time when they went up into the mountains and it rained and rained, and all they had to eat were Rich Tea biscuits. Sometimes he hears Ben crying and goes in his room and says ‘Ben’ and Ben says ‘What?’ and he say ‘Nothing’.
His mother has taken to wearing a pendant around her neck with a little picture of Jake, which he kisses every night before bedtime. His mother tells him Jake is an angel up in heaven. He is the boy in the bottom bunk, underneath him, it’s hard to think of him up above. But he does. And he says prayers every night and asks him to look over him, even though he’s underneath. When he prays it is so quiet that he can hear moths fluttering against the light in the hallway. And when he’s in bed the dim light through the window over the door stings his eyes, but he won’t let his mother turn it off. Then he hears her, and he closes his eyes tight, feeling her shadow move across them and the warmth of her body stooping over him, her breath smelling of cloves.
‘Are you sleeping, John darling? Are you? Don’t you worry, everything is going to be alright. Mammy loves you very much. You say a wee prayer for me, hah, and for Ben, and for Jake. You’re my little angel. What would I do without you? I’m awful tired …’
The trick for getting rid of her is to moan and turn over on to his deaf ear so’s he can’t hear her anymore. He hates this mother who comes to him in the night.
He needs one more vision to secure his place in heaven at the right hand side of God. It’s the only place will do, otherwise he’d feel like he was missing out. But the visions have all dried up lately.
His front tooth is loose. That could be a sign. And the girl next door has stopped speaking to him. Maybe she senses something. They were supposed to get married, now she won’t even look at him. Maybe the next miracle is to stop his mother crying all the time. Then the whole neighbourhood would raise him up on eagle’s wings, make him to shi-ine like the sun, he sings in his head. Oh praise be to St John of the Miraculous lake. He can hear them clear as day.
He knows what to do. And so he gets himself a bucket from the shed, a long time after Jake has been away, and he makes his way down to the lake, the forbidden place. He doesn’t meet anyone he knows on the road. Safe over, and over the stile into the field that leads down to the swimming place. It is the place of the first miracle, the sacred place. He steps tentatively into the water, crouches down and drags the bucket through the water. One bucket of holy water is all it will take. One bucket will fill the whole basin where they used to keep the frogs. And then it will be the holy fount, and people will come to him to be healed. And he will heal his mother, and his father, and Ben. He will wash away their weirdness, Amen, Gloria in Eggshells! That’s what they’ll say at his first communion, when he’s brought up before the priest on the altar, bathed in light.
The water is soaking through his trainers.
Next thing there’s somebody in the field, a flurry of colour running towards him. He turns his back on her. Maybe she won’t see him, or know it’s him. He needs more time. He needs to be able to get the water back up to the basin. But when he turns to look she’s still running, and it’s clear now that it’s his mother. He tightens his grip on the handle of his bucket. There’s mud on his hands. She’s nearer, scooping him up with words; then she’s here taking him right up in her arms. He clings, water splashing over the sides of the bucket onto his hands.
‘Put it down. Put it down,’ she screams, grappling with his fingers.
It falls away, splashes into the water. Then he knows the only thing he can do is save her alone, so he slowly raises his eyes up to hers, lifts his muddy hand, and dabs her forehead with the holy water. He holds her, very quiet, very still, as her eyes dry into the lake.