And too bad he couldn’t stay longer. But this was only a stopover, scheduled at the last minute as he was leaving Rome for New York. He was one of the Vatican’s veteran investigators of the miraculous, and the Holy See had asked him to look into what lately had become known as the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh.
The Weeping Virgin had been gathering an increasing amount of press over the past few weeks, first the Irish papers, then the London tabloids, and recently the story had gained international attention. People from all over the world had begun to flock to the little village in County Cork to see the daily miracle of the painting of the Virgin Mary that shed real tears. Healings had been reported—cures, visions, raptures. “A New Lourdes!” screamed tabloid headlines all over the world.
It had been getting out of hand. The Holy See wanted the “miracle” investigated. The Vatican had no quarrel with miracles, as long as they were real. But the faithful should not be led astray by tricks of the light, tricks of nature, and tricks of the calculated human kind.
They chose Vincenzo for the task. Not simply because he’d already had experience investigating a number of miracles that turned out to be anything but miraculous, but because the Vatican had him on a westbound plane this weekend anyway, to Sloan-Kettering Memorial in Manhattan to try an experimental chemotherapy protocol for his liver cancer. He could make a brief stop in Ireland, couldn’t he? Take a day or two to look into this weeping painting, then be on his way again. No pain, no strain, just send a full report of his findings back to Rome when he reached New York.
“Tell me, Michael,” Vincenzo said. “What do you know of these miracles?”
“I’ll be glad to tell you it all, Monsignor, because I was there from the start. Well, not the very start. You see, the painting of the Virgin Mary has been gracing the west wall of Seamus O’Halloran’s home for two generations now. His grandfather Danny painted it there during the year before he died. Finished the last stroke, then took to his bed and never got up again. Can you imagine that? ‘Twas almost as if the old fellow was hanging on just so’s he could be finishing the painting. Anyways, over the years the weather has faded it, and it’s become such a fixture about the village that it became part of the scenery, if you know what I’m sayin’. Much like a tree in someone’s yard. You pass that yard half a dozen times a day but you never take no notice of the tree. Unless of course it happens to be spring and it’s startin’ to bloom, then you might—”
“I understand, Michael.”
“Yes. Well, that’s the way it was after being until about a month ago when Seamus—that’s old Daniel O’Halloran’s grandson—was passing the wall and noticed a wet streak glistening on the stucco. He stepped closer, wondering where this bit of water might be trickling from on this dry and sunny day, for contrary to popular myth, it does not rain every day in Ireland—least ways not in the summer. I’m afraid I can’t say that for the rest of the year. But anyways, when he saw that the track of moisture originated in the eye of his grandfather’s painting, he ran straight to Mallow to fetch Father Sullivan. And since then it’s been one miracle after another.”
Vincenzo let his mind drift from Michael’s practiced monologue that told him nothing he hadn’t learned from the rushed briefing at the Vatican before his departure. But he did get the feeling that life in the little village had begun to revolve around the celebrity that attended the weeping of their Virgin.
And that would make his job more difficult.
“There she is now, Monsignor,” Michael said, pointing ahead through the windshield. “Cashelbanagh. Isn’t she a sight.”
They were crossing a one-car bridge over a gushing stream. As Vincenzo squinted ahead, his first impulse was to ask, Where’s the rest of it? But he held his tongue. Two hundred yards down the road lay a cluster of neat little one- and two-story buildings, fewer than a dozen in number, set on either side of the road. One of them was a pub—Blaney’s, the gold-on-black sign said. As they coasted through the village, Vincenzo spotted a number of local men and women setting up picnic tables on the narrow sward next to the pub.
Up ahead, at the far end of the street, a crowd of people waited before a neat, two-story, stucco-walled house.
“And that would be Seamus O’Halloran’s house, I imagine,” Vincenzo said.
“That it would, Monsignor. That it would.”
There were hands to shake and Father Sullivan to greet, and introductions crowded one on top of the other until the names ran together like watercolors in the rain. The warmest reception he’d ever had, an excited party spirit running through the villagers. The priest from Rome was going to certify the Weeping Virgin of Cashelbanagh as an inexplicable phenomenon of Divine origin, an act of God made manifest to the faithful, a true miracle, a sign that Cashelbanagh had been singled out to be touched by God. There was even a reporter from a Dublin paper to record it. And what a celebration there’d be afterward.
Vincenzo was led around to the side of the house to stare at the famous Weeping Virgin on Seamus O’Halloran’s wall.
Nothing special about the painting. Rather crude, actually. A very stiff looking half profile of the Blessed Mother in the traditional blue robe and wimple with a halo behind her head.
And yes indeed, a gleaming track of moisture was running from the painting’s eye.
“The tears appear every day, Monsignor,” O’Halloran said, twisting his cloth cap in his bony hands as if there were moisture to be wrung from it.
“I can confirm that,” Father Sullivan said, his ample red cheeks aglow. “I’ve been watching for weeks now.”
As Vincenzo continued staring at the wall, noting the fine meshwork of cracks in the stucco finish, the chips here and there that revealed the stonework beneath, the crowd grew silent around him.
He stepped closer and touched his finger to the trickle, then touched the finger to his tongue. Water. A mineral flavor, but not salty. Not tears.
“Would someone bring me a ladder, please. One long enough to reach the roof.”
Three men ran off immediately, and five minutes later he was climbing to the top of the gable over the Weeping Virgin’s wall. He found wet and rotted cedar shakes at the point. At his request a pry bar was brought and, with O’Halloran’s permission, he knocked away some of the soft wood.
Vincenzo’s heart sank when he saw it. A cup-like depression in the stones near the top of the gable, half filled with clear liquid. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that water collected there on rainy days—rarely was there a week, even in the summer, without at least one or two rainy days—and percolated through the stones and grout of the wall to emerge as a trickle by the painting’s eye.
The folk of Cashelbanagh were anything but receptive to this rational explanation of their miracle.
“There may be water up there,” O’Halloran said, his huge Adam’s apple bobbing angrily, “but who’s to say that’s where the tears come from? You’ve no proof. Prove it, Monsignor. Prove those aren’t the tears of the Blessed Virgin.”
He’d hoped it wouldn’t turn out like this. He’d hoped discovery of the puddle would be enough, but obviously it wasn’t. And he couldn’t leave these people to go on making a shrine out of a leaky wall.
“Can someone get me a bottle of red wine?” Vincenzo said.
“This may be Ireland, Monsignor,” Father Sullivan said, “but I hardly think this is time for a drink.”
Amid the laughter Vincenzo said, “I’ll use it to prove my theory. But it must be red.”
While someone ran to Blaney’s pub for a bottle, Vincenzo climbed the ladder again and splashed all the water out of the depression. Then he refilled it with the wine.