The Exorcised Child

The Exorcised Child

It was the day my mother called “Johnny’s exorcism” that showed me the difference between real outrage, planned outrage and no outrage at all.

A spontaneous overreaction is human, but planned outrage, like we see in politics all the time, is devious and only meant to hide something.

In my family it is an old story usually told by my sisters, with much elation and jubilation, and numerous “Thanks be to gods”.

Several unrelated incidents led to the exorcism.

At six years old, I was showing my three-year-old brother Dennis how much pain I could take. It was just a boy thing, bravado after a Saturday morning “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” show. I pulled out a clump of hair just above where the part should have been — then another and another. I then had a sort of divot in my head.

I had also seen my older sister plucking her eyebrows, so I, being a curious boy, did some of that too.

To add to the mystique, earlier in the year, I had fallen down the back stairs and cracked all my teeth, and the dentist told my parents it would be cheaper if they “just let him eat all the candy he wants and let them fall out. They are just baby teeth anyway.”

To add to my boyish charisma, for six months before my first day of school, I had hung out with my father who was injured at work at the shop. In our time together he inadvertently taught me his vocabulary.

Then I got glasses with a coke-bottle left side and a black eye patch on the right.

That is how I arrived at St. Mary’s school, and when Sister Mary Patrick was trying to keep me from scaring the girls in recess line, something unexpected happened.

I had never realized before that my friends Laurie, Elaine and Pansy were good looking. I smiled at Elaine, and we started to talk, when Mulchahy stepped in front of me and shoved me back. He was accustomed to having his own way, because he was rich and a favorite of the nuns, but it was time for recess to end and I wanted to talk to Elaine.

“Hey,” I said, pulling him back and stepping back in front of him, “Get in line!”

He shoved ahead of me again, turned and glared at me. Glaring being his main weapon, learned at home, I guess. Glaring was not one of my weapons. I grabbed his shirt with both hands and pushed him against the granite wall of the building, “Get in line!” I hissed. I was jerked backwards by a very strong religious force, and I nearly fell to the ground but was held up balanced on my heels. Next I was spun around, and I stood in the clutches of Sister Mary Patrick. She looked over my head and asked, “Mr. Mulchahy, are you alright?”

I guess he was, because she now turned her full force back to me. “I have had enough of you,” she said in a deeper voice than she usually had. “We don’t have time for this.”

She pulled me by my jacket collar, shoved me in front of her and said “March!” She paraded me along the girls’ line pushing me from time to time to get me to move faster, but she didn’t take me into the school. Instead, she pushed me toward the sidewalk on Winter Street and herded me like an animal up past the life-sized statue of St. Joseph and on to the church. Frightened and angry I remembered that my mother had told me no one has a right to put their hands on me unless I tell them it’s okay. I tried to push her away, but she held tight to my collar.

I glared at her below my missing eyebrow, with my one working eye made huge by the thick lens, bared my black-fang teeth, and with the sun glinting off the bare spot on my forehead, I spouted a list of bad names which you should not call a nun.

Soon I was being hustled up the street to the church, and being popped in the head with a folded  umbrella every few steps.

“You no good Goddamn son-of-a-bitch, get your feckin’ hands off me or I’ll beat you within an inch of your life!” This always worked for my father, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I pleaded, but she only glared harder.

“You will leave that child alone, do you hear me?” she demanded.

“What?”

“Leave him alone! In the name of Jesus!”

Damn, I thought, they must really like Mulchahy. I struggled, but she was too strong and wouldn’t let go of my collar, and at some point she began shaking me as if I were one of my sisters’ Raggedy Anne dolls. The sidewalk was wet from an earlier rain, and as she pushed me along, I kept slipping. When I fell, she picked me up by my belt and dragged me to my feet.

“Move!” she demanded.

I had no idea what was happening. I mean Mulchahy started the fight, and where was he? At the door to the church she let go of me for a second and pulled open the door. Then she dragged me inside. “I have had enough of this,” she said spinning me toward her and bending to look directly into my soul.

“Get inside!” she said as we pushed through the second set of doors and into the main expanse of the church. She dragged me down the center aisle, never even stopping for me to anoint myself with holy water.

“Father?” she shouted, and it echoed off the walls of the spacious church. “Father are you here?”

Her calls rattled through the church with an angry insistence, and the air smelled stale and empty and cold. I brushed a fly from my face as the visiting priest stepped from the sacristy to the left of the altar. He was wearing the black pants and jacket and collar of a Catholic priest.

“Yes?” he questioned.

“Sit here!” she said and pushed me down into a pew only a few from the front.

The two of them spoke in hushed voices. I heard, “hair falling out, weight loss, black teeth” I was becoming seriously frightened and looked around the church for the familiar face of Father Carbary, a Skibbereen man like my family. He could keep me from being slain. He was nowhere in sight. “Foul language and blasphemy,” she said, and then she looked at me while still talking to him and said, “And he is exceedingly strong.” She held out her arm to show him the red mark at her wrist where I had grabbed her to try to free myself on the “walk” from the school.

He nodded, turned on his heel, and went back into the sacristy. She returned and stood over me. “I know it’s not your fault, John,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

How the hell could I not hear her? She was only inches from my face. This confused me even more. If it wasn’t my fault, why was I here?

“I know it’s not you.”

“What?”

“Shortly you will be back to yourself.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but this whole Catholic thing had been a confusion since its beginning, and it was now getting to be more than I could handle. She knelt down at the opening to the pew and took both my hands in hers and demanded loudly, “Let this boy alone!” Her eyes frightened me. They were staring into my eyes as if she was trying to see my brain.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll leave him alone.”

“Liar!” she shouted.

She pulled me to my knees at the edge of the pew.

“Now we will pray and wait for the priest.” She began reciting the Our Father. I pulled my hands free and pushed between her and the edge of the wooden pew back. She grabbed for me, but I pushed her away and spun toward the back of the church. I had taken two quick running steps when I ran full force into the purple silk robes the priest had changed into. It was as if I had been a fish caught in a purple net. His hands were suddenly on my shoulders. I still couldn’t understand him completely, but it sounded to me as if he was rolling off a list of saints' names. I bent his little finger with my right hand, but he was strong as a working man and held tight. My heart pumped wildly as I looked to my right to see Sister still kneeling and praying. What the hell was going on?

His voice slipped in and out of English, but there was enough so I could tell he was talking to someone else other than me or Sister, and he was calling on Jesus to help him.

“Are you out of your fecking minds?” I screamed, and it echoed through the church. Off the altar, “fecking mind.” Off the statues of Mary and Joseph, “fecking mind.” Off the pulpit, “mind, mind, mind.”

This was the same place where I sat piously on Sundays with Jake or with my sisters, in the same church where I tried to discern who was a ten-dollar giver and who was a dime giver. It was the same church where I spoke directly to Jesus and listened to his answers, the same church where the sound of the Latin Mass soothed my soul. Now this priest with the foreign accent was asking my name, and the smell of incense was making me nauseous. He sprayed holy water at me, and it ran down my face.

“Who are you?” He insisted. “What is your name?”

“My name is John O’Malley, I live at 197 Purchase Street. You know me,” I turned to Sister and pleaded. “You know me, Sister.”

She blessed herself in horror or guilt.

The priest had retreated entirely to his native language leaving English totally behind. His eyes were raised to the far off ceiling, and he continued to shout. I hauled off and kicked him in the leg with all I had, and his grip loosened for a second. As he reached for his shin, I pulled away, stepped back and stared at him. Sister continued to murmur her prayers. I made the sign of the cross. He stared at me too, for just a second, and then suddenly he looked like someone who just realized he had made a horrible mistake.

He reached out for me, but I stepped back again, “God will put you in hell for this,” I shouted, refusing to let the tears escape from my eyes. I swallowed hard, blinked my eyes, turned away and started toward the door, but since I had to walk in front of the altar, I genuflected … all the way to the floor. Then I walked out of the church, stopping only to anoint myself at the holy water receptacle.

In retrospect, I believe the nun’s outrage was an overreaction.

It was unplanned though, and nothing was expected of it other than the devil would be hard pressed to control the O’Malley boy for a while at least.

Any thinking person could understand why a nun might think I was possessed. I mean I knew all the words a piece-working bedlaster knew, and I used them all on this 25-year-old Sister of Saint Joseph. Her overreaction was only human, but the planned outrage we consistently put up with now is just devious.

I can’t help thinking we should only be outraged when we truly are outraged.

To feign outrage to make ourselves look better, or more holy, or more American, or to make someone else look worse when they are really not, well that is just some kind of sin, I think. Then I walked by myself down the sidewalk past the school to Main Street. I walked alone to a place I had been before. I stepped inside the front door of the taxi stand.

“197 Purchase Street,” I said, “My mother will pay you when we get there.”

I went outside and climbed into the back of the taxi and waited.

When I got home and I told my mother what they had one, she smiled and said, “Johnny, I think they exorcised you.”

She smiled again, let out a small laugh and added, “I hope it worked.”

Then we both laughed.