#irenaeus

The man had a fire all round ‘bout his head and his face, hands size to blot out the sun and a height to him like a far flung mountain more than any of the rolling hills that surrounded the tomb mound where St. Mary’s had been built. Tomb, for that’s what they called the little town he visited that day, the one which Tam had known all his life and naught else besides. Red hair, deep like ocher and blood. Eyes made of hard ice, the sort a boy may slip and cut a gouge in his hands on when he caught himself to keep from busting his nose broken. When Tam saw him, dressed all a funny like a man out of time and place, the air tasted of ash and burnt meat. Offerings at Easter. But he’d come all the same and he’d spoke to the nuns and the nuns had shown him in, and then they’d closed the door with Tam and the man both inside.

Tam was five. He’d been five that day. His birthday. Just five and all alone with a stranger the color of an upsurge of orange and an accent that promised a posh upbringing somewhere in England. Where the betters came from.

“The fine women who run this establishment tell me you’re quite gifted,” the man said.

Tam’s own wariness was well tempered by curiosity, a sense of the familiar where it ought not have been. A sameness. Perhaps kinship.

“I haven’t got a gift on Christmas or even my birthday but once,” Tam said. He wanted the man to know he should choose his words carefully lest he offend those less fortunate than him in his corduroy suit and waistcoat.

“And what gift is that?” the man asked in a calm, agreeable tone, as though willing to humor the round about way Tam had chosen to set the tenor of the interview.

“A secret gift,” said Tam. “From the fairy lady.”

“The fairy lady?” asked the man.

Tam nodded. The room they were in was on the first floor, where all the visiting was done and it had a view of the yard out back, just enough to encompass the chain link fence that divided it in two, one half for mothers, the other for babies.

“With mats in her hair and an empty stare,” said Tam.

The man hummed a note of understanding. “Your English is quite good, Tom,” he said.

Tam pulled his eyes away from the fence. “English is easy,” he said. “And French too.” The man hummed again. “But the fairy lady speaks in whispers no one else can hear. That’s hard sometimes.”

The man’s thick, bloody eyebrows pushed down on his heavy lidded eyes, narrowed them beneath the rims of his spectacles. “Mother [ ] tells me you’ve a knack for tricks, Tom.”

“I’m not mean,” Tam said. “Only fair.”

“And how’s that?” asked the man.

Tam looked at him again, trying to gauge what response he’d get. “It’s the other kids,” he said. “The ones from outside. They pull tricks first, and mean ones too. None of the grownups do a thing. Put up their hands to hide laughs. Somebody has to get even.”

“And that somebody is you?”

“Sure,” said Tam.

The man picked his briefcase up off the floor and laid it across his lap, hands folded on top. “It’s only there’s been a complaint. And I only ever come so far to follow up such complaints. The teachers at the school said you did something not so nice to little Mary-Anne.”

Tam was not entirely surprised this was the line of questioning. Disappointed perhaps. He’d thought that twinge of kinship might make for more interesting conversation, but it was clear this interview would be mind bendingly dull. “Which Mary-Anne?” he asked.

A flash of rage passed over the man’s face. So quick Tam almost questioned if he’d seen it at all. “Don’t be obtuse,” he said.

“I’ve been told I did it,” said Tam. “But I can’t see how, and no one can explain how I did it, so I says I didn’t.”

“You say,” the man corrected.

Tam shut his mouth. He was growing very tired of this conversation and the room felt to be growing very small. “I say I didn’t.” Tam repeated, staring hard into a corner of the room, careful not to glare. Adults hated when babies glared. Without a proper mommy and daddy, there was no right inherent to a baby that let them glare.

“Perhaps,” said the man, “They cannot prove you’ve done it. But I am not so simple to fool and you won’t pull the wool over my eyes, Tom.”

“So you haven’t come to take me up in a real house?” Tam asked. He expected the man to show some guilt or shame in the face of this question when he turned to meet those icy eyes, but there was no softening there.

“No,” the man said.

Tam realized then that he regretted that moment of kinship he’d felt with this stranger. Obviously it had been a trick itself. A mirage of sorts like the sort they read about in bible studies when people talked about the desert and the wise hermits who lived there, scrying shadows on cave walls and talking directly through the fire to God. He did not like this man, and he would prefer if they had nothing between them which could be called common. No drop of water or salted earth.

“How come you know my name but I haven’t got yours?” Tam asked.

“It would not be wise,” said the man, “To give my name to a fairy, would it?”

“And how will you?” Tam asked.

“How will I?”

“Prove it,” said Tam.

It was not a smile so much as a smile’s ghost which threw a pall over the man’s face. Tam knew it well, the silent crow of victory. It was a look he had seen on the face of many a mean cunt on the playground, gave the feeling of being raked over the shattered glass of the baby-house windows, cold as the eyes it shadowed. He set his tongue behind his teeth and he pressed until he could feel their points digging in, the tingling sensation that followed. The words the man said, he said slowly, almost as if each were a full sentence;

“I know your secret.”

There was one. A true secret. One Tam knew. The kind you don’t tell. He’d seen the bones in the hollow place. Deep under the ground where the memories of little babies drowned in sweet treacle only to rot waterlogged in their nappies. Little stack of bodies with the stench of death on the nothing that was left of them when the colic went cold. He knew that sometimes the nuns would do the nice thing and tuck them up so warm they couldn’t breathe to relieve them their burden. Gone so small even God did not want them so they could not be committed to any holy place. Sweet silence in the cistern where the worms crawl in and out. There were many voices wont to silence voices, many lips want to still lips. The knowledge that if another soul knew what he had seen there in that dark place, they would want him to be quiet too.

Sweet treacle. Choking on a wet lozenge as the warm fills you right on up and the world gets heavy.

But that wasn’t what the man meant. Even if for a moment in Tam’s mind it was all he could possibly mean, the only answer that could be anything. The man meant a different kind of secret. The sort that children like to keep not because they have to but because keeping it makes things more fun.

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In the recapitulation view of the atonement, Christ is seen as the new Adam who succeeds where Adam failed. Christ undoes the wrong that Adam did and, because of his union with humanity, leads humankind on to eternal life (including moral perfection).

I have never heard this theory of atonement until this year despite spending my whole life (I'm in my mid-20s) inside the church. I wish I had heard it sooner. I first encountered it via a tiktok and I immediately saved it for future research. I am excited to learn more.