The Pilgrimage I Took for Someone Else
My grandmother couldn't walk the hill, so my legs carried her vow.
My grandmother owes God a mountain, and this July I paid it for her. That is the plainest way to say what happened, and it is also, I have learned, the fastest way to end a conversation at a dinner party, because nobody knows what to ask next. So let me tell it properly.
Nana Rose made a vow in 1987. That is all any of us knew for most of my life. Somewhere in that year, for reasons she kept in the same locked place she kept her wedding ring and her opinion of my uncle's second wife, she promised God she would climb Croagh Patrick, the holy mountain in Mayo, the one pilgrims have been walking up for longer than anyone can prove.
And then she did not do it.
Not in 1988, not in 1995, not in any of the years her legs were still willing... There was always a reason. A calving season. A funeral. A rain that never quite lifted.
The vow sat in our family like a piece of furniture nobody used but nobody would throw out.
She is ninety-one now. Her knees are, in her own words, ornamental.
In June, out of nowhere, at her kitchen table, over tea strong enough to trot a mouse across, she said, "You'll do the Reek for me before the last Sunday of July." Not a question. She said it the way she would tell you the immersion heater was on. And I, thirty-four years old, no believer, a person whose main pilgrimage that year had been between my desk and the fridge, heard myself say yes... before I understood I was being asked.
"It has to be a person of my blood," she said, "and it has to be given freely, and you're the only one of the lot of you I'd trust not to take the shuttle." There is no shuttle up Croagh Patrick. That was her little joke. She held my hand across the oilcloth, hers gone light as a bird's, and I felt the transaction close like a door.
I set out on a Friday at dawn from a rented room in Murrisk, and the fog was so thick the mountain had been repossessed overnight. The road to the trailhead was empty, one long grey corridor with hedges for walls, and my boots on the tarmac were the loudest thing in the county. Halfway along, an old man materialized out of the mist with a dog, said "Grand soft morning," and dissolved again, and I understood why this country invented half its stories.
The climb itself is honest. I will give it that. The first hour is a track, the second is a shoulder of loose shale where every step slides half a step back, and the last stretch is a steep cone of scree where you stop pretending you are a hiker and start using your hands. I passed a barefoot man in his sixties doing it the old way, offering it up, his feet the colour of the stones. I passed a woman saying a rosary in a whisper, one bead per step. I had no beads. I had a bottle of water, a ham sandwich, and somebody else's promise.
And somewhere on the shale, with my lungs burning and the fog erasing the world below me, I stopped finding it absurd. That was the first surprise. I had come expecting to feel like a courier, a man delivering a parcel he had no permission to open. Instead I felt, for the first time in years, precisely located. One task. One direction. Up. My grandmother's vow did not care that I doubted the recipient. It only needed my legs.
A vow does not care whose legs it uses. It only asks to be kept.
I reached the summit chapel in cloud so thick I nearly walked past it. A small white church, wet to the touch, on a table of stone above an invisible bay. I did what she told me to do: a circuit of the chapel, her words said aloud, my full name and hers, and then her instruction, delivered at the kitchen table with the solemnity of a customs declaration: "Tell Him it's settled between us." I said it. My voice sounded thin up there, one syllable of steam at a time. A German hiker nodded at me respectfully, assuming grief. It was not grief... I did not have a word for what it was yet.
I got my word on the way down. That is where the story turns, so I will slow down and tell it straight.
Back in her kitchen that Sunday, feet blistered, thighs ruined, I asked her the question we had all been forbidden for thirty-nine years. What was the vow for? She was quiet for so long... I thought the shutters had come down again. Then she took my face in both hands, which she had not done since I was a boy, and told me.
In 1987, my mother was pregnant and the doctors in Castlebar found something wrong with the baby's heart... They told her to prepare herself. And my grandmother went out to the shed where nobody could hear her and made her bargain: let this child live, and I will climb your mountain. The baby was born in the spring with a heart that had, in the consultant's own baffled phrasing, sorted itself out.
The baby was me.
I had carried my own vow up that mountain.
My legs had been paying for themselves. Thirty-four years of walking around, every step of it borrowed against a promise made in a shed by a woman standing among turf and rusted tools, bargaining like a market trader with the Almighty because she could not think of anything else to do with the size of her love.
"Why didn't you ever climb it?" I asked her, when I could speak.
"Because I was afraid," she said, simply. "If I finished it, the deal was closed, and I would have nothing left to hold over Him if you ever got sick again. I kept it open on purpose, like an account. But I'm ninety-one. It was time to settle up before I go, and I wanted the mountain to meet you. Now He's seen the goods." And she laughed, wickedly, at her own blasphemy, and poured more tea.
I do not know what I believe about any of it. I know a cardiologist would have an explanation, and I know my grandmother would listen to that explanation politely and then ask the cardiologist if he wanted a biscuit. What I know for certain is smaller and harder: I was loved like that. Before I could walk, someone promised a mountain on my behalf. Whatever faith is, I have been inside its blast radius my whole life and mistaken it for ordinary family weather.
I have been writing about it ever since, because I do not know what else to do with it either. A while back I found a prompt that asked writers to describe a promise they inherited, and I laughed out loud at my desk, because I did not inherit a promise.
I was the promise.
The poem I wrote is not good yet. Neither am I. Both of us are getting there.
They say on a clear day you can see the whole of Clew Bay from the summit, three hundred islands scattered like change on a counter. I saw fog. I have decided that was correct. Some things you are not meant to see from the top; you are meant to walk up into the cloud on someone else's errand and come down with your own name settled. The road back to Murrisk was still empty. My boots were still loud. But I walked it like a man whose account was paid.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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