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want to say how Moo hadn’t been right since we brought Boson home, or how Gilpin scurried about untended and rat-like. I didn’t want to say how my fussing mother had sunk into some boghole of her own, and was now keeping company only with moaney-fae. She was mobbed all about with them. You could feel them flapping at you when you sat by her, their black wings creasing the air and their beaks pecking at the sore places of her heart.
    Scully Slevin nodded slowly. ‘And himself?’
    ‘All right,’ I said and that was mostly true.
    My father was still my father, with no sign of clinging spirits about him. He was just sad, and then sometimes angry, but still working and eating and playing with Gilpin. It was just that he didn’t seem to know what to do with Moo. He and my mother sat each end of Boson, she watching the body and he watching her, and me watching them.
    Why didn’t Pa just sort Moo out? He should’ve been telling her that she wasn’t the only one who sorrowed. That she wasn’t alone in feeling one of her eyes had been poked out. That she still had us to care for.
    I was starting to think I would have to tell her myself.
    Then Scully Slevin put his spidery hand on my shoulder. ‘And you, Fermion Quirk?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m fine,’ I told him shrugging his bony, white fingers off me.
    ‘Good,’ he said, all unnoticing of my disgust. ‘Because I wanted to say as how, in your brother, the affliction was a beautiful thing.’
    I took a deep breath.
    ‘He was a special one,’ he added, as I thought he might.
    I was pleased with my self-control.
    Scully was quiet for a moment and picked at his bodgey old fiddle. He played a scrap of a cheerless sort of tune as we went and then he said, ‘Mam says he was like that other one.’
    I waited.
    ‘What other one?’ I said, in the end.
    ‘Ah,’ he said, pleased-like. ‘You haven’t heard.’
    ‘No,’ I said in spite of myself. It was all he needed, the great blather-pail. ‘But keep it short,’ I added.
    ‘All right, all right,’ he started in his best
listen-to-me
tones. ‘Short, then. When Ma was a just-wed woman, and your parents were children, and you and I weren’t yet thought of, there was a Brother down at the monkhouse who was one of those who saw the world in a drop of water and heard angels everywhere. He drew folk to him; heartbroken folk usually, but also folk cursed with unexplained joying.
    ‘This Otherwise Brother,’ Scully Slevin said, ‘was never left alone. When he slept he was infested with archangels needing to pass messages. When he worked he was crowded with lost Dead-ones looking for particular paradises, and at meditation foretelling phantasms rose in him, warning and sounding bells. But in spite of the world loading him with its sour parts, he stayed sweet as honey.
    ‘He was so sweet that all the lice in the monkhouse took up residence in his robes. Not one single louse stayed put elsewhere.’
    I felt the sneer coming, and hid it.
    ‘From a distance,’ Scully went on. ‘He looked to be soft-edged, so crawling with them was he. He wouldn’t kill them, he wouldn’t use the cures. He said it was his glory to carry his little brothers and sisters, and for his body to feed such a multitude of holy mites; they were so many and the monks so few, he said, it was plain who God preferred.’
    That tickled me. A laugh bubbled up. I couldn’t help it.
    ‘Hah!’ I bust out. ‘Hahahaaaa—’ The laugh turned to tears in the middle. I swallowed them in a lump as big as a crabapple. Scully Slevin grinned into the sky like a bog-turtle on a rock.
    ‘So, what with all his lovingness and his courage about the frightful Seeing and all, folk came to noticing him. Then they came to wondering at him, then to just plain loving him — then one of them wrote to the Bishop and before you could say
Pater Mary One
there that lousy monk was, Venerable and rushing saintward. Without even asking, one of his followers made a picture of