A Texas Writer Tackles a Subject ‘Beckoning in the Shadows His Entire Life’

These days the thrum of traffic and the roar of a bulldozer intrude on conversations at caf tables clustered outside the Swedish Hill bakery an Austin landmark where author Stephen Harrigan and a scarce writer friends have long gathered to swap ideas Once Harrigan rode his Trek down the hill to grab a croissant and coffee here for around the bill on a latest visit was times higher and the crowded street challenging for cycling Even this seemingly historic place is a mirage The caf has moved twice Next door the bulldozer is busy excavating a huge crater at its prior site Change in Austin seems constant yet Harrigan s friends maintain their connection Harrigan credits Lawrence Wright his Pulitzer Prize-winning neighbor and the breakfast club founder with inspiring his latest nonfiction book an exploration of a peasant girl s visions of the Virgin Mary on a remote mountaintop in Portugal Sorrowful Mysteries The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century Alfred A Knopf April Sorrowful Mysteries The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century Courtesy publisher Harrigan asserts he originally intended to write only an article about this devout peasant girl Lucia and his long fascination with the secret prophecy she left behind after hearing her story from a nun at Catholic school in Abilene But Wright swears that his buddy needed only a nudge The mystery of the Fatima prophecies suffused his growing-up years as it did for bulk Catholics in that era Wright notified the Texas Observer It seemed a perfect match between a writer and a subject that has been beckoning in the shadows his entire life Harrigan who was born in Oklahoma City and raised in Abilene and Corpus Christi is a prolific author of more than a dozen books novels nonfiction essays and about screenplays but he d never before considered writing a memoir This is kind of a sideways memoir he announced I haven t lived a very memoirish life Harrigan one of the original staff writers of Texas Monthly magazine proposes to be only an accidental journalist He became a yard man and began mowing lawns and writing articles to pay the bills after graduating from the University of Texas in Ten years later novels arose out of magazine pieces A story on the ruthless capture of wild dolphins for an aquarium formed his debut Aransas in The chronicle of an eccentric Italian sculptor who lived in San Antonio and left his legacy carved in statues across the Lone Star State inspired Remember Ben Clayton his saga of family pride loss and estrangement Yet when he first traveled to the Central Portuguese mountaintop where this peasant girl claimed to have seen her visions his reporter s journey became increasingly personal Harrigan s connection with Lucia and her two younger cousins all of whom claimed to have communicated with the Virgin Mary in intersected with his earliest memories He and these long-dead Catholic kids had all knelt to recite the same Latin words Ave Maria gratia plena What s more he too had fervently thought in the power of a benevolent virgin as he writes usually depicted wearing a blue cloak her arms open at her sides and her hands open Like them he grew up believing Mary never perished but ascended to heaven He felt moved when he visited the places those children lived and died and when he strolled through the enormous shrine that stands in the place of a scraggly Holm Oak where they claimed to have seen a holy glowing orb The conclusion of that exploration and reportage is a braided narrative of Harrigan s life which sees him forsake Catholicism as a UT aspirant in Austin s slacker years and of the life of Lucia the oldest of the three child visionaries and the only one to survive to adulthood It s also an exploration of the liturgy history and legends surrounding the Virgin Mary Jesus mother whose place of death remains a mystery for theologians and historians alike He also explores why so multiple pilgrims still visit places where she s supposedly reappeared including Fatima Portugal Lourdes France and Mexico City The intriguing tale of Lucia s secret letter a prophecy from the Virgin that was given to the pope and was left unopened for decades is the mystery that captivated Harrigan as a child But as an agnostic adult he dug deeper into the life of the girl depicted in his book s cover photo wearing a head covering a long dark skirt and a piercing haunted look He writes naturally about this visionary whose accounts of the virgin brought a horde of pilgrims and financial ruin to her parents grazing land He writes compellingly of the interrogations and cruelty she faced which drove her to seek the life of a cloistered nun In his work Harrigan often seeks emotional linkages Bringing a long-dead Portuguese nun to life may seem like a challenge for the happily married father of three who left the church long ago Yet he has no trouble relating to an impassioned female character according to another long-time friend the Austin novelist Elizabeth Crook who in recent weeks collaborated with Harrigan on a screenplay based on The Which Way Tree her tale of a girl s quest to hunt down the mountain lion who killed her mother Steve just has an innate and uniquely perceptive understanding of human nature He can put himself into the mind of his characters and intuit their motives with an strange ease In an outbuilding-turned-studio in Austin s Tarrytown Harrigan creates in a space surrounded by walls of books and a lifetime of memorabilia On one shelf are three plastic dolls of the Portuguese prophet children On another sits a glass votive featuring the president depicted in his novel A Friend of Mr Lincoln which imagines a younger Abe as a droll literary and only locally famous lawyer Just above his office chair is a bumper sticker with the slogan Puedes exhumarlo which one of his daughters printed up as a joke after Harrigan mangled the translation of his s catchphrase Can you dig it He knows that really means Can you exhume it But somehow the slogan still fits a writer who digs up facts in obscure corners and writes amid piles of the evidence he s accumulated Perched atop one of the highest bookshelves stand vintage Western figurines men on horseback representing historical and fictional characters whom he calls his oldest friends He was when he got the first from his mother s new husband His birth father a WWII veteran and test pilot died in a crash when his mother was pregnant with him Harrigan can easily reconnect with memories of his fatherless early boyhood as he did in his novel The Leopard Is Loose plunging into a world where shadows morph into monsters and real and imaginary threats mingle He knows that visions and spirituality that sprout in a child never truly disappear in an adult That connectedness lends Sorrowful Mysteries an unexpectedly universal appeal Readers simultaneously experience the wonder of childhood and the high price of unfettered belief In search of this story his own and Lucia s Harrigan visited the austere cell where the Portuguese peasant girl lived out her adult life in isolation as well as the hospital and mountainside hut where each of her younger cousins perished in the influenza pandemic When he arrived one day on the Sierra de Aire near the spot where all three claimed to have seen the Virgin Harrigan experienced his own vision a shaggy black dog creeping along a trail that connects the glitzy modern Fatima shrine to the humble village where Lucia was born As he approached Harrigan s vision shifted and he realized the doglike figure was a pilgrim a woman on her knees crawling in the dirt She like him was searching for the right path The post A Texas Writer Tackles a Subject Beckoning in the Shadows His Entire Life appeared first on The Texas Observer