Missionary Man

F3 cycle 22
Prompt: THEMED WORD LIST – road, beer, luck, coin, pot, gold, rainbow, snakes
Genre: Open
Word Count: Under 1000 words
Deadline: Thursday, March 16, 2011 4:30 pm EST

Things are hard out there for a saint. I walked a lonely road, and wish that there had been someone to warn me, back before my luck ran out, and I’d happened on this enviable occupational path to sainthood. I'm called so many things - Pádraig, Patricius, Padrig...but between you and me, it's just Pat. I know the stories, but don't you believe a word. It wasn't me. None of it. It was all that other guy. Everything except the name. Otherwise, you'd all be paying too much for cheap beer on Saint Palladius's day. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it?

Glory belongs to the hapless. Someone should put that on a tunic. So everyone knows about the snakes. A wonderous bit of cultural mythology, nothing more. Symbolism and metaphor are lost on some people. No one talks about the years of slavery, day after day of indentured servitide tending flocks, hours filled with nothing to fill them but prayer. And oh, how I did pray. Isn't that a touch of the ol' irony, a literal shepherd to a figurative one.

I reclaimed my freedom and fled Erin without a pot to piss in, but I'd picked up a smattering of the local tongue and a feel for the old religion. Useful skills for a man whose life's work of bringing Rome's new god to heathen masses would become the stuff of legend. I hear they even have parades in my honor, wagons festooned in a rainbow of garish display. A day of drunkenness and frivolity - what a legacy for a sainted man!

Where departed Palladius failed, I succeeded. I was already a man with a name. And now, one with a plan. There are claims that I abused my position and accepted gifts. All true, no matter that hostoric record will state that I refused gold for services rendered. Of course I had to maintain plausable deniability to the church. A man of the cloth, I was. On a mission from God. An expectation of vows of poverty and piety were the price of building a legacy. Of course, a man's got to live. Who could say they themselves wouldn't take a spare coin offered by a pious hand out of charity to a spiritual man in need, from time to time?

I take my eternal rest on the Emerald Isle, as the legend states. But I'll not confess to where. My bones are sacred, I'll have you know. I'm so important a figure that a battle was waged over my body. "Over my dead body." That's an idiom for the times. So, on the celebration of this, my day of days, raise your glasses and toast my name.