by Lisa Samson
Earlier today Sister Angie (given name Angelica) opened a blue and green webbed folding chair and set it beside mine. We’ve been together a long time. My mother’s sugar maple tree blared that beautiful orange-red. Sugar maples get a bit braggy in the fall.
“What’s in your lap?” She pointed to this notebook open to the passage you just read, my pen resting in the fold.
“Just writing down some memories.”
She sat in her chair, stretched her legs straight out in front of her, and folded her hands atop her tummy. “Mary-Francis is on my case too. I need to get moving, I guess.”
I agreed. During Angie’s years as a school sister, she was surrounded by a pack of wild dogs in a remote school in Alaska, was chased by revolutionaries in South America, and picnicked in France with rich schoolgirls. Angie was even arrested down at the School of the Americas, but that has nothing to do with our order. She’s just an upstart when she finds the time. She taught in eight different schools and we ended up back here together at St. Mary’s. She lived the life I thought I was going to. (Right, Angie? Yes, I can see you rolling your eyes.)
She adjusted the back of her chair, setting the teeth of the arms to recline a little. “I went to see Gerald and Hattie a few minutes ago,” she said.
“How’s Gerald doing?” I snapped shut this notebook and slid it into my tote bag.
“Not well. Hattie’s so upset about his condition they had to give her a light sedative. But she told me that Gerald had something to tell you and to get on over there.” Angie leaned forward and whispered, though no one else was around. “She said you wouldn’t like it in the long run. She said it was about your mother when push came to shove.”
My mother?
I stared at the old lighthouse out in the bay off the southern point of the island. Hattie and Gerald lived there for years, the last lightkeepers on the Chesapeake Bay. If you are reading this, I hope you’ve come, or will come, to love these waters as much as I always have. They are like a mother to me, the home to which I’ve always returned eventually. Jude would have gone crazy out on the waters had he lived there all those years like his older brother, Gerald; this island made him crazy enough.
Oh and by the way, this is Jude’s story as well. You cannot hear mine without hearing his.
The light circled around inside the plastic lens. The great Fresnel lens, an artistic, graceful beehive of beveled glass, was smashed years earlier by a baseball bat held in Jude’s hands. Jude’s soul frothed and foamed, stirred by an anger that began fermenting well before the day his mother left the light and took him with her. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Jude and I had mother issues in common, indeed. Most likely, it drew us together. Unfortunately, back then, Jude was wont to concentrate on the mercies he thought he was denied.
“Poor Gerald. The last of the Keller men.” I waved to Glen Keesey sailing by in his Sunfish. Glen waved back and held up his book, my copy of Bluebeard. Between March and November, Glen sails out to Hathaway Island, a small, uninhabited, marshy speck half a mile east of the light, so he can sunbathe in the buff. He joins us for a glass of wine every once in a while too, while we watch the sunset.
“Yep. All gone but Gerald.” Angie nodded, removing a barrette from her hair and replacing it, retightening the entire arrangement. Her knuckles have become knobby, but she always keeps her nails so nice. She’s prissy. Tough, but prissy. I’ve rarely seen her without some makeup, and her shoes, while comfortable, are never ever called sensible. “It’s the end of an era, Mary.”
The sisters all call me Mary. Mary-Margaret’s a mouthful.
She looked upon the lighthouse too, a structure that seemed somehow less for all the automation going on inside. Aunt Elfi used to say that people dignify most structures, enliven them. Without us, what is the need? If you think I’m wrong, just imagine nobody ever going up and down the Eiffel Tower again. And why do ruins make us yearn to go live there?
I pointed to the lighthouse. “Mr. Keller saved many a life. Hard to believe the place is empty.”
She harrumphed. “I’m sure the ghost of Mr. Keller got back there somehow. I think that lighthouse was the only thing he ever really loved.”
Angie and I differ on what Mr. Keller should have done when his wife, Jude’s mother, contracted cabin fever. I say he couldn’t have possibly known what was going on. She says any man worth his salt should have figured all was not right, that he had to have known somewhere deep in his soul something was horribly wrong with his wife.
“I’ll see to Hattie.” I stood and lifted the straps of my canvas tote up onto my shoulder, trying to shove those heavy thoughts aside.
“It would be a good idea. She needs you.”
So I gathered my chair and traipsed through the tall brown grasses of early October toward St. Mary’s Village Assisted Living. After Grandmom died of a heart attack, I went to live there at the age of eight. It was a convent school back then; Aunt Elfi moved to a monastery in Tibet hoping they’d be more amenable to her odd religious juxtapositions, hoping to find something resembling Shangri La, which she never stopped talking about after reading Lost Horizon. Although I knew how much she loved me, this didn’t come as a surprise to me. Even I knew my grandmother cared for Aunt Elfi every bit as much as she cared for me.
I passed the entrance of the old drugstore—now a gamer café—where I first spent time with Jude, and I looked back at Bethlehem Point Light and, because I believed it only fitting and proper, prayed for those who once lived inside its walls.
It’s late now and time for sleep.
The story continues in The Passion of Mary-Margaret by Lisa Samson.
About the Author
Lisa Samson lives in Kentucky. She has three children and enjoys art and making good food. She is the author of 35 books, a two-time recipient of the Christianity Today novel of the year award, a Christy Award winner, and grateful for all she has been given. You can find her on Facebook at writerlisasamson.Facebook: Lisa-Samson
