Miracle Woman

by Marita Conlon-McKenna

  ‘Sure.’

  Janet Rimaldi put down what she was doing the minute Martha entered the small cluttered office with its bags of cereal mixer and bulging file cabinets.

  ‘Janet, I think there’s been some mistake . . .’

  ‘Sit down please, Martha,’ gestured the fifty-year-old with her greying perm and plain face devoid of any trace of makeup.

  ‘My name’s not on the list!’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I couldn’t put you down on the monthly roster, Martha. In the last few weeks there has been a constant stream of calls from people wanting to talk to you, looking for the healer woman. The staff and I are wasting a huge amount of time just answering them.’

  ‘Listen, Janet, I don’t have to do phones, I won’t go on them at all, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘Martha, I don’t think you understand. These last few days, so many are phoning that our main helpline is almost constantly jammed. That means we can’t receive calls about animals that might need urgent rescuing or answer queries from anxious owners. The phone is our lifeline. You know that.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve caused any of this, but maybe I could just walk the dogs and . . .’

  ‘Martha, you volunteering here is just not going to work any more. I’m sorry but I have no option but to take you off the volunteer roster for the moment. Honestly, I’m really sorry. When this hullabaloo dies down you are more than welcome to return, but for the moment I have to put the welfare of the animals first.’

  Stunned, Martha went back outside. Donna had taken the Persian out of the wired cage and stood her on the table and was very gently trying to pull a wide-toothed comb through the mass of tangled pale grey fur.

  ‘Hey, come on!’

  ‘I’ve got to go home,’ said Martha, lifting her jacket. ‘I’m off the roster and the volunteer schedule, so I can’t stay.’

  ‘God, I’m sorry. But why?’

  Upset, Martha explained the reason.

  ‘Listen, we’ll keep in touch,’ said Donna.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yeah, promise.’

  ‘And you’ll keep an eye on Dollar for me.’

  ‘For sure.’

  Driving back up along the highway she realized there was absolutely no point in being bitter or angry. Now her life was moving in a different direction, she must open her mind and heart to healing. Once she got home she would sit down and study some of those books. Annie had lent her and then everything else she could on the subject of healing, for it was high time she understood more about this gift she was supposed to have.

  Chapter Seventeen

  MID-MORNING, MARTHA collected her mother from the Belmont Retirement Home. Frances Kelly wrapped a warm red scarf around her shoulders and neck, as already there was a slight chill in the air temperature. The trees on the entrance avenue were ablaze with fall colours, a grey squirrel zigzagging crazily in his hunt for provisions as the sprightly seventy-two-year-old locked the door of her apartment and walked out to the car.

  Once a month Martha drove her mother to the small cemetery out beyond Westwood where her father was buried; the two of them would pay respects to the late Joseph Kelly and go for lunch afterwards. Martha valued that special mother–daughter relationship and knew that her mother still played an important role in her life. She couldn’t understand why her mother always insisted on eating at one of the small restaurants nearby instead of letting Martha take her further afield to try out somewhere new and different.

  ‘I’m a creature of habit, Martha, you know that, and I like to go and say hello to my poor Joe whenever I get the chance.’

  Martha smiled. Somehow or other over the past twenty years her mother had managed to almost canonize her late father, bestowing a load of saintly qualities on him that he sure had never possessed during his lifetime. Her father had been big and loud and jocose to those who had frequented ‘Kelly’s Saloon’, as he jokingly called the bar he and his partner had owned in south Boston. The anger and temper and frustration he’d felt at working nights and running a barely profitable bar had been saved for behind the closed doors of 151 Hillside where they’d grown up. His investments in real estate, which included the then due to be demolished bar, and a small family construction business had at one stage almost bankrupted them but prudent management had managed to keep the Kelly ship afloat. Martha still remembered the long hours her father endured, out on construction sites in all weathers during the day and working three or four nights a week fixing up the derelict bar, and then running it.

  As a child she pictured him asleep in the big double featherbed with the woollen blankets pulled up around him, as she and her brothers got dressed and got ready for school. He was up and shouting at their mother, looking for his work clothes by the time they left. Cantankerous and bossy, that’s how she mostly remembered him.

  ‘Joe was a good man, rare enough these days, let me tell you,’ said Frances.

  Martha gripped the steering wheel, wondering what the definition of such qualities truly was.

  ‘Your Mike is a good one too.’

  Martha swallowed hard. Mike was nothing like her father, nothing like him. In fact that had been part of his appeal. She’d had enough of her father’s erratic mood swings and blasting gusts of love for his wife and family followed closely by contempt and harshness. It was part and parcel, she supposed, of being the daughter of an alcoholic and never knowing what to expect.

  Her mother with every year seemed to forget those bad old days and replace them with the good ones. Perhaps that’s what the gift of age was: only the times that made one happy or brought joy were remembered, with the others pushed to the back of consciousness and disappearing from the drain of the mind like water down a plughole.

  The New England countryside basked in low Autumn sunshine, the trees along the roadway wrapped in shades of red, orange and gold, the landscape a beckoning blaze of colour as they drove through it.

  ‘Mom, isn’t it awesome!’ gasped Martha.

  ‘I suppose all the leafers must be heading up our way. I saw a busload of them yesterday with their cameras.’

  ‘They’re just trying to capture it, Mom, and it’s so beautiful who can blame them.’ Martha turned the heat up in the car as her mother always complained of the cold.

  Frances commented with interest on the houses and stores they passed.

  ‘Why’d they go and paint their door that colour? . . . She’s got herself a good set of plants up on that porch. Protect them from the frost, that’s what that garden guy on the TV always says . . . I don’t know why anyone would hang such ugly drapes, there’s no sense to it, Martha.’

  It never ceased to amaze Martha the interest her mother took in strangers’ lives, the curiosity it stirred up in her. Passing all these places gave her mother satisfaction; sitting in an armchair all day back at the Belmont complex watching soap operas on TV was certainly not something Frances Kelly was ready for yet.

  ‘I see that house on the corner got a new birdhouse, that wasn’t there last month.’

  Martha caught a glimpse of the white and blue painted bird feeder that stood on the top of a slim pole in the corner of the front yard.

  ‘Yes, Mom, I guess that’s new.’

  The cemetery at Westwood was about a half-mile out of the town and was as quiet and tranquil a place as anyone could be laid to rest. Her grandparents were buried there too, Mary and Joseph O’Malley, who’d emigrated from Galway in the 1930s. Her mother had brought flowers and now she bent down and placed them next to the stone where her husband’s name was carved.

  Martha stared at the stone, concentrating on the letters of her father’s name.

  ‘We’ll say a few prayers,’ her mother encouraged.

  Martha, joining in, the words automatically tripping off her tongue, thought how she had grown up with prayer, a typical Catholic childhood dominated by Sunday mass, confession and communion. Prayers when
her mother served the meal, prayers at bedtime, the rosary rattled around the fire on a Saturday evening, novenas for exams, for good health, and for those less fortunate than themselves. A while later she moved away to let Frances have the opportunity to speak to her father on her own.

  ‘I’ll wait back in the car, Mom, you take your time.’

  The grey-haired waitress nodded in recognition as she showed them to a booth at the back of the restaurant. Both of them perused the menu, even though it never changed from month to month, or season to season.

  ‘I’ll have a burger and fries,’ said Frances. ‘Chicken salad and a baked potato,’ Martha added.

  As always, her mother talked about her father, Martha sipping on a Diet Coke and just listening.

  ‘Do you remember the summers, Martha?’

  ‘Hot and sticky . . .’

  ‘No! No, not those ones, I mean the summers back home in Cork.’

  She remembered those all right. The few trips back to Ireland, her parents scrimping and scraping and putting money by for almost two or three years in order to pay for the fares and the expense of returning to the country they loved. Her father would visit Mossy Ryan’s the tailor and buy a new coat and jacket and trousers, the boys would be dressed in their finest, and she and her mother would be treated to a trip to Filenes to array themselves in the latest style, as the Yanks, as her cousins called them, returned to visit all the relations back in Skibbereen.

  ‘Do you remember it?’ urged Frances. ‘The excitement and the palaver of it – sure your father was in his element over there.’

  She remembered her grand-uncle John and her father’s older brother Tim and the farm snug in the rolling West Cork countryside and a myriad cousins who bore the same names as themselves and a similar appearance.

  ‘Your father loved it there.’

  Martha remembered being sick with excitement as the visit to Ireland drew nearer and nearer and her father making a big show of going on the dry and staying off alcohol for at least a month so he would look well and fit and not a bit like a bowsie, and the pledge being broken after only a few days of being back where he belonged. One year there had barely been the fare for her father to go and her mother had feigned illness so only the and Brian had flown to Shannon and taken the hire car down the country. The rest of them made do with the hose and the paddling pool and pink ice-creams and sitting up till midnight out in the open air with Frances and her women friends, smoking and playing cards and listening to Frank Sinatra.

  ‘While the cat’s away the mice can play,’ was all her mother would say about that summer vacation in their own back yard.

  ‘They were good times,’ murmured her mother now. ‘When you were all young and your father was still with us.’

  Martha nodded and out of instinct squeezed her hand.

  They made small talk with the waitress, and Martha watched as her mother drenched her meal in salt, scattering it partly on the Formica table top.

  ‘Why don’t they season food properly any more! All those people on them faddy diets and allergic to every morsel they put in their mouth. When I was a girl we just ate what we were given and were grateful for it. Food didn’t make us sick then.’

  Martha toyed with her pieces of chicken, hiding some of it under a furl of lettuce leaf.

  ‘Kids and Mike OK?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘All doing OK?’

  ‘Mike’s caught up in this new biotech project for the company, designing some kind of information systems.’

  Her mother’s eyes looked blank. Martha couldn’t blame her, for if she herself had so little understanding of the work that occupied her husband for most of his waking hours you could hardly expect a woman in her seventies with little interest in the information highway to be interested.

  ‘Well, at least he likes what he does. In my time most men worked at jobs they hated. When I see Mike and your brothers it makes me realize how much things are changing.’

  Frances Kelly speared three golden chips on to her fork asking, ‘And what about you, pet? How are you doing?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mom, honest.’

  ‘All this talk of miracles. There was something more about you again in the papers.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Hopefully in time it will just blow over.’

  ‘You can’t blame them, Martha darling, people are only human and are bound to be interested in talk of miracles and the like.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Are they still phoning and coming to the house? I don’t know how you cope with it at all, I honestly don’t.’

  ‘Mike’s going crazy about it.’

  ‘Lord rest your father, but he would have been the very same.’

  ‘He doesn’t realize that I can’t just pretend this whole Timmy thing hasn’t happened. I can’t turn my back on someone who asks for my help, I’m not like that! Mike doesn’t seem to understand the need inside me to use this healing ability or whatever it is to help people.’

  ‘You were always like that. Good-natured and kind, Martha love, even when you were a small girl. Do you remember that time Sean had that desperate fall from his bike and split open his lip and you carried him most of the way home?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mom, I dropped him and he cut his knee and arm and I made things even worse!’

  ‘But your intentions were good, you just wanted to help your brother.’

  ‘He kept crying for you and wanting to get home, and then I went and dropped him on the pavement and he roared and roared.’

  Frances Kelly laughed aloud. ‘You were always such a Girl Scout!’

  ‘Mom!’ protested Martha.

  ‘I just mean you were always in tune with others. Why, the nuns at St Teresa’s were forever telling your father and myself that we were blessed to have such a daughter. You had faith. A great faith and goodness – I remember Sister Alexandra thought you might even have a vocation and want to join the order.’

  Martha giggled, remembering the religious phase she went through, with a statue of Our Lady on her dressing table and the hours she spent praying and trying to be holy and good and glide around the polished wooden floors at home like the way the nuns in the convent moved.

  ‘It was just a phase, Mom, that’s all!’

  Frances Kelly raised her neatly pencilled grey eyebrows and the two of them burst into laughter.

  ‘To tell the truth, both your father and I were doing novenas that you’d get a bit of sense and were mighty relieved when it did pass.’

  ‘What about now?’ Martha asked, hesitant. ‘What do you make of what’s going on now? Honest to God, Mom, what do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know what to make of it. I know that you’re a good person and have always had a strong faith, and I suppose if the Lord wants to act through anyone, well, my daughter is as good as he’ll find. The healing gift is a powerful one, mighty powerful. Perhaps it’s in the family. Your great-grandmother had a way with her, and people used to come for miles looking for potions and cures. They didn’t have fancy hospitals and pills and medicines in those days and I guess belief and faith came into it when a person got sick, for that was all they had! My mother told me she could close an open wound, staunch bleeding with just the touch of her hand, and the people in the district used to send out a pony and trap for her whenever there was an accident or injury. Even her mother before her was rumoured to be a great one for sick and injured cattle.’

  ‘Mom, why in heaven’s name didn’t you mention any of this before?’

  ‘To be honest, I just didn’t think about it. It’s all so long ago, before my time. When I travelled across the Atlantic with my parents, all that stuff seemed like a lot of old talk and superstition, something we were trying to put behind us.’

  Martha ordered coffee for the two of them, trying to make sense of the connections between generations of women.

  ‘Martha, I know you want to help people, heal them, whatever you call it, I’m not interfering but jus
t be mindful of yourself, you have a husband and children, a family. I might be getting on a bit myself but I’m still your mother and I can’t help worrying about you all.’

  Martha understood her mother’s genuine concern for her well-being and that of her family.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mom. This healing is something strange and kind of exciting. I can’t explain it but it seems to create an energy within me that makes me feel good.’

  ‘Energy or not, you just watch yourself – you’re still my little girl and I can’t help worrying about you,’ declared Frances Kelly, standing up from the table.

  The waitress, noticing their empty cups, came over and offered them a refill. Afterwards Martha paid the bill while her mother visited the rest room.

  On the way home they stopped off at a roadside stand piled high with orange pumpkins of every shape and size, dozens of them. Martha walked up and down, taking her time, picking out about five suitable for the kids to cut out and decorate. She added two pots of autumnal chrysanthemums to stand out on her front step, while her mother knowledgeably discussed pumpkin recipes with the chatty stall holder.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew all those pumpkin dishes!’ Martha teased as they carried her purchases to the car.

  ‘Ah, they’re just out of my recipe books, sure you know I can’t abide the smell or taste of those yokes!’ laughed her mother, putting them in the trunk. The two of them automatically reached forward and hugged each other before setting off for home.

  Chapter Eighteen

  AS WORD OF her gift of healing spread, Martha felt as if she and her family were under siege, their home and family life no longer their own. Absolute strangers approached her in the street, prepared to share the most intimate details of their life with her and ask for healing. They came up to her in the stores, outside school, at the local swimming pool, where she was trying to teach Alice the backstroke. Polite, she listened and talked to them, often at pains to point out that their own medical practitioners were far better qualified to help than she was.