The Passion of Mary-Margaret

by Lisa Samson

  And as those two women washed the bloody legs and the pale, fragile arms of my mother—pictures of her display lovely, wavy, dark hair and dark eyes—I lay bundled on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. That’s what Aunt Elfi told me. I didn’t cry until Father Thomas returned to comfort us in our sorrow and he gathered me into his fragile arms, crying with me. He was a tender sort until the day he passed away.

  I was two days old when Father Thomas, the older members of our parish, and our family, consisting of my grandmother, my aunt, and myself, committed my mother to the earth at St. Francis Church’s graveyard. Afterward, they walked right inside the church, stood by the simple, stone baptismal font, and I was baptized in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sister Thaddeus, whom I’ll tell you more about later, an older schoolgirl at the time, said she watched from the shadows, listening to the Holy Spirit telling her to pray for me every day. And she did.

  Afterward, Aunt Elfi brought me to Bethlehem Point, this very piece of land on which I now sit, beneath the same tree, and she held me as the sun went down for good over my mother. She walked back home with me in her arms, fed me a bottle, and laid me in my bassinette, where I slept through the night. Exhausted, they both deserved that little ray of grace. I never gave them any trouble either.

  SO, MY SISTERS, I FIGURE I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S GOING ON these days while I jot down this little history, that way if something of note happens to me, this is all recorded and I won’t have to scrape my brain to locate the information. I can tell you what happened forty years ago with little problem, but last week sits somewhere between the equation for finding the angles of an isosceles triangle and the name of the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Am I killing two birds with one stone or robbing Peter to pay Paul by doing it this way? Feel free to be the judge of that.

  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.

  IT’S EARLY MORNING AND I CAN’T SLEEP. MAYBE I DIDN’T want to start writing something like this because I know how much space it will take up in my mind.

  So, sisters, let me tell you about where you’ve found yourself if you don’t already know. Locust Island was put on the map by Captain John Smith back around 1608 when he explored the Chesapeake Bay. Its shape bears resemblance more to a chicken than a locust; however, when he happened upon it, a great population of insects inhabited the place. Maybe not much more than now, I don’t know, but I’d wager to say even more waterfowl—diving ducks, dab
bling ducks, geese, and swans—made their home here than we have today, what with the hotshots from DC buying up waterfront land for vacation homes so large you could house a whole plane full of refugees inside. One of them is bright turquoise! With yellow shutters. We are not in the Caribbean, might I remind them.

  We’re north of Tangier, the island where some folks still speak with an Elizabethan accent. I doubt the young people do now, what with television and videos. I’ve noticed a lot of the younger set have what Angie calls “the sitcom accent,” slightly Valley Girl and mildly prepubescent, everything sounding like a question.

  The town of Abbeyville, Maryland, was founded in the mid1600s by a relative of George Calvert, who received a Royal Charter for Maryland from Charles the First. That relative was a Benedictine abbot named Father Jerome Calvert, who founded a monastery upon his arrival from Ireland, although he was born an Englishman. Other settlers quickly followed and the town was named Carringtown for reasons I don’t know, but Abbeyville, the nickname, ended up taking over sometime in the early 1700s. After a century and a quarter, the monastery followed the path of all earthly things and only two monks remained and, rumor has it, they couldn’t abide one another. The legend goes that Brother Paul dug a pit and lived his life as a hermit until the Carmelite nuns took over for another one hundred and some odd years. They, too, went the way of the Benedictines, only without digging themselves into pits or becoming overly crotchety, and in 1887, the School Sisters of St. Mary’s took over and began St. Mary’s Convent School for Girls. The town had exploded during the oyster wars and the sisters devoted themselves to educating children of watermen, seafood canners, and the few farmers whose families had been here for a couple of hundred years. The occasional child from Baltimore City or Dover, Delaware, whose parents needed to dispose safely of their child for reasons good and bad, sometimes spent their childhood days with the sisters as well.

  During my nine years there, this happened to be Sister Angie, my best friend. Her mother and father traveled in a vaudeville show and sent her the most delightful cards and letters from the road.

  She’s now threatening to write down her memories, but I’ll believe that when I see it. She was a science teacher. And by the way, I taught art and English. I taught English so I could teach art. I believe it’s akin to having the football coach teach history.

  A ferry service to the mainland began around 1900 or thereabouts and the first car came onto the island in 1925. People still rarely use cars around the place; the island is only about a thousand acres. But some folk have them for traveling up to Salisbury to shop for items unavailable here. We sisters have a little white Honda Civic.

  When I moved over to St. Mary’s after Grandmom died, our dormitory window afforded me a view of the screwpile lighthouse, built in 1862. Its iron legs reached down into the muddy bottom of the bay, screws eleven feet long at their ends, holding up the white, octagonal house with four dormered windows on its second floor. Standing out in the water like the guardian it was, it really only needed giant arms crossed defiantly over its midsection to complete the picture.

  Here is a picture from the old days. The shutters were crimson when I was a child, but Hattie painted them dark blue when she moved out there after she married Gerald. I believe this is from the late 1800s. The large rocks were dumped on either side to break up ice floes so they didn’t damage the pilings. Can you see the little boat hung up on davits to the left there? Gerald used to hang his boat like that too. There was also a pulley system by which they’d raise heavier objects up into the house. Hattie bought a new refrigerator in 1965 and that turned out to be quite the job getting it up to her kitchen. But they did it. Nobody dared risk the wrath of Hattie Keller, let me tell you.As Sister Mary-Francis always says, “What a broad!” And she’s spot-on. Sister Mary-Francis has lived with Angie and me for ten years now.

  I used to imagine what it must be like to live there, surrounded by the gray waters of the Chesapeake, standing on the decking that encircled the house. Did Jude look back to Bethlehem Point just west of our school and see me standing there upon the shore, a little dot of girl gazing over the waters? A little girl under a tree.

  I first noticed Jude as he rowed out on the bay, his oars slicing through the water with smooth precision. He rowed almost every day, I’ll warrant.

  Jude Keller and his parents boated over to our town twice a month. The first time I ever saw him up close, around eight-thirty on a Sunday morning in May, Mass at St. Francis’s had just ended. We proceeded out of the church in a double line, wearing our light blue Sunday dresses. The seniors, their majestic forms, tall and strung like a stretched rubber band from skull to spine, led the rest of us; the kindergarteners jumped along like grasshoppers at the end of the line. I was a fourth grader by that time.

  Jude sat on the steps of the drugstore. Above his head, a calendar hung on the door, its picture displaying the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the swollen, robust heart crowned in glorious flames of passion for souls and wreathed with thorns that tell us he still feels our infirmities, and he does, sisters, he does.

  But Jude wasn’t much fond of religion. Not remotely. A picture like that would have been spooky to Jude, as it is to many others who don’t know the story behind it. Many was the time he told me he thought us all a bunch of superstitious folk who believed in a lot of hokum. He believed in pleasure, plain and simple, and God, as far as he could tell, wanted people to feel nothing of the sort.

  “Do you believe in God, though?” I asked him.

  “Of course. You live in a house surrounded by water with storms and birds and all, you know there’s some kinda power nobody can really explain away no matter how hard they try. I just think God likes that power a little too much.” He told me that when I was fifteen and I had nothing to say in return. How does an innocent girl tell an already experienced boy that she was completely in love with Christ, the Son of the God Jude bristled against?

  Even now it sounds a little odd, but there it sits. Hopefully, you who read this, having given your entire lives singularly to his service, feel the same. It does make it a bit easier in the long run, although there are plenty of other challenges to take its place.

  And naturally, at that age, I wasn’t able to talk about how God uses his power for love and goodness and for our benefit because, unfortunately, I’ve never been quick at defending my beliefs. Ten minutes after the conversation ends, oh yes, my goodness, I’ve got all the right answers. It’s God’s way of keeping me from being a real boob, I guess.

  After calling me superstitious, he would proceed to remind me of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Bloody Mary, and, because he was smarter than he pretended and snuck over to the library when nobody was looking, every single pope who committed homosexual acts, had sexual relations of the heterosexual variety, sired children, or was otherwise a scoundrel. Don’t even get started on the alcoholics.

  Oh yes. If you find yourself in the Church, you find yourself with some of the worst. But thankfully, God calls sinners, not the righteous, and our tradition is chocked full of the former, as any parish priest could tell you.

  From his perch on the step where Jude sat, his one leg following the contour of the stairs, the other raised up next to him, bent knee providing a rest for his thin but muscled arm, he whistled at us—a juicy, leering sort of whistle that lifted up our skirts like an unwelcome wind off the bay, demanding a peek. He would have seen the standard issue white underpants we all wore in compliance with our uniform policy, which was as stiff as our dresses, but that wasn’t the point. Even as a fourth grader I felt besmirched and yet a little bit excited at the same time.

  I asked Sister Thaddeus about it that night as I handed her the mugs she lined up on a shelf in the kitchen. “Is that really the way it works?”

  Sister Thaddeus, I figured, had her share of catcalls. “Yes. It is. For those of us mortals who feel those sorts of things.” She wiped a brown curl away from her forehead. She tried not to be allu
ring, the Lord knows she tried, but even her habit did little to detract from her beauty and her curvaceous figure. We all felt sorry for her.

  “Why is it like that?”

  “Most of us are made to have babies. Boys like Jude realize that a little sooner than they’re supposed to.” She climbed down from the stepstool, holding up her light-gray habit to reveal, not surprisingly, a well-carved ankle, the beauty of which her black brogan failed to diminish. “Not that it’s a big surprise in his case,” she mumbled. Sister Thaddeus always mumbled her opinions, leaving it up to you if you wanted further clarification. I always did.

  “What do you mean?”

  She passed me a floor duster, its long handle smooth against my palm. I loved running it along the floor of the dining room, the great loopy strings snatching up crumbs and lint. Shaking it out over the lawn was even better, unless the wind blew right at you. “If he’d stayed at the lighthouse with his father, his life would be different. But”—she waved her hand—“but he’s started living with his mother and that oysterman.”

  As if that said it all. And what it said, I had no idea. Nine-year-olds, unless you were Jude Keller, didn’t know such things, not like children these days. But I realized it meant something regarding women and something regarding nice and something regarding how those two words never mixed together in the oysterman’s abode, a little yellow-brick bungalow on the edge of town near the processing plant. I figured I’d know more of the details someday. Not that I didn’t already have my share of maturation by then. It was just in other areas. I’d already learned about rape, being illegitimate, losing your mother and all the relatives that you’ve ever known and loved. But, sisters, I’d also talked with Christ face-to-face. Not that anybody knew. In fact, this is the first time I’ve written about it and I’ve never told a soul. Not even my dear friend Angie. Do forgive me, friend, as you read this. Some things you choose not to tell even your best friend.