by Lisa Samson
From this point onward you will have to suspend your disbelief or do an in-depth study of Christian mystics who enjoyed an unusual relationship with Christ, and even then, the accounts I’ve read were nothing like my own. The mystics receive a great deal of flack from some of my protestant brothers and sisters who claim demons are responsible for their peeks into heaven, as if heaven is out beyond the stretches of our universe and the two plains never meet. Let’s just say I disagree and leave it at that. Although the mystics’ individual stories vary, this can be said of each one: they gave up everything for the Lord.
Most did this by choice, and that is why they are saints. Some, well, dare I say it? Oh, I’ll go ahead; most likely I’m already dead anyway. Some seemed a bit mentally troubled. But God even meets his children there, doesn’t he? How can he help himself? Doesn’t love go to the end of the universe and back?
I am no saint. You’ll read no story detailing holy anorexia or invisible wedding rings and stigmata. No self-inflicted wounds of penance and thankfully all that cutting and burning went out of fashion many, many years ago. Thankfully, we don’t have to understand the saints to feel affection and gratitude for them. They preserved the faith we now know. They didn’t drop the ball, so to speak. I do hope the generations ahead of us will at least recognize us for carrying on however much they might come to disagree with the way we did things. But perhaps they won’t. Who can tell these things?
I was invited into this realm of the hidden holy and as I saw it, at the age of seven, I could either embrace it tenderly or kick it away like Jude’s stepfather would kick their dog. I wish I was kidding or at the very least being cliché. The man actually and frequently kicked Spark, a mix of cocker spaniel and golden retriever who went rowing with Jude. The way his jowls would flap in the air like bunting still makes me laugh.
I chose to embrace the spiritual because already, by that age, I knew I needed something more. More than coming home to an empty apartment after school. More than my tired grandmother and my tired aunt who came home after shucking oysters or picking crabs all day at the cannery. More than shoes that pinched my feet. It seemed like less effort for me to bring God into the pitiful circumstances of my life than to demand a fancy, all-encompassing do-over. I thought perhaps that might be too hard for God. I confess, sometimes I still think some things are too hard for God. I mean, deep down I think that. But thankfully there’s an even deeper down. Unfortunately, crawling down into that well hurts like the devil because we know God can do something and yet doesn’t, and we don’t have many choices after that realization, and none of them are one hundred percent easy breezy.
So. Talking to Christ face-to-face.
On Ash Wednesday, 1937, I walked over to St. Francis’s for the seven p.m. Mass. I didn’t have to go, we’d already been to Mass at school, and it wasn’t a holy day of obligation. By that age, however, I’d already decided Lent was for me. My life was dark from the moment of my conception; why not take forty days to celebrate the fact? If I needed to do no real penance at that age, perhaps I could do so for my father, the raping seminarian, who surely must have ruined his life that evening by Fort McHenry.
I didn’t voice these thoughts back then, but have merely put them together as I’ve aged, trying to figure out why Jesus came that night amid the ashes. I wasn’t particularly sad or lonely as I sat in the sanctuary and heard I was made of dust and would return to the same. I pictured red blood turning to sand and grinding to a halt inside the tunnels of my veins.
We all come face-to-face with our mortality for the first time, and Ash Wednesday, 1937, was my scheduled appointment. Yes I was young, but I was steeped in death, formed in the womb of a dead woman.
I wanted to give up something for Lent but just couldn’t come up with a firm idea. Sitting there on the wooden pew, weighted feet dangling downward from my bent knees, I thought about my favorite things. Candy, ice cream, toys, what most seven-year-olds would enjoy, weren’t a regular part of my life anyway as my grandmother didn’t have the money for the typical things from which a child might abstain. So giving them up would be silly, akin to giving up tiaras or rides on parade floats. Playing at the playground or running around with the other kids wasn’t a good choice either. I had trouble in school, especially math. Each night I sat at the kitchen table, trying to figure out the problems in front of me, thankful for crazy Aunt Elfi who never minded going over and over my assignment. I didn’t have time for much play, but Aunt Elfi was fun to be around, the way she’d make pudding at eight p.m. and let me eat half the bowl, or how she could snip out the most fanciful animals, flowers, and trees from a simple sheet of paper. Nobody had TV then and nobody ever went out to eat. I didn’t drink coffee or beer or smoke cigarettes.
But I loved Jesus.
If you grasp nothing more about me, sisters, grasp this: I loved Jesus. I’m not embarrassed to admit it. If it makes me corny and predictable, I don’t care. He alone, of all those who walk the earth, was my mother, my father, my husband, my comforter, my good and honest friend.
“But how can I give you up?” I whispered in my heart, feeling the sadness of a child who was supposed to get a bicycle and ended up with a pack of crayons.
Father Thomas, a younger man with the face of an angel and a puff of prematurely white hair, traced the ashy black cross on my forehead and said, “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” Then he reached forward, laid his fine, white hand atop my head, leaned toward me, and whispered in my ear, “May Almighty God bless you with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Mary-Margaret.”
I looked up into his eyes and I saw love. Not just the love of Father Thomas, but the love of Jesus our Lord. Father Thomas faded away, the people faded away, the wooden pews, the stone walls and aisle, the glowing candles, and even the carved altar faded away, and I saw only those eyes, once blue, now a Jerusalem brown, and a voice said, “Do not give me up, Mary-Margaret. You are my daughter and I will always take care of you. You are my bride and I will always love you and keep you close to my heart. You are my friend and I will always walk beside you. I am yours.”
I blinked and Father Thomas just smiled, removed his hand, and went on to the next parishioner. That moment shone like the North Star. My mother couldn’t finish her calling, and Jesus made me his bride. There could be only one vocation. When a religious takes her final vow, she dons a wedding band, signifying that she is now married to Christ. That moment, when the cool gold would slide onto my finger, became what I looked forward to every day. As so many little girls look forward to becoming a wife and a mommy someday, I dreamed about becoming a religious sister. I decided that Ash Wednesday, alone in my bed, it was the only life for me.
If I tell you I had dark nights of the soul, it would be a lie. For most people, Jesus hides himself at times, like a lover who has been scorned just a touch and must remind his love what she has. But there was never any of that for me. He was true to his word, always taking care of this spindly, redheaded orphan, always keeping me close to his heart. I felt it beating every waking moment.
Not that he didn’t ask anything of me. Oh no. There’s where my walk with Jesus became an uphill climb.
YESTERDAY AFTER SUPPER, SISTER ANGIE AND I SAT BESIDE Hattie and Gerald’s beds. St. Mary’s Village provides everything from self-sufficient apartments to hospice. I hear that’s big business these days what with the baby boomers nearing retirement age. As I said, it used to be the convent school, but enrollment kept dropping, so the order rents the facility to a company that runs such ventures. We’re here to minister to them as chaplains, social workers, and “cruise directors.” I conduct the arts and crafts classes. Angie advocates for patients’ health care with Sister Mary-Francis who is actually a licensed social worker, and Sister Blanca serves as chaplain, spiritual director, and general person of prayer and supplication. In an official capacity, of course. We all do what we can on those fronts. Sometimes our duties mix and match.
Hattie and Gerald’s r
oom used to be the northern half of the science lab, which explains why Angie finds herself there so much. It was her old classroom.
I held Gerald’s hand; she held Hattie’s. The Mother Superior at school told us once that becoming a religious kept a woman from aging in the way married women do. And she raised one of her fine, winged eyebrows at us.
We laughed about it then, but I looked upon the hand of Hattie tucked into Angie’s and instead of the five years’ difference by the calendar, there were at least fifteen by the scan of the eye.
Much the same with Gerald and myself. Gerald, if you will remember, was the last lightkeeper and Jude’s eldest brother—twelve years his senior. I squeezed his hands, compressing a few of the brown age spots into a squiggled line along the tendons stretched down the back of his slender, yellow-skinned hand. Gerald was a ladies’ man like his brother. But he took one look at Hattie the day he returned from Japan to the island and every other woman on earth might as well have either gotten married or died.
“Gerald,” I whispered. “Gerald?”
He opened eyes floating in puddles of sickness. I saw those eyes, exactly the same, decades before, sitting in the eye sockets of my grandmother. “Mary-Margaret.”
“How do you feel?”
His smile bared false teeth hanging a bit low. His words clicked a little. “Like trash.”
“You don’t have to wear those teeth now.”
“Like heck I don’t.”
Well, perhaps a little of the Keller vanity remained. Both of those boys should have been on the silver screen judging by looks alone.
This spotty man with thinned hair scraped like silken floss over his skull had once dated three women at the same time: Miss Friday Night, Miss Saturday Night, and Miss Sunday Night. And there he lay on his bed. Reduced. Spine curled at the top like a fiddlehead.
“Good for you.”
“My Hattie asleep?”
“Yes.”
“Those drugs’ll do that for you.”
I laughed.
Jesus sat on the bed beside us. “Hattie will go first,” he whispered. “Don’t tell.”
All right. That’s a surprise.
“So what will you do when you come around, Gerald? Go on a safari? See the North Pole?”
“Oh no! Nothing wild or cold. I’d like to row over to the lighthouse once more, though.”
“I’ll take you.”
Will you just let him go to the lighthouse one more time? I asked Jesus. I’d like to go back myself.
“Oh!” Hattie cried out in her drug-induced sleep.
I looked over at Jesus as he said, “In fact, Mary-Margaret, you will go before Gerald does too.”
Soon?
“Let’s just say, in the proper time. You’re going to love what I’ve done with the place.”
And I can’t wait to go.
My heart was full of love and when he slipped away, the smell of lilies remained.
Gerald fell asleep, his dental plate slipping down and resting against his bottom teeth. A light snore trembled his lips.
I patted Angie’s leg. “I’ve got a pottery class to teach in an hour.”
“You go on, Mary-Margaret. I’ll sit here with them. By the way, you got a letter from John in the mail this morning.”
Hattie, who was once what Aunt Elfi called “a heroic figure of a woman,” lay flat on the bed, her body deflating a little more each day. She will soon become even with the bed, only her small, shiny red face above the covers, its skin smooth by the weight of the excess flesh drooping beneath her jawline. Her hair, still the shocking red that Angie applied only three days ago as they laughed like schoolgirls, now fanned out against her pillow like a bloodstain. I leaned down and kissed her cheek with its liberal application of rouge. Oh Hattie. Good for you.
After peeking into several rooms down the hallway and saying hello or hearing a soft snore, I headed over to our cottage on the grounds and climbed the steps to my bedroom. And while it’s true I can talk to Christ anywhere, that I see him in the eyes of each one he’s given me to teach and to love, I love meeting him and the rest of the Godhead right here in my room. I lit some candles, knelt on the kneeler I fashioned out of driftwood, lifted up my rosary and my eyes toward the crucifix, and I pictured Hattie and Gerald and all those I looked in on, as well as the girls in our school who suffer with wounds nobody can see, and began to pray for divine mercy.
For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.
Jesus never met me at my private altar like he did elsewhere. There I was level with the rest of Christendom. And though for whatever reason he chose to accompany me to the nursing home, to the places where the sick reside—the lonely, the dying—at my altar it was different. And it is here I will die. I know this because I asked him if he would take me at this very spot. He said that would be fine.
I want to be on my knees when I die, I requested later when I sat in the dimness of Hattie and Gerald’s room.
“Then that’s where you shall be.”
Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.
THE DAY I FIRST ACTUALLY MET JUDE I WAS NINE; HE WAS eleven. Of course I’d watched him row on the bay for a couple of years by then, or stared at his kites when he flew them from the decking of the lighthouse. He could make them do such tricks, loops and dives and corkscrews! He’d come off the lighthouse for good by then, living with his mother, Petra, and his stepfather, Brister Purnell, the infamous oysterman Sister Thaddeus clearly disapproved of.
Jude was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen other than Sister Thaddeus. Because I began my life in ugliness, beauty speaks to me, and so Jude, as he stood there by our schoolyard, legs apart, arms crossed over his chest, drew me to him. His ivory skin had been tanned by hours in the sun that summer, the last summer he’d scramble around the decking of the lighthouse, his clear aquamarine eyes scanning the horizon. The sun had streaked his light brown curls with a generous brush. His muscles, already developed into sleek lines from all the rowing and swimming he did out in the bay, glistened with perspiration that only highlighted him like armor of light. He drew me to him, not as a lover is drawn, but as a rose bids the painter come closer. Beware the thorns, I must add. For if outwardly Jude grew more beautiful as he approached manhood, inwardly, briars poked at the invisible flesh of his soul, shredding it, mangling it, and rearranging it. Satan likes doing it like that, leaving just enough there to fool you things are still the same, when in point of fact, nothing’s like before. Well, almost nothing. He cannot take away the stamp of God’s image. I don’t know if God himself can even do that, or why he’d even want to if he could.
Jude’s stance sizzled with challenge that morning as, finished with my kitchen chores, I hurried to my room to fetch my schoolbooks.
I walked over to him, flipping my red braid behind me, my heart feeling as if it were rolling around in my chest, throwing itself against the front of my rib cage.
“It’s just as pretty up close,” he said.
“What?” Not what I expected.
“Your hair. I seen it from the platform out at the light. You the girl that goes walking sometimes, right?”
I nodded.
“So it’s pretty. You all need to not wear them stupid hats to church so I could see it better.”
“Thanks. I like your kites that you fly.”
“I make ’em.”
“I’ve never flown a kite before.”
“It’s easy. What’s your name?”
“Mary-Margaret.”
“Two names in one.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mine’s Jude.”
“I know.”
He squinted. “How do you know that?”
“Sister Thaddeus. She says you don’t live at the lighthouse anymore and that you have an older brother who went off to fight in the war.”
He placed his hands on the fencing. “I’m the you
ngest.”
“I’m an only child.”
“So . . . you’re the youngest too.”
I nodded. “Did you go to the Labor Day parade yesterday?”
“Nah. Brister says who needs stuff like that. We sat around by the water and drank beer.”
Oh. At his age?
“You row a lot. How come?”
He shrugged. “Can I come into the yard?”
“Nope. No boys allowed. At least that’s what I think’s the rule.”
“I gotta get to school anyway. Bye.”
He pushed off the fence and picked up a stack of books held together by a rubber strap.
I looked behind him toward the drugstore, wondering what it would be like to sit and have a soda with a beautiful rose like that.
“You wanna meet me there after school?” He scratched his side, the plaid of his shirt rubbing up and down against his soft skin, revealing the tanned flank above his belt.
“I have chores.”
“After that?”
I couldn’t figure out why someone so beautiful wanted to be with me. He was a Keller and I was a girl living on the charity of a convent school. I oozed chastity and dependence; he oozed carnality and freedom. Even at that age. Sister Thaddeus said some boys are just like that.
“Just for a minute. I could use some soap.”
“Good.”
He walked toward Locust Island Elementary School. Our bell rang and I ran into class. Sister Thaddeus touched my back before I sat down at my desk. “Can you come with me into the hallway?”
I followed her. She leaned forward behind the door. “Was that the young Keller boy you were speaking with?”
I nodded.
“What did he want?”
“He wants to meet me at the drugstore after school.”
“Do you want to?”
