by Lisa Samson
“Yes, sister.” I never could lie to Sister Thaddeus; she was that nice.
“Well, I need a new toothbrush if you’d like to walk over there with me.”
“Yes, sister. Thank you.”
Jude waited, sprawled on the steps, leaning back on his elbows, the sun shining down on him like a spotlight he soaked in through the membranes of his cells. He scowled at Sister Thaddeus, who touched his light brown curls and swung into the store.
“D--- nuns,” he said.
“She’s not a nun, she’s a religious sister. Nuns are cloistered.”
“It’s a convent school, idn’t it?”
“Well, yes. Some of them are cloistered, but Sister Thaddeus isn’t.”
“She’s a looker. Even in that penguin suit.”
I rolled my eyes. And he laughed, baring his perfect teeth.
I laughed too. “She’s gone in to get a toothbrush,” I whispered.
He whispered back, “Is that . . . a secret thing? Nuns brush their teeth?”
“No. I . . . I don’t know why I whispered.”
“Don’t go whispering around me, Mary-Margaret. I don’t shock too easy.”
“How old are you?”
“Eleven.”
“I’m nine.”
“I know. But you’re older inside. Like I am.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. I just do.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a peppermint. “Here. I got it inside. I had a feeling the penguin would show up.”
“Thanks.”
“I gotta go. Brister wants me on the boat this afternoon and if I don’t get there on time, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Does he beat you?” I remember the shock that spilled over the edges of my brain and into my heart.
“Yeah, the pansy. But I can take it.” He jerked his head to the side. “There ain’t nothing he can dish out I can’t take.”
Jesus sat down next to me. “Don’t take his words at face value, my dear. Brister wounds his heart as well as his backside. There’s more going on there than you can imagine right now.”
Do you love Jude too?
“Oh yes.”
“Well, it’s been swell.” Jude jumped off the step and ran down the street, his gait graceful and untamed. I didn’t see him again until Christmastime. Jesus accompanied Sister Thaddeus and me back to the dining hall. I remember we had fried oysters that night for dinner.
They might not have been from Brister Purnell’s boat, but I pretended they were.
ANGIE, BLANCA, MARY-FRANCIS, AND I GATHERED AROUND the table for dinner last night. We don’t live at the school anymore now that it’s a retirement village. We reside next door. For years Mr. Johnson Bray lived in this house along with his wife, Regina, and their eight children who were grown up and gone by the time I graduated from high school. Mr. Bray was the first person to show me the proper ratios for drawing the human form and he explained color theory based on nature. I was the only girl to live at the convent all year long. I miss him more than I could possibly say. He was a tailor by trade who cooked up fancy dinners on Sundays. The sisters let me go over there to eat during the summer.
The Brays’ cottage now witnesses simple meals, beans and rice most days. Mary-Francis cooks up a large pot on Mondays and we eat off of it the entire week. She used to be a missionary in Mexico and likes to remember the people there, so we eat the same dinners they do. On Sundays Blanca cooks a roast and on Saturday I bake bread, five loaves for us, five to share. Angie shops. We banned her from the kitchen when she first moved into the cottage after arriving back to Locust Island from her transient life, aging but still going strong. It’s a hard place to be when your bones grow brittle while the fire’s left inside. But we’re all in it together and we always will be until Angie, who we all bet will be the last to leave, goes on to our motherhouse in Baltimore. We have a nice assisted-living place for all the retired sisters. It’s a fine order.
After lives of much excitement, the motherhouse won’t be a bad place. Anybody who thinks being a religious sister is boring work must not know any of us. Between the four of us, we’ve been on every continent, even Antarctica. Blanca visited her brother stationed down there. She spent a good deal of her life in the Ukraine, China, and Hungary. I’ve mostly been here, although I went to Africa for a year a couple of years ago to visit and serve with my son, John. Mary-Francis served in Central America, Mexico, South America.
If Jesus comes to them like he comes to me, they’re not saying any more than I do. For I know this, the day I tell is the day he stops appearing. He didn’t have to tell me this; I just know it.
Angie covered my rice with a heaping spoonful of black beans. We gathered our napkins and placed them on our laps like the ladies we were taught to be all those years ago when St. Mary’s was somewhat of a finishing school as well. The simple bands on the fingers of our left hands glimmered golden in the overhead light. Blanca, who’s 4’11” and has always somehow managed to look fifteen even though her hair is white and her skin creased from her days teaching in the sun, calls us God’s Harem. And rolls her eyes after she says it. Every single time.
We crossed ourselves and said grace. And my heart was full of love for my sisters. I gave everyone a scare back in 1958 when Jude showed back up. Angie thought she’d never get me back again. And at times, I thought she might be right. But some days it just didn’t seem to matter. Others, I felt a longing so deep for life at St. Mary’s I wondered if my heart was just a fickle fist of flesh. Sorry, Angie, I know you’re cringing at the alliteration. But it just fits.
“Amen.”
Jesus didn’t need to show up right then, for he was smiling at me in the eyes of the women around me. My friends. My partners. Truly, my sisters.
I pulled on the chain of the lamp beside my bed in the room Angie and I share. She was already asleep, but she doesn’t mind the light or the scritch of my pen as I write in this notebook. My goodness I’ve written so much today. These days Angie conks out right after Jeopardy! The Tonight Show is beyond us. Tomorrow is Saturday and we’ll set this place to rights after the busy week. Blanca and Mary-Francis will give the house a deep clean. Angie will shop and run errands. I will bake bread, mow the lawn for the final time this season, and weed and mulch the flower beds for the winter. I’ll finally get to planting those bulbs that have been sitting around in the toolshed for years.
Jude bought them for me back in 1964.
I wonder if they’ll bloom. I doubt it, but I’ve been wondering about Jude a lot these days. Some people say our sins are purgated here on earth; others say there’s a different plane. For Jude, I hope and pray the former is true. He deserves that, considering the way he died.
Angie mentioned John’s letter. Here it is:
Dear Sr. Mom,
I wonder each day how you and the others are faring on the island.Did Sr. Blanca get over her bronchitis? How is Mary-Francis’s father?What about Uncle Gerald and Aunt Hattie? It took quite awhile for your letter to reach me, unfortunately, which explains my tardy reply. I hope you weren’t worried.
Everything is going well here in Big Bend. A church in the US recently built a structure at a carepoint where orphans are being fed daily. We’ve offered to teach two days a week those children who cannot afford the school fees and they’ve accepted our offer. I’ll still run the clinic while Brothers Luke and Amos will teach school, the basics: math, science, English, reading in both siSwati and English. Religion, of course.
The medical needs grow here in Swaziland, as you can imagine. I ran into a Pentecostal missionary the other day who said that when he arrived fifteen years ago he was doing one funeral a week. Now, he’s up to several a day due to HIV/AIDS. Not that anyone really dies of AIDS according to their relatives.
We need more antiretrovirals, but money is in short supply. We’re doing what we can with what we’ve been given. Even for the little we do, the Swazi people are so
thankful. But then, I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you.
I’m going to have to return to the US to keep up my hours. I’ll be doing them at Hopkins so hopefully I can stay with you for a while. After all this time on the parched plain, I need your healing rains.
Much love,
Fr. Son
The other day I picked up a copy of The Knowledge of the Holy, by the protestant mystic Aiden Wilson Tozer. He’d don a coverall, slipping it over his suit and tie, and fall on his face before the Lord. He gave away most of his earthly gifts to feed the poor and help others. If it was up to me to decide sainthood, I’d go with the man. I came to know Tozer through the aforementioned Johnson Bray, a person I’ll miss with a pinprick sadness until my dying day.
Mr. Bray also sewed ready-made suits before ready-made suits were the norm. He was a man ahead of his time. I would find him in his workshop, hunched over the machine, this giant, kingly black man with hands so large it astounded me they could do such fine work. His workshop looked as if a notions store had exploded. Buttons, trim, fabric, spools of yarn in no particular order covered every flat surface. He didn’t allow his wife, his opposite, to step so much as a toe over the threshold. She was grateful for that.
Sometimes, when he did his handwork, hemming, and basting, usually late at night, I’d sit with him.
“Come on in, MM!”
And there he’d be, sitting in an old tapestry chair, his swollen feet pushing out the sides of his slippers resting on an ottoman. Holding that teeny needle in those big fingers, he usually was sweating underneath the lamp because when I talked most to Mr. Bray, I was on summer vacation and the nuns didn’t always know what to do with me.
So we sweated together, him more than me, and as he sewed I sketched. Usually pictures of him or Jude. Or Jesus. But nobody’s ever seen those. I keep them in their own portfolio.
“How you doin’ tonight, Sister Mary-Margaret?” he’d always ask. He was the first person to ever call me that.
“Fine, Mr. Bray. Hot.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Whose suit is that?”
This was 1940 and I was ten years old.
“Mr. Clark Gable’s.”
“No!”
“Oh yes. Yes, yes.”
“How did you get him?”
“Well now, it’s a very interesting story.”
Mr. Bray pronounced it in-ter-REST-ing.
Mrs. Regina Bray, a beautiful woman with the grace of a dove, always offered me a lemonade and I always accepted because she wasn’t stingy on the sugar. She was every bit as lithe and willowy as her husband was thick and heavy. She wore yellow at least seventy-five percent of the time and her voice always sounded as if she were speaking in church.
“Oh, Johnson and his stories.” She’d chuckle.
He’d nod. “But it’s late and you should be in bed, shouldn’t you?”
“No. Everybody’s asleep. I’m free and clear at least until compline.”
He’d laugh and laugh. And then he’d usher me into his workshop. That night he told me a grand tale of how Mr. Clark Gable himself came upon Mr. Bray right there in Abbeyville! My, that man could weave a story. Mermaids and miracles and just plain fancy. He was one of those people you suspected could be an angel. Mrs. Bray too.
“You tell a story better than Aunt Elfi,” I said. “Unless she’s not making all that up.”
He laid a finger on the side of his nose. “She was a mystic for sure.”
“That’s what she told everyone.”
“Oh no. I think she really was. Now, about her being the reincarnation of Catherine of Siena, well, that seemed a bit farfetched, considering Catherine’s a saint. What’s the theology on that, MM?”
“Saints are people the Church is positive are experiencing the beatific vision.”
“Heaven?”
“Yes, sir. Which makes it just seem plain silly that a saint could be reincarnated.”
“Still, seems to me she found God in a way few have, I’ll warrant. God meets people in the strangest places.”
I found out a few years later that Aunt Elfi had been dropped on her head as a baby.
Back to Clark Gable. “So, is he really as good-looking in person?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Clark Gable.”
“Better looking.”
“I knew it!” I snapped my fingers. I was crazy about Mr. Gable.
Sisters, here is one of my favorite portions from the book Mr. Bray gave me, The Knowledge of the Holy.
They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art, and so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy; therefore, enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art, so that we may perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee.
An “amen” rings in my heart, and I remember Mr. Bray, long gone, and how he taught me not to tell God where he can and cannot go, who he can and cannot save, and why he can and cannot do so. “Love rules the day,” Mr. Bray told me when I asked him years later why Jesus would have me reach out to Jude in the way he was asking. “If Jesus is asking you to do that, it’s because he loves you both that much.”
I miss Jude tonight. In truth, despite the tickle in the loins (which I thought a machination of the evil one), I initially viewed Jude as a call to obedience, a chance to understand what sacrificial love really means. But every once in a while, when we were teens and I walked with him at the edge of the point, and the light from Bethlehem Point Light swung around and around, I loved him a little. Or maybe it was just physical attraction back then. It doesn’t matter now. And I was still a girl who loved Jesus more than some boy.
The third time Jesus came to me I was ten years old and sitting at Fort McHenry, the place of my conception. We’d come to Baltimore for a three-day field trip, the sisters traipsing us around the fort, the USS Constellation, the Washington Monument, Union Station, the Basilica of the Assumption, and to see the circus at the Armory. I’d detached myself from the group and sat on one of the star points of the old fort, my legs dangling down in front of the brick, my eyes tracking the ships sailing down the Patapsco River to the Baltimore Harbor and to the docks on the waterfront.
Naturally, I thought of my mother.
The circumstances surrounding my birth saddened me not so much because of what my mother went through, although clearly, that was something to mourn and at times I did. What saddened me the most was that I had such a bad man for a father. I often wondered if somehow his propensity for gross mortal sin was engraved like fine glass etching into my cell membranes. Was I lacking the ability to stop myself from placing my desires so forefront I’d force my will against another?
The noon sun lowered as I sat thinking about this, only not in such grandiose terms as written above. Did my father’s transgressions leave some sort of mark on me? Something like the mark of Cain, only my sin was not my own? For certainly, the children at St. Mary’s, other than Angie, tended to leave me alone. Was it more than the fact that I was deemed “odd” because of my orphan/charity status? Had some bubble formed around me, something toxic that mere contact with would render a person . . . what? Not popular? Stained? Damned?
“No. Not damned at all, T—.”
I glanced to my left and there he stood, the grass, having wintered and grown too long before the first cutting, brushing against his bare ankles.
I remembered those eyes.
Oh my. He came back!
“Yes, it’s me again. You think more deeply than you should for your age. And you must know there’s nothing you can do that will damn another person.”
“I hate how I was made. If that seminarian was doing the right thing, then I wouldn’t be here.”
“True.”
He walked closer and rested his hand atop my head. Light and love flowed into me.
“But you still love me.”
“You are very dear to me, T—.”
It was then I found out what my real name meant.<
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“Because of the way I was made?”
“Yes.” He sat down. “Listen to a story I will tell you.”
He asked me to keep it between us. Jesus comes to many people, of this I’m convinced, but in many ways, and he always asks them not to brag about it.
So that was the day I fell in love with him.
That day Jesus took my hand and walked me to the water’s edge. “I don’t like that fort,” he said. “Too much bloodshed. Too much plotting and planning of pain. Let’s sit here instead.”
We sat in the long grass together and he never let go of me.
“Let me know this is real somehow,” I asked after the sun set and the sky turned a blazing lavender with shoots of golden cloud zooming across its breadth.
You see, the group had left without me. It was almost as if I had disappeared and nobody realized it.
He pressed his thumb into the soft spot of skin and muscle between my forefinger and thumb. Warmth surged in through his branding touch. I can’t see the red spot it made anymore, but it still feels tender to the touch and reminds me of the day I was born anew, you know, when I became a little girl who really and truly knew she was loved by God. That’ll make anyone feel brand new.
He told me a story that day, a story of how sin can lead to God’s mercy. My very existence was filled to overflowing with God’s mercy. “And that seminarian, though he didn’t know it, gave you to me to love, T—. Somehow, though it doesn’t seem to make any sense, we can at least be thankful for that.”
THIS HAS BEEN ONE OF THE MOST EXHAUSTING DAYS OF MY life!
I was praying myself awake this morning when Jesus sat next to me on the bed. “I want you to do several things before I bring you home, T—.”
T— is my true name and I don’t feel comfortable writing it down. It’s just for me. The name he gave me. We all have one, just not many of us know what it is. Indeed, do you think God knows you as the name your parents gave you or the one he gave you before the foundations of the world? Don’t you ever wonder what that name might be?
All right, Jesus, I’ll do what you ask.
