by Lisa Samson
It was then I realized, sitting among the death, the AIDS, the senseless starvation, the ants, and the home-provided blankets, that I owed my father two of the three greatest happinesses of my life: my marriage and my son. Of course, the third I’m living out now.
Sister Mary-Margaret indeed!
I wanted him to be alive.
So I think it’s important I tell you about the wedding.
I stood near the front doors of the church, peeping into the sanctuary around which Mrs. Bray had strewn some bows and flowers. The Brays sat next to Sister Thaddeus, and my friends from the consolidated school dotted the pews, as well as the ancient set at St. Francis who always showed up for daily Mass and the altar society. Perhaps thirty of us in all. A nice, circumspect little gaggle to be sure, people I knew wouldn’t make a fuss. So when Rosalie LaBella walked in with a man in a brown habit, nerves overcame me as two worlds crashed in the middle of the narthex, and I hoped that Jude would be all right.
LaBella sallied right up to me, concern etched on her face. “Jude called and invited us. I hope you don’t mind,” she apologized.
I sighed in relief. “No! That’s fine.”
“And he asked me to sing a song a song at the reception. I hope you don’t mind.”
I hesitated.
“Don’t worry. It’s appropriate. I’ll talk to the priest if you’d like.”
She certainly had dressed herself appropriately, more the lady in the row house on Highland Avenue than the stripper down on Baltimore Street and thanks be to God for small favors.
She’d chosen a cranberry suit with a black belt, a small black hat, and mid-heeled pumps. Her heavy, dark hair was curled sweetly around her face and she’d applied her makeup sensibly.
“I believe you,” I said, reaching out and bestowing a quick lady hug upon her.
“This is Brother Joe,” she said.
Brother Joe stuck out his hand, his voice soft-spoken but intense and so kind. “It’s good to meet you, Mary-Margaret. I always knew somebody would tame that young man. Leave it to the Lord to make it someone going into the religious life.”
I know. It was my father. I didn’t know it then. His hair blazed like mine; his eyes squinted like mine. He was angular like me. But I didn’t see the resemblance that I saw when I looked at his picture from seminary.
He was a fifty-four-year-old man by this point, the coarse cloth of his brown, Franciscan habit falling down from sharp collarbones. Even as I remember him, I can’t quite get my mind around the fact that he was the raping seminarian.
Oh yes, I suppose I could talk myself into remembering some haunted guilt rummaging through the goodwill in his expression, but at that time, all I could think was, This man loves the prostitutes and the sinners. And I would have been foolish not to believe that his love for Jude, his open doors, weren’t instrumental in bringing Jude back from the dead.
Brother Joe was a smiling redheaded Franciscan who ran a rescue mission. Nothing about him hinted at anything different.
No Mass was said, since Jude wasn’t Catholic and it wouldn’t be appropriate if we couldn’t share Communion together. But Father Thomas, still with the face of an angel, but not looking as young as when he buried my mother, lent his overall air of holy joy to the sacrament, and we knelt, and were blessed, and we said our vows, Jude gently taking my hand between his own.
And in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit, we were united in the eyes of God, the Church, our friends, our family, and each other. I looked at him, love spilling out from my heart. His eyes smiled into mine and I ran my hand along his jaw.
I never wanted to be here and yet, the joy inside of me swelled. Joy at what was, and yet, pain at what would never be.
Fear not. Fear not.
He pulled me to himself and held me so tightly I wondered if I’d keep breathing.
“You love me, Mary-Margaret,” he whispered against my neck.
“Yes. I do.”
I don’t think Jude believed it until right then.
Even now, I’m trying to remember Brother Joe better. After the ceremony, we went out onto the lawn for the reception, a down-home potluck. Mr. Bray had roasted a pig all the night before, digging a pit and keeping vigil until the meat was falling off the bones. With his sauce, Mrs. Bray’s baked beans, and bowls of greens and potatoes, sweet potatoes, potato salad, coleslaw, corn on the cob, and, much to our surprise, a whole bushel of steamed crabs compliments of Brister, who came over after the ceremony, we feasted until we all thought we’d pop.
Jude ate about half as much as I did, but he sat and watched me pick crab upon crab. “We didn’t get these much at the convent school,” I explained, shoving bite after bite of the glorious meat into my mouth.
“We ate them all the time. I’d rather have a crab cake.”
He still hadn’t kicked the cigarette habit, and when Brother Joe came over to chat, he excused himself for a minute to go smoke.
“I prayed I’d see this day and always wondered why I felt the urge. Now I know why.” Brother Joe smiled as the soft-spoken words came forth. “You know, we do what we can at the mission, and we see some success, more with the women than the men unfortunately. But this beats all.”
“Have a crab.” I laid out some newspaper beside me on the picnic table, three pages thick, and plopped down a small wooden mallet.
“I believe I will, thank you.”
Of course, you know and I know that I’m filling in these conversations with what I hoped happened. I remember the gist of things, but the exact words? Well, as I sit here and think about my father, Brother Joe, I wish to goodness I could recall it all exactly.
But the truth is, I just remember a quiet, happy person eating crabs with me, enjoying every bite and sipping on a mug of beer. I remember how soft his brown robe was, obviously washed dozens and dozens of times. I remember thinking those people down at The Block were extremely fortunate someone was giving his life for them and asking nothing in return. I remember thinking how grateful I was he was there when Jude needed someone to keep him alive.
I haven’t gone into Jude’s drug use much. He hated that part of himself even more than what he did and I’m still not sure why. Maybe it had to do with him being out of control. He took the story of that bit of him to his grave and I let him. Of course, so much of his selling his body had to do with feeding it heroin. Brother Joe found him on the street one night in the dead of winter, passed out, needle in his arm.
He brought him inside the mission.
Jude never told me what happened after that other than this: “I was there for two weeks, Mary-Margaret, and when I emerged, I never shot up again.”
I still don’t know how Brother Joe got Jude to kick his addiction to such a powerful drug, but he did. And maybe, if I can find him here in Africa, he’ll tell me. And maybe he’ll tell me how Jude knew all the prayers and creeds as if he were a cradle Catholic. He wouldn’t tell me about that either.
La Bella stood to her feet and sang, a cappella:
The bells of St. Mary’s Ah, hear, they are calling The young loves, the true loves Who come from the sea And so my beloved When red leaves are falling The love bells shall ring out, ring out For you and me.
Jude saved up some money from working on Brister’s boat for a two-day honeymoon in Ocean City. We drove Brister’s car two hours across the lower portion of the Eastern Shore the day after the wedding. Sunday. We stopped for Mass in Salisbury at St. Francis de Sales Church, Jude sitting in the pew as I went forward to receive the Eucharist. When I returned to the pew and knelt down to pray, he joined me on the kneeler and took my hand.
We made it to the Plim Plaza Hotel by lunchtime, a grand old hotel that had seen its better days come and go. We wiled away the rest of the afternoon on the rocking chairs lined up along the front porch, facing the ocean. The town had basically closed up for the season. A few people pedaled their way down the boardwalk on brightly colored cruisers; some walked hand in hand or jog
ged; others just seemed to wander along, the stretch of wood an invitation for the mindless rambling of those who have no place else to go or be.
Jude heard the stories of my life I’d forgotten, laughing at Angie’s antics, listening intently as I described my favorite pupils including my friend Morpheus from Georgia. When I told him about the night I was almost killed, his skin blanched to a shade that echoed the cirrus clouds shredded overhead by the stiff breeze.
“See?” I said. “You weren’t the only one living an exciting life.”
“Well, at least I know you know what it feels like to think you’re about to die.”
“I was so frightened. Not so much about death, but about the pain involved.”
“You were never one that could handle physical pain well.”
He was right. I was always at the infirmary for something.
But Jude, his motto had been since he was a young teen, “If you don’t need to sop up the blood, you don’t need a doctor.”
We ate dinner in the hotel dining room where a tuxedoed old man played a tinkling piano, caught some more live music, jazz, over at The Commodore, and, as planned, Jude slept on the sofa in the sitting room of our suite.
I don’t know why I thought he’d change his mind about climbing into bed with me. But disappointment flowered inside of me, a bloom much larger than I expected.
All the next day I took his hand, held on to his arm, did all I could to display affection. He responded in kind, but with no one-upmanship. I realized that any progression in our relationship would be up to me. He’d handed over the keys of the car to a woman who knew only the bare facts of driving and from a book at that.
Our second and final night there, I felt that responsibility flow down onto me, coupled with the newness of this life with Jude, the leaving of my sisters, and the lack of a family; I quietly cried in the darkness. I tried not to make much noise, but, sisters, I don’t cry delicately. My nose fills up and you could collect my tears in a bottle. I lay there sniffing and sniffing.
The bed dipped at the right side and he lay down. He pulled me close to him in the bed, and we fell asleep that way, snuggled together, our breath skimming one another’s shoulders. When I awoke in the middle of the night, he was back on the couch.
I grabbed the bedspread, laid it down on the floor next to the sofa, and covered myself with a blanket. The next morning I was awakened as Jude lifted me in his arms and placed me back in the bed. His lips rested on my temple and his hand rested on my head. I pretended I was asleep.
“Oh, Mary-Margaret. You’re a silly, silly girl.” Tenderness tempered the words he didn’t think I heard.
He gathered together his clothing for the day, then undressed. I watched him through slitted eyes as he stripped to nothing, his muscles close beneath his skin, his legs long and lean, his hips slender. His arms and neck were so much darker than the rest of him, I wanted to laugh. But those legs also were lightly pocked by the scars from the pustules of the secondary stage of syphilis he’d come out of several months before. And beneath that skin and hair and muscle and bone, the disease might well be attaching itself to his organs as I watched him.
“It wouldn’t take much,” I said.
He turned, standing without a stitch on, completely comfortable, forgetting, I suppose, he was supposed to feel naked. “I didn’t know you were awake. I’m sorry. Maybe I should have just left you on the floor.”
“I’m fine.”
“Why did you sleep over there anyway?”
“To be with you. It’s why I married you.”
He ran his fingers through his curly hair. “What were you talking about when you said, ‘It wouldn’t take much’?”
“Penicillin.”
“Oh.” He lifted a pair of boxer shorts from atop the dresser and slid them on. I wanted to tell him to stop. I know this may sound strange, but he was mine. He was given to me and I liked seeing him.
When he walked over to yank his shirt off the hanger, I said, “Stop.”
“What? I just thought I’d go down and bring us up some coffee from the restaurant.”
“I know you don’t want to . . . do anything. But I just like looking at you.”
“You and a thousand other people.”
He might as well have slapped me. And it wouldn’t have been undeserved. What was I thinking? I’ll bet I sounded just like those awful women and men who’d hired him.
“Oh, Jude! I’m so sorry!”
It was then, sisters, that I really and truly realized Jude wasn’t some pervert who lusted and used and to hell with the world. He was one of the broken ones, the severely broken ones upon whom sin settled down and stayed, screwing its bolts into him, body and soul, piercing the muscles, grinding the bones to bits and stirring the marrow. His complicity in it didn’t make it any less so, didn’t make his own choices any less wounding.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Get dressed. I will too. And we can just go have breakfast in the dining room.”
I took my clothes into the bathroom and changed where he couldn’t see me.
“Thank you,” he said, when I emerged. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. You couldn’t have known.”
At least there was that.
He twined his fingers amid mine and we headed down to eat.
We lived above the tackle shop, Jude sleeping on the couch as promised, me in the bed. Every so often I’d sleep next to him on the floor, and he’d lift me up and put me back in the bed.
“You pulled a Plim Plaza on me last night again, huh?” he’d say the next morning. But the truth was, I wanted to be near him. I was, at twenty-nine, turning into a woman. I loved being with him, near him, touching him, but he wouldn’t go beyond holding me in his arms, kissing me softly, caressing my face.
“I just want to lay in your arms, Jude.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what will happen if I stay with you.”
“Would it be so bad?”
“Mary-Margaret! I’ll give you syphilis. Why in the world do you want to take a chance like that?”
And since I couldn’t say Jesus told me to do that, I just said nothing.
I’ve been in Swaziland for two weeks now. There’s so much to do I forget about writing in this thing. But I feel like I’m with Jude again in the penning of the tale and that is wonderful. And there’s so much to tell about my stay here as well.
John fetched me that first night from the women’s ward at the hospital around ten fifteen, leaning down to hug Precious and speak soothingly to the other patients. The ones he knew personally he touched, rubbing their arms or blessing their heads. Calling them friend. Many of the women sat up, bare breasted. It didn’t bother my son. I was proud of him.
It took us almost two hours to arrive in Big Bend. We stopped at a Spar (a grocery store) in Manzini before we really set out on the road and bought Cokes, the sweetest Coke you’ve ever tasted. I felt nervous, so the calories were welcomed. John bought me a candy bar as well, a Nestlé Aero bar, the perfect candy bar for smashing against the roof of your mouth with your tongue when you’re feeling at all apprehensive.
Driving at night in Swaziland isn’t such a good idea. Cows wander the roads, people walk alongside, some of them having imbibed too much; a person could find themselves hitting just about anything.
Once the city dissipated into the countryside, it was hard to see, but I knew that homesteads dotted the darkened landscape. I could sometimes see a kraal against the night sky. Kraals are where cattle are kept and where village meetings take place between, normally, the chiefs and the men. They are interesting corrals, large sticks driven into the ground and secured with wire or strapping of some sort. You cannot take pictures of a kraal, because it is an official building. Taking pictures of official state buildings is illegal in Swaziland.
But here is a drawing. They’re beautiful, like a modern, organic sculpture or a giant crown, the sticks bending in lovely curves and angles.
Of course, some dark
decisions can take place in a kraal, but this is not that story. I didn’t stay in Swaziland long enough to get in that kind of trouble! Now, if Angie had come, there’s no telling what would have happened. Oh, I do hope, for your sakes, sisters, she wrote down her adventures.
By God’s grace we made it to Big Bend.
John’s clinic lay beneath one bare light on a pole, its anemic rays illumining a corrugated tin roof that protected the cement block building. Behind the clinic a smaller building consisting of only four rooms sat darkened. And then there was the church, a little chapel whitewashed near the road. Only two percent of Swaziland is Catholic.
He unlocked the door to the living quarters. “The others have gone to bed. We’ll just make our way quietly back to my room, Mom. I’ve got a cot set up for you. We’ll have to bunk together this time.”
“Has another doctor joined you?” I asked.
“Not yet. He will. One of our medical priests from Mbabane.”
Mbabane is the capital city to the northwest. It’s pronounced Buh-bahn.
“You remember me talking about Father Ignatius all these years, right?”
“Yes.”
“I just set up his room this morning. He’s old and sick and he doesn’t want to go back to the States. He wants to die in Africa, so we’re going to take care of him. I mean, I’m here because of him. It’s the least I can do.”
“Tell me a little more about Father Ignatius,” I requested as I put fresh linens and a blanket on the cot. “He’s been over here a long time, hasn’t he?”
Father Ignatius recruited John.
“Yes.”
“Where did he go to school again?”
“He graduated from Mount St. Mary’s way back in the thirties.”
“Where was he before he came to Africa?”
“He ran a ministry to street people in Baltimore. Down at The Block.”
“Was he called Brother Joe then?”
