Sacred Trust

by Meg O'Brien

  “Little Miss Helpless now, are you? Or just used to being waited on?”

  I can’t help grinning at that. “I very seldom get waited on. I cook for myself, and believe it or not, I make my own tea.”

  “Huh.”

  She takes a teaspoon from a drawer and hands it to me. Taking up a potato, she begins to peel it. Her lips tug at the corners—not quite a smile.

  “You’re really happy here, aren’t you?” I ask, warming my hands around my cup as the chamomile steeps. “You were smiling—even humming—the other day when Sister Pauline and I walked in.”

  “I suppose it’s all right here.”

  “Hah. More than all right would be my guess. Right now, anyway. Helen, I’ve been thinking. You’ve been acting angry with me ever since you saw me at Marti’s funeral. And you raged at me the other night. I’ve been trying to figure out why. At first I thought maybe it was because I’d had a fairly easy life, compared to the difficult time you’ve had. Then I thought maybe you were angry because my husband is trying to get his hands on The Prayer House and you thought I was in cahoots with him.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “But you know,” I say, “I’ve been thinking something else since I woke up from my fall this morning. Funny what a bonk on the head and a nosedive into solid stone can do.”

  She makes a snorting sound that’s surprisingly like the one I make myself, the one Jeffrey hates. I can’t help wondering if I got it from her all those years ago.

  “I’m guessing,” I continue, “that it’s really only Justin you’re angry with me about. And I have to ask myself why that would be. Helen, you’ve been around Justin for years, so you must know I’ve never done anything to harm him. And I think you know Marti asked me to look after him, in the event something happened to him, that is.”

  She frowns. “You didn’t even do a good job at that, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I think I did, at least until a few months ago—”

  “At which time you let your personal life take priority over Justin’s safety,” she snaps. “Oh, don’t think I didn’t hear about that. All of Carmel has been buzzing about your husband having an affair with your sister, and you prancing around with that police detective.”

  “We are not prancing around!” I say defensively, warping back to my teenage years.

  Helen slams the potato down. “Young lady, Marti didn’t just ask us to watch over her son, as if he were some expensive car parked in an alley somewhere! What she charged us with was nothing less than the safety of her child.” Her voice lowers and breaks. “You failed her. And so did I.”

  “I know,” I say just as quietly. “And I regret that—so much, you will never know. I’ve loved Justin as much as you have.”

  “Love! What do you know of love? Especially for a child? What do you know of the sacrifices it takes to give one’s time and energies to a child, to be there for him even when you’re not feeling up to it, to never turn your back on him, no matter what? What do you know—”

  She breaks off, clamping her lips shut. Picking up the potato again, she begins peeling with sharp jabs, cutting huge chunks out with every slice.

  I sip my tea, satisfied I’m on the right track. My thoughts roam back over the last days.

  “You know what I think?” I say, setting down my cup. “I think the person you’ve really been angry with is Marti, for giving Justin away.”

  That elicits a sharp look.

  “And,” I say, “I think that goes back to the way you yourself must have felt when you entered Joseph and Mary, and your parents disowned you.”

  Her eyes go wide at this breach of her privacy. “I never told you anything about that!”

  “I know. I guess I must have picked it up somewhere.”

  “Somewhere! A bunch of old gossips in this place! Old biddies, talking about people behind their backs!”

  “No, not gossip. Helen, that’s the thing. They all love you here. As irascible as you may be at times—sorry, but you are—they love you. Some of that may just be their religious spirit kicking in, but I don’t think so. I think they know you aren’t an evil person, that below all the bluster, you are kind and good. Sister Anne even called you ‘quite the little nurturer.’”

  She makes the snorting sound again.

  “So, anyway, this is the way I’ve got it figured,” I say, “and I think I’ve done a pretty good job at this, at least. You remember how you used to make me think logically, one step at a time, in math? You taught me that there was only one way to arrive at an accurate answer, and that was to take what I knew and build on it—logically, no side roads, no errors along the way, or the entire problem would fall apart. That was a good lesson, one that helped me find the truth in stories I reported on later as a journalist.”

  The hand peeling the potato slows. I see I have my teacher’s interest.

  “See, what I think now,” I say, “is that it’s all about abandonment. When J&M closed down in the mid-eighties, there were those few months when they parceled all of you out to other convents and orders. That must have been incredibly difficult for you, losing the one home you knew. It wasn’t as if you had the support of your parents during the first months before donations kicked in.”

  “As if I wanted donations,” she says angrily, jabbing the poor potato again. “Charity! Nothing but charity, just like before!”

  Surprisingly, her eyes tear. But she straightens her back and says stiffly, “The order, you know, never gave postulants a thing. First of all, our parents were supposed to pay the order a dowry when we entered. Then they were supposed to buy everything we needed during our postulant year—uniforms, under-clothes, shoes, stockings, soap, toothpaste…”

  “But your parents wouldn’t help you,” I say. “Right? They abandoned you. That’s what it felt like, didn’t it?”

  She sits heavily in a chair on her side of the table and studies her raw, gnarled hands. “The cloth for my first habit came from a Saint Vincent de Paul thrift store. It was cheap, heavy material, hot as a blister in summer. Rotted under my arms when I perspired and didn’t clean up right, ever. Believe you me, young lady, by the time I took my vows four years later, I was sick to death of charity!”

  Her chin goes up. “When I started teaching, I bought my own cloth. We didn’t make much, mind you, but I put a little aside every month. I made my new habit with a washable material, and from the moment I put it on, I loved it. It was mine.”

  “That’s why you refused to give it up for so long. Sister, I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for you to go through all that at eighteen.”

  She glares at me. “I was strong. Independent. I knew I could take care of myself.”

  “I’m sure you were strong, Sister. But it must have hurt. And you probably thought you could take care of yourself, but most eighteen-year-olds think that way. We always believe we can conquer the world. I know Marti and I did. But when we got into religious life, they did their best to strip us of that spirit of independence. Isn’t that the way it was for you?”

  “That’s the way it was for all of us then,” she snaps. “They took young women and separated them from everyone they knew and all they believed. Today that’s called brainwashing. At least, by some. The younger sisters, the ones who like the changes, will tell you they turned us into mindless little servants of the Church. If you ask me, it was more like they kidnapped us and held us hostage somewhere.”

  Standing, she gathers up her vegetables in a large pan and takes them to the sink, rinsing them under running water. “Then one day they ‘set us free.’ Or so they said. We had no money and no way to take care of ourselves. So yes, I took their donations for a while. But it was still charity to me—and to a lot of the others, though they don’t speak of it now.”

  She turns and fixes me with an angry look. “Don’t go thinking we didn’t appreciate what people were doing to help us! But we should have been paid properly in the first place for the t
eaching we did. We should have been allowed to put money away for our retirement. If things had been run right, we never would have had to take charity at all.”

  Dumping the rinsed vegetables into a large kettle, she slams a lid on it and lights a fire beneath it.

  “You are quite an enigma, Sister Helen,” I say. “You loved religious life the way it was, and you even loved living by the rules. Yet you were willing to end up homeless to be independent—which is part of the freedom the younger sisters were fighting for.”

  “It’s not as if I chose to end up homeless,” she argues. “I worked past my retirement for ten years, and I wanted to go on working, the way a lot of the older sisters have.”

  “But then you had a bad car accident, and you had to stop working because the pain was too severe. I know.”

  She sits down again and sighs. “No, young lady, you do not know. That might have been the reason I used for retiring, but the truth is—”

  “You were tired,” I finish for her. “Tired of all the changes, of your home closing down just when you were getting ready to live out the rest of your life there. You probably even had dreams of dying at J&M with all your old friends and sisters around, the way it used to be.”

  “I did love walking in the gardens,” she says, her tone changing abruptly as her eyes look into the past and soften.

  “I know,” I say just as softly. “I loved it, too. Remember how we all made the rounds of the statues of Mary on May Day, singing songs to her and laying flowers at her feet?”

  Her eyes close against tears, and the old chin wobbles as her mouth shakes. “It was beautiful…so beautiful,” she says.

  When she looks at me again there is so much sadness in her eyes, so much grief for a life she will never know again, I almost regret having to do what I’m about to do to her.

  I lean forward and cover her hand with my own. “Sister? I was right, wasn’t I? It’s all about feeling abandoned. You felt abandoned, and you can’t bear now to see that happen to anyone else.”

  “What are you getting at?” she says sharply, pulling her hand away.

  “The primary rule of The Prayer House, Sister. It’s a rule I would expect you, of all people, to follow.”

  The old eyes take on a wary light.

  “‘Inasmuch as you do this for the least of My brethren,’” I say, “‘you do it for Me.’”

  She looks away, avoiding my eyes.

  “That’s what you’ve been doing here, isn’t it?” I press. “Caring for the ‘least of His brethren’?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I am so sorry for what happened to you,” I say. “I’m sorry things weren’t different. But they are different now, aren’t they? Really good? See, it was the humming, Sister. That’s what didn’t fit for me, from the first time I saw you in this kitchen looking peaceful, content—and humming.”

  She pulls her hand away from mine. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I couldn’t help wondering. How could you be so happy, even here—when Justin, the boy you’ve loved for years as if he were your own, had been kidnapped and could even be dead?”

  A shudder takes her body, as if a burden carried far too long has suddenly been dropped.

  “You couldn’t be that happy, could you?” I say. “That’s how I knew.”

  Again, I take her hand, holding it firmly in mine. “I want you to take me to Justin, Sister. Take me to him now.”

  19

  We trek up the hill side by side, each of us carrying a pail. Helen carries the scraps from her vegetables for composting, while I hold in one hand the pail with the extra chicken she’s been buying at Albert-son’s the past two months. With the chicken, now roasted to crisp perfection, is a jar of hot soup and a loaf of bread—Justin’s typical lunch for the past two months.

  “You’ve just been pretending to make bad batches and throwing them out, haven’t you?” I say, huffing a bit as I strain to keep up with her. “The other women were talking about that the other day at lunch. They said how unlike you that was. And when I thought about the way you come up here to these outbuildings every day, rain or shine, with your pails of ‘scraps,’ I realized finally that it wasn’t like they thought, that you were making bad batches because you were getting old and forgetful. You just let them believe that. It was a good cover for buying all this extra food for Justin.”

  “You always did catch on to things faster than most,” she says in a sour tone.

  “Not really. I didn’t actually put all this together till I got knocked on the head. It must have jarred something loose.”

  “Huh.”

  She keeps on walking, her limp getting worse, and as for me, my muscles are screaming to get there and have this Golgotha done with.

  “That’s why you won’t let anyone help you with your composting, isn’t it?” I continue. “And it’s at least part of the reason you’ve been treating me the way you have. You were keeping me at arm’s length, afraid I’d come to The Prayer House too often and find him here.”

  I stop a moment to catch my breath. “You know what? I’ll bet that’s why Ned, Marti’s brother, was so cold to me, too. You turned him against me, didn’t you, so we wouldn’t put our heads together too much?”

  She pauses, turns back, and gives me an irritable look.

  “Ned’s gone home already, hasn’t he?” I say. “Not much to hang around here for with Marti gone. So you can’t have told him Justin was kidnapped, and that you’ve got him now.”

  “You think you know so much,” she says acidly, starting to walk again. “And I told you before—you know nothing at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She won’t answer that, and I am left to wonder what I’m getting into. Have I miscalculated this time? Is Sister Helen crazy as a loon? Will Justin be bound to a chair and gagged?

  Or is he here at all? Is she leading me into a trap?

  I don’t honestly believe any of this, but these are the kinds of thoughts that run through my head as I follow my old teacher’s stiff, arthritic footsteps up the hill to the old outbuildings.

  Rounding the largest outbuilding, we come to a door at the back. Sister Helen takes a key from her pocket and opens a rusted padlock that looks as if it hasn’t been used in years. The key slips easily into place, however, and I see there are traces of oil around the keyhole.

  The sight that greets me when the door is opened shocks me. This is not at all what I might have expected.

  Justin sits writing on a yellow pad, at an old wooden table in the middle of a room that has been dusted to a fare-thee-well and turned into a cozy, though rustic, studio of sorts. It is furnished with so many books, he virtually has his own library. They are stacked from floor to ceiling along a wall and piled on the floor by the desk. A battery-operated Coleman lamp sits on the table, casting light around the room, and there is a bed in a corner that is covered with a homey quilt. Several plump pillows lean against an old iron headboard, and there are piles of books scattered about the bed, as if Justin spends his nights there reading. The room smells like lemon-scented polish, and Justin himself looks like any student anywhere, doing his homework while munching on a candy bar.

  Tears fill my throat and eyes. I’ve found him, Marti. He’s all right.

  Oh, dear God, thank you. Marti’s son is all right.

  20

  “Aunt Helen?” Justin looks up, obviously nervous to see a stranger with her. He pushes up the sleeves of his “PACIFIC GROVE HIGH” sweatshirt and rubs his palms on his jeans.

  “Good morning, Justin,” Helen says in a reassuring tone. “This is Abby Northrup. She’s an old friend of your mother’s.”

  She doesn’t specify whether she means Mary Ryan or Marti, but her hostility toward me disappears entirely in front of Justin. She clearly doesn’t want to worry or frighten him.

  “Hi, Justin,” I say, willing my lips to stop shaking. “How’s it going?”

  He looks from me to Sist
er Helen and shrugs. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “We brought you lunch,” Sister Helen says.

  “I can smell it.” He grins. “It sure smells good. Chicken?”

  “What else? I hope you’re not getting tired of it. I could try to get Tammy to buy a piece of pork or beef next time—”

  “No, no I like your chicken. In fact, you make the best I’ve ever tasted. Honestly, Aunt Helen, it’s great.” He gets up and gives her a hug. “You’re great.”

  The only way I can think to describe the expression on “Aunt Helen’s” face at this moment is that she’s beaming. Clearly, she is at her happiest doing “for the least of His brethren”—as children, I remembered earlier, have been referred to in the Bible.

  I set the food pail down on the table and begin to unpack it. Sister Helen has put a large, blue-and-white-checkered napkin in with the food, and I lay it on the table and place the chicken, then the soup, on it. There is also a knife for cutting the small loaf of wheat bread, and two paper plates. I put one plate in front of Justin, who has taken a seat again. On the other plate I put the bread, and begin to slice it. My hands are still shaking from the relief of finding him here. If ever there was a miracle, I think, this has to be it.

  Eyeing Justin closely, I say, “You seem pretty healthy.”

  He grins again, brushing his dark hair back from his forehead. “Thanks to Aunt Helen. You can see how she feeds me.” He pats his tummy. “If anything, I’ve gained weight since I’ve been here.”

  “How—” I begin, but then fall silent. I want to ask him how long he’s been here, but I don’t want him to feel pressured by me.

  “Almost two weeks now,” he supplies, as if reading my mind.

  “Two weeks!” Since Marti was murdered?

  Picking up a drumstick he starts working on it, talking between bites. “It’s been going by pretty fast, though. Did my mom send you here to check up on me?”

  I am confused, and can’t help showing it.

  “Your mom? She knows you’re here?”