‘Nothing in the Bible says you can’t have fun,’ Sarah said to Maria later that first week. She was perched in the limbs of a mulberry tree at the back of the convent’s orchard, picking and eating the mulberries until her mouth and fingers were stained purple.
Maria sat beneath the tree, afraid of getting into trouble, nervously looking over her shoulder for the black and white habits of the sisters.
‘Here. Catch.’ Sarah’s legs swung from the branch as she threw Maria a handful of berries. Maria had to drop her books to catch them, and a few exploded on impact, the juice spraying her in the face. Sarah hooted with laughter, her voice still farm-loud, not yet convent-quiet.
Their friendship continued over the next two years, through a shared bedroom, secret looks and quick elbow jabs in mass. Every day was a good day with Sarah nearby.
But then she was sent away. Deemed too wild to ever be truly tamed by the habit she too easily wore, she was sent back out west, even further than her home town, perhaps in an effort to break her spirit—though the nuns would have called it ‘encouraging her humility’. They sent her all the way to Longreach, to the only school, where she remained as the sole teacher and later head teacher for decades. Maria had never seen her since.
‘That’s so sad,’ Tansy sighed, her hand on her heart, squinting into the sun. ‘You were like Anne Shirley and Diana Barry from Anne of Green Gables—kindred spirits—and they tore you apart.’ Maria laughed. ‘Where do you get this romantic streak from? I don’t think it’s from your mother, unless she’s miraculously undergone a transformation since her younger days. I always think of her as so pragmatic and sensible.’
‘She is.’
‘Your father then? Finlay?’
Tansy tilted her head to the side, thinking. ‘I wouldn’t normally say so, but he surprised me yesterday with something he said about his marriage to Mum. He’s a believer.’ She waved a fly away from her face. ‘But let’s get back to the story. Did you ever hear anything from Sarah again?’
For her sins, Maria had kept in touch with Sarah, defying direct orders from her superiors that she break off all contact—Sarah was seen as a bad influence. Maria wrote letters to her friend, then hid them in her habit and posted them when she was in town on errands. Sarah, alone in Longreach and in sole charge of her affairs on a day-to-day basis, was able to receive them. Maria, on the other hand, lived with more than a dozen other sisters, and all their correspondence went through Mother Superior, who could, and would, open any letter, even if it was privately addressed.
So Maria had to be crafty in order to stay in contact with Sarah. It was a sin, she knew; the sisters in her order were supposed to renounce everything, including their own family. She’d asked a mature, trustworthy senior student called Lauren Hanley, who was close in age to Maria and Sarah, to act as go-between. A good Catholic girl, Lauren held all the sisters in high regard. But she was also smart and an independent thinker, considering the teachings and doctrine for herself. After school she was set to attend the University of Queensland and become a scholar. She too had a best friend and couldn’t imagine life without her, and was only too happy to help Maria.
A day student, Lauren lived near the convent and was a frequent visitor outside of school hours, bringing the sisters flowers from her family’s garden, surplus eggs from their chickens and ducks, and preserves that her mother had made. So it was not unusual to see her walking around the grounds and stopping to talk to Maria, at which point she would surreptitiously pass on Sarah’s letters.
‘So cloak and dagger,’ Tansy said, pouring clean marbles back into her birdbath.
Maria stared into the middle distance. ‘I lost a lot of sleep about that, for so long.’ Then her eyes snapped back to Tansy, alert. ‘But the day came, after seventeen years, when I knew without doubt we’d been right to keep up our secret correspondence.’
‘What happened?’
Maria inhaled deeply as everything came back—the doubt, the frustration, the injustice, the rage. Her out breath was unsteady, but still it calmed her, gave her the strength to finally tell someone, other than her precious bees, the whole story.
Sarah’s most important letter had arrived on a scorching hot November day, with the jacarandas in purple bloom and full of busy bees, and the senior students studying for exams. Lauren Hanley was by now in her mid thirties, a university lecturer, a wife and mother of two children, still a good Catholic woman, and the volunteer provider of floral arrangements for the church altar. And she still delivered letters to Maria, having never once questioned her role despite her full knowledge that she was participating in a deceit of almost two decades.
Maria was now a seasoned teacher of English and geography in the senior school and a much-loved class teacher in the primary school. She was stern but not unkind, and her students often brought her gifts of posies or fruit or handmade cards.
She read Sarah’s letter in the classroom after school, the students all gone, the afternoon sun beating down on the buildings. Piles of English assignments sat beside her, waiting to be marked. But the yellow-lined notepad paper on which Sarah’s letter was written was far more enticing.
My dear friend and sister, Maria,
I hope this letter finds you well. If you’re anything like me you’ll be both dreading and longing for the final weeks of school to pass so you can have a brief reprieve before beginning the planning again for first term. After all this time, it still amazes me how quickly it goes.
Alas, I’ll have to keep the pleasantries and news updates to a minimum. It is with a heavy heart, and after considerable meditation and prayer, that I write to you today. I am sure you will understand the gravity of what I’m about to reveal, both in its content and what it means in the context of my vow of obedience to our church superiors. It is therefore a sin for me to tell you this.
Our parish priest, Father Peter Cunningham, of whom I have spoken a little in the past, has received his transfer orders and will be joining your parish. I know you’ve always spoken fondly of Father Brian and will be sad to hear he is leaving, but you will be sadder still when you learn of Father Peter’s character.
My dear, there is simply no easy or polite way to say this. Two of my students, whom I will not name here (two young girls, of twelve and eleven), confessed the most horrible things to me, things done to them by the very priest in question. Appallingly, these things were done as part of their ‘penance’ after their confession of sins to him, and by the time they came to me it had been going on for two years.
I feel sick, Maria. These girls were in my care.
I reported it, of course, to Bishop Tully, but he told me in no uncertain terms that these matters were dealt with internally in accordance with established church policy, in absolute secrecy, and to go against that was to go against the Vatican, and surely I, a mere sister, didn’t believe I knew better than the wisdom of the Pope. He advised me that to lose faith in our religious superiors—men chosen by God and filled with God’s authority—was a sin against God and I must pray for more faith. I was instructed to never speak of it again on pain of immediate excommunication.
His answer to the problem I presented him was to relocate Father Peter to your parish.
Maria, I don’t know what to do. This letter alone is grounds for my excommunication. That is my deepest fear, because I feel I still have much work to do here for these students and to serve God. My life is here, not out in the wider world. I’m needed in this town, in this school and in this community. I couldn’t do the work I do without the church.
My hands are tied. But I had to warn you.
Please, I beg of you, burn this letter the second you have read it.
Yours in Christ,
Sarah
Maria had sat frozen, the letter clenched in her hands. Her body began to shake, firstly from the inside, deep within her bones, then spreading outwards until the paper rustled in her fingers. A fallen priest was on his way to her parish, to listen to h
er confessions, to listen to her students’ confessions, to offer the holy sacraments and be the guiding light in the faithful’s moral life, and he was hiding the most grievous of sins.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ Tansy said, her hands at her face. ‘That is ghastly. I mean, you hear it in the news all the time these days, but to hear it from you, having lived through that era.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just dreadful.’
Maria walked with Tansy to the tap, each of them carrying buckets to fill with water. ‘Yes, it was.’
‘And you burned the letter?’ Tansy was clearly dismayed.
‘Yes. In the incinerator—it was the done thing to burn anything in an incinerator in Brisbane in the seventies. And lawn sprinklers would be going day and night. Those were the days—pollute the air and use endless water without a second thought. It’s so different now, isn’t it? I guess people did a lot of things in those days with far less conscience than they do now.
‘Back then, the Vatican itself ordered complete secrecy around these types of matters. The initial intention may have been to protect everyone until a final verdict was reached—I can’t say for sure—but in my experience, any such intention was twisted and misused and in practice came to mean that all testimony and evidence was sealed and anyone who talked of it—including the victims—would be excommunicated.’
‘So, basically, the victims were punished for speaking up.’
‘Yes, and from what I’ve read of the trials both here and overseas, speaking up could lead to more of the same treatment the victims had already experienced as a way of further terrifying them into silence.’
Tansy was white.
Maria turned on the tap and water gushed into the bucket. ‘Perhaps we should stop talking about this now. It’s upsetting. I’ve had a lot of years to process this. It must be difficult for you to hear it for the first time.’
Tansy took the full bucket and passed Maria an empty one to fill. ‘Of course. But just before we finish, was that why you left the church? Because of this Father Peter character?’
Maria gave a rueful smile. ‘In part, yes. It was a lot more complicated than that. I stayed for another twenty years. But we’ll talk about it another time.’
‘I do have to go,’ Tansy said. ‘I’ve so many things to do.’ She smacked her palm to her forehead. ‘So much washing for Dougal.’
‘I hope everything goes well in the next few days,’ Maria said, her heart aching for Tansy. It must be a terrible weight on her niece’s shoulders right now.
19
It was Thursday, and Dougal’s departure was barrelling towards them. Only two days to go. Tansy could feel each hour slipping away. He was still going to work in Brisbane, much to Tansy’s disgust. Without him here at home to distract her, her mind rattled with everything Maria had told her. Her stomach was in knots.
Enid, meanwhile, had Paula over, again, taking over the kitchen, again, making such a mess that no one else could find a clean spot on the bench to make even a sandwich. And she had begun to order them around whenever they so much as stepped into the kitchen.
‘What are you looking for?’ Enid would ask across the benchtop.
‘Um, the muesli,’ Leo muttered, afraid to enter the women’s space.
‘Here.’ Enid plucked it expertly from the cupboard and passed it over, along with a bowl and spoon. ‘And I’ve changed your milk to zero fat,’ she said, pulling the carton from the fridge. ‘So much healthier.’
Leo had shot Tansy a beseeching look but she simply didn’t have the focus to deal with her mother right now. She needed to phone the doctor’s surgery to see if she could get Dougal an appointment late this afternoon when he got back. He’d decided that although her gift of hippie travel-sickness medicine was lovely, he’d also like some bona fide drugs.
With the appointment made and Leo heading to uni, and Enid and Paula cackling in the kitchen, Tansy needed to escape from the pressure cooker her unit had become. She left the building and strode down to the fresh air and sunshine of the boardwalk, gazing out at the cobalt ocean and the surfers bobbing up and down on their boards, waiting for the perfect wave. Taking cleansing breaths, she phoned Maria, and was grateful to catch her inside and not out working in the garden.
‘I can’t stop thinking about what you told me yesterday,’ Tansy said, ‘and I keep pacing the house with anxiety over Dougal’s departure. Talk to me, please, tell me what happened after Father Peter transferred to the convent.’
Maria paused, perhaps wondering if she should tell Tansy more. Then, ‘Okay, let me just get settled.’
Father Peter, like Maria, was in his mid-thirties when he arrived at St Lucy’s College for the morning tea the sisters had organised to welcome him to the parish. Maria had built him up in her mind to be such a monstrous figure that she stopped dead in the doorway of the dining hall when she first saw the ordinariness of him. Holding a cup of tea in one hand, he was smiling, and wore round John Lennon–style spectacles. His hair wasn’t exactly long, as so many men of that era had begun to wear it; it was still above his collar, but it was also certainly fuller than she’d come to expect in a man of the cloth.
He was holding court to Mother Veronica, who was eating a scone with jam and cream, her tongue working its way around her teeth as she went, and Sister Margaret O’Shea, who had also recently transferred to the Brisbane college from a position up north, and was detailing her gratitude at leaving behind a sweltering north Queensland summer.
Maria hovered in the doorway, her stomach churning, her palms sweaty. Her legs were prickling beneath her thick stockings. She didn’t want to meet the new priest—the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Worse, actually: the wolf in shepherd’s clothing.
The room was full of sisters eating cake and talking. Everyone was relaxed, perched on the edge of chairs or standing in little clusters in corners with small plates. More than a decade after the Vatican II council, which modernised the church, the sisters had long moved on from the black and white ‘penguin’ habit, and they all wore conservative short-sleeved white dresses, with a crucifix on their lapels and sensible brown shoes. The only person in the room who looked even the slightest bit unnerved, other than Maria, was young Celine. Wearing a patchwork apron over her white dress, Celine scurried to and fro with slices of fruitcake and shortbread, her eyes downcast. Her fingers were stained, Maria noted, probably from her work on the chapel organs, which were undergoing their yearly servicing at this time.
Celine cast a wide berth around Father Peter; she met Maria’s eye brief ly, her green irises haunted beneath lowered brows. And—did Maria imagine it?—Celine shook her head, ever so slightly. Then she was gone, back through the swing door and into the kitchenette to begin the washing-up.
Maria’s senses tingled.
Celine was a strange, unpredictable nun at best. Some days she was overcome with a nervousness and skittishness that defied explanation, jumping at the smallest sounds and rushing out of the room. On these occasions the other sisters generally left her to herself; she would spend a day, sometimes two, in prayer in the chapel, and return to her duties more settled. No one ever pressed her for answers, which they knew would only ever be riddles anyway.
But was it possible, Maria thought, that somehow Celine knew? Could this frail bird of a child, with her damaged psyche from God only knew what experiences in her home, who’d fled to the nuns for protection, who walked in the spaces between the earthbound reality and the invisible mysteries of a broken mind, somehow sense something in Father Peter that made her aware of what he was?
Or—more than likely—was Maria just seeing what she wanted to see because she didn’t want to be the only person in this convent and college who bore the burden of such knowledge? Was she so desperate and selfish that she longed to share her own pain with someone else, in whom she could confide without fear of excommunication?
‘Sister Maria.’ Mother Veronica was waving at her from the other side of the room, sm
iling. ‘Come join us.’
Maria took a breath, folded her hands together at her abdomen to keep them from trembling, and stepped towards the man who had committed unspeakable crimes and sins against innocent children, and who now turned to her and smiled, imbued with the power of Christ and the trust of the faithful; the man in whom she was now supposed to place her trust for her own spiritual guidance.
She stood beside him.
‘Greetings, Sister Maria,’ he said, and reached out his hand to take hers.
She hesitated for just a moment, but in that moment she saw clearly what she must do. Father Peter might have been sent to this place to be their leader but the look on Celine’s face had marked Maria’s soul and she could not turn away. If she’d ever had any doubts as to the reason she was here in this place, ever wished she hadn’t agreed to her mother’s plan, ever had any thoughts of walking away from the convent, they were gone.
This was why she was here. This was why God had put her on this path. She’d been chosen from among the many to be the one who could and would stand up.
She steeled her nerves and took the outstretched hand of the devil, feeling a sharp, sickening wave of disgust as their skin connected.
His fingers . . . fingers that have . . .
She quickly retracted her hand and placed it behind her back with the other one, then deliberately straightened her shoulders.
‘Good morning, Father,’ she said, locking eyes with him. ‘I’ll do everything in my power to watch over you while you’re here.’
Every morning and every night, Maria prayed for strength to be in the presence of Father Peter Cunningham, knowing that if she was to fulfil God’s calling to watch over him and intercede wherever it was needed, she would have to stay close to him.
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