by John Brady
It had taken a long time to persuade her last night. But whether it was the anger that he had thought he was holding back well enough from his voice, or the tension in him that she had picked up, she had finally agreed to make that phone call to Ferg Twomey. She had insisted on writing down each and every word of what he wanted her to say to him too, and then slowly reciting it all to Minogue. She had held out longest over using the word
‘miracle’ with Twomey. When she had finally phoned Minogue back later, she had sounded tired, regretful. Yes, Twomey had agreed to meet her at the nursing home in the morning.
“Look,” he said. “I wish I could persuade you that you’ve done nothing wrong,”
Still she said nothing. He worked his way by a distracted van driver.
“We need to try this,” he said to her. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Her voice had dropped back to a whisper.
“Is it,” she said.
He settled on the slowest setting for the mist cycle. The roads were more damp than wet, but the traffic cast up a fine grey drizzle of its own. He stole a glance at her, and wondered if this warrior woman had somehow shrunken a little in the seat.
“I think Albertina would say it was okay, what we’re doing,” he said.
“Well I told you already” she whispered. “I feel that Bertie hears me.”
She drew something out from a sleeve. He looked down, saw rosary beads.
“‘Bertie,’” he said. “Is that what she prefers to be called?”
“She does.”
Mention of the name had drawn that wistful smile he had seen earlier.
“Yes, that’s what we call her, us sisters. Not the children, of course. Yes, she always liked that name. She used to say she should have picked ‘Bertie’ when she took her vows. That wasn’t on, of course. But that was how she is, you see. How she was, I mean.”
Minogue braked for a bus. From the corner of his eye he saw her thumb move up to the next bead. The bus driver changed his mind, and abruptly pulled in. Minogue managed to dart around him.
“Bertie was a hell of a driver too.”
He looked over. She didn’t acknowledge his surprise. Her smile had stayed, and even gained strength.
“Drove like a maniac sometimes, she did. She’d have that old Land Rover – and I mean old, it was given to them before independence even – flying over the road like nobody’s business. A bat out of hell.”
“Where was the bat from again?” he couldn’t resist asking.
“The locals knew to keep well out of her way, even Jerome. Yes – Jerome Innocent Odinga. Constable Jerome. Jerome was one of our own, one of the first of the Luo to come through St. Brigid’s.”
“St. Brigid’s,” he said. “Now there’s a name.”
“Isn’t it though? God but we were the proud Irishwomen when we opened that little school,—its corrugated roof and all. But Jerome would tell her to slow down, that it wasn’t God’s work she was about when she was driving, it was the devil’s work.”
She glanced over at Minogue.
“They’re very superstitious in Kenya, you know.”
“So I heard. Not like us, of course.”
But again she seemed not to have heard him.
“I still have his letter,” she said, and paused as though to search her memory for more details. “When I came back to Ireland for good, and I found out about Bertie, I wrote Jerome a little letter. Jerome went on to do big things. He ran some police department in Nairobi. Anyway, didn’t he write me back a lovely long letter? He said the villages cried for Sister Albertina, but that God was by her side, and ready for her. Doesn’t that tell you something, that after all those years, he would remember Bertie?”
Minogue offered a nod.
“He said that all that bouncing around Bertie had done on the back roads, down in the river beds in that old thing might have started the clots. He wasn’t joking either. Did I tell you how superstitious they are still?”
“So she went to Kenya before she went to the Philippines. Right?”
Immaculata grabbed the next bead as though slowly devouring the rosary in her fist. “She did,” she said.
“Before she met him, like.”
Immaculata made a single, thoughtful nod, and then she crossed herself, kissed the crucifix and tucked the beads back into her sleeve. From the other sleeve she drew out a hankie, its floral scent drifting by Minogue as she opened it. He heard her sniff once.
“How long were you working with her?”
“Four years. But it felt like a lifetime.”
“You’re very close to her, I’m thinking,” he said after a pause.
She drew out the hankie again. Her breath caught as she spoke.
“If she hadn’t come home for that visit… I used to think for many years.”
The resolute tone swept back into her voice.
“But that was the decision. And she never went back. She stayed in the convent for six weeks, and then off she went to Manila, the far side of the world. That was that.” “And you learned of this when…?”
“Oh I was already back in Kenya, getting it in dribs and drabs. I remember the days being like weeks, or months even, while I waited to hear anything.” An uneven patch of road rattled through the car.
“You’re in the snapshots too. On that trip over to the island.” Her nod did not suggest to him any agreement with anything he had said.
“I had to come back to Ireland that time. I had to have an operation done, you see. There’s a thing in our family, to do with vertebrae. It got bad on me out there, it might have been an infection that put it into high gear. But at any rate, my mother and father, God rest them, they kicked up a fuss with the Mother Superior to get me back here for the operation. So I was back in Ireland the month before, and I was recuperating at home. Actually I was in fine fettle, rarin’ to go, but my mother wanted me to stay.”
“And Sister Albertina? Sister Bertie?”
“Well she was on leave. It wasn’t easy back then, you have to understand. We got trips home only every five years or so. It was all part of the calling. I’m not saying it was easy or anything. But she was home for a month. So like I said to you, I was confined to barracks up on the farm, doctor’s orders and all that. But one day, didn’t I get a phone call. A Monday, I well remember it, the month of Our Lady, and everything in bloom. It was Bertie: was I fit enough to come up to Dublin, and see her. And she sounded so cheerful! I don’t know to this day if she was hiding it from herself as well as from me.” “You met her then, and Murphy.”
“I did,” she said, her voice trailing off. “Was I expecting him to be there? I certainly was not. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he shows up as we’re getting off the train there out in Dalkey. I found out later on that she had met Father Murphy one evening over a dinner. Bertie’s brother was a Guard, you see, and very well thought of. And didn’t he bring her along with him on a visit to people he knew. Oh and they were fine people too, the father a judge and everything. And there was Father Murphy, the man’s brother-in-law. The woman of the house, Mrs. Larkin, was his sister. All well-educated, accomplished people. Good-living people.”
“Did you go to the house ever, the Larkins’?”
“I never did. I only found out all this later, much later. So there I was, walking down the road from the station and fetching up at a little harbour there. Bertie wanted to visit an old church out on an island. You know it?” “Dalkey Island, I do, sort of.”
“Right, so. This is sheer madness, I thought to myself, but it was a lovely, lovely day. Bertie told me about that saint to do with the place, and that she was the first missionary to leave Ireland all those years ago. So to me, everything looked normal.”
Over the roofs of the car ahead, Minogue caught sight of a digger’s arm rising and falling. The arm began to shudder and slowly descend out of sight. A man in a safety vest appeared out of the traffic ahead, twirling a sign. He planted it, Sto
p side toward Minogue, and with a contented look, that was little short of a smirk, he lit a cigarette.
“When exactly did you find out?” he asked her.
“I got a letter the day before I was headed back.”
“A letter? She didn’t phone you?”
“No. I don’t think I slept a wink the whole night long. My mother was driven demented, because I wouldn’t tell her. I must have fallen asleep eventually, or maybe I was so tired that I began to imagine things. She came to me, and spoke to me, but I couldn’t tell what she was saying. It was the shock, maybe.”
She looked over.
“I’ve never told that to anyone. You see that, in your line of work? Shock?”
Parts of his own scattered memory of yesterday afternoon came to him for a few moments, its events still as jumbled and accordioned. He still could not fathom how he had actually slept for long stretches last night, and had even woken up clear-headed too. He was still on guard, and jumpy, and still suspected that he was drifting in some kind of fake calm that could give away at any moment.
“At times,” he said. “Anyway. You went back to Africa. Obviously.”
“I did. And to this day, I think it was Bertie. It was her, her prayers, that visit. It was her way of telling me that they needed me back, and that she’d be okay. You see?”
Minogue imagined a young Immaculata reading a letter over and over again.
The Stop sign revolved around to Slow.
“So she was disciplined. Is that what it’s called for nuns?”
“That’s it all right.”
“Do you know if she ever considered walking away?”
“Leaving the order? I doubt it. That sort of thing only began later on. But as for that man, may God forgive me, they should never have listened to him in the first place.”
“Father Murphy you’re talking about, I take it.”
“I could never understand why he was sent out on the missions in the first place. But then, after how many years out there, that he would end up five or six hours away from me there? And that it would be me he’d call for at the end?”
The car ahead began to pull away at last.
“I never asked you,” she said. “Where did you find those pictures?”
“Someone found them in a drawer, out in Dalkey Garda station, when it was being done up a few years ago.” She shook her head slowly, twice.
“Like I always say,” she said. “‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ Doesn’t He?”
“There are days, Sister, when that’s not clear to me at all.” He didn’t like the sound of gravel pinging off the underside of his Peugeot.
“I have to say,” he began, not sure how he’d finish the sentence. “In these photos, you look pretty…content, the three of you.”
She seemed to consider his choice of words for a moment. “Funny you should say that. For me at the time, it was like, I don’t know, a dream. So unexpected. And going in a boat like that, it was new for me, across to that church on the island. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten the name of the saint there.” “Begnet,” he said. “St. Begnet.”
“That’s it. Later on, it came together about why Bertie picked that place to go. That was after I got her letter of course. Do you know the stories about Begnet? This is not long after Christianity came. Instead of marrying a king’s son, she took the green exile, across to England. She ended up an abbess, and there are miracles associated with her. I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. But I do remember thinking at the time that Bertie was asking me along that day because it was part of her plan. It was a fair journey down to Dublin from our farm. She knew I was after an operation. So it wasn’t just a whim.”
“But it was unusual for a nun and a priest to be together though, wasn’t it?”
“It still is. But he didn’t need me for chaperoning. She had taken care of that already, with her brother there. I think it was something else.”
He waited. She began to study some part of the sky. “It was so I could see how happy she was,” she said. “And that she knew it was ending. I think she was saying goodbye.” She was smiling when she caught his eye now.
“Ah, but see how God brought us back together after so many years?”
He tried to picture what awaited them at this nursing home. His favourite aunt had lain stricken for over a year, sunken-faced and helpless, only her eyes moving. A stretch of road had arrived. Soon he’d be at White’s Cross and turning onto the N11.
“All I had was that one letter,” she said. “That one letter, all the way from the Philippines. She said she was turning to God, looking for a life away from everything that had gone on. And she meant what she’d said too. She bore her burdens. She’s still bearing them.”
He was actually managing to get into top gear. Through the bare branches he caught a quick glimpse of Two Rock Mountain and the antennae on its crest.
“People don’t believe in the Devil anymore,” she said. “Do they.”
“I’m not sure. Less so than before, I’d guess.”
“Not the tail and the horns bit. I mean the Devil working through others.”
She had returned to her study of the horizon. “You were with him at the end, I heard,” he said. She turned suddenly, and for the first time he saw anger on her face.
“And that’s when you knew for sure,” he added. “Wasn’t it?”
She turned back to the window. Long moments passed before she spoke.
“You’re right,” she said. “But don’t think that I got the answers I wanted.”
“But at least you knew why she had cut herself off, I meant.”
She darted a quick, remonstrating look his way.
“He wasn’t really a priest at the end. He was just another suffering human being. The Lord let it happen in this way, to show me what I should do.”
She looked down at her cuffs and tugged each smartly in turn.
“He told me that he needed to tell someone, someone who’d understand. Later, afterwards, I realized that he had always meant to tell me. That was my role, my work.”
“You said that he had tried, in his own way.”
She looked baffled.
“You said it in that conversation with the Commissioner yesterday.”
“God, that man forgets nothing! The Jesuits lost a good one in him, surely.”
“How did Father Murphy try to make good?” She seemed unsure how or even if she should answer. “I heard things over the years,” she said. “He was a good five or six hours away by road, over the far side of the valley. The Rift Valley? He got involved in land rights there, grazing rights.
Government people were lining their pockets you see, and sticking to their tribal line in the allocations. He became a go-between, with the government and some locals, the tribes. An advocate. It was really social justice that he was working for.” “All his time there, he was doing that?” She shook her head.
“He was getting himself into scrapes. I heard about him drinking, showing up in the stops. You know, the stops along the roads there, the lorries...? Sheebeens I call them. I didn’t want to know about it. Let someone else handle this, was my approach.”
“You stayed away from him.”
“The local people liked him well enough. But I was ashamed that a priest would carry on this way, an Irishman too. So we had nothing to say to one another, nothing that was good, or Christian. I never even asked him if he was in touch with Bertie, or if he had tried to make amends for what he did to her.”
“Doesn’t it take two?”
Her eyes flashed, but she turned away, and she knit her hands together tight.
“You’ve no idea,” she said. “A priest? A nun? Who has power there, you think?”
“But it was you he called on, in the end, wasn’t it. You, he wanted to see.”
“It was,” she said, softly now. “Like I say, God works His wonders.”
“Will you tell me about the arrangement? The pact, you cal
led it, I believe.”
Her eyes widened and she allowed a thin smile.
“I might as well have recorded the conversation, I suppose…. He told me that he needed a burden lifted off him, that his time was close.” “Was he ill then?”
“To my shame, I do not know. It was a man came to the school, a local man, someone who had become a friend of his, I suppose. And when I saw him, I knew he was sent. It was all part of the plan, God’s plan.” “So you went to him.”
“What else could I do? Of course when I got there, he wasn’t at death’s door, or anything like it. I knew the reputation he’d gotten over the years, with the drink and that. And that night, he showed it in spades, I can tell you. But to make a long story short, he asked me if he was to be called, would I help carry his burden afterwards.” “Burden?”
