Stony River (11 page)

Miranda marvels at how the individually mute fragments of brilliant glass in the windows speak as one to tell stories she'd never heard before coming to the orphanage: Gabriel advising Mary she'll bear a child; the Last Supper; Mary appearing to Bernadette when she was as young as Miranda. Light from the World illuminates them. The Voice claims that the light's source deserves to be honored more than a god that forbids eating from a knowledge tree.

The sun, the glorious sun, was ablaze the afternoon Miranda arrived at St. Bernadette's, in the city called Newark, a twenty-minute car ride from Doris and Bill Nolan's house. Bulgy-eyed Sister Bonita escorted her and Cian directly to the infirmary. Past the chapel, up two flights, along a queer-smelling hallway hung with photographs of solemn children, their huge eyes wary, past dormitories and the sisters' sleeping quarters. Except for the wee ones in the nursery, the children and most nuns were away at summer camp. The only sounds were the rustle of Sister Bonita's long, heavy black tunic and the
tip-tap
of her black shoes on the linoleum floor. The infirmary door opened to a long corridor of closed doors reminiscent of the morgue in Stony River. From Miranda's suitcase, Sister Bonita confiscated the “unholy” drawing of Ethleen holding the moon, the “dangerous” candle, matches and moonstone and Cian's “unhealthy” blanket. Miranda and Cian were to be quarantined until the sharp-chinned nurse, Sister Marie Claire, pronounced them free of communicable disease.

Miranda's heart quickened at the possibility of finding Nicholas in Quarantine. But Sister Nurse said St. Bernadette's had no animals except for stray cats that hung about the kitchen door due to Sister
Ernestine's soft spot. Not the same type of soft spot the visiting doctor asked about when he measured Cian's head and said he was microcephalic, a word Miranda wrote in the journal Sister Bonita allowed her to keep because it was educational. At eighteen pounds, Cian was no heavier than an eight-month-old, the doctor said. Miranda couldn't say what the lad weighed at birth. And she couldn't report anything unusual about her pregnancy.

“Did you try to escape?” he asked.

“From what?”

The doctor said Cian wouldn't live to an old age and, most likely, would be retarded.

Sister Bonita said it was God's will.

The Voice of James said:
Hogwash
.

Sister Nurse said she'd seen a man with a very small head sing and dance at the circus once when she was a little girl. He looked happy, had seemed to enjoy the attention.

In the infirmary room Cian and Miranda shared, the shades were always up. Sunlight caressed Miranda's face each morning, making her weep for the years it had not. She sleeps now in a dormitory with thirty-nine others, her steel-frame bed in the row nearest the door, farthest from the sun. Some mornings, when she awakens before the chimes and the subsequent sound of forty sets of knees dropping for Hail Marys, she lies abed imagining herself as the goddess Eri, to whom a man in a silver boat floats down on a shimmering sunray. The man is always James.

She sees Cian once a day before bedtime and weekend afternoons. She assumed she'd continue to feed and bathe him, but Sister Cameron said it was best if he began to detach from her. Like the lambs of Lughnasadh James spoke of, abruptly weaned from their sheared and washed ewes. Sister Joseph said Cian would respond better to toilet training and learn to use a spoon and fork if Miranda weren't around catering to him. Sister Nurse bound Miranda's
breasts until the milk dried up. Occasionally, it leaks out when a cry from the nursery reaches her ears.

The chapel is empty now except for her and Father Shandley, who has returned from seeing the outsiders off. He's moving items about the altar under the big cross on which Jesus suffers night and day. Miranda likes the father-bird way the priest deposits Christ's body on her tongue. How he places wine and water into the chalice as James placed salt and water into theirs. The way Latin spills from his mouth as Gaeilge did from James's.

He could be older than James or younger; Miranda's not yet a good judge of age. His hair is as dark as Nicholas's, neatly parted on the side and slippery looking. She lifts her doily and smoothes her own hair, the same ginger-spice shade as James's, the waves ending just below her ears. Sister Nurse keeps the inmates' hair shorn so that lice will find no haven there.

“That gorgeous mane gone,” Doris said, nearly crying, the first time she visited.

Miranda doesn't mind. It's easier to brush. And when she glimpses herself in the mirror above the row of lavatory sinks, it pleases her to look more like James.

A whiff of onion floats by. Miranda pictures one hundred and twenty bowls of soup waiting obediently. Even from the chapel she can faintly hear the warning chimes.
Bing-bong, bing-bong:
ten minutes to lunch. Chimes announce when to get up, when to go to meals, to Mass and to school. Some inmates complain they feel like dogs ordered about by a whistle—the same girls who put sweaters on backwards, as if they were straitjackets, and say “Look at me, I'm in an asylum,” daring Sister Bonita to emerge from her room with the strap to remind them that asylum means refuge, asylum means home.

Being ordered about doesn't bother Miranda. She likes not having to decide what to do next. She likes knowing when to worship: Mass every day and twice on Sunday, prayers upon rising and before falling
asleep, the rosary in the afternoon. Around the sisters' waists hang heavy wooden rosaries that nearly brush the floor. Miranda's is shorter and has blue glass beads, a silver crucifix and a silver medallion with Mary's face. She received it for winning a spelling bee. She's the best reader and speller in Sister Celine's fifth-grade class and excels at religious studies; she'd be in a higher grade if she knew more about such things as the Pilgrims and the Gold Rush. When she works the beads, relishing the smoothness of them under her fingertips, she imagines James's hands moving along the cord of knots. She hears the chant he repeated at each knot and sees him slipping into a trance.

Quick as a morning shadow, Miranda crosses the aisle and slides into a pew closer to the stained-glass windows for a better view of Mary's halo—a radiant aura, like that ringing the moon. Sometimes the light breaking through the windows is so bright it bleaches the edges of all around it. Today it lights up a strip of wooden floor, making it shiny, like honey on porridge.

Father Shandley turns sharply as though just noticing her then lifts his hand in greeting. Embarrassed to be caught watching him, she quickly bows her head and whispers, “Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Miranda has learned much about Mary in the past four months and feels a kinship with her. It is as if the Blessed Mother and Danú are one and the same. She asks them both to cast an invisible net of safety over Cian each morning, as James once asked Lugh to do for her. She wonders if Mary felt the Holy Ghost enter her to conceive Jesus, as Miranda felt the Wise Father god Dagda enter her.

But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Like Mary, Miranda must suffer in silence the knowledge of how Cian came to be. The catechism says that Jesus had no human father. Neither does Cian, despite what the nuns and Father Shandley want her to confess.

The catechism also says there is but one God, a He. The Voice says:
The book is wrong. There are many gods and many goddesses; remember our altar, one side for Her, the other for Him?
But increasingly Miranda remembers only bits of James's lessons. Isolated words and phrases, like shards of stained glass no longer able to form a tableau.
Hold onto them
, the Voice urges,
if not for yourself then for the lad
.

Being a good Catholic is easier. The catechism has answers for everything and the answers are full of certainty. We know God made the World because He says so. To be confirmed, Miranda had to profess faith in Christ. The Voice reminds her that the Christ story is oft told: the mythical sacred king who must be sacrificed for the seasons to be born and die, like the summer and winter kings whose births and deaths James and Miranda celebrated each year.
You need honor naught but the sun and moon, water and air, day and night, sea and land,
it tells her. Softly, under her breath, she reminds it she's never been to the sea. It pleases her to be one of
them,
now. No longer, as Sister Bonita branded her, the devil's child who lay on the wrong side of the sheets.

Father Shandley ascends the slanted nave from the sanctuary to Miranda's pew. A flush rises through her as he kneels beside her. She wants to touch his arm but Sister Bonita says Miranda's habit of touching people is sinful. That and the way she stares.

Father Shandley lives alone in a small house behind the orphanage. Some inmates think he looks sad; they speculate that he's lonely. Miranda envies him. She would like to not hear the night sounds of thirty-nine others and to be able to cry in private.

Father Shandley's presence fills more space than his slight frame requires. He crosses himself with his blunt-ended fingers, silently moves his thin lips and, when done, lifts himself onto the creaky pew. She follows as though drawn by a magnet. He leans into her and asks in his confessional voice, gentler than the one he uses for his impassioned homilies, “Shouldn't you be at lunch? I wouldn't want you in trouble with the sisters.” So like James in his concern for her.

His face is close enough for her to smell Christ's blood on his breath. She thinks of the biscuit-eating girl who said at dinner, “Yum, like Jesus with no bloody aftertaste.” Not seeing the humor in it, Miranda didn't laugh, but was punished for being at the table with those who did. They had to kneel and hold their arms straight out to the side until they wept in pain to appreciate what Jesus endured for them. If communion wafers taste like anything, it is tears.

“I can't go to lunch until I say more prayers to release my father from Purgatory.”

“Was he truly penitent before he died, worthy of Purgatory's fires?”

“And for what would he need be penitent?”

Father Shandley sighs as though the air has been punctured out of him. He stares out toward the giant crucifix hanging above the altar and waits. He's good at that. His silence behind the confessional grille often feels like an invisible hand reaching out to seize her secrets. He asks her, every time, to tell God how Cian came to be. Every time she responds that, if God is all-seeing, he already knows. He tells her she's young; God will forgive her for having been seduced into sin if she is contrite. She says she wasn't seduced. He asks on how many occasions she and her father sinned. Each time she assures him that she and James did not sin.

Today he smiles. “The sisters claim that if Saint Peter bars you from the pearly gates, Mary will let you in the back. Maybe your prayers will open Heaven's back door for your father.”

Miranda realizes he's joking—she's getting better at that—and a tiny smile inside her expands. She pictures Heaven's gates as the tall wrought-iron ones Doris and Nolan's car passed through the day they delivered her and Cian to St. Bernadette's. She imagines James going round to the kitchen door with the stray cats, petitioning Sister Ernestine.

“On Wednesday,” Father Shandley says, “I will say three Masses
in honor of the dead, including those who, it is said, still ‘groan' in Purgatory. If you make a full confession”—he gives her a pointed look—“and take Holy Communion at All Saints Mass the day before, you might gain an indulgence for your father's soul. In fact, I guarantee it.”

It's more than coincidence that the dark half of a new year begins soon. At the precise moment when the Dark Moon of Samhain blocks starlight, time will belong to neither the old year nor the new and the dead will find it easier to wander among the living. On Samhain Eve—Doris calls it Halloween—she and James left plates of food for departed souls and built a fire in the hearth to warm them. She thought she could will her mother to rise out of the flames simply by wanting it badly enough. James said it would require years more study and practice before she was open for communing with the dead. And even then, it might not happen. His mother and grandmother bled through each year, but never Eileen. Miranda wonders now if her mother was trapped between worlds with no one to pray for her.

“Will you wear black?” she asks.

“I will.” He laughs. “You ask the most … Remind me which saint you chose for your confirmation name.”

“Maura.”

“Ah, yes. You ask the most interesting questions, Miranda Breege Maura Haggerty.”

“Sister Bonita thinks not. She says curiosity wastes God's time.” Miranda doesn't tell him that some girls laugh at her questions about things they take for granted: hissing radiators, the walking and talking photographs of television, water in fountains bubbling up like tiny dancing balls.
Say goodnight, Gracie,
they croon.

“Does she? Well, you can waste my time. Nobody's mistaken me for God yet.” He stands and extends a hand to help her up. With a warm thumb, he traces a firm sign of the cross on her forehead. “Now, to lunch, please. If need be, tell the sisters I kept you.”

Miranda feels a quiver of hope, then fear. She will invite James to the Mass of the dead, but what must she confess to deliver him there?