The Passion of Mary-Margaret (15 page)

“You need to, Mary. Trust me.” She let go.

“You really think so?”

“I know so.”

“But how can you be so sure?”

“We've been together a long time. I'd like to think I know you pretty well.”

I continued scrubbing. “How about an ice-cream cone? They've still got pumpkin flavored across the street.”

“Let's go.”

She grabbed a sponge and we made short order of the work.

When we'd situated ourselves at the back table in Clare's A Sweet Thing, I pulled out the letter from my pocket and handed it to Angie. “Take a look.”

Clare sidled up, hands in the pocket of her apron. Her bright red hair sprang from either side of her thin face in two long ponytails. Her lips matched. “Hey, little sissies. Pumpkin? The last of it too, so you just made it.”

Sissies. You just have to love that.

“Sign us up!” Angie rapped the table.

“You two doing okay? I heard you kidnapped Gerald and took him to the lighthouse yesterday, Sister Mary.”

I whistled. “Word sure gets around, doesn't it?”

“Yep. Good for you. I'd have done the same thing. Heard he had a miraculous turnaround too.” She crossed herself even though, as far as I know, Clare is one of those new emergent Christian young people who worship down at the old bowling alley. It seems like it's about the furthest thing you can get from Catholicism, I think, in their lack of hierarchy; I don't quite understand it, but they love Jesus and who am I to tell the Holy Spirit when and where to show up? “We started lighting candles for people down at The Alley. Want me to light one for him?” she asked.

“Please do. I'll do the same up here at our end of the spectrum.”

She pulled on one of her ponytails and gave me a smirk. “We could learn a lot from you guys. You should come down sometime.”

“Maybe we will. And we'll learn from you too.”

“Lord knows us old gals could use a shot in the arm,” Angie said.

“I'll get your ice cream.”

She whisked back behind the counter, her mid-thigh-length plaid skirt brushing jauntily against her striped tights.

I settled my chin in my hand. “Do you ever miss the fact that we didn't get to be funky, crazy girls in wild tights and bright red hairdos?”

“All the time,” said Angie. “Oh, I guess I could have been crazy when I was a young married, but I was swooning so much over the whole deal, I just wanted to make sure Mack came home to a clean place and a good supper and some crazy lovemaking.”

“Angie! Spare me, please.”

“Oh, come on. Don't look so shocked. It's not like you never—”

“Hey!”
But I held up my hand to my mouth and stifled the laugh.

“You know it's true.” She whispered, “You slept with the best-looking guy I'd ever seen. And built too.”

“Angie!”

“Jude looked like an angel, Mary. A rough-and-tumble, hard-edged angel.”

I couldn't help but picture his ice blue eyes and the way he'd lift his hand to cup my jaw. “He was the prettiest boy I'd ever seen.”

“Okay.” She set her hands flat on the table. “Tell me about the papers.”

Let's see, I need to tell you about what happened in Georgia because that's really part of my religious sister journey and many of you might relate to the teaching aspect.

For half a year, I taught art as well as literature to the orphans. In fact, it was in the spring of my first school year that we decided, after seeing how competitive their testing was, to blend the two schools. Only Angie and myself and two other sisters, Magdalene and Joan, taught at the school anyhow, and we were all on board. Separation of church and state was on our side.

We worked hard that summer, expanding the curriculum, whipping the classrooms into the best shape they'd been in years. Yes, the facilities, an old plantation house and stables, seemed to be in need of constant repair, but by the beginning of our second year at St. Teresa's, everything gleamed with a fresh coat of white paint.

“It's a little slice of heaven,” Morpheus said about two weeks before Labor Day as we bent some more saplings out in the backyard.

“Sister Angie says it looks like an asylum.”

“Oh no. They's love in there, Sister Mary-Margaret.”

We lost a lot of the day students when we announced our plans, but a few of the more forward-looking families stuck with us, and a large Catholic family moved in that year with eight school-aged children (of fourteen!). One Baptist woman named Minnie (for Minerva) sent her son and became one of our most ardent supporters. You simply can't tell where the Spirit of God will work, can you? Minnie even sewed uniforms for us and taught deportment, throwing a high tea that next year. Some of the social mavens tried to shun her by refusing to attend her Thursday afternoon card club; she immediately filled the spots with younger women on the waiting list. She ended up adding four more tables for the deserters after they came back with their tails between their legs.

The fact that we even had a school year was a miracle.

What happened the night before school began, the day we were set to throw open our doors to the brave and the bold, turned out to be, quite possibly, the worst night of my life. And it had been such a nice Labor Day. But let me tell you a little bit about Bainbridge, Georgia, first.

When General Sherman marched to the sea leaving a wake of sorrow and destruction, he missed Bainbridge, Georgia. Along Shotwell Street, mansions sit shoulder to shoulder, their intricate woodwork harboring some inhabitants who'd thank Jesus for his cross one minute and burn it the next. If I could have understood it, I'd have foregone the opportunity. Blanca, from Lexington, Kentucky, told me not to be so judgmental. “Why, Mary, in my own home city the Church began St. Peter Claver so the black folk wouldn't go to St. Paul's. And the Episcopalians did the same thing with St. Andrews.”

Sad, but true.

But there were a lot of wonderful people in Bainbridge too: the man who helped us with repairs, Jack Dryden, and his wife, Sue-Ellen; Pastor Lundquist at the Presbyterian Church. Bitty Ann Shea, who ran the grocery store, always gave us a big smile and some conversation whenever we went in. Oh, and lots more.

If you walked down to the end of Shotwell Street, you arrived at the Flint River and the edge of town. Two hundred yards from the riverbank sat our school where, on that Labor Day in 1958, we tacked up the final maps and washed the chalkboards with warm, soapy water. Angie lifted new dictionaries from a cardboard box, raising each book to her nose and breathing in the fresh, pulpy scent of paper with more than its fair share of citrusy-smelling ink inside, before sliding it onto the bookshelf.

I sat at one of the student desks, drawing pictures of mathematicians and scientists for her to tape up over her doorway and windows. “We might not get away with this.”

“Somebody's got to be the first. We'll say we didn't have the money to continue with two separate schools.”

The orphan school was a one-room school in a small trapper's cabin right on the river. The four of us each took one day a week. The day school met on the bottom floor of the big house, the upper floors housed the orphans, and the attic housed the sisters. Hot as blazes in the summer, and thank fully, south Georgia didn't get so horribly cold in the winter.

“Well, I guess that's true enough.” I gave Blaise Pascal a jaunty feather in his hat. “But God always seems to provide.”

“You and I both know that, but why
should
he provide for something so obviously misguided? These poor children forced into that little building, so chilly in the winter, so hot all the other times. It's shameful. It's time something was done and I'm glad we're the ones.”

The orphans helped as much as they were able. Helping us all summer as we sanded and painted, patched plaster and painted, washed and painted. “I'll never live anywhere so fine as here,” a girl named Birdie said when we washed out the last round of paintbrushes. Father Cook came through and blessed the building, the children all dressed up in their church clothes, prouder than a new sofa. I soaked in their expressions hoping that maybe, for the first time, they really knew what it felt like to move forward because you worked so hard and believed it was possible. And all the praying we did didn't hurt either.

That evening we sat out on the porch drinking iced tea, pressing the perspiring glasses on our cheeks, our foreheads, the sides of our necks above our collars (my, how hot those habits got), fanning ourselves with paper fans someone had taken from the funeral home years before, and judging by the looks of them, perhaps the original owners of the plantation. The cicadas buzzed in an almost deafening profusion and a great, green grasshopper landed on my knee.

“That's good luck right there.” Angie pointed to it.

But it flew away. Almost as soon as it landed.

I drew quite a bit that night, I seem to remember. Several pictures of Jude, what I imagined he looked like more settled into his man-face and man-body.

I began drawing Jude when I was twelve and he was fourteen. Well, I should say I began drawing Jude from life at that time.I'd drawn him before from memory, but it was never quite right. Jude seemed amused at the whole thing.

“Well,” he said when I'd turned sixteen, “if I can't get in your pants, at least I can get on your paper.”

“You're so crude.”

“I know.”

And that tickle arrived again. To be honest, many a night the tickle erupted down there because of thoughts of Jude. Satan was doing a number. I told Sister Thaddeus, who said don't be sure about that. “You need to wait until you absolutely know for sure whether you say something is of the devil, Mary-Margaret. Don't rush to judgment, because if it's from God and you give credit to his enemy—well, it's just something you want to steer clear from.”

Steer clear from.

Sister Thaddeus used that term quite a bit.

So I asked Jesus about it and he remained mum. “T—, you know I'm not at your whim as your personal seer.”

I sighed that night in the kitchen where Jesus and I sat together, sorting
canned goods for a drive St. Francis had the week before. “I don't love him, Lord, but I like him, you know, in
that
way.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Is that wrong?”

“Not if you don't dwell on it. We made bodies to react that way. It's all right.”

“I'd hate to think . . .”

He reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Nothing goes to waste, T—. I wouldn't dream of it.”

“But what does the future hold for Jude and me?”

“Nothing at times. Everything at others. You'll see.”

A tear slipped from my eye. “I just want to be with you,” I whispered.

He set down a can of creamed corn and drew me to himself, so tender and loving. “I told you a long time ago, I'll always be near.”