by Robert Stone
“I’ve had it with the order and I’ve had it with my sister of mercy number.”
“Then it’s time you went home,” Sister Mary said. Justin’s words made her shudder. “Justin—something special is happening now. The church is really turning back to Jesus. It’s gonna be great and it would be a shame to miss out on it.”
Justin put her hand across her eyes.
“If I told you,” Sister Mary went on, “that you need to pray—that you need to ask God’s help—would you say I was talking pie in the sky again?”
Sister Justin had turned her face away and was pursing her lips to make her tears stop. Mary Joseph watched her young friend cry; she no longer felt it in her to be outraged.
“Doesn’t it mean anything to you anymore?”
Justin only shook her head.
She was a real beauty, Mary Joseph thought, the genuine article. In her own order they would never have let one so pretty and headstrong take final vows. But it was hindsight—Justin had soldiered on for six years, cheerful and strong, the wisest of catechists, a cool competent nurse. A little too good to be true in the end.
“This is no place for a personal crisis,” Mary told her.
“I know,” Justin said. She patted her cheek with a folded handkerchief.
“On the practical level—the fruit company repurchased the property—you can’t stall them forever. And there’s really a lot of negative talk. The Archbishop is starting to get upset.”
“That old creep,” Justin said. “He’s not even a Christian. He’s a cross between a Grand Inquisitor and an Olmec priest.”
Sister Mary sat stiffly for a moment and then dissolved in guilty laughter.
“Justin—you’re such a smart aleck.”
Even distraught Justin could not help smiling back at her.
“Well, he ain’t Bing Crosby,” Sister Mary said in a low-comedy mutter. “But he represents the church here and that means plenty. And believe it or not he’s protecting you from a government investigation.”
Justin Feeney rose from her chair and walked to the edge of the veranda.
“Give me a few days before you speak to anyone. I have to make some plans of my own.”
Mary Joseph frowned. She did not believe that one could plan in idleness.
“Now I want to hear from you in a week and I want to hear a date of departure. If you need extra help maybe I can sneak you some Peace Corps kiddos to pull and tote.”
“Thanks, Joe. Thanks for giving a damn.”
Mary Joseph picked up her black bag and went to the top of the steps. She had mastered an impulse to touch Justin on the cheek or to give her a hug. Such demonstrations were contrary to her training.
“Hey, listen, you did an A-1 job here for a long time. Don’t go feeling like a complete flop. Don’t let yourself get morbid. Just get busy and pack up.”
Justin nodded briskly.
“God loves you, Justin. You’re his special lady. He’ll help you.”
“O.K., Joe.”
On the first step down Sister Mary Joseph was smitten with dread. In Justin’s impatient goodbye smile she read the word “lost”—and the word sounded in her scrubbed soldierly soul with a grim resonance.
“Hey,” she said, turning round, “I got a thing for Charlie Egan, know what I mean? I really want to see him get home alive. Can you take care of it for me?”
“You bet,” Justin said.
Walking to her jeep, Sister Mary caught sight of another vehicle rounding the palm grove between Freddy’s Chicken Shack and the water’s edge. It was a four-wheel-drive Toyota and the driver she recognized as Father Godoy, a Tecanecan priest from Puerto Alvarado. She waited beside her Willys as he pulled up.
Father Godoy wore creased chino pants, a blue plaid shirt and expensive sunglasses. He was out of his Toyota shaking her hand and breathing English pleasantries before she could utter a greeting.
His long face lengthened further in a bony yellow smile; he was tall and angular, a tragical Spaniard of a man.
“Well, it’s going great, Father,” Sister Mary heard herself declare. “We have an OB now and some new hardware and God willing we’re going to have a real good year.”
He bobbed his head before her in hypothalamic agreement with everything in sight. Very sexy, she thought. She distrusted intellectual priests and the native clergy she generally regarded as soft, spoiled and unprogressive.
“Terrific,” he was saying, in the racy Stateside which he affected for people of her sort, “really great! What would they do without you up there?”
“Looking in on our friends here, Father?”
“Right, right,” he said, as though he had not understood her question.
“I hear,” she said, “you have a nut loose down the coast. Somebody killing little kids.”
“It seems that way,” Godoy told her. “The people think it’s a foreigner.”
“Yeah,” the nun said, “I’d want to think that too. I hope the word’s out to be careful.”
“Everyone knows,” Godoy said. “That’s how we are here.”
“Well, so long,” she said, climbing into her jeep. “Keep us posted.”
“All the best,” Godoy called to her. “All the best to everybody.”
When she had driven as far as the palm grove, she stopped the jeep with the engine idling and bent into the lee of the dashboard to the light a cigarette. Inhaling, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Godoy at the top of the steps beside Sister Justin. Both of them were looking out to sea.
“Oh, boy,” she said to herself as she put the jeep in gear, “a couple of stars.”
Father Godoy was complimenting Sister Justin on the beauty of the ocean and her good fortune in living beside it. His doing so made her feel guilty.
“Would you like some tea?” she asked.
“No, no, please.” He looked about him cheerfully, further embarrassing Justin with the station’s lack of activity.
“How’s Himself,” Godoy asked in a low voice.
She smiled at the missionary Irishism.
“Not well, I’m afraid. He’s rather crushed and not always rational. A while ago he had the boat out in the middle of the night. I can’t imagine why.”
“Strange,” the priest said. “A little worrying, eh?”
“Please have some tea.”
“I have to go. It’s the day of the procession in town.”
“Oh drat,” Justin said. “It just got away from me. I haven’t missed it once since I’ve been here and today I forgot.” She shrugged sadly.
“I can take you in tonight,” he said. “For the festival afterwards. You see, I’m coming back to take some children from the company school. So we’ll stop for you if you like.”
“That’d be great. Would you?”
“Yes, of course. Of course. In fact I came now to ask you.”
“Well,” Justin said, laughing, “yes, please.”
“Great,” the priest said. “I’ll go now and then after six we’ll pick you up.”
“Wonderful.”
“Well, until then,” he said, and went down the steps, leaving the image of his shy smile behind him.
“Wonderful,” she said.
Wonderful. “Wonderful wonderful,” she repeated dully under her breath. “Goddamnit, what a fool I’m becoming.”
As she watched Godoy get into his jeep, she felt mortified and panic-stricken. She hurried from the veranda before he could turn and see her.
For a while she busied herself with sweeping out the empty dispensary, spraying the stacked linens for mildew, poking in the corners for centipedes or scorpions. Within the hour a man came from the village with a red snapper and a basket of shrimp; Justin went down the steps to pay him. The man brought a message from the Herreras, a mother and daughter who did cooking and cleaning for the station, that they would not be coming for several days. They had not come for some time before—nor had the young women who worked as nurse’s aides, two girls fro
m the offshore islands whom Justin herself had taught to read and write, her barefoot doctors. It was just as well since there was no work for them.
Somewhat later Lieutenant Campos drove by to give Sister Justin a quick glimpse of herself in his silvered sunglasses.
She cleaned and scaled the snapper, washed the shrimp and showered in her own quarters. Changing, she put on a cool khaki skirt, a red checked shirt, an engineer’s red scarf over her hair. When she went back into the kitchen, she found Father Egan mixing cold well water into his rum.
“Are we friends today?” she asked him.
“There’s a level, Justin, on which we’re always friends. Then there’s a level on which we can’t be.”
Justin received this response in silence. Mystical as ever, she thought. She picked up the cleaned fish, stood holding it for a few moments, then set it down again.
“Sister Mary Joseph is after us to close. You probably know that.”
“Yes,” the priest said. “Of course it’s up to you.”
“Why is everything up to me?” she asked, wiping her hands on a towel. “I mean, what’s happening with you? It’s very worrying.”
“Don’t reproach me,” Father Egan said. “I’m reinforcing this mutiny with my frail presence. It’s up to you because you’re a sensible girl.”
“Must you keep drinking?”
“Never mind that,” Father Egan said.
She walked over to the kitchen table and leaned on her fist, watching him.
“You’ve been so darn irrational I can’t cope. And I know you’ve been worse since that night you had the boat out. I wish I knew what that was about.”
“Under the seal,” Egan said. “The rest is silence.”
Sister Justin shook her head to clear it of his madness.
“I don’t feel very sensible now,” she said. “I feel like a complete idiot.”
“Not at all,” Egan said. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Yes, please.”
“I think you’re very intelligent and moral and all good nunnish things. You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible. Nothing wrong with that, Justin. Fine tradition behind it.”
“You encouraged me.”
“Yes. Well, I wanted to stay too. And I respect you, you see. Believe it or not.”
“I thought I could pull it off.”
“Because you were always made much of by the order. They want to keep you. You’ve had things your own way. You’ve been spoiled, dear.”
“Oh, Lord,” Justin said. “Spoiled hell.” She folded her arms angrily and went to stand in the doorway with her back to him. “I’ve been on my hands and knees since college. I mean—I work for a living. I wouldn’t call this a cloistered life, would you?”
She heard his dry sickly laughter and turned.
“Is what I’m saying ridiculous?”
“You’ve been morally spoiled. There’s always been someone around to take your good intentions seriously—and if that isn’t being spoiled I don’t know what is.” He sniffed at his rum and drank it. “Religious women are always a good deal younger than their ages—Mary Joe’s an example. Religious men are worse. One’s always a kid. The life is childish.” He shrugged. “Believing at all is childish, isn’t it?”
Justin looked at him surprised. Perhaps, she thought, he was snapping a paradox. They were all great Chestertonians in his generation.
“You haven’t been saying your office,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “You haven’t said it for ages.”
“I consider it wrongly written down.”
She smiled, watching him polish off the rum.
“Are you serious?”
“I will—if called upon—say Mass. I will administer the sacraments. But my office is strictly between myself and God and I won’t say it their way. It’s all wrong, you know,” he said, fixing her with an unsettling stare. “They have it all wrong. The whole thing.”
“I give up,” Justin said.
“Interesting my orthodoxy should make any difference to you. Surely you don’t believe?”
“I can’t answer that question.”
“Well,” Egan said, “you’re supposed to answer it every day.”
At the kitchen counter, she took up the fish again. The right thing would be to broil it, to make a sauce with peppers and onions and greens. But he would be more likely to eat it if she simply shredded it into the soup with some shrimp. It was such a shame. Red snapper.
It went into the soup and Egan faded back toward his quarters.
Justin found herself on the veranda again. Her hands were clenched on the rail as she leaned out toward the ocean, the ebbing tide. The sea’s surface was soft blue; the sun had withdrawn beyond the green saw-toothed hills above the station.
Utter total foolishness, she repeated silently.
Her soul extended along this meditation as it might in prayer. There was nothing. Only the sea, shadowed deeps, predatory eyes. Her heart beat quietly alone, its panicked quickening like a signal to the void, unanswered, uncomforted. It beat only for her, to no larger measure, a futile rounding of blood. The desire for death made her dizzy; it felt almost like joy.
She was still leaning over the rail, half stunned with despair, when she saw a young man walking along the beach from the direction of the village. He was barefoot and full-bearded, extraordinarily blond; he wore a white shirt of the sort that required a detachable collar and faded bib overalls. When he drew closer she could see the filthy condition of his shirt and the dirt and dried blood that soiled his hands. His appearance bespoke need and for this reason she was vaguely glad to see him there. She assumed he was one of the North American kids who drifted up and down the Isthmus following the beach. They had first appeared in numbers the previous spring. Some of them were far gone with dope or alcohol. Her ready impulse was to have him come in and see if there was anything that might be done—before Campos and his men or the local ratones caught scent of him.
Justin had gone as far as the top step when the odd cut of his hair registered on her. It was crude cropping that one did not see on even the weirdest passing gringos, almost medieval, monkish. As she started down to the beach, he turned toward her and his face stopped her cold.
Although the man’s walk and carriage were youthful, his face was like an old man’s, the skin not tanned but reddened and weathered, deeply seamed around the features. The massiveness of his brows and cheekbones made his upper face as square as a box; his nose was long, thin and altogether outsized, upturned toward the tip. Elfin, she thought, staring at him, gnomish—but suggestive of carving like some sort of puppet, a malignant Pinocchio.
Two things about his small blue eyes impressed her—one was that they were not, she was sure, the eyes of an English speaker, another that they were the most hating eyes she had ever seen.
Justin had to remind herself that she was in lay clothes. But even people who thought nuns bad luck had never looked at her so.
Fascinated, she watched the man’s mouth open and she braced herself for a threat or an obscenity. His shout, though when it came it contorted his face, was absolutely silent.
It seemed that one of the words he mouthed at her was Schwein—the bared teeth savaging the lower lip. There were other words. Du was one. She had only known German as a tourist in Austria but she felt certain that German was his language. Schwein, Du.
“Beast” was the word that came to her. She was quite frightened.
Then the youth walked on, toward Puerto Alvarado. He was very big. His shoulders under the stained white shirt looked broad as an ox yoke.
She went back into the kitchen, lifted the pot lid and stirred her red snapper and vegetable soup. The young man, she realized, must be a Mennonite—there were a few of their settlements in the south, inland. They were not numerous in Tecan and it was years since she had seen a band of them in the capital, in the central bus station there. They had seemed shy, cheerful
people, very clean and friendly.
It was the time of late afternoon when the color drained out of the day. Sky and ocean gentled to temperate pastels and the jungle on the hillsides was a paler green. Wandering to the doorway, she savored the breeze.
Along the beach, from the grove at Freddy’s to the point southward, there was no one to be seen. Vanished, the passing youth seemed to be a creature compounded of her fears; the hatred, the Germanness were the stuff of nightmare and bad history. Somehow her despair had summoned him.
When Godoy and his jeepload of small boys pulled up at the foot of the station steps, she ran down gratefully to join them. The boys were black Caribs and there were six of them crowded into the jeep, some with the Indian cast of eye or the shock of coarse straight hair that marked the Caribs among the black people of the coast.
“Buenas,” she called to them and to Godoy.
“Buenas,” the boys said, and made room for her. Some of the younger boys smiled, the two oldest ogled her with grim elaborateness. She sat down next to the priest.
“We’re off,” he declared.
“Right on,” Sister Justin said gaily.
Along the roadside, plantation hands walked homeward cradling their machetes against their shoulders; children struggled along under loads of firewood for the evening meal. At every fresh creek there were women gathering up laundry from the rocks on which it had been drying in the last of the daylight, and other women were hurrying along balancing ocher jugs on their heads filled with cooking water from the public well. But most of the people on the road were walking toward Puerto Alvarado and what remained of the day’s fiesta.
Each time they passed a settlement of sticks and palm thatch Godoy would sound his horn, a child would wave and the boys in the jeep display their privilege as passengers in a private vehicle.
The road led them inland through banana and then pineapple, to the top of Pico Hill, where they could see the ocean again and the wharves of the distant port, then down again past acres of yellow-painted, numbered company houses, finally to the tin-and-crate-wood shacks on the edge of town. From the town center they could hear the report of exploding firecrackers and the blare of the sound truck the Syrian storekeeper had hired to publicize his holiday specials.