by Lisa Samson
Aunt Elfi would also pack up my pencils and papers and she’d say, “Draw a pretty picture for our friend today. Maybe it will help ease his suffering.” So I’d draw pretty trees, flowers, animals, mountains with a sunset in between, and she’d tack it up where they could see it.
I’ve been trying to do that with my art ever since too, I suppose. And I don’t know if that’s why I’ve never really made it in the art world. Maybe there’s just too much motive behind my work. Art for art’s sake and all that. I don’t have the type of brain that can figure that out. I just like to do what I like to do. Angie, I believe, sports a bit of a grudge against fate on my behalf because I’ve never been recognized as any sort of artist of merit. But I can’t be bogged down by that sort of yearning for other people’s approval. The art world doesn’t seem to be filled with people I’d want to drink a cup of tea with anyway. At least that’s the way it seems in the movies.
And I’ve gone off on a rabbit trail again, but at least you know more about Grandmom and Aunt Elfi.
Jude and I were supposed to meet that next morning, but he didn’t show up. I suppose his sin had not yet come to completion . . . like those KKK boys. He’d spent the night at Brister’s house according to Hattie and the two got drunker than Friar Tuck after a raid. He stumbled onto the ferry the next morning and headed, I supposed, to Europe with, hopefully, somebody clean at the very least.
So I spent a few more days cloistered at the school. I prayed the divine offices, helped with chores, ate with some of the sisters in the silent dining room, rested in the garden, and read and prayed.
Angie called me from Bainbridge. “Why are you doing all that now? You’re going to be doing that for a month during your tertianship.”
“I figured I’d practice up a little. How’s it going down there?”
They did what they could from the carriage house, then moved the school to downtown Bainbridge. They were renting an old hotel scheduled for demolition the coming summer. “By that time, a new building will be built and guess who’s the chief donor?” Angie said.
“I have no idea.”
“The police chief’s father. That old coot!”
“Oh my goodness!” (I never told her I was almost raped by his son.) “And Sister Magdalene’s going to take it?”
“You bet!”
“Wonderful! Listen, those boys’ll never get caught. The least we can do is take their money.”
I arranged my habit, set my feet on the secretary’s desk, and rapped a pen repeatedly against my knee.
“How’s Morpheus?”
“Fine. Turned fifteen last week. We had a little party. Everybody likes it at the hotel just fine. So we’re doing well. I’ll be back in the summer then, and I’ll start my tertianship as well. By September we’ll be back on track, Mary. Just don’t do anything crazy in the meantime.” She laughed herself silly at that.
After I hung up the phone, I realized I’d always taken the obvious path. They hadn’t always been easy, as my time in Bainbridge proved, but they were most certainly, at the time of decision, the paths of least resistance.
I settled my feet on the floor, stood up, and looked out the window onto the quad. I rushed over to the art room, dragged out a canvas I’d prepared the day before, and painted with all the force inside of me, my veil swinging in an arc almost parallel to the floor as I swiveled back and forth from palette to canvas. Black and yellow and cream slammed against the canvas in great swaths and arcs. Next came a deep black-red and my brain forgot to whom it belonged and that small dot of a portion deeply buried took over.
When I was finished, spent, sweaty, and leaning against the desk like it was the railing at a roller rink, Sister Thaddeus stood in the doorway and applauded. “Wonderful! Just as good as any of that Long Island set.”
She was speaking of the Abstract Expressionists.
“Yes!” I breathed in heavily. “Except I’m late to the party as usual.”
“It’s beautiful.” She practically floated across the room in her habit, still a stunning woman whose hair, I expected, was probably starting to gray at the temples. “I just wanted you to know how much I’ve been praying for you lately. The Holy Spirit keeps bringing you to mind, Mary-Margaret, urging me to pray, pray. Are you sure about saying your final vows?”
I was, I wanted to say. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no. I just remembered Jude standing at the fence a few days earlier, and all I wanted to do was run away from the memory of his shrunken cheeks and shaded eyes.
Jesus went after that one lost sheep.
“Well, I just wanted to let you know that we could use you here next year, Mary-Margaret, to teach art and, if you don’t mind, some English courses. It would be wonderful to have you back in the routine of St. Mary’s once you’ve taken your final vows.”
Yes. And of course, it would seem like the perfect path for me. Just right. The obvious next step.
A few days later, Hattie and Sister Thaddeus waved me off at the bus station in Salisbury and I journeyed first to Baltimore and the motherhouse, then to our retreat center in Luray, Virginia.
Something about the mountains feeds the spirit. The high spines of the Blue Ridge sprouting the massive growth of oak and pine, the brooks with their large, smooth stones on which you can rest your bottom and your soul. And if you’re in the mood for something a tad more extravagant, the Shenandoah River with its graceful loops and soft flow provide a nourishing place for soul rumination.
Of course, the practice run at St. Mary’s did little to help me at first. I walked the leafy pathways in the woods, hiked the trails, and strolled by the Shenandoah for a week with the world whispering in my ears and buzzing about my head like flies around trash. I argued with an imaginary Hattie at least every hour about Jude, about how her brother-in-law was not my problem, that he needed a bigger fix than I could provide. Indeed, if Jude had been the type of sinner who justifies, sanctifies, and glorifies what they do, I might have had something to work with. Instead, he fully admitted his transgressions and failed to react positively against them. Most of us are under the delusion if we can simply convince somebody they’re wrong, they’ll turn away from their error. But arguments cost nothing. Only love and faith are up for such a task. Faith I had, at least a little. But love—who did I really love in such a manner? Nobody. Jesus didn’t count—who wouldn’t love him if he visited them like he visited me? Did I really even know how to love at all? Did I know how to love as Jesus loved? Giving myself completely to one who didn’t deserve a bit of it, not just because it was the right thing to do but because I was so filled with love and grace I couldn’t help myself? Can anybody love like that?
Well, Hattie did, leaving the world behind for Gerald’s sake. My grandmother. Even Sister Thaddeus, who, I would find out years later, gave her portion of her inheritance to the order to finance my education all the way through graduate school. It was a good thing I didn’t know that then, or I might not have followed the Lord down the path he was going. And surely he would have found a replacement to bring Jude to himself. I’d like to think so.
I thought of a dozen conversations I wanted to have with Angie about the school and how they should set up the art room. I tucked a copy of the New Testament in my pocket and even reading 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 John, my favorite standbys, did nothing to settle my soul into the rut of peaceful cohabitation with silence.
I thought of Thomas Merton and almost cursed him a time or two with his talk of silence. Easy for him. He was a contemplative. I was just a young woman who visited with Jesus through no doing of her own, a person with a very noisy brain who looked at her splitting fingernails during the Eucharistic prayers. He came to me not because I deserved it but because of his great mercy. He knew I was alone in some way, that blood ties are important, that someone without a mother, like the mother he so loved and adored, needed something extra.
He knew my heart. How much I loved him.
Was I a mystic? W
ell, I seriously doubt it. I’d read Julian of Norwich and Jeanne Guyon and the like; Jesus seemed to have very different conversations with them than he did with me. They didn’t make him a cup of tea and he didn’t talk about how the one pair of sandals he owned gave him a callous on his big toe like you wouldn’t believe.
Jesus joined me there in the woods at times and he said little, just took my hand as I walked along. “It’s all right to wrestle, my dear,” he said several times.
Finally, the silence came and I heard the music of God around me, a strain from heaven is the only way I can explain it, for the birds’ music formed into something rhythmic and melodious. It was as if I’d been given jazz ears. I soaked in it, rolled in it, glorified God and felt like the Trinity let me in on Their little secret, an age-old secret suddenly real.
You love, T—, because we first loved you.
On my last day, as I packed my suitcase, Jesus sat on the end of the bed.
“You need to find Jude,” he said.
I turned. I hadn’t realized he’d come. “What?” And then I flew to my knees beside him. “I’m so sorry!” I gasped, slamming my hand over my mouth. I’d never questioned him before.
“Shhh, my dear.”
He swept an arm around the plain room, over the desk with my copy of the Scriptures and prayer books, over the white wall with the crucifix, over the simple bed with a rather flat pillow and a wool blanket. “Mary-Margaret, do you love me more than these?”
Horror filled my chest cavity. “Of course, Lord. You know I do.”
“Feed my lamb.”
“But, Lord—”
In his one hand, he picked up the veil I’d laid out to be folded and packed; in the other he hung my rosary from his fingers. Oh, how many times I’d prayed the Divine Mercy Chaplet on it, I couldn’t have said. “Mary-Margaret, do you love me more than these?”
“Oh, my Jesus. Yes, I do. You know I do.”
“Feed my lamb.”
He picked up my sensible shoes and laughed. “Mary-Margaret, T—, do you love me more than these?”
I joined in with his laughter. “Lord, you know all things. You know I love you more!”
“Feed my lamb.”
I rested my head on his lap. “What are you telling me, Jesus? What do you want me to do once I find Jude?”
He ran a gentle hand across my hair, smoothing it back from my brow. “We’ve been together for so long, T—, and we always will be. You know how much I love you, don’t you?”
“Yes, Lord.”
He continued to caress my head. “I remember the day you were born. Such sadness in that room. Your mother’s time had come for many reasons. The chief reason she was brought home was to save her from herself. But you’ll find out more about that on your own someday. But you came into the world. You realize I had been forming you, watching you grow for all those weeks. I gave you that fiery red hair to match your zest for life, to reflect the passion I knew you would develop and, quite frankly, my dear, will need for this leg of the journey ahead.” He lifted my head, drew me to my feet, and set me beside him. He took my hand. “T—, the next few months are going to be the most difficult of your life, but I’ve got a plan for you. It’s the Father’s plan and the Spirit will guide you. Do you trust us? Do you know that nothing we do will be for your detriment, but ultimately for your good, for your own perfection? Do you know that we will not harm you, that not a hair on your head will be touched that we don’t will? Do you love us enough to seek the lost lamb with us? It’s what we want of you. Of course, we won’t force you, my dear.”
I looked into those brown eyes, so soft and winsome, yet deep inside the fire of holiness and Deity and an all-consuming love that no human will ever duplicate no matter how long we’ve been in heaven with him. He smiled and raised an eyebrow. I placed my hand in his and he squeezed it. “Well, T—?”
“All right.” I touched his cheek with my other hand. “All right.”
To be honest, despite the Holy tenderness, my stomach rose in my throat and I wanted to throw up. The sun streamed through the window I’d opened a few inches with the morning breeze. I pictured the scene outside my window at St. Mary’s. The fishing boats would be long gone from the dock, and in the distance the light at Bethlehem Point would be spiraling around and around.
“I’ve always loved it there, Jesus,” I said, knowing I didn’t have to explain my thoughts. “I hope I can return there, live there, teach there, be there. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Other than you.”
“Yes, I know. It’s up to you whether or not you’ll go back to the Island in the long run. But for now . . . will you follow me?”
“Yes, Lord. I’ll follow you where you want me to go.”
He placed his arms around me and drew my head to his chest. I felt the softness of the heavenly garment of white and heard his heart again, beating with love for all the world.
“I want you to marry Jude Keller.”
IT’S AMAZING HOW YOU CAN PUT A PROJECT DOWN THAT means so much to you and end up walking away for months. It is now December of 2001 and I’m in Florida once again for the Christmas holidays. I still haven’t looked into Brother Joe’s whereabouts after his time at the mission on The Block. And I still haven’t planted Jude’s bulbs either. You know, I knew what kind of flowers they would produce years ago, and now I simply cannot remember.
This past summer I tried, and failed, once again to get a showing at a gallery in Ocean City and I vowed to never try again. That owner has something out for me because he hangs all manner of seascapes with waves that are about as luminescent as a pot roast and even sculpture that’s crafted from old lawn mower parts, but my sculptures are, in his words, “Pedestrian, Mary. Utterly pedestrian.” If I go down in obscurity, so be it.
I visited with Morpheus for two weeks in June, stayed at the retreat house in Virginia for a week in July, then, amid flower-arranging classes and beading sessions, had to get my plans ready for the coming year to submit for the budget. I needed to develop a more advanced painting class for two women who were going great guns, as well as a few of the men decided they wanted to learn how to carve decoys. Researching, finding a teacher and inexpensive supplies, not to mention a field trip in early August to the Waterfowl Museum in Havre de Grace, took up the rest of my summer.
All wonderful, happy reasons to forgo a search.
Unfortunately, however, after a vacation to Niagara Falls with Gerald and Hattie that included a ride on Maid of the Mist and dinner at a Tyrolean restaurant, as well as a visit to several wax museums, Hattie took a turn for the worse. They’d stepped down their care level and moved into a lovely little unit with a kitchenette, a bed and bath, and a sitting room. On September 11th, she had a stroke just after watching the second plane slam into the World Trade Center. She’s been in a vegetative state ever since. We can’t figure out if the attack caused the stroke or it was just a coincidence. I figure the latter; Angie, of course, says Hattie was probably more frightened of the changes in the world than she ever let on. The woman who rescued people in hurricanes single-handedly? I just don’t think so. “She lived in a lighthouse most of her adult life, Mary. That’s quite a sheltered existence.”
Whatever the reason, Gerald can’t cope, simply put, so I haven’t felt the freedom to just go traipsing off to find my father. Aunt Elfi trained me too well. However, Hattie’s youngest sister finally convinced Gerald to visit her in Hagerstown for the Christmas holidays and I begged him to go.
“Hattie might linger for many more months. But if she does wake up, and it would take a miracle, Gerald, I think she would be glad you took a trip to see Adele. Don’t you? Honestly?” We were sitting in the facility dining room eating tapioca pudding with vanilla wafers ringed around the inside of the pedestaled, glass dessert cup.
“I think you’re probably right. But what if she dies while I’m gone?”
“You’ll come home from Hagerstown and I’ll return from Florida and you and I will walk throug
h that valley together. I’ll be with you every step of the way. I promise, Gerald. Do you understand?”
After what Jesus told me about our death order, I felt fully confident saying that. Jesus doesn’t lie.
He whipped a white handkerchief out of his back pocket and dabbed at his eyes. Hattie’s illness aged him a good five years. “You’ve been a good friend all of these years, MM.”
“I’ve tried. And you’ve always made it easy, Gerald.” I lightly pinched his bony forearm. “So don’t start making it difficult for me now.”
“Aye, aye.”
Later I took him in my arms as we sat at the edge of Hattie’s bed, just like Jesus always took me into his. Gerald said, “All right, MM. I’ll go.”
I’ve got to get back to the mission. Maybe I will after vacation. But for now, I’ve got my toes in the sand, a very large hat on my head, and this notebook. And so I will continue my tale.
My latest letter from my son John in Africa bore good news. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to come back to the United States for classes last summer and ended up completing his hours in Johannesburg.
Dear Mom,
I miss you as always and am craving a plate of your crab cakes as usual. Please tell me you eat them at least once a month. I’ve been hankering for some good old Maryland seafood lately.
December is always the worst time here in Swaziland as all the rituals with the king are in full swing. I’m staying put here in Big Bend and putting off my trip to Mbabane until after the New Year.
The church from Colorado finished their building out at the nearby carepoint and we were able to start classes for the older children who cannot afford school. We have thirty students ranging from ages 14–18.You’d love them so much. I think a few of them will actually make it in this world. At least a third of them are already HIV positive.