by Lisa Samson
We figured the least fanfare the better in regard to the actual ceremony. Some of the best things happen quietly. Johnson Bray made my dress, a tea-length silk satin with rosettes scattered on the skirt. The simple bodice was covered by a short jacket with three-quarter sleeves. I wore my grandmother’s mantilla, the webbing of the lace almost snapping beneath the pressure of my fingers. Regina Bray curled my hair and applied makeup, something I wasn’t used to doing myself.
“You look lovely, Mary-Margaret,” she said, turning me to face the mirror over her bedroom bureau.
I did. Fancy? No. But a little shinier than usual? Yes.
Angie entered the room wearing Regina’s yellow chiffon dress and carrying a bouquet of yellow roses. “You look beautiful!”
“Really?”
Do you see? I’d never really been told that by anybody other than Jude. And honestly, at the time I thought, what did he know? He was just trying to sleep with me.
I looked at myself in the mirror, really looked at myself, and I realized I looked nothing like my mother. The hair was most likely the raping seminarian’s, but I always liked it.
“Really. You ready? Your groom is waiting.”
Mrs. Bray smiled and handed me my bouquet, a full, sidearm bouquet of calla lilies.
No. I never saw that day coming. I pushed each sadness aside. I’d only have one wedding day whether I wanted it or not!
With the amount of Divine maneuvering this took, I knew I wouldn’t go through it again after the syphilis took Jude.
“Can I just spend a few minutes alone?” I asked the ladies, and they understood, filing down the steps for a quick cup of coffee before the ceremony.
I sat on the edge of the bed picturing him there with me and I felt certain the sweetness of his breath whispered upon my cheek as I finally arose and walked toward what was probably one of the strangest marriages ever arranged.
“Only you, Jesus.”
I placed my hand on the doorknob and slowly separated the door from its frame. My future wasn’t secure. I was joining myself to this man, but I had no idea what was going to happen after I did. And how was I going to convince him to sleep with me?
First things first. Marry the man, Mary-Margaret. I could hear the words in my grandmother’s voice and I couldn’t help it—I laughed out loud.
God help me, I prayed. So this is what cold feet feel like.
Perhaps it wasn’t too late to run back into the arms of Sister Thaddeus.
But would I really have run? It’s a question I can only guess at, and thankfully, I don’t feel the need to figure that out all these years later.
Oh dear. I put this thing down again. I’ll get back to the wedding, but I have to tell you about my first day in Swaziland.
Fr. John Keller, my son, is forty-one years old now, a fact that astonishes me. He doesn’t look much like me, other than the pale complexion and the red hair, and John’s isn’t the color of carrots my father’s and mine was, but darker and richer like rust in the rain. His red hair is now going a little white at the temples and, unfortunately, he has my grandmother’s propensity to gain weight around the middle even on rice and beans.
He did inherit his father’s eyes and nose, so when the sun catches him from the side and he smiles, the corners of his eyes pushed up by his cheeks, I see his father in him. And then there’s the beard. A great red beard!
When he came toward me in the Johannesburg airport, I was a little surprised to see him in surgical scrubs. It’s not like the Jesuits wear a habit or such, but I don’t know, you expect to at least see the priestly collar and a black shirt.
“Mom!” he rushed toward me, face lit up like a blowtorch.
I haven’t seen my son in three years. The lines on his face are deeper from time in the African sun, and I suppose he has his worries as well. He’s seen so much misery and death.
Oh, he felt so good in my arms. Now, with his height I suppose it would be more accurate to say I was in his arms. Brother Joe’s height came in play on that one, I suppose. John is a bear of a man to put it mildly. Six foot four and a half inches from that little twenty-inch baby that only cried for thirty seconds after he was born.
And his laugh! It rings. I’m not sure where he got that. He says at seminary. It was either laugh or cry, he always said.
He laughed as he embraced me. “I can’t believe you’re here, Sister Mary-Margaret.”
“Me either, Father John.” When I at last took my final vows, we started calling each other by our titles as a joke. “Your Uncle Gerald was beside himself when he drove me to the airport.”
“He can barely see!” And that laugh rang out so much so that half the people in baggage claim looked over. Half of those smiled. And half of those laughed too.
“It was a nightmare!” I picked up my backpack as he grabbed my duffel. “My life flashed before my eyes at least five times. I prayed five Divine Mercy Chaplets for him to make it back to the island alive!”
I’m the most me I ever am around my son.
Right now I’m sitting in front of John’s clinic at Big Bend. It’s winter here in mid-July. Luckily I remembered and brought a jacket. Even so, the sun shines now near high noon, and the earth is dusty under my feet. It’s about sixty-five degrees today. Tonight it will most likely go down into the low forties.
Theft is high here. A lot of the stick and mud homes are broken into and the blankets stolen. I’ve already e-mailed Angie on a trip to Manzini and told her to collect some funds from the School Sisters so I can buy blankets for distribution.
So after John picked me up at the airport, we headed right to the Nazarene Hospital in Manzini where he does surgery. But first we had to get through Johannesburg, which claims the dubious honor of one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Razor wire tops fences and the concrete feels harder against the soles of your feet, more likely to bruise and batter you if you fell upon it. Black and white still keep separate, even more so than in the US. I remember a few years ago, during my last visit, I met up with another School Sister of St. Mary’s, a woman from Nigeria. We had lunch in a little restaurant and I was given a glass of water. She wasn’t. Until she asked. My order was solicited. She had to push in and say what she wanted to eat. The man seemed so put out, his head set in an angle of defiance, his eyes saying, “The law is the law, unfortunately.”
I felt such outrage I began to speak until my friend laid her hand atop mine and said, “Jesus was despised and rejected of men.”
Well, I suppose so.
And so, driving along the highway, it feels like the city almost spits you out into the African countryside. The flat land widens and sprouts shrubs and grasses, tufts of life springing from the earth. The deep coal mines, their ziggurats of leftovers looking like miniature Babels, fuel the various power plants that crown the horizon. And then the land buckles, undulating as we head away from South Africa, stretching its muscles and rolling over. Mountains form, green and tall, and Swaziland steals your breath.
It does this to me every time.
At the hospital, we locked the ancient brown Land Rover up tightly and John took my arm. The hospital is decrepit, several buildings held together by a labyrinth of breezeways and courtyards. The cement-faced buildings were painted a dull goldenrod, the concrete walks worn smooth and shiny by the many feet that scuffled along its path since a Scottish couple opened the hospital fifty years before.
“Why don’t you go into the women’s ward?” John said. “I’ll probably be a couple of hours. I have a friend there in the corner on the far right side. She has no one. Her name is Precious. I try to feed her when I’m here, but I’m only here once a week.” No laugh now. “I honestly don’t know if she eats any other time, Mom. I hope she’s still alive.”
“I’ll find her if she’s still there.”
“She’s unmistakable. She looks like a famine victim. I’ll come get you when I’m finished.”
I watched him as he walked away
, his large form just a little hunched up at the top of his spine. Probably from the hours spent looking down over patients. Or as he calls them, “My friends.”
John calls everyone “friend.” Like Jesus did.
I gave up so much to bear that child. Instead of a life teaching children in exotic, or at the very least, remote places, perhaps putting my life in peril, I made countless tuna sandwiches, read numberless books, took walks on the beach, flew kites, and loved him like he was wine and I was the imbiber with no control.
Can I tell you it was worth it? Because it was. Every day I missed my sisters was worth loving him. And I did miss the life I forwent. It wasn’t as if Jesus took away those yearnings. I missed stealing into the chapel at odd hours to pray. I missed the daily offices. I missed the serenity of being only with my own gender. That surely does remove a certain kind of pressure, indeed?
Anyway, I digress. Again. And I’m getting ahead of the story. Again. Forgive me, but I’m just getting old, I suppose.
The women’s ward is like nothing you’ve ever seen in the US. One long room, divided up into three sections, the ward houses around thirty women. Many of them are dying from AIDS, although to hear their families tell it, none of them are. For a country with one of the highest HIV rates in the world, it’s amazing how nobody has AIDS, how people disappear in back rooms of homes and are never seen again. Not really.
I passed through several sections, feeling quite pale. It’s good to feel pale after feeling so “regular” all the time at home.
Making eye contact was difficult, for truly, I am an imposter; as well-meaning as I am, I don’t belong. But sometimes you have to go where you don’t belong if that’s where Jesus tells you to be.
I don’t understand it, but I do know in my own life, the times I was most on edge were the times Jesus was seen most clearly; the times I was pulled from my element into a place of uncertainty were the times I was carried in his arms.
I spotted Precious right away.
There’s a photo from the Sudanese famine that everybody in America should be required to view the next time they complain about the fact their dinner is an hour late and they say, “I’m starving.” Honestly.
The man looks like this:
His heels look three times the size they should be, don’t they? How can he be alive?
My squiggles can’t possibly do the image justice, or extend that man the right of truth. The truth. I hear people talk about the truth all the time, people terribly underexposed to the real truth of the world they live in. As long as their truths, what they believe, are all lined up in a neat little row, they believe they know the truth. But the truth is that they shove food into their mouths at potlucks and banquets while God’s other children go hungry, their skins stretched like dried leather over the armature of their pitted bones.
And me? How many meals have I eaten without regard? Did I really need that extra skirt or pair of shoes? God help me when I have turned my back on The Truth and what he taught. God help me when I have failed to love my neighbor as myself. In that ward, I was reminded of my own selfishness and failure to live every moment for the Lord.
Does God love me anyway? Oh yes. Did I feel there in the ward that I still had a ways to go in loving God more? Yes to that too.
Precious lay in her bed looking at the ceiling, her lips pulled back from her teeth, the flesh clinging so tightly to her skull, the ridges of bone beneath sparse hair sprouting from her head in tufts. The seams of the bony plates knit together in the womb were visible like fault lines.
There was loss and death come too soon, and in her suffering, for the beating I’d given myself only moments before, Jesus drew me to himself as he lay in the bed inside the skin of Precious. My heart joined with hers because I had lost my family too: my mother, Grandmom, Aunt Elfi, and countless others I wasn’t ever introduced to or told about. I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of desertion in a time of need, of anguish. And then when Jude died—
I closed my eyes, opened them, and reached out my hand. “Precious.”
She turned her face toward me. “Yes,” she whispered in English.
I laid my hand on her shoulder. Hard bone. “I’m Father John’s mother.”
The smile appeared gruesome. But it was beautiful to me.
“How is my friend, Father John?”
Her voice, though raspy, was high and musical.
“He’s in surgery. He told me to come visit you. I’m Mary.”
I realized I was Precious’s Mother Mary and her John and Mary Magdalene, the one come to comfort her on her cross.
“Sister Mary-Margaret.” Her eyes provided the exclamation point.
“He’s told you about me?”
She closed her eyes. “Tells me stories.”
On the bedside table I noticed a cup of orange juice and a slice of toast. I checked my watch. Four o’clock. “Breakfast?”
Precious raised a hand.
“Nobody comes to feed you?”
“My family, they all gone.”
Her strength was so taxed, I decided to ask John about her background instead of getting it from her.
I picked up the cup of juice. Ants swam around the lip of the cup, and it was much the same with the toast. This woman literally starved while the bugs ate well.
It’s so different there, sisters. Family must come and feed their relatives and give care. No nurses tend the sick carefully as in our hospitals. I have nothing with which to compare it so you’ll understand.
As I picked the ants from the stale bread and broke off a piece, a group entered the ward. They were singing an old hymn. “What can wash away my sins . . .”
Oh good, I thought, maybe they’ll help some of these poor people eat.
I scraped the ants from the cup of juice and skimmed the drowned ones off the surface with my thumbnail as the group gathered in the middle of the ward. The patients stared at them.
Some of the family members sat up in their chairs as the group quieted down.
I slid an arm under Precious’s back, her shoulder blades protruding against my forearm, and lifted her to a sitting position. Precious’s head fell back and I leaned in to support it with my shoulder.
The group went right into “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” And music always makes a person feel a little better, doesn’t it?
Precious moaned as I raised her, fully sitting, her legs, knees turned out, thin-line Vs on the mattress.
The group, women in colorful dresses that contrasted with their dark brown skin and covered their knees, and the men, in slacks, shirts, and ties, sang in such rich harmony, goose bumps rose like miniature mountains on my arms.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said, hoping Precious was paying attention. She nodded and opened her mouth as I held the cup to her lips. A bit dribbled out the side of her mouth and I wiped it with the hem of my shirt. After all those hours of traveling, the orange juice was almost an improvement!
A man in the group, in his thirties, I’d say, his white shirt glowing against his skin and the shabbiness of the ward, lifted up his Bible and waved it a little as he spoke in siSwati.
Several of the nearby women lowered themselves down into their blankets, all the covers different from bed to bed, some brought from home. Many pairs of eyes went glassy as his words tumbled out faster and faster and his pitch rose in a stunning crescendo. What was he saying?
I could only hope they were words of mercy and hope, not condemnation. These people were dying. Was he telling them of a God of mercy and love, who enfleshed himself in our fragile dimensions? Oh yes, I hoped.
By the time he’d finished, Precious had eaten half the piece of bread and drank half the juice. She shook her head when I offered another piece.
The group dispersed, following the pastor, walking to each bed, shaking the hand of the patient and moving on. He squeezed Precious’s shoulder and quickly turned.
I don’t blame him. Perhaps his theology tells him things min
e doesn’t. That God doesn’t ever want his children to suffer, and if they do, there are two reasons. The first is that somebody did something wrong. The second by default, then, is, he cannot comport his will on earth. There might be many nuances in between I’ve never thought of simply because I’ve been spared that.
I laid Precious back and opened her drawer to find a brush.
She had little hair left, but perhaps it would be soothing. Inside the drawer lay a copy of The Imitation of Christ and a little prayer book.
Oh, Jesus! This is far better than a brush.
I leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “Offer it up, Precious. Offer up your suffering.”
Now, my theology tells me suffering can be for a purpose if we make it so. Perhaps she was giving God her suffering as a prayer for a wayward son or a fragile nation. Precious could barely speak. So I will never know.
But again she nodded, and as she fell asleep to my gentle brushing, her lips moved silently. In prayer? I hoped so. I believe so.
The church group finished shaking hands and left.
I prayed for them too. Who knew the suffering in their homes? Maybe a song and a sermon was all they had left to give. It wasn’t my job to judge.
John stayed in surgery until ten that night. I gave Precious her dinner, a small portion of it anyway, and fed three other people as well. Many had family to tend them. Family ties are as strong as anchor chains inside some of these Swazi women; you can imagine how beautiful I, as an orphan, think that is.
I began to think about my father and what I would find. My first step was to ask John about him. It just wasn’t something I wanted to do in a letter. I pulled my father’s pictures out of my backpack, one from the file at the seminary, so young and smooth, and then a snapshot from our wedding. Sitting next to Jude, both of them in lawn chairs, leaning forward, head to head in a deep conversation.