The Passion of Mary-Margaret (29 page)

Jude accompanied me with one request. “Let's not go down to The Block, Mary.”

We were just climbing into Gerald's motorboat. After landing we'd get into the car of Regina Bray's sister. She was only too willing to let us take it if it would bring art supplies to the school.

My mouth dropped open. “Jude, why in the world would I go down there?”

And I think, for the first time, Jude really, I mean truly and actually, realized that most of the people in the world don't find themselves in the red-light district; that those on the margins, and those who like to fancy themselves so, if only for a few hours, find themselves in places like the Gayety or the Two O'Clock Club.

Road trips provide wonderful space for talking. Give people a couple of hours or more in a car and you never know what's going to be said side by side and not face-to-face. This time, however, I had a lot to say, and Jude wouldn't be able to plead a relapse and head into his bedroom. He'd been doing that out at the lighthouse during my visits, particularly when I began pressing him for information about his illness. Thank goodness his hair was growing back again.

We'd been driving for a while in a white, wood-paneled station wagon. I had just cleared Salisbury when I figured now was as good a time as any to say what needed to be said.

I gripped the steering wheel and glanced over. He was looking out the window at the farm that happened to be whizzing by, sitting with a bone-straight back as though the white vinyl seats were made of oak. The Eastern Shore of Maryland is flat and highly suitable for farming. It's lovely, not breathtaking, but gentle and fruitful. But then, sisters, you live here too, and I suppose you'd know that. I'm tending to think, as I write this, that some of you are on unfamiliar territory, and yet I would think you noticed the landscape on your way over from Washington DC or Baltimore. In the summer, as on that day with Jude, you'll pass stand after stand selling fresh produce.

Now, I don't mean to be proud, but white Maryland sweet corn, the kind we call Silver Queen, is quite possibly the best corn on the cob you'll ever eat. Uniform kernels, so sweet that the sugar juice bursts from the kernel, mixes with the butter and salt, and if you weren't holding the steaming cob, you'd clap.

You might even give it a standing ovation if it's your first bite of the stuff. Unfortunately, it ruins you for corn anywhere else.

Other strains become mere vehicles for melted butter.

Our beefsteak tomatoes are nothing to sneeze at either. As a child, before I came to live with the sisters, Grandmom and Aunt Elfi would let me eat as many as I wanted. And I did, slicing up the meaty red flesh, salting them, and sitting out on the back stairs that led up to our apartment, the late-July sun beating down on the back of my neck as I forked up mouthful after mouthful, the juice collecting in the plate and dripping down my chin to mingle with the sweat on my neck.

Of course I ended up with canker sores lining my mouth from all that acid. But I didn't care.

You'll also see a seafood stand or two. The thought of steamed crabs, too expensive for Mercy House and her inhabitants, makes you want to cry you want some so badly. And the smell of the spicy steam as it escapes the vats, along with the sight of those hard crabs, red and encrusted with spices, will send you running for a pitcher of beer, some mallets, and a stack of old newspapers to lay out on the table.

Enough ruminating about produce and food. I guess it's hard for me to tell the next part of the tale and I'd like to put it off, but I should move on.

“Jude, I know you have syphilis.”

He turned his face toward me. “You've got to be kidding me. You've known all this time?”

“I heard about it from LaBella before I found you at the lighthouse.”

“What have you been doing then, Mary-Margaret? And why would you ask me to marry you knowing this?”

“I . . .” I tried to think of a response that wouldn't be a lie. “I think you need somebody, Jude. And it might as well be me.”

That was pretty darned close to the truth anyway.

“So . . . you see me as a mission or something. That's just great.”

“No. I do”—and could I have hesitated just a few seconds more to make it even less convincing—“love you—”

“Oh yeah, right! You can barely get the words out of your mouth. Mary-Margaret, I'm not a dope. The disease hasn't climbed into my brain yet.”

“So you've read about it?”

“All that I can.”

“Me too.”

“That doesn't surprise me. How did you end up talking to LaBella?”

“I went to her house.”

“I gotta hear this.”

I told him the story as we zipped up Route 50 toward Easton, marshlands and estuaries glimmering in the summer heat, the waning rainfall pulling the green from the long grasses growing closer to the road.

“You're a busybody, you know that, Mary-Margaret?”

“Yes, I do. But tell me. All those comments you've been making for years about wanting to . . . well—”

“Get in your pants?”

“Well, I was trying to put it a little more delicately, but, yes.

That. Well, now I'm giving you invitation—” Pictures of the chancre came to my mind and turned my stomach, but I smiled anyway.

“At quite a hefty price.”

I scoffed. “Oh goodness, Jude. As if you have so many other offers.”

He looked back out the window, hand gripping the door handle.

“Don't make a jump for it. I swear I'll run you down,” I said.

To my relief, he laughed. “I was just thinking how ironic life is. If this had happened when we were much younger, it might have made all the difference in the world. But now—well, I don't know—it seems impossible.”

“Why? I mean, you've taken penicillin, haven't you?”

“Mary-Margaret, next chance you get, pull off the road, will you? I've got something to tell you. You're not going to understand it, and you're really not going to like it.”

I figured that maybe some conversations truly needed to happen face-to-face, not side by side. So I pulled off into an Esso station and came to a stop under a large maple tree toward the back of the station's lot. I turned off the engine and we opened our windows, the smell of tar mixed with freshly cut hay borne in on the breeze rolling off the fields to our left. A mother yanking on the hand of a small boy disappeared into the restroom.

I faced him. “Okay, what is it, Jude?”

He placed his hands on his thighs, just above his knees, and squeezed. Of course, with the weight he'd lost, his legs looked almost like old man legs, hard bone knees from which the gabardine of his slacks draped. I wanted to cry at such reduction. “I'm not getting treatment for the syphilis. It's why I can't marry you.”

“Lord have mercy,” I whispered.

If hearts stopped at bad news, I guess we'd all be dead. However, it felt as if mine did. For just a few seconds. I reached forward and clutched at the dashboard with my left hand. “But you know you can't do that, don't you?”

“I can, Mary-Margaret. I'm going to.”

“But why?”

“I'm tired.” His words
held three decades' worth of baggage, three decades moving forward on hands, knees, and sometimes his belly, three decades of hunger and thirst never satisfied during the long journey.

“But this . . . this death. Do you realize how horrible it will be? Not only for you, but for those taking care of you? Most likely Hattie and Gerald, I guess.”

His eyes flashed and I was glad to see it. “What makes you think I'm going to ask anybody to take care of me, MaryMargaret? No, I'll be gone long before it comes to that.”

“No! You can't do such a thing. It's a mortal—”

“I'm not a crazy papist like you are.”

“It doesn't matter whether you are or not. It's still—”

“Shut up, Mary-Margaret! Just shut up!” He yanked on the door handle and sprang out of the car. “You think you know so much when the truth is, you're just a parrot for that pope of yours.” Slamming the door, he walked toward the trunk of the shade tree. He jarred his back against it, then bent double, grabbing his hair, once so thick and beautiful, with both hands, clenching the lackluster strands into his fists. And he let forth a feral moan that lasted, or so it seemed, until the sun set and the fields went black, the darkness settling on the drying hay, the heat receding just a little, the crickets grating their legs together in a scraping chorus that gave no comfort. Only the sight of boats out on the bay, their lights reflecting on the surface of the inky water soothed me at all as, by this time, we sat together on the hood of the car, and he held me as I cried.

Not you too
, I sang in my brain.
Not Jude.

The thought of his death brought with it a desolation and a loneliness at the realization that nobody else would love me, truly, ever again. At least not in a way that went into the marrow of their bones. Angie loved me like a close friend does, even one almost as close as a sister. To Sister Thaddeus I was still a little girl—not that I usually minded.

But no one needed to love me, save for Jude.

“I won't let you commit suicide,” I said, looking up at the stars. “Just don't do that.”

“There isn't any other way.”

“Marry me, Jude. Let me take care of you. I want to.”

“I don't want to be your mission.”

I grabbed his arm, feeling now the dissipation of his form.

“I need you to be. My life hasn't turned out to be even close to what I expected. Jude, please. Would you do it for me? I need you to love me. Nobody on earth loves me like you do. And I need to love you too. I don't know what it means to love like that.”

And I found I meant every word of what I was saying. Without the school sisters, I was nothing. I needed him. I needed Jude Keller.

I could hardly believe it myself.

Of course, he didn't commit to anything that day, or even that week. But we had a nice time together at the art store. I strolled among the paints, wondering if I should buy watercolor sets or tubes of paint I could divvy out on plastic pallets.

“Well, the pallets can be reused every year, Mary-Margaret.” Jude picked up a paintbrush and twirled it between finger and thumb. Jude had beautiful hands, his fingers extended and refined, his nail beds square and long. “I'd try to accumulate as many lasting things as you can.”

“That's good advice.”

The significance seemed to just pass by him and I thought about Jesus's words. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Then give Jude those ears too, Jesus. Because he's going to die soon and nobody
should die without knowing, really knowing, you love them. That would be the
biggest shame of all.

So I prayed that prayer over and over for the next couple of months.
Give Jude ears. Give Jude ears. Give Jude ears.

It sounded as silly then as it does now, but then, my whole life had become a joke to the people on the island. MaryMargaret left the order to chase that reckless Keller boy? Is she crazy? What kind of a person would do something so thoughtless,so ridiculous? She's always had her head on straight before this. Doesn't she realize what she's doing?

Honestly, I don't think I really did. Definitely a point in my favor.

I've been sitting outside of customs, at the baggage claim of the Johannesburg airport. They're sure not worried about snazziness here. I normally try to pack lightly, but, figuring I'll be gone for almost six weeks, I shoved as many blouses and pairs of underpants as I could into my duffel, as well as some art supplies for my time working with Samkela. So here I sit with my little notebook, jotting things down while I wait for John. He said he'd be a little late due to the day's appointments at the clinic. You see, John's specialty is birth deformities; he's quite the plastic surgeon. So once a month, he devotes his day to those sorts of surgeries. He's also a general surgeon as well and that skill, I'm sure you'll agree, is more necessary to his work at the clinic. Some of the things he does there at the clinic at Big Bend astonish me because there's not a chance they'd let such procedures be carried out in such rudimentary circumstances in the US. But as John says, “I'm a Jesuit. We'd rather ask forgiveness than permission.”

And so I write. I'm tired, by the way. I never sleep well on planes and I sat next to quite the snorer. I try to be upbeat, but it's hard to think of anything nice to say after six hours of that rattling racket. On with the story. I really just want to get this thing done now.