The Passion of Mary-Margaret (35 page)

“It wouldn't take much,” I said.

He turned, standing without a stitch on, completely comfortable, forgetting, I suppose, he was supposed to feel naked. “I didn't know you were awake. I'm sorry. Maybe I should have just left you on the floor.”

“I'm fine.”

“Why did you sleep over there anyway?”

“To be with you. It's why I married you.”

He ran his fingers through his curly hair. “What were you talking about when you said, ‘It wouldn't take much'?”

“Penicillin.”

“Oh.” He lifted a pair of boxer shorts from atop the dresser and slid them on. I wanted to tell him to stop. I know this may sound strange, but he was mine. He was given to me and I liked seeing him.

When he walked over to yank his shirt off the hanger, I said, “Stop.”

“What? I just thought I'd go down and bring us up some coffee from the restaurant.”

“I know you don't want to . . . do anything. But I just like looking at you.”

“You and a thousand other people.”

He might as well have slapped me. And it wouldn't have been undeserved. What was I thinking? I'll bet I sounded just like those awful women and men who'd hired him.

“Oh, Jude! I'm so sorry!”

It was then, sisters, that I really and truly realized Jude wasn't some pervert who lusted and used and to hell with the world. He was one of the broken ones, the severely broken ones upon whom sin settled down and stayed, screwing its bolts into him, body and soul, piercing the muscles, grinding the bones to bits and stirring the marrow. His complicity in it didn't make it any less so, didn't make his own choices any less wounding.

“I'm sorry,” I said again. “Get dressed. I will too. And we can just go have breakfast in the dining room.”

I took my clothes into the bathroom and changed where he couldn't see me.

“Thank you,” he said, when I emerged. “I'm sorry I snapped at you. You couldn't have known.”

At least there was that.

He twined his fingers amid mine and we headed down to eat.

We lived above the tackle shop, Jude sleeping on the couch as promised, me in the bed. Every so often I'd sleep next to him on the floor, and he'd lift me up and put me back in the bed.

“You pulled a Plim Plaza on me last night again, huh?” he'd say the next morning. But the truth was, I wanted to be near him. I was, at twenty-nine, turning into a woman. I loved being with him, near him, touching him, but he wouldn't go beyond holding me in his arms, kissing me softly, caressing my face.

“I just want to lay in your arms, Jude.”

“I can't. I don't know what will happen if I stay with you.”

“Would it be so bad?”

“Mary-Margaret! I'll give you syphilis. Why in the world do you want to take a chance like that?”

And since I couldn't say Jesus told me to do that, I just said nothing.

I've been in Swaziland for two weeks now. There's so much to do I forget about writing in this thing. But I feel like I'm with Jude again in the penning of the tale and that is wonderful. And there's so much to tell about my stay here as well.

John fetched me that first night from the women's ward at the hospital around ten fifteen, leaning down to hug Precious and speak soothingly to the other patients. The ones he knew personally he touched, rubbing their arms or blessing their heads. Calling them friend. Many of the women sat up, bare breasted. It didn't bother my son. I was proud of him.

It took us almost two hours to arrive in Big Bend. We stopped at a Spar (a grocery store) in Manzini before we really set out on the road and bought Cokes, the sweetest Coke you've ever tasted. I felt nervous, so the calories were welcomed. John bought me a candy bar as well, a Nestlé Aero bar, the perfect candy bar for smashing against the roof of your mouth with your tongue when you're feeling at all apprehensive.

Driving at night in Swaziland isn't such a good idea. Cows wander the roads, people walk alongside, some of them having imbibed too much; a person could find themselves hitting just about anything.

Once the city dissipated into the countryside, it was hard to see, but I knew that homesteads dotted the darkened landscape. I could sometimes see a kraal against the night sky. Kraals are where cattle are kept and where village meetings take place between, normally, the chiefs and the men. They are interesting corrals, large sticks driven into the ground and secured with wire or strapping of some sort. You cannot take pictures of a kraal, because it is an official building. Taking pictures of official state buildings is illegal in Swaziland.

But here is a drawing. They're beautiful, like a modern, organic sculpture or a giant crown, the sticks bending in lovely curves and angles.

Of course, some dark decisions can take place in a kraal, but this is not that story. I didn't stay in Swaziland long enough to get in that kind of trouble! Now, if Angie had come, there's no telling what would have happened. Oh, I do hope, for your sakes, sisters, she wrote down her adventures.

By God's grace we made it to Big Bend.

John's clinic lay beneath one bare light on a pole, its anemic rays illumining a corrugated tin roof that protected the cement block building. Behind the clinic a smaller building consisting of only four rooms sat darkened. And then there was the church, a little chapel whitewashed near the road. Only two percent of Swaziland is Catholic.

He unlocked the door to the living quarters. “The others have gone to bed. We'll just make our way quietly back to my room, Mom. I've got a cot set up for you. We'll have to bunk together this time.”

“Has another doctor joined you?” I asked.

“Not yet. He will. One of our medical priests from Mbabane.”

Mbabane is the capital city to the northwest. It's pronounced Buh-bahn.

“You remember me talking about Father Ignatius all these years, right?”

“Yes.”

“I just set up his room this morning. He's old and sick and he doesn't want to go back to the States. He wants to die in Africa, so we're going to take care of him. I mean, I'm here because of him. It's the least I can do.”

“Tell me a little more about Father Ignatius,” I requested as I put fresh linens and a blanket on the cot. “He's been over here a long time, hasn't he?”

Father Ignatius recruited John.

“Yes.”

“Where did he go to school again?”

“He graduated from Mount St. Mary's way back in the thirties.”

“Where was he before he came to Africa?”

“He ran a ministry to street people in Baltimore. Down at The Block.”

“Was he called Brother Joe then?”

“Yes! Do you know him?”

I felt like I'd been shocked on a pasture fence as John handed me a pillow. I sat down on the edge of my cot. “Father Ignatius used to be a friend of your dad's. He was at our wedding. We lost track of him.”
Obviously he hadn't lost track of us.

I pulled out my snapshot from my backpack. “Look. Is that him?”

John examined it by the lamp. “He's so old now, Mom, I can't tell if that's really him or not. But when I arrived eleven years ago . . . well, I guess, yeah, that could be him. Of course, he was already well past eighty by then and pretty ancient. No offense.”

“Hey, I'm only seventy-two!”

If the laughing tones of Jesus had met my inner ear, I wouldn't have been surprised. But honestly, I just felt loved. Jesus was bringing my father to me. Still, my nerves seemed to rise to the surface of my skin.

I yanked my duffel bag up onto the bed and pulled out my pajamas. My inner clock was so befuddled. It was only 5:30 p.m. at home, and yet, not being much of an in-flight snoozer, exhaustion had begun to seep from the core of my bones into my muscles and skin. “You'll have to tell me all about him tomorrow.” I just wasn't ready to hear more.

“You can come with me to pick him up.”

He gathered together his pajamas and headed to the small bathroom. The water to the house was stored in a large, green plastic cistern on the roof. A water truck kept it filled on a regular basis. They used it very sparingly, using a smidge when only a smidge was necessary.

I quickly changed into my pajamas, afterward securing a robe around me. We brushed our teeth together. He leaned in close, his arm touching mine as we moved those toothbrushes in much the same manner, owing to the fact I was the one who taught him how to brush.

Did I tell you how much those little rituals meant to me?

I felt so at home in John's room, the icons hanging on the cement block, the crucifix of rough-hewn wood and a pewter corpus cast in an artistic fashion hanging on the wall at the head of his bed. The carpet at his bedside was worn in two spots where his knees had rested countless times.

John prayed for his friends. He told me once, “I can give all the medicine in the world, do all the surgery I can, and it doesn't hardly matter if prayer doesn't accompany it. Prayer is more important than the medicine. It is the real medicine, I guess.”

I tapped my toothbrush on the sink. “He's coming tomorrow, you say? How did that happen?” I tried to sound breezy.

“He's been looking out for me for years, Mom. I owe more to him than I can say, so, well, I guess now it's time for me to pay him back a little. He's an amazing man.”

The raping seminarian. An amazing man.

Father Ignatius. Yes, the Father Ignatius John talked about for years. The raping seminarian.

Well, yes he was, so it seemed.

I began art instruction with Samkela today! We can't understand each other's language, but lines are lines and colors are colors and shapes are shapes. John was right. He's something! He's latched onto the poppy red Prismacolor pencil and I don't blame him one bit. It was my mother's favorite color too, according to Aunt Elfi. One of the few items I owned from her belongings was a scarf in that color.

One Saturday, not long after our honeymoon, I went through my old trunk. In between Grandmom's one fine tablecloth and my Aunt Elfi's drawing, that red scarf pierced my vision.

I felt a sense of loss so profound I smashed the fabric against me, and a soft moan escaped from my mouth. I missed my mother so badly. I missed that I couldn't be her daughter and that, if Jude prevailed, I'd never have a daughter of my own.

“Mary-Margaret!” Jude rushed in and knelt just behind me. He rested a hand on my back. “Are you all right? Are you sick?”

I just shook my head. “I just found this. It's been so long since I've seen it. It was my mother's.”

I told him the few stories about Mary Margaret the First that I remembered, not that he hadn't heard them before. He was patient. “She would have been such a wonderful mother.”

He said nothing, just held me close and kissed my face, over and over, then my mouth, and with a moan, he deepened the kiss for the first time since we were teenagers and I pressed myself into him. It was as if he said, I'm all you have, and I'll try to be enough.

After that day, he continued to kiss me and I felt like the teenager I never had been. Maybe he did too. A teenager that found someone safe to love early on, who didn't have to waste himself on acquiring women, collecting experiences, and then drugging himself out to cope. Maybe it was the first time he'd ever really kissed the woman he loved and who loved him in return.

That thought was like fresh water to me. In a way, Jude was as innocent, as untried in the building of a loving relationship, a life, as I was.

I kept that scarf around though, setting it on the windowsill in the bedroom. I told you how someone who is orphaned feels the need to be connected to someone else, to know your blood flows in someone else's veins too. I'm sure people look at their parents and take that sort of thing for granted, their brothers and sisters, maybe even their own children. But when you're all you've really got in the world, relationally speaking, the old saying “Blood is thicker than water” lands on you with a thud, bruising your chest right down through your ribs and into your heart.

Maybe if I had a little baby of my own, I reasoned, some of the loneliness would go away.

But that, of course, would be up to Jude.