The Passion of Mary-Margaret (39 page)

I'm back from Siphewe's. She was thankful for the food and made me a cup of tea and a coarse but delicious corn bread. You don't refuse the offer of food here. I learned that several trips ago. She doesn't speak English, but somehow we understood one another. John doesn't know this yet, but she's taken in three orphans whose mother died, most likely from AIDS, a few days ago. The father has been gone for two years at least. I'll tell him when he's finished looking at patients for the day.

So much to do here. This is a country that crawls along on the backs of its women. But maybe that's another story as well. It's a beautiful evening and the sky would look much better with a colorful kite looping and diving across its expanse.

Kites became very important to Jude and me. After we set about the cure for syphilis.

We booked ourselves in a cheap hotel in Salisbury near the hospital for our penicillin treatment, a seven-day round for me, ten for Jude. With each injection, he seemed to change for the better emotionally. Death left him in stages and I gladly watched it go. We took long walks during the day and began to dream about what life could be like with the past truly behind us.

That we would have children was assumed and the sooner the better. Neither of us were teenagers anymore.

We ate ice cream in the evenings and dreamed out loud.

“What would you do if you could do anything you like?” he asked me.

“I'd be an artist. Just an artist. I'd do my crazy sculptures again and I'd make them bigger than ever. Outdoor installations.

I'd love
to try doing a bronze. And I'd like to do something like Brother Joe does, but maybe with runaways or something. What about you? What makes you happy?”

“You're going to think this is crazy, Mary-Margaret. I love to fly kites. I made some great kites when I was a kid. Remember those?”

I used to watch him out of my window at school sometimes, out there on the point, flying his kites. And from off the lighthouse when he was smaller.

“It always made me feel like I was doing something so amazing. Why is that?”

“Because it's attached to you and it's flying and soaring and you're holding on. It's the closest you can get to flying and still be on the ground.”

He closed his eyes as we sat on a bench downtown, licking our ice-cream cones.

Finally, I said, “Do you like the beach? The ocean?”

“I do. I almost packed up and went to Ocean City instead of Baltimore. I wish I had, but, anyways, it's water under the bridge now.”

“Do you think Brister would lend you some seed money for a business?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“A shop on the boardwalk. A kite shop. People fly kites at the beach all the time, and if they don't they should. And you can make kites too, good kites, not those cheap things you get at the dime store.”

“They're such a waste of money.”

I pulled a notepad out of my purse along with a pen.

“Get planning.”

He began to jot down ideas, supplies, other items we might sell. By the end of the trip, he had it all planned. I'd never seen this side of Jude.

I only knew one thing, people like Jude needed to fly; you just had to help point them in the right direction. It sounded like a good life. And it was.

I put my notice in at the school and they were sad to see me go, but, like most everyone else on Locust Island who were well acquainted with us, thought it was the right move.

The next September, almost a year after our wedding, we rented a furnished efficiency apartment on Wicomico Street and leased a storefront space on the boardwalk between Division and First Street, just down from the Plim Plaza where we honeymooned.

Behind the apartment house, I rigged up my pulleys and chains and prayed that somehow I'd find wood from someplace. We had no truck and it wasn't as if trees were aplenty there on that strip of land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Assawoman Bay.

Jude ordered the materials he needed for kite making: cane and hardwood, stripwood, crepe paper and nylon, glue, twine, and paints for me to decorate the kites. He ordered manufactured kites to begin selling right away. “I'll make up some kits for people to assemble themselves. Family projects or what have you.

And we'll sell them for less.” I told him that was a fine idea.

We called our business The Kite Shack. I tried to come up with all sorts of plays on words, High Hopes, The World on a String, and such, I can't remember them now, but Jude would have none of it. “Let's just keep it simple, Mary-Margaret, so folks will remember.”

All winter long he worked on his kites and I helped him as the wood I needed had not yet shown up on our doorstep. I asked Jesus about it, but he remained silent. So. Kites it was, then. I painted some beautiful butterflies that winter, dragonflies and birds, stingrays and colorful, fanciful fish. Peacocks too. I thought the peacock kites would be best sellers, and they were.

By December I was expecting, happy to think about a September baby. Good things seemed to happen to me in September. We both had such hope wrapped up in this child. For me, that blood connection; for Jude, the chance to break the family's dark line of abuse.

So while we made kites, God made our baby inside of me, cells collecting upon one another, forming this human child.

Of course, we didn't have ultrasounds in those days, but both of us felt the child was a boy. And no, Jesus didn't give me the scoop ahead of time. But he did tell me one night John had a specific mission. “He will help save a nation.”

Sounded pretty big to me, and I couldn't quite imagine what he would do.

For twenty years we lived in Ocean City and Jude made and sold kites and helped found a mission with a Jesuit missionary, and we both became part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. The Oasis ministered mostly to prostitutes and Jude became a street worker, gentle and loving, but able to say, “I know where you've been. So let's not pretend, okay?”

Oh, we had some crazy meals around our table once we bought a small house on the other side of Ocean Highway, last house on the left, Bayview Avenue. The sunsets we watched over the water of the bay, the sails on the sailboats, turgid silhouettes against the flaming sky, as if someone drew them in India ink. The boats skimmed by, always adding a peaceful benediction to the day. There we'd be, sitting with the rabble of the town, laughing and picking crabs Jude caught in his traps off our dock, then steamed himself, or smelling the aroma of grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. Summer lasted so long there at the beach. Or maybe we just engineered it to be that way.

God allowed my marriage to Jude to last twenty-seven years. I wondered at times if I was sent to Jude, or Jude was sent to me, or we were both given each other to make John. Then again, limiting God like that is never good. Knowing him, he had something up his almighty sleeve for all three of us. He's quite thrifty, you know.

Jesus took to showing up on my birthday, early in the morning before anyone else was up, just to tell me how glad he was that I was born.

When I gave birth to John, I realized this was more than just one human being giving life to another; this was a holy calling, every bit as holy as being a religious sister. Yes, I knew that was the traditional teaching of the Church, but when I held that little boy in my arms for the first time, I knew it in every square inch of my frame.

The birth was grueling, the uterine bleeding so intense a surgeon was called in to perform an emergency hysterectomy. It could have turned into a situation that mirrored my own birth, but we'd chosen to have the baby at the hospital just in case.

Jude gave me a bag of bulbs the day John was baptized. Oh yes! Now I remember, white daffodils, for new beginnings, renewal. Resurrection. “I'll plant them someday, Mary-Margaret.”

But as happens with some things, they ended up under an old flowerpot in the garage and got pushed back in a corner, then covered with junk, and there they sat until I unearthed them when I moved away from Ocean City. I will plant them as soon as I get back to the island. We all need new life, fresh beginnings, renewal and resurrection. Now is the time. Now is always the time.

There, I just wrote
Plant Bulbs
on my palm again! Let's hope it works this time. I'll keep refreshing it until I'm back in the States.

I could tell John was special from the beginning, understanding the importance of our faith from an early age, talking about God in such intimate ways, referring to himself not just as a Christian but God's friend. He began doing that at five and I had no idea from where he heard the term. Perhaps Jesus appears to John too and he's not allowed to tell either! Sometimes I truly have to wonder about that.

Jude never became overly vocal about his faith; he showed it by his actions, however, down at the mission, at the shop where he kept some kites he made out of scraps to give to kids with no pocket change. And Jude could spot them somehow. His ability to discern people was so much keener than mine, as well as
his inherent knowing of who was down and out.