The Passion of Mary-Margaret (6 page)

I'm going to have to return to the US to keep up my hours. I'll be
doing them at Hopkins so hopefully I can stay with you for a while. After
all this time on the parched plain, I need your healing rains.

Much love,

Fr. Son

The other day I picked up a copy of
The Knowledge of the Holy
, by the protestant mystic Aiden Wilson Tozer. He'd don a coverall, slipping it over his suit and tie, and fall on his face before the Lord. He gave away most of his earthly gifts to feed the poor and help others. If it was up to me to decide sainthood, I'd go with the man. I came to know Tozer through the aforementioned Johnson Bray, a person I'll miss with a pinprick sadness until my dying day.

Mr. Bray also sewed ready-made suits before ready-made suits were the norm. He was a man ahead of his time. I would find him in his workshop, hunched over the machine, this giant, kingly black man with hands so large it astounded me they could do such fine work. His workshop looked as if a notions store had exploded. Buttons, trim, fabric, spools of yarn in no particular order covered every flat surface. He didn't allow his wife, his opposite, to step so much as a toe over the threshold. She was grateful for that.

Sometimes, when he did his handwork, hemming, and basting, usually late at night, I'd sit with him.

“Come on in, MM!”

And there he'd be, sitting in an old tapestry chair, his swollen feet pushing out the sides of his slippers resting on an ottoman. Holding that teeny needle in those big fingers, he usually was sweating underneath the lamp because when I talked most to Mr. Bray, I was on summer vacation and the nuns didn't always know what to do with me.

So we sweated together, him more than me, and as he sewed I sketched. Usually pictures of him or Jude. Or Jesus. But nobody's ever seen those. I keep them in their own portfolio.

“How you doin' tonight, Sister Mary-Margaret?” he'd always ask. He was the first person to ever call me that.

“Fine, Mr. Bray. Hot.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Whose suit is that?”

This was 1940 and I was ten years old.

“Mr. Clark Gable's.”

“No!”

“Oh yes. Yes, yes.”

“How did you get him?”

“Well now, it's a very interesting story.”

Mr. Bray pronounced it in-ter-REST-ing.

Mrs. Regina Bray, a beautiful woman with the grace of a dove, always offered me a lemonade and I always accepted because she wasn't stingy on the sugar. She was every bit as lithe and willowy as her husband was thick and heavy. She wore yellow at least seventy-five percent of the time and her voice always sounded as if she were speaking in church.

“Oh, Johnson and his stories.” She'd chuckle.

He'd nod. “But it's late and you should be in bed, shouldn't you?”

“No. Everybody's asleep. I'm free and clear at least until compline.”

He'd laugh and laugh. And then he'd usher me into his workshop. That night he told me a grand tale of how Mr. Clark Gable himself came upon Mr. Bray right there in Abbeyville! My, that man could weave a story. Mermaids and miracles and just plain fancy. He was one of those people you suspected could be an angel. Mrs. Bray too.

“You tell a story better than Aunt Elfi,” I said. “Unless she's not making all that up.”

He laid a finger on the side of his nose. “She was a mystic for sure.”

“That's what she told everyone.”

“Oh no. I think she really was. Now, about her being the reincarnation of Catherine of Siena, well, that seemed a bit farfetched, considering Catherine's a saint. What's the theology on that, MM?”

“Saints are people the Church is positive are experiencing the beatific vision.”

“Heaven?”

“Yes, sir. Which makes it just seem plain silly that a saint could be reincarnated.”

“Still, seems to me she found God in a way few have, I'll warrant. God meets people in the strangest places.”

I found out a few years later that Aunt Elfi had been dropped on her head as a baby.

Back to Clark Gable. “So, is he really as good-looking in person?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Clark Gable.”

“Better looking.”

“I knew it!” I snapped my fingers. I was crazy about Mr. Gable.

Sisters, here is one of my favorite portions from the book Mr. Bray gave me,
The Knowledge of the Holy
.

They that know Thee not may call upon Thee as other than Thou art, and
so worship not Thee but a creature of their own fancy; therefore,
enlighten our minds that we may know Thee as Thou art, so that we may
perfectly love Thee and worthily praise Thee.

An “amen” rings in my heart, and I remember Mr. Bray, long gone, and how he taught me not to tell God where he can and cannot go, who he can and cannot save, and why he can and cannot do so. “Love rules the day,” Mr. Bray told me when I asked him years later why Jesus would have me reach out to Jude in the way he was asking. “If Jesus is asking you to do that, it's because he loves you both that much.”

I miss Jude tonight. In truth, despite the tickle in the loins (which I thought a machination of the evil one), I initially viewed Jude as a call to obedience, a chance to understand what sacrificial love really means. But every once in a while, when we were teens and I walked with him at the edge of the point, and the light from Bethlehem Point Light swung around and around, I loved him a little. Or maybe it was just physical attraction back then. It doesn't matter now. And I was still a girl who loved Jesus more than some boy.

The third time Jesus came to me I was ten years old and sitting at Fort McHenry, the place of my conception. We'd come to Baltimore for a three-day field trip, the sisters traipsing us around the fort, the USS
Constellation
, the Washington Monument, Union Station, the Basilica of the Assumption, and to see the circus at the Armory. I'd detached myself from the group and sat on one of the star points of the old fort, my legs dangling down in front of the brick, my eyes tracking the ships sailing down the Patapsco River to the Baltimore Harbor and to the docks on the waterfront.

Naturally, I thought of my mother.

The circumstances surrounding my birth saddened me not so much because of what my mother went through, although clearly, that was something to mourn and at times I did. What saddened me the most was that I had such a bad man for a father. I often wondered if somehow his propensity for gross mortal sin was engraved like fine glass etching into my cell membranes. Was I lacking the ability to stop myself from placing my desires so forefront I'd force my will against another?

The noon
sun lowered as I sat thinking about this, only not in such grandiose terms as written above. Did my father's transgressions leave some sort of mark on me? Something like the mark of Cain, only my sin was not my own? For certainly, the children at St. Mary's, other than Angie, tended to leave me alone. Was it more than the fact that I was deemed “odd” because of my orphan/charity status? Had some bubble formed around me, something toxic that mere contact with would render a person . . . what? Not popular? Stained? Damned?

“No. Not damned at all, T—.”

I glanced to my left and there he stood, the grass, having wintered and grown too long before the first cutting, brushing against his bare ankles.

I remembered those eyes.

Oh my. He came back!

“Yes, it's me again. You think more deeply than you should for your age. And you must know there's nothing
you
can do that will damn another person.”

“I hate how I was made. If that seminarian was doing the right thing, then I wouldn't be here.”

“True.”

He walked closer and rested his hand atop my head. Light and love flowed into me.

“But you still love me.”

“You are very dear to me, T—.”

It was then I found out what my real name meant.

“Because of the way I was made?”

“Yes.” He sat down. “Listen to a story I will tell you.”

He asked me to keep it between us. Jesus comes to many people, of this I'm convinced, but in many ways, and he always asks them not to brag about it.

So that was the day I fell in love with him.

That day Jesus took my hand and walked me to the water's edge. “I don't like that fort,” he said. “Too much bloodshed. Too much plotting and planning of pain. Let's sit here instead.”

We sat in the long grass together and he never let go of me.

“Let me know this is real somehow,” I asked after the sun set and the sky turned a blazing lavender with shoots of golden cloud zooming across its breadth.

You see, the group had left without me. It was almost as if I had disappeared and nobody realized it.

He pressed his thumb into the soft spot of skin and muscle between my forefinger and thumb. Warmth surged in through his branding touch. I can't see the red spot it made anymore, but it still feels tender to the touch and reminds me of the day I was born anew, you know, when I became a little girl who really and truly knew she was loved by God. That'll make anyone feel brand new.

He told me a story that day, a story of how sin can lead to God's mercy. My very existence was filled to overflowing with God's mercy. “And that seminarian, though he didn't know it, gave you to me to love, T—. Somehow, though it doesn't seem to make any sense, we can at least be thankful for that.”

THIS HAS BEEN ONE OF THE MOST EXHAUSTING DAYS OF MY life!

I was praying myself awake this morning when Jesus sat next to me on the bed. “I want you to do several things before I bring you home, T—.”

T— is my true name and I don't feel comfortable writing it down. It's just for me. The name he gave me. We all have one, just not many of us know what it is. Indeed, do you think God knows you as the name your parents gave you or the one he gave you before the foundations of the world? Don't you ever wonder what that name might be?

All right, Jesus, I'll do what you ask.

“I want you to get Gerald out to that lighthouse as quickly as you can. Sneak him out of the facility if you have to. And you'll have to.” He lifted my hand and squeezed it, and it was light and warmth and love. “Touch Gerald for me today, with this hand.”

I will.

I went right over to Gerald's room, the hall lights low, the floor smelling freshly buffed, the aides' shoes seeming thicker and quieter, as though nighttime medical footwear had special requirements. The bulletin boards, so cheerful in sunlight, looked drained and depressed. I touched his arm as he slept, then slipped quietly back to Mercy House for Matins.

I returned later this morning after breakfast to find what seemed impossible.

Hattie
was slipping away! I couldn't believe it. Before Jesus said what he did, we all thought Hattie was the stronger one while Gerald sat cross-legged in a pile of ashes on the doorstep of death.

Angie rushed into their room where I sat holding Hattie's hand. “What's going on?” She slipped off her jacket, sat down, and took Hattie's other hand.

“Her vitals are slipping. There's no reason for it. Her heart is strong, her arteries are in good shape. She's not having a heart attack or a stroke. It's medically unexplainable.”

I want to tell you about Hattie before we proceed. Hattie lived for decades out on the light with Gerald. When Gerald came ashore, sometimes for several days to go into Baltimore for major supplies or to talk to his boss with the coast guard, she'd man the light.

Hattie saved the life of three watermen during Hurricane Agnes after their skipjack had slammed into the shoals. She got in her motorboat, ripped the cord of the outboard, and rescued them. I can picture her housedress clinging to her comfy exterior, her bottle-red hair sitting like a soaked octopus atop her head, the tensile muscles in her arms tightening as she reached forward, hand-over-handing the men to safety. Nobody would dare drown when Hattie was on duty.

They weathered out the storm aboard the light with her, the metal pilings creaking and groaning, the waves crashing almost up to the windows as Agnes grew angrier.

Gerald watched from the shore.

“Honest to Pete, when I got out there, Hattie was playing gin rummy with everybody, the place warm and cozy, and she looked up at me and said, ‘Gere, did you remember the sugar?' And of course I forgot the sugar, so I took those men back to shore, picked up a sack of sugar, and made Hattie and me a tray of sugar cookies.”

Hattie was fifty-five years old when she saved those men.

The lighthouse survived. They all did. Only minor repairs were necessary to Bethlehem Point. Other lighthouses weren't so lucky, but we all figured that light held together by Hattie's sheer, strong will. How it lasted the years before she got there, I couldn't begin to say.

And now, if she wants to die, she will. Most likely, she knows something we don't. Or perhaps it's just time. Who can know but God? And maybe Hattie Keller.