The Passion of Mary-Margaret (9 page)

He refreshed my tea with a shaking hand. “Of course people tried to warn me. She'd been hanging around the bar down near the shoe store.”

“Broomhall's?”

“Yes. And then one day she met that man. But I suppose I lost her the day I bought her that boat.”

Jude walked in from the decking, gold-brown hair mussed by the fingers of the breeze, cheeks pink, blue eyes still filled with the sun.

“Can I make myself some coffee?” he asked.

“That's fine, J.G.”

And even at fifteen I saw their relationship in that inch-long snippet. Dad offers tea; son wants coffee.

Tea is good. Coffee is good.

Unfortunately, Jude and I left thirty minutes later. We skimmed over the bay, calm that day, and he said little and it didn't feel awkward.

I returned to school, to the prayer chapel where I said some prayers for my friend, Sister Thaddeus joining me silently. Jude went home and got the beating of his life from his stepfather.

He should have stayed at the lighthouse, but nobody knew enough to interfere in the situation.

Gerald called up the steps, pulling me back to the here and now. “MM? Everything all right?”

I headed back outside and looked down to where my old friend stood on the dock beneath the lighthouse. Somehow he made it out of the boat on his own. His strength seemed to be returning, infusing a revived will in his muscle fibers, pumping blood to spots gone weak. In years gone by, the keepers kept their own livestock down there on a platform just above the boat slip. It wasn't strange for cows and chickens to lose their lives to a squall, the waves of the bay reaching over the railing for the poor beasts and dragging them into the water. Of course, even back in the forties when I'd head out here with Jude, there was no longer a need for any livestock. They had installed a generator that ran their electric lights, and their stove and refrigerator ran on propane.

“It's fine, Gerald. Just a little spooky. I'm hearing the voices of years gone by. Do you think you can make it up the steps?”

He grabbed onto the railing. “If not, I'll die trying.”

“I have to admit, it would be the perfect way for you to go!”

Gerald shook his head. “How you get away with being so caring and yet so unsentimental is beyond me.”

I hurried down the steps and circled an arm around his waist as he climbed up to the only true home he ever knew.

“I'm not sure how you and Jude turned out so differently, Gerald. Could you be any less alike?”

“No.” He grunted as he heaved his body up another step. “But Jude and I had different mothers.”

“What?”

We paused. He nodded, his clear blue eyes picking up the light sliding in through the pilings. “He didn't know that. Only Hattie knows. I hate to talk about it. My father was first married to a fine woman. She didn't have those . . . urges that Petra had. Guess sometimes our paths are handed down to us in our genes.”

“Oh, I hope not, friend. At least not completely. And I hope it's not ironclad.”

“Well, that's where people like you come in, I suppose. Hopefully it makes a difference.”

Oh dear Lord, yes. At least that's the hope, isn't it?

We continued the climb. A gull swooped in and out beneath the house, weaving her flight between the iron pilings; in the distance a couple of pleasure boats skimmed along the bay, their sails fully pregnant with the breeze. People on the water just know how to live, don't they?

“Do you think we'll get in trouble?” he asked, knowing the answer if his smirk was any indication.

“Would it be worth it if we did?”

“Oh, yes sirree.”

It took us a full ten minutes, Gerald resting after each step, breathing like a runner after a mile, but, by golly, we reached the deck. And considering he was at death's door yesterday, I'd say we'd practically run a marathon. Gerald stood by the railing and looked out over his waters and I mean it literally when I say the lines of his face receded like the past back into which he slipped.

“So how did your mother die?” I asked.

“She was outside washing the windows to the lantern and fell down on the rocks. Broke both her legs and cracked her head open. She died three days later up in Salisbury.”

How did I never hear this? Why would an entire town keep Mr. Keller's secret? Sisters, I still don't know the answer to that one. There were too many secrets out at that lighthouse. Jude's was the most dangerous.

We all grieve what happened to Jude, the massive repercussions he bore due not only to Petra's decisions but because of the woman herself. I believe it all goes back to this: none of them really believed God actually loved them.

It's
hard to come to that point of realization. I know. Despite my calling, it took me years to see it myself. It actually took Jude for me to understand the tenacious love of God, and I told him that. He chuckled, but when I explained, he knew I was right. Oh, we'll get to that part of the story in due time.

The calmly committed love of Jude's father could have never filled the space left inside Petra by a clinging, suffocating mother who claimed she loved her daughter to pieces, but in truth, only used Petra to feel better, to complete her, to fill the gaping space left inside by parents who deserted her to her own grandmother's care. Petra had other matters to deal with, we've figured, perhaps her uncle or a man in the neighborhood. Nobody's left to tell us and we don't know for sure what or if anything abusive happened. But Jude and I couldn't imagine another scenario that would warp someone into what Petra became.

All those uneven links in a heavy chain holding up years of pain and the inability to cope—no wonder Petra snapped.

Unfortunately, she took Jude with her in the fall. Somehow he was handed down that maverick blood, or maybe he just heard her complaining too much when Mr. Keller was outside painting the lighthouse or up in the lantern polishing the brass and cleaning the 4th order Fresnel lens. He took his life practically in his hands every time he climbed outside the lantern and washed the windows. But Petra never saw it that way and she used Jude to make up for her husband's deficiencies.

So she scrubbed the inside of the house from top to bottom almost every day, the peace cords in her mind fraying with every swipe of the graying rag until one day, according to Jude, she threatened to jump off the lantern and onto the rocks supporting the structures.

The next day Mr. Keller bought her the skiff.

I never knew why that was the final straw for Mr. Keller. Now I do.

So Jude came by his restlessness honestly. I still blame myself for not seeing what was really going on with Petra Keller. But who could guess such a thing? We walk by people every day who are daily experiencing a horror, and we don't even know it.

That evening after we visited his father, Jude walked me back to school, made some smart remark softened by the look that came into his eyes at times like that, which told me yes, he understood the parameters of our relationship, but he didn't have to like it.

Brister Purnell, his stepfather, came off the boat in a “hel-luva mood.” That's how Jude described it, and whenever I hear that word, I think of Helluva Good Cheese, which is actually pretty good cheese. Apparently some watermen from Virginia, real scallywags, were poaching from his crab pots, and kept Brister and his crew at bay by pointing their shotguns at them.

It was a poor catch that day to put it mildly.

“We gotta figure out how to keep that from happening again,” Brister said as Petra placed a plate of crab cakes, homemade slaw, and home-fried potatoes in front of him. Say what you will about the woman, but she knew how to cook.

Jude slipped in just as his mother set his plate on the table, just under the gun, and they had a conversation that amounted to something like this: “Let me at them, Brister. Take me out of school tomorrow and onto the boat.”

Brister, burned a reddish brown from his years on the water, set down his fork. “Brave words from the ladies' man.”

Now, you must understand something about Jude Keller: he learned more from Brister Purnell than he ever did from Mr. Keller. Brister taught him the measure of a man was how many women he'd had, how many shots he could throw back and still walk a straight line, and how many fights he'd been in and had emerged the winner.

“Where's the harm in that?” Jude would say. “I don't take anything from anybody they're not willing to give. It works for Brister.”

“Indeed?” I asked just before he left the island. “He doesn't seem to be so happy. Our bodies don't just house the
real
us, Jude. They're part of the complete whole.”

Jude just scowled and told me to keep my theology to myself. He slept with the trampy girls and I suspect he didn't want to be reminded that they didn't make him happy either, just prone to be viewed as a man of sexual prowess. And in control.

That night Brister wasn't in the mood for the usual male bravado that stomped atop their table like gunfighters with spurs, only Jude didn't pick up on the new tempo.

“I can do more than love.”

“Oh, you can fight?” Brister raised his eyebrows. “Well then, Mr. Big Shot, let's go!”

And despite Petra's cries, he dragged Jude by the collar outside the house.

“I didn't know what to do,” Jude told me the next day as he pushed against the bruises around his eyes and on his face. “Do I hit my mother's husband? My stepfather? I mean, in general circumstances Brister's all right. What was I supposed to have done? Let me tell you, the guy can really pack a punch. I thought he was all mouth. Apparently not.”

I didn't let him in on the fact that he'd turned the other cheek. Jude wouldn't have wanted the similarities between Jesus and his whupping to be highlighted.

Petra locked herself in her bedroom as Jude hauled himself down to Dr. Taylor to be stitched back together. When he came home, she asked Jude to watch over her that night.

The next day Brister did the same thing.

Jude took his own anger out on what he hated more than anything else. He drank some gin, grabbed a baseball bat, jumped in the motorboat, and headed toward the light. Mr. Keller knew better than to get in the way. He let his son rage and scream and curse him. He sat in his chair while Jude smashed the Fresnel lens, and he watched as Jude heaved the baseball bat like a gangling boomerang out into the charcoal waters of the Chesapeake.

He lied and said someone came and vandalized the light while he was ashore getting supplies.

Petra informed Brister she'd leave if he didn't stop treating her son that way, but Jude knew it was all talk. And he knew those boys from Virginia had stolen his stepfather's business right out from under him. If Brister couldn't beat them, he'd beat Jude.

At least that was Jude's take on it. I'd have to say the matter was far more complicated; I'd have to say Jude was just looking for an excuse to get away.

Jude returned to the light a few weeks later after school ended for the year, shook his father's hand good-bye, then returned to shore. He bought an old green Packard with the crabbing money he'd saved up and headed to Baltimore City. He never saw Mr. Keller again.

And now here I was back at the light. Apparently as lost in thought as Gerald seemed to be as he stood outside, looking up the steps toward the lantern.

I didn't want to disturb him. We had at least an hour. I figured a good amount of time stretched before us until Hattie slipped away if things continued along the same track. But I knew I'd better make sure.

I slipped my cell phone out of my windbreaker pocket. I hate that thing, this bow to technology and the material, but the fact is, I always want to know when someone is passing away at St. Mary's Village. I like to be there for it. If they're Catholic, I call Father Brian who became the pastor of our parish a few months ago, and he meets me there to deliver the rite of the Anointing of the Sick.