Stony River Read online

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Tereza was dreaming about a TV wedding. When the preacher said “forsaking all others,” the realization that Ma had been forsaking her for Jimmy since she was four years old smacked her clear across the face. She woke to a throbbing head and a mouth crusted with drool. Her whole body felt pissed off as she trudged to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand this cold, dark prison any longer. If she had a boat, she’d row down the river all the way to the ocean and let herself get swallowed by a whale.

  Leaning against the sink, chugging glass after glass of water with shaky hands, she spotted a door on the landing at the bottom of the kitchen stairs, hidden behind the coat and hat she’d thought was Crazy Haggerty. She pushed the coat aside and turned the knob.

  Locked.

  She got the crowbar. Linda wouldn’t have approved but Linda wasn’t there. So what if there was something behind the door that could kill her? She didn’t exactly have great plans for the future.

  She broke open the door, fired up the flashlight and started down another set of stairs, swiping at cobwebs. The air smelled like a wet mop. A mouse scurried in front of her and disappeared into shadows. The basement was long and narrow, one half filled with crap, the other set up for some kind of meeting. On the crap side, dried-up plants hung from a clothesline strung beside a boiler. The boiler looked like a dead bug with four pipe legs reaching up into nowhere. She’d check out the boxes of junk cluttering the floor later. The other half of the room was squawking for attention.

  A harp, like the one on the flask, leaned against a black-draped table in front of the black curtain and white pillars she and Linda had seen. The black hooded robe still dangled from a hook. Pinned to the curtain was a hand-drawn picture that looked like the one-celled creature Mr. Boynton had shown them under a microscope. Weird objects sat on the table just so: a metal goblet wearing a necklace of acorns and seashells, a creepy animal horn, a tall white candle, a wooden stick, a long piece of knotted yarn, a black-handled knife and three jingle bells on a string. The stick, polished and tapered at the end, looked like a wand. Tereza picked it up, tapped the air and said “Bibbidy bobbidi boo,” but she was still there, still pond-scum ugly. She lifted the knife and blew the dust off it. Its double-edged blade was six or seven inches long, but it would fit in her pocketbook.

  Ma claimed Tereza had ESP because she always knew when it was safe to come home. What if Miranda and Tereza were tuned to the same frequency? It would explain why Miranda had looked across to where Linda and Tereza were hiding the day the cops took her away and why Tereza had known she’d hole up in this house one day. The voice calling her yesterday could’ve been Miranda’s, the objects on the table a coded message.

  Tereza had to break into the desk now. Miranda would want her to.

  FIVE

  OCTOBER 30, 1955. In a chapel cool and dim with rafters high and dark, Miranda prays: “I confess to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, to blessed John the Baptist, to the holy Apostles Peter and Paul and to all the saints …”

  Mass is over but she remains, knees pressing into the unforgiving bench she can feel even through her mother’s rose-patterned dress. Lingering as well is smoke from burning incense—“the petitions of the faithful drifting up to Heaven,” Father Shandley calls it. The pungently sweet smell tugs at her: a longing for James and the sacred ground of their altar, their place apart from the World and protected.

  “… that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”

  The musicality, not the meaning, of the words renders the Confiteor Miranda’s favorite prayer. She recites it first in English, and then, not sure she’s pronouncing it correctly, in the Latin she memorized from the short, squat missal Doris gave her when she was baptized. Once she’s able to attend high school, like the inmates who get to wear uniforms, she means to study Latin properly. Miranda has spent half of the four months she’s been at St. Bernadette’s in religious instruction. The nuns are amazed at how much she’s absorbed. She finds it easy to grasp and strangely familiar: the saints in heaven have the same great power as the gods and goddesses to intercede for mortals. At mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa she strikes her chest with her fist three times, a gesture of sorrow for sin. The words and the gesture reach far down to the faceless place where the Voice of James lives curled up inside her. It tells her she has no need for sorrow, that the concept of sin is a fallacy. Some days she believes the Voice; other days, the nuns and Father Shandley.

  Worshipers file out in the aisles on either side—the girls, like her, with mandatory white lace doilies on their head; the nuns all in black, swooping like the war goddess Morrígan in her scald-crow-of-battle guise. And those from the hunched-together houses and tenements surrounding St. Bernadette’s Orphan Asylum and Convent: bowed old women in long, dark dresses whose bones crack as they kneel; parents who supply the chapel with altar boys; rough-looking men rumored to sleep on the ground outside the gates.

  The girls will proceed to the dining room on the same floor as the chapel. They’ll pass the laundry where Miranda works two hours each day after school, ironing sheets the nuns take in from hospitals and nursing homes.

  “Do they pay you?” Doris asked. “You should insist they pay you.”

  They don’t.

  It’s fair play for the food Miranda eats and has not to prepare. She doesn’t tell Doris that the nuns dole out additional hours in the laundry as punishment. She’s partial to the smell of hot iron on bleached sheets and enjoys the power she has to make wrinkles disappear. She likes ironing better than building wood fires or laundering nappies.

  Miranda will join the lunch queue once she finishes her prayers. It doesn’t bother her to be last. She doesn’t care with whom she sits. Others will push their way into the room, tripping over each other to secure their favorite places at the long wooden tables and benches. Sisters Elaine and Monica, the prickly-voiced twin goddesses of the dining room, will threaten to banish them, right this minute, if they don’t slow down. Miranda will think about nothing except holding Cian after lunch, kissing his soft cheek, hoping this time he won’t cry when he sees her.

  He eats in the nursery with the children who aren’t yet schoolaged. He’s gained six pounds since they arrived. If not adopted by age five, boys are sent to a different orphanage; girls move to the dormitory. Miranda means to be free of St. Bernadette’s before Cian is five and return with him to their house until his calling is clear. He will cling to her, not Sister Joseph, when he’s sleepy or hungry. She, not Sister Cameron, will be first to hear his latest word.

  She’ll collect him today before Doris arrives, as she does every second Sunday after the midday meal. Sometimes it seems as if Doris exists for Miranda alone. It’s surprising when she materializes suddenly, like a rainbow, where others can see her, too.

  Miranda squeezes her eyes shut to concentrate. Distraction from prayer is a sin.

  “Therefore, I beseech blessed Mary ever Virgin, blessed Michael the Archangel, blessed John the Baptist, the holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, to pray to the Lord our God for me.” The repetition and the symmetry reassure Miranda that order exists outside her often chaotic mind. Whenever prayer leads her into a dreamlike state, the Voice whispers encouragement. The words matter less than the surrendering, it says; ritual’s purpose is to distract the conscious mind and let the subconscious take over. Whatever sadness Miranda’s conscious mind may be feeling when she enters the chapel recedes with the magical chill of holy water from the font, the ritual crossing of herself and the hush that allows James’s voice to come through and make each next day possible.

  To the right of the sanctuary is a stone angel robed in a cloud, wings spread, poised for flight. It brings to mind James’s tales of invisible beings, some winged, some not, some benevolent, some not. Pure energy they are, James told her, shaped from beliefs and memories. He often en
countered them on his journeys between this world and an saol eile, the Other Life, where everything is more intense and nothing is hidden. She says six Our Fathers, six Hail Marys and six Glory Be to the Fathers in case James is stuck between this world and an saol eile—the place the catechism calls Purgatory.

  Miranda marvels at how the individually mute fragments of brilliant glass in the windows speak as one to tell stories she’d never heard before coming to the orphanage: Gabriel advising Mary she’ll bear a child; the Last Supper; Mary appearing to Bernadette when she was as young as Miranda. Light from the World illuminates them. The Voice claims that the light’s source deserves to be honored more than a god that forbids eating from a knowledge tree.

  The sun, the glorious sun, was ablaze the afternoon Miranda arrived at St. Bernadette’s, in the city called Newark, a twenty-minute car ride from Doris and Bill Nolan’s house. Bulgy-eyed Sister Bonita escorted her and Cian directly to the infirmary. Past the chapel, up two flights, along a queer-smelling hallway hung with photographs of solemn children, their huge eyes wary, past dormitories and the sisters’ sleeping quarters. Except for the wee ones in the nursery, the children and most nuns were away at summer camp. The only sounds were the rustle of Sister Bonita’s long, heavy black tunic and the tip-tap of her black shoes on the linoleum floor. The infirmary door opened to a long corridor of closed doors reminiscent of the morgue in Stony River. From Miranda’s suitcase, Sister Bonita confiscated the “unholy” drawing of Ethleen holding the moon, the “dangerous” candle, matches and moonstone and Cian’s “unhealthy” blanket. Miranda and Cian were to be quarantined until the sharp-chinned nurse, Sister Marie Claire, pronounced them free of communicable disease.

  Miranda’s heart quickened at the possibility of finding Nicholas in Quarantine. But Sister Nurse said St. Bernadette’s had no animals except for stray cats that hung about the kitchen door due to Sister Ernestine’s soft spot. Not the same type of soft spot the visiting doctor asked about when he measured Cian’s head and said he was microcephalic, a word Miranda wrote in the journal Sister Bonita allowed her to keep because it was educational. At eighteen pounds, Cian was no heavier than an eight-month-old, the doctor said. Miranda couldn’t say what the lad weighed at birth. And she couldn’t report anything unusual about her pregnancy.

  “Did you try to escape?” he asked.

  “From what?”

  The doctor said Cian wouldn’t live to an old age and, most likely, would be retarded.

  Sister Bonita said it was God’s will.

  The Voice of James said: Hogwash.

  Sister Nurse said she’d seen a man with a very small head sing and dance at the circus once when she was a little girl. He looked happy, had seemed to enjoy the attention.

  In the infirmary room Cian and Miranda shared, the shades were always up. Sunlight caressed Miranda’s face each morning, making her weep for the years it had not. She sleeps now in a dormitory with thirty-nine others, her steel-frame bed in the row nearest the door, farthest from the sun. Some mornings, when she awakens before the chimes and the subsequent sound of forty sets of knees dropping for Hail Marys, she lies abed imagining herself as the goddess Eri, to whom a man in a silver boat floats down on a shimmering sunray. The man is always James.

  She sees Cian once a day before bedtime and weekend afternoons. She assumed she’d continue to feed and bathe him, but Sister Cameron said it was best if he began to detach from her. Like the lambs of Lughnasadh James spoke of, abruptly weaned from their sheared and washed ewes. Sister Joseph said Cian would respond better to toilet training and learn to use a spoon and fork if Miranda weren’t around catering to him. Sister Nurse bound Miranda’s breasts until the milk dried up. Occasionally, it leaks out when a cry from the nursery reaches her ears.

  The chapel is empty now except for her and Father Shandley, who has returned from seeing the outsiders off. He’s moving items about the altar under the big cross on which Jesus suffers night and day. Miranda likes the father-bird way the priest deposits Christ’s body on her tongue. How he places wine and water into the chalice as James placed salt and water into theirs. The way Latin spills from his mouth as Gaeilge did from James’s.

  He could be older than James or younger; Miranda’s not yet a good judge of age. His hair is as dark as Nicholas’s, neatly parted on the side and slippery looking. She lifts her doily and smoothes her own hair, the same ginger-spice shade as James’s, the waves ending just below her ears. Sister Nurse keeps the inmates’ hair shorn so that lice will find no haven there.

  “That gorgeous mane gone,” Doris said, nearly crying, the first time she visited.

  Miranda doesn’t mind. It’s easier to brush. And when she glimpses herself in the mirror above the row of lavatory sinks, it pleases her to look more like James.

  A whiff of onion floats by. Miranda pictures one hundred and twenty bowls of soup waiting obediently. Even from the chapel she can faintly hear the warning chimes. Bing-bong, bing-bong: ten minutes to lunch. Chimes announce when to get up, when to go to meals, to Mass and to school. Some inmates complain they feel like dogs ordered about by a whistle—the same girls who put sweaters on backwards, as if they were straitjackets, and say “Look at me, I’m in an asylum,” daring Sister Bonita to emerge from her room with the strap to remind them that asylum means refuge, asylum means home.

  Being ordered about doesn’t bother Miranda. She likes not having to decide what to do next. She likes knowing when to worship: Mass every day and twice on Sunday, prayers upon rising and before falling asleep, the rosary in the afternoon. Around the sisters’ waists hang heavy wooden rosaries that nearly brush the floor. Miranda’s is shorter and has blue glass beads, a silver crucifix and a silver medallion with Mary’s face. She received it for winning a spelling bee. She’s the best reader and speller in Sister Celine’s fifth-grade class and excels at religious studies; she’d be in a higher grade if she knew more about such things as the Pilgrims and the Gold Rush. When she works the beads, relishing the smoothness of them under her fingertips, she imagines James’s hands moving along the cord of knots. She hears the chant he repeated at each knot and sees him slipping into a trance.

  Quick as a morning shadow, Miranda crosses the aisle and slides into a pew closer to the stained-glass windows for a better view of Mary’s halo—a radiant aura, like that ringing the moon. Sometimes the light breaking through the windows is so bright it bleaches the edges of all around it. Today it lights up a strip of wooden floor, making it shiny, like honey on porridge.

  Father Shandley turns sharply as though just noticing her then lifts his hand in greeting. Embarrassed to be caught watching him, she quickly bows her head and whispers, “Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Miranda has learned much about Mary in the past four months and feels a kinship with her. It is as if the Blessed Mother and Danú are one and the same. She asks them both to cast an invisible net of safety over Cian each morning, as James once asked Lugh to do for her. She wonders if Mary felt the Holy Ghost enter her to conceive Jesus, as Miranda felt the Wise Father god Dagda enter her.

  But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart.

  Like Mary, Miranda must suffer in silence the knowledge of how Cian came to be. The catechism says that Jesus had no human father. Neither does Cian, despite what the nuns and Father Shandley want her to confess.

  The catechism also says there is but one God, a He. The Voice says: The book is wrong. There are many gods and many goddesses; remember our altar, one side for Her, the other for Him? But increasingly Miranda remembers only bits of James’s lessons. Isolated words and phrases, like shards of stained glass no longer able to form a tableau. Hold onto them, the Voice urges, if not for yourself then for the lad.

  Being a good Catholic is easier. The catechism has answers for everything and the answers are full of certainty. We know God made the World because He says so. To be confirmed,
Miranda had to profess faith in Christ. The Voice reminds her that the Christ story is oft told: the mythical sacred king who must be sacrificed for the seasons to be born and die, like the summer and winter kings whose births and deaths James and Miranda celebrated each year. You need honor naught but the sun and moon, water and air, day and night, sea and land, it tells her. Softly, under her breath, she reminds it she’s never been to the sea. It pleases her to be one of them, now. No longer, as Sister Bonita branded her, the devil’s child who lay on the wrong side of the sheets.

  Father Shandley ascends the slanted nave from the sanctuary to Miranda’s pew. A flush rises through her as he kneels beside her. She wants to touch his arm but Sister Bonita says Miranda’s habit of touching people is sinful. That and the way she stares.

  Father Shandley lives alone in a small house behind the orphanage. Some inmates think he looks sad; they speculate that he’s lonely. Miranda envies him. She would like to not hear the night sounds of thirty-nine others and to be able to cry in private.

  Father Shandley’s presence fills more space than his slight frame requires. He crosses himself with his blunt-ended fingers, silently moves his thin lips and, when done, lifts himself onto the creaky pew. She follows as though drawn by a magnet. He leans into her and asks in his confessional voice, gentler than the one he uses for his impassioned homilies, “Shouldn’t you be at lunch? I wouldn’t want you in trouble with the sisters.” So like James in his concern for her.

  His face is close enough for her to smell Christ’s blood on his breath. She thinks of the biscuit-eating girl who said at dinner, “Yum, like Jesus with no bloody aftertaste.” Not seeing the humor in it, Miranda didn’t laugh, but was punished for being at the table with those who did. They had to kneel and hold their arms straight out to the side until they wept in pain to appreciate what Jesus endured for them. If communion wafers taste like anything, it is tears.