A Flag for Sunrise (6 page)

“Let’s not talk theology,” she said.

“Who’s talking theology?”

“You,” Sister Justin said. “Pie in the sky.”

Sister Mary Joseph had come down from the mountains around Lake Tapa to talk sense to Justin. Her own situation was very different; her order was strong and adaptable, her dispensary could measure its effectiveness in lives preserved. Arriving at French Harbor she had quickly surmised that the local people were staying away, that something was seriously wrong with Father Charlie Egan and the stories she had heard about the state of the Devotionists on the coast were at least partly true.

“You gotta have an element of pie in the sky, kiddo,” she told Sister Justin. “That’s part of the basics.”

Justin shaded her pale blue eyes from the glare of sky and ocean and leaned her chin on her fist.

Sister Mary Joe stood up and took their tea glasses.

“You want to talk pragmatism—O.K. we’ll do that.” Holding the glasses between her thumb and fingers, she waved them before Justin’s averted face. “You’re accomplishing nothing. You’re not needed. Am I reaching you now?”

These were words as hard as Mary Joe commanded and the satisfaction with which she flung them at poor Justin caused her immediate remorse.

She was rinsing the glasses in the kitchen when Father Egan came in, shuffling toward the icebox, holding a flyswatter absently in his right hand.

“How’s things, Father?” Sister Mary asked, looking him up and down.

“My dear Joe,” Egan said. “Things are rich.” He fixed himself a glass of water and gave her a vague smile. “How nice of you to come and visit us.”

“Beats working,” she told him. “Still going over your book?”

“Scribble scribble scribble,” the priest said, and retreated back to his room.

Mary Joe wiped the glasses and went to the refectory to get a stethoscope from her black bag. Then she rapped once on Father Egan’s door and let herself in.

She found him sitting by his window, the shutters thrown open to the green hillside below, a working bottle of Flor de Cana at his feet. Outside chickens picked among the morning glory vines, an old woman chopped at a stand of plantain with her machete.

Sister Mary settled her thick body on the window rail.

“We’re old friends, aren’t we, Father? We can speak plainly to each other.”

“Yes,” Egan said, “we’re old pals, Joe.” His smile faded and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. “And I won’t have her tyrannizing you. You don’t have to listen to her.”

“C’mon,” Mary Joseph said, “Justin’s O.K. She’s a good kid.” She opened one of the buttons of his white cotton shirt and pressed the scope over his breastbone. “Let’s talk about you.”

The beat was feathery and irregular. Egan was in his early sixties; to Mary Joe his heart sounded as though it should belong to a very old man.

“So how about laying off the sauce?”

“Ah,” Father Egan said. “You have me there.”

“Yeah, I got you there, Charlie. And from where I’m standing you look a little portly to me and what do you bet your liver’s enlarged? The right bug would knock you flat on your back.”

She bent down, picked up the rum and set it down on Egan’s desk beside the crucifix.

“You need to go home, Father. This kind of life—keep it up and it’ll be curtains.”

Father Egan scratched his ear and looked out of the window.

“I mean, what are you guys doing here anyway?” Sister Mary demanded. “Your instructions are to close this joint. This is the religion where people do what they’re told, right?”

“Yes, well,” Father Egan said, “you see, I thought I’d finish the book before we struck the flag.”

“Boo for that idea,” the nun said. “Because if you want to finish that book you better strike your flag or whatever—quick.

“Look,” she told him. “I’ll leave some pills with Justin for you. Take one every four hours instead of the joy juice. But don’t take them both or you’re dead.”

“Bless you, Joe,” Father Egan said. He said it in a far-off manner that Mary Joe found alarming.

“God bless you, Charlie,” she said. “Pray for me.”

She went back to the refectory, put the stethoscope away and carried her bag out to the veranda. Sister Justin was still in her chair, staring sadly out to sea, and Mary Joseph suspected she had been crying. Mary Joseph was not very sympathetic.

From time to time, up at Lake Tapa, Sister Mary had found herself with the obligation to comfort some of the younger and tenderer agents of the Peace Corps. She forgave them for their tears—Tecan was a hard place and they were young and American. First time away from their skateboards, she liked to say.

But the sight of a nursing nun in tears made her feel ashamed and angry. Tears were for the Tecanecan women, who always had plenty to cry about.

“Great day in the morning,” she declared, forgetting that she had repented her earlier hardness, “if I lived around here and I needed help I sure wouldn’t try to get it from this balled-up operation. I’d go
right straight to the Seventh-Day Adventists or the LSA’s or to somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing.”

“The LSA’s!” Justin said savagely. “The LSA’s are a bunch of right-wing psalm-singing sons of bitches. They’ve got a picture of the President on their wall, they suck ass with the Guardia and they fink for the CIA.”

In spite of herself, Mary Joseph blushed.

“You got a lot of nerve,” she said, “to talk that.”

Justin looked down at the veranda deck and shielded her eyes. Mary Joe waited for her to calm down and then sat beside her.

“Look, Justin, the very fact that you have the leisure to sit around and brood should tell you that you’re not doing your job. I mean, great guns, kid—it’s no time or place for ego trips.”

“Am I ego-tripping?” Justin asked. “Isn’t it supposed to bother me that people starve so America can have Playboy Clubs and bottomless dancing.”

Sister Mary snickered. “Aw, c’mon,” she said.

“Maybe I’m putting it stupidly. Doesn’t it bother you?”

“If it’s true it bothers me. But what do I know? I’m just a pill pusher. So are you. Nobody elected us. You know,” she told Justin, “in many ways you’re a typical Devotionist. You all tend to be very bright and high-strung and short on horse sense.”

Sister Justin brushed the windblown hair under her checkered bandana.

“I’ve had it with the order and I’ve had it with my sister of mercy number.”

“Then it’s time you went home,” Sister Mary said. Justin’s words made her shudder. “Justin—something special is happening now. The church is really turning back to Jesus. It’s gonna be great and it would be a shame to miss out on it.”

Justin put her hand across her eyes.

“If I told you,” Sister Mary went on, “that you need to pray—that you need to ask God’s help—would you say I was talking pie in the sky again?”

Sister Justin had turned her face away and was pursing her lips to make her tears stop. Mary Joseph watched her young friend cry; she no longer felt it in her to be outraged.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you anymore?”

Justin only shook her head.

She was a real beauty, Mary Joseph thought, the genuine article. In her own order they would never have let one so pretty and headstrong take final vows. But it was hindsight—Justin had soldiered on for six years, cheerful and strong, the wisest of catechists, a cool competent nurse. A little too good to be true in the end.

“This is no place for a personal crisis,” Mary told her.

“I know,” Justin said. She patted her cheek with a folded handkerchief.

“On the practical level—the fruit company repurchased the property—you can’t stall them forever. And there’s really a lot of negative talk. The Archbishop is starting to get upset.”

“That old creep,” Justin said. “He’s not even a Christian. He’s a cross between a Grand Inquisitor and an Olmec priest.”

Sister Mary sat stiffly for a moment and then dissolved in guilty laughter.

“Justin—you’re such a smart aleck.”

Even distraught Justin could not help smiling back at her.

“Well, he ain’t Bing Crosby,” Sister Mary said in a low-comedy mutter. “But he represents the church here and that means plenty. And believe it or not he’s protecting you from a government investigation.”

Justin Feeney rose from her chair and walked to the edge of the veranda.

“Give me a few days before you speak to anyone. I have to make some plans of my own.”

Mary Joseph frowned. She did not believe that one could plan in idleness.

“Now I want to hear from you in a week and I want to hear a date of departure. If you need extra help maybe I can sneak you some Peace Corps kiddos to pull and tote.”

“Thanks, Joe. Thanks for giving a damn.”

Mary Joseph picked up her black bag and went to the top of the steps. She had mastered an impulse to touch Justin on the cheek or to give her a hug. Such demonstrations were contrary to her training.

“Hey, listen, you did an A-1 job here for a long time. Don’t go feeling like a complete flop. Don’t let yourself get morbid. Just get busy and pack up.”

Justin nodded briskly.

“God loves you, Justin. You’re his special lady. He’ll help you.”

“O.K., Joe.”

On the first step down Sister Mary Joseph was smitten with dread. In Justin’s impatient goodbye smile she read the word “lost”—and the word sounded in her scrubbed soldierly soul with a grim resonance.

“Hey,” she said, turning round, “I got a thing for Charlie Egan, know what I mean? I really want to see him get home alive. Can you take care of it for me?”

“You bet,” Justin said.

Walking to her jeep, Sister Mary caught sight of another vehicle rounding the palm grove between Freddy’s Chicken Shack and the water’s edge. It was a four-wheel-drive Toyota and the driver she recognized as Father Godoy, a Tecanecan priest from Puerto Alvarado. She waited beside her Willys as he pulled up.

Father Godoy wore creased chino pants, a blue plaid shirt and expensive sunglasses. He was out of his Toyota shaking her hand and breathing English pleasantries before she could utter a greeting.

His long face lengthened further in a bony yellow smile; he was tall and angular, a tragical Spaniard of a man.

“Well, it’s going great, Father,” Sister Mary heard herself declare. “We have an OB now and some new hardware and God willing we’re going to have a real good year.”

He bobbed his head before her in hypothalamic agreement with everything in sight. Very sexy, she thought. She distrusted intellectual priests and the native clergy she generally regarded as soft, spoiled and unprogressive.

“Terrific,” he was saying, in the racy Stateside which he affected for people of her sort, “really great! What would they do without you up there?”

“Looking in on our friends here, Father?”

“Right, right,” he said, as though he had not understood her question.

“I hear,” she said, “you have a nut loose down the coast. Somebody killing little kids.”

“It seems that way,” Godoy told her. “The people think it’s a foreigner.”

“Yeah,” the nun said, “I’d want to think that too. I hope the word’s out to be careful.”

“Everyone knows,” Godoy said. “That’s how we are here.”

“Well, so long,” she said, climbing into her jeep. “Keep us posted.”

“All the best,” Godoy called to her. “All the best to everybody.”

When she had driven as far as the palm grove, she stopped the jeep with the engine idling and bent into the lee of the dashboard to the light a cigarette. Inhaling, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Godoy at the top of the steps beside Sister Justin. Both of them were looking out to sea.

“Oh, boy,” she said to herself as she put the jeep in gear, “a couple of stars.”

Father Godoy was complimenting Sister Justin on the beauty of the ocean and her good fortune in living beside it. His doing so made her feel guilty.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

“No, no, please.” He looked about him cheerfully, further embarrassing Justin with the station’s lack of activity.

“How’s Himself,” Godoy asked in a low voice.

She smiled at the missionary Irishism.

“Not well, I’m afraid. He’s rather crushed and not always rational. A while ago he had the boat out in the middle of the night. I can’t imagine why.”

“Strange,” the priest said. “A little worrying, eh?”

“Please have some tea.”

“I have to go. It’s the day of the procession in town.”

“Oh drat,” Justin said. “It just got away from me. I haven’t missed it once since I’ve been here and today I forgot.” She shrugged sadly.

“I can take you in tonight,” he said. “For the festival afterwards. You see, I’m coming back to take some children from the company school. So we’ll stop for you if you like.”

“That’d be great. Would you?”

“Yes, of course. Of course. In fact I came now to ask you.”

“Well,” Justin said, laughing, “yes, please.”

“Great,” the priest said. “I’ll go now and then after six we’ll pick you up.”

“Wonderful.”

“Well, until then,” he said, and went down the steps, leaving the image of his shy smile behind him.

“Wonderful,” she said.

Wonderful. “Wonderful wonderful,” she repeated dully under her breath. “Goddamnit, what a fool I’m becoming.”

As she watched Godoy get into his jeep, she felt mortified and panic-stricken. She hurried from the veranda before he could turn and see her.

For a while she busied herself with sweeping out the empty dispensary, spraying the stacked linens for mildew, poking in the corners for centipedes or scorpions. Within the hour a man came from the village with a red snapper and a basket of shrimp; Justin went down the steps to pay him. The man brought a message from the Herreras, a mother and daughter who did cooking and cleaning for the station, that they would not be coming for several days. They had not come for some time before—nor had the young women who worked as nurse’s aides, two girls from the offshore islands whom Justin herself had taught to read and write, her barefoot doctors. It was just as well since there was no work for them.

Somewhat later Lieutenant Campos drove by to give Sister Justin a quick glimpse of herself in his silvered sunglasses.