Pierced by a Sword (12 page)

Around them, there was no light, but there was fire.

6

Saturday Afternoon
7 October
San Nicholas, Argentina.

Maria Bonilla knelt before the tiny altar in the nook of her one-room apartment.
There was a small, cheap statue of Mary, shaped much like the statue of Mary above the Golden Dome at Notre Dame. Next to that statue was a smaller, expensive marble replica of the Pieta. There was also a set of old rosary beads, three candles, and an arrangement of wildflowers–which are difficult to find in the barrios of San Nicholas. A battered black and white photograph of her only son, Jesus-y-Maria,
who had died exactly thirty years ago to the day, stood next to the Pieta. Maria picked up the beads, and tried to shake the sleep and sting from her eyes, confused.

Hoy tengo bastante sueños–I have enough dreams for today.

Why am I so tired?
He
must need my prayers very much or El Diablo would not be trying to make me sleep. Perhaps because it is the anniversary of Jesus-y-Maria's death. Santa
Maria, keep me awake for my Rosary for
him.

The
he
she referred to was not Jesus Christ. Nor was
he
her son, the dead Jesus-y-Maria.
He
was the son Maria did not know.

In the bed behind her, Miguel Bonilla, her husband of forty-seven years, was asleep, exhausted after working a ten hour night shift at the garbage processing plant.

German surnames are common in Argentina. Maria's father, Gunter
DeGraffenreid, a poor farmer and young widower, had emigrated to Argentina from Bavaria, Germany, in 1905. Unable to earn enough money to buy land, he was reduced to a life of backbreaking manual labor in the dingy factories on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Gunter was ostracized by his few German peers in his factory when he took an Argentinean girl for his second wife. He valued his faith much
more than his social standing. Gunter DeGraffenreid moved to San Nicholas soon after he remarried.

His bride Alena, Maria's mother, was a very holy woman. Alena had given Gunter nine children. She lovingly taught her nine children–especially her youngest, Maria–to pray fervently for all things and to bear the burdens of poverty with dignity.

Medical complications had prevented Maria from having
any more children. She had poured her heart and soul into raising little Jesus-y-Maria to be a successful man. Maria was therefore profoundly disheartened when the legacy of faith was broken when her only child, her Jesus-y-Maria, had taken up with drugs.

She did not blame Miguel for Jesus-y-Maria's demise. Miguel was a faithful, hardworking, and devout husband, and could he help it if he had
to work long hours to keep them from starving?

Although she had very little formal education and did not know the intricacies of moral theology, she did know her faith and she did understand in her heart about human nature. She did not think that Jesus-y-Maria had been completely without blame for his own life. Indeed, Maria believed he had chosen his fate. His death was the result of his driving
ambition to leave the barrios; his reliance
on himself.
She knew this. She was not a fool. She had taught him to be this way. She had instilled the ambition into his young heart.

During the agony she experienced after Jesus-y-Maria died of a drug overdose, she had taken an honest accounting of herself. Maria had compared her life to that of her own mother. She realized that if she were to die
and face God, He would weigh her and find her wanting regarding the one task He had given her beside that of being a good wife.

She had sinned by relying on herself and her own will to form Jesus-y-Maria. Whereas
she
was content to live honestly and proudly in her own poverty, she had taught her son to seek a way out of poverty
for its own sake.

She had paid lip service to passing the faith onto
her son. She taught him the catechism with little enthusiasm. Yet what energy she poured into tutoring him in language and math! Education would save him! A house on the hill with the middle class would save her Jesus-y-Maria! She had even studied on her own, scrimping and saving to buy textbooks, so as to learn more and more so she could pass on her new-found knowledge to Jesus-y-Maria.

At first
Jesus-y-Maria had done well in the one-room shack that served as the school building. The teachers all agreed that he was bright and ambitious. He was popular with the boys and girls alike and could make everyone laugh. After graduating in the American equivalent of tenth grade, he went to the city to seek real work in the factories. He found a job quickly and within two years was promoted to
a management position.

Then it had been simply a matter of saving enough money to move them all out of the barrio to one of the few middle class
avenidas
of San Nicholas, which were located on a small hill on the east side of town. Maria did not realize how much she had been looking forward to moving "onto the hill" until after Jesus-y-Maria died. She bitterly recalled bragging to her neighbors
about how well he was doing at work and where they were going to live in just a little while longer.

Jesus-y-Maria began taking the amphetamines manufactured in his factory. The uppers helped him stay awake to work the extra hours he needed to get a jump on the other managers. He didn't dare tell his mother, whom he loved with all his heart. He was doing it for her! She would not understand.

He died when he took a lethal pill that was mistakenly manufactured at ten times normal strength by a worker who was trying to conceal his inability to read the mixing instructions at his new job station. It was a freak, really, an accident of chance. Thirty long years had passed since Jesus-y-Maria's burial.

But Maria had not taken his death as an accident. As far as she was concerned, she had
put the pill into Jesus-y-Maria's mouth. She had traded the spiritual for the material, and her son had paid with his life in the bargain. If it had not been the pills, it would have been something else, she concluded.

Maria mourned for two years. Miguel could not console her. She went to the church in San Nicholas and knelt before the large replica of the Pieta, wordless, unable to pray, unable
to cry. She looked at the immense anguish in Mary's face and contemplated the suffering of the Mother of God, who held her broken Son in her arms. Maria condemned herself. Mary had not killed her own Son.

I have no right to suffer like you, Señora! You did not kill your son!

At three o'clock on October seventh, the Feast of our Lady of the Rosary, two years after Jesus-y-Maria died from the overdose,
Maria Bonilla heard the Blessed Mother speak to her as she knelt before the Pieta. The words were clear and distinct. She heard them with her own ears, and even though she knew the church was empty, she turned to see if there was someone behind her. Maria was certain she was alone in the empty church. She thought that it must have been her imagination. Then the words were repeated again. It
had sounded as if Mary were sitting right next to her. These were the words Mother Mary repeated:

"Your heart, too, has been pierced by a sword, Maria. My Son Jesus has forgiven you. You will be given another son. You must pray for him. You must pray for him."

The second time she heard the beautiful, soft, yet firm voice of the Mother of God, Maria almost fainted because her mind could not deny
what was happening to her.

"Who is this son? How can I have a son? I am barren," Maria had said aloud to the Pieta, stricken with fear and surprise. Intense heat filled her chest underneath her black dress and spread to her limbs.

Am I losing my mind?
she asked herself.

The Blessed Mother answered her out loud; and these words were the last words Maria ever heard from Mary on this earth:

"You
are not losing your mind, my daughter. You will not know this son. He is one of mine. Now he is our son. He needs you to pray for him. Will you pray for him?"

"Yes," Maria whispered, offering her fiat.

Maria began to pray. She prayed for six hours–the first joyful prayers since her beloved Jesus-y-Maria had died. She prayed fervently, tears streaming down her face, ignoring the people who came
and left the church. The pastor had to help her off her aching knees so she could leave.

In the confessional the next day, she told the priest what had happened to her. He did not know if she was telling what had really happened to her or what she
thought
had happened to her. It mattered little to him. He could hear the hope in the tragic woman's voice. It was the first hope he had heard from
Maria Bonilla since poor Jesus-y-Maria had died.

He absolved her of the same sin she had confessed over and over during the last two years, and asked her to follow him into the humble cottage that was his rectory. There he gave her the beautiful statue of the Pieta he had bought with three month's stipend while visiting Rome as a seminarian decades earlier.

"You are not to question what happened
to you yesterday, Maria. Nor are you to tell anyone else, not even Miguel. Do you understand?"

She nodded. He continued.

"You have suffered much, and I will not judge you. From now on, you will not judge yourself. You will leave that to God. You have been given a second chance by the Mother of God. Do not waste it. Take this statue home and pray a full, sincere, and complete Rosary–all fifteen
decades–every day at three o'clock, the hour of Jesus' death. Yesterday was the Feast of the Holy Rosary–it was not a coincidence. You will also start being a wife to your husband again. Miguel has suffered too, and you have been selfish with your grief. He also deserves a second chance. He is a good man. If you do these things, I believe you will meet this 'unknown son' Our Lady spoke to you about
when you get to heaven. Will you do all these things, Maria?"

She nodded vigorously.

The old priest walked her to the door. As she went down the path he made a mental note that his own prayers for the ending of Maria's suffering had been answered. He had never known a holier woman in his entire life–with the possible exception of Maria's own mother, Alena.

Maria went home feeling as if the weight
of the entire world had been lifted from her shoulders. For the next twenty-seven years, she faithfully kept the stipulations of the bargain the priest had laid before her.

So, the unaccountable sleepiness and the urge to skip her
Rosario
and climb into the warm bed with Miguel was brushed aside by the force of long years of habit. In fact, Maria rejoiced that her heavy eyelids would merit more
grace for her unknown son by making her normally joyful Rosary all the more difficult. She turned her eyes toward the Pieta as the words of the
Madre de Dios
echoed down through the years in her mind, as they did every day at three o'clock when she prayed.

"Now he is our son. You must pray for him."

7

Sunday Evening
8 October
The sky over Mishawaka, Indiana

Denny prepared to land the Cessna.

He was one of that rare breed–the natural born pilot. Dennis "Denny" Wheat, twenty-four, gently touched his Cessna 172 down on the homemade airstrip on six acres of land within walking distance of his parent's farmhouse.

Denny was slightly built, yet strong and muscular–not unlike Pope Patrick, Angus O'Hara. Denny spent a lot of time in the air. He had been obsessed with flying since he saw a documentary
about the Wright Brothers on television at the age of five.

Even then, he knew that he would spend as much of his life as he could sitting in a pilot's seat. His childhood was filled with memberships in air clubs, endlessly making model planes, and working odd jobs (especially over at Hubert "Huey" Brown's farm) to save for his first plane.

Nevertheless, his childhood had been one long wait until
the day when Huey Brown decided to let Denny, age fourteen, take the stick of the old Cessna Huey used for dusting his crops. (Yes, Huey Brown was known by his Hoosier neighbors as Farmer Brown.)

Denny headed toward the thick clouds on his second day up with Huey Brown and flew "on instruments"–that is, without any reference to land and without visibility. It was a skill which Huey himself had
mastered only after a hundred hours in the air. Denny, however, performed on instruments like a seasoned pilot. Clearly he also enjoyed it–unlike the most seasoned of pilots.

Kid's a born aviator,
Huey thought.
I need a pot o' money to rebuild the Deere–maybe I'll offer him the 'duster. Betcha corn to cotton he's got the money for it.

Four weeks later Denny bought the Cropduster from Huey. A few
years after that, Denny acquired the Cessna 172. The 172 was much faster, held four passengers, and had sophisticated radio equipment. He called the two planes his "fleet."

Anne Wheat had resigned herself to the fact that she couldn't keep Denny out of the air. By the time the boy was ten it had become obvious to her that "the flight thing" was not merely a stage he was going through. But she
was still his mother and was darn well going to make certain the boy got a good education, pilot or no pilot. He had spent four interminable years at Notre Dame, where he majored in aeronautical engineering. He squeaked by in classes that did not have to do with flight, while acing any course that did.

The boy was unpredictable. One time his mother wondered aloud why Denny showed no desire to
join the armed services to fly jets, or run off to the air shows that toured the cities of America. Denny told her that he preferred small prop planes because they required more artistry to control. As for air shows, he didn't want to be a freak in a circus. He had strong tastes and a purity in his love of flight. He was a prop man and that was that.

Had Denny been born fifty years earlier, Lindbergh
might have faced some serious competition.

He now had a job flying freight from Michiana Regional to Midway for a local company. He found flying to Midway boring and much preferred the peaceful freedom of being in the air alone in his Cessna. He also enjoyed dusting crops for the local farmers.