Cat In A Zebra Zoot Suit

24

Counting Sheep

“I’ve been in a bar, now I want to go into the convent.” Kathleen announced as Max steered the Honda out of Dublin on the busy M1. “Is that what you’re hoping, Michael? That I’ll finally ‘find religion’, as you put it in the States?”

“No, but you badly need to find a new mania, a new cause,” he said.

“Do I? I don’t need to find anything you might think I would.” She sure knew how to pout, looking kittenish with her chin pointed down and her unearthly aqua eyes gazing up at him. The fading pink scar tracks looked like she’d run a pale lipstick tip over her cheek for some punk-style look. “I know about That Damn Movie.”

“‘That Damn Movie’ doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Phil-o-meen-a.” Her bitter, twisted lips mocked the title and herself.

Max nodded. “The Little Indie Film That Could. Dame Judi Dench playing the title character got the film a lot of notice for a biopic. Oscar nominations.”

“I’m amazed you and the Circle Ritz crowd are so au courant about films. Particularly that one. Always thinking of me and my sad orphaned history.”

Max shrugged. “And it’s a great detective story.”

“Not solved by Philomena. That woman was a sheep. Her toddler was taken from her, sold to American adoptive parents for two grand, and the Magdalene ‘asylum’ for fallen women would never tell her where he was sent. She only found where he was after he was middle-aged and dead, and after he’d had himself buried at that damnable place in case his birth mother ever came looking for him. The nuns knew they were searching for each other and kept them apart. Philomena did nothing but accept that she deserved the disdain and pain the Church handed out to her and her despised unwed mother cellmates. Sheep. Meek sheep.”

“I see Philomena’s quest as one of being reconciled with the past,” Max said. “A horrible past, but she accepted that she couldn’t have changed it.”

“She could have taken the baby and run.”

“You did that, Kathleen. You owe your plucky past self more than rage and bitterness in the present.”

“And what about your past? You clutch your guilt like a talisman. It’s a way to ward off people from getting close, isn’t it? Father Matt would say that. Poor Michael. You can’t leave your young self behind either.”

“Don’t call me Michael.”

“I’ll call you what I want to call you. Is Michael the Martyr any better or saner than Kitty the Cutter?”

“No,” he said. “The punishing world you fled now has been exposed and has changed, but women and children are still being treated as badly, or worse, in much of the world elsewhere today.”

“Screw foreign atrocities. I only care about my world. My IRA work helped end the daily brutal rule of the English over the Irish in Northern Ireland.”

“And it was for the Irish Catholics you fought.”

“Sheep, but now that they’re not distracted by centuries of ethnic discrimination, perhaps they’ll become more critical of their goddam religion.”

“Or, their religion will become more critical of itself.”

“Religion causes strife and suffering because it encourages people to despise those not of the ‘true’ faith. Look at the Mideast.”

“Not my field of operation.”

“What is, now?” she asked.

“I’m retired, although some folks won’t accept that.”

“And your last mission is to find dear lost—but alive if I’m not lying—Cousin Sean.”

“Not quite my last mission.”

“Right. You want to find the grave of your partner in undercover work.”

He nodded.

“And you wanted to introduce me to my now-grown surrendered daughter, whereupon I would supposedly melt into a bloody, woolly, ill-smelling, bleating sheep of sweetness and light upon a first glimpse of her.”

“Never expected that.”

“So. We have a rental car. You are licensed and able to drive on the left side of the road. Where do we go next?”

“To church, I think.”

“I won’t cover my head. I won’t kneel. And I may spit in the baptismal fount.”

Max laughed. “You’re finding your inner brat. I’m glad you’re making up for lost time.”

And he was.

“This is the place where I was kept,” Kathleen said as Max pulled the Honda up to the convent church. He’d made sure to rent a car model different from the one he’d shared with Garry a mere two months ago. Yet, every time he glanced left at Kathleen in the passenger seat, he saw a gray ghost with a slack neck and bloody temple in the curve of closed window glass behind her.

“It’s also the place I visited on my last trip.” Max closed that conversation by going around to open her door.

She swung her narrow legs to the ground, looking up at him in that same disturbing way he only indentified now: like the preternaturally knowing evil child in a horror movie. He pulled her up by the icy hand. She seemed to take perverse satisfaction in his courtesy.

The old brown brick building with red-brick bordered windows looked as ancient and abandoned as before when he’d visited with Garry. Against troubled gray clouds a crucifix stood in relief atop the rambling building’s only peaked roof.

As before, when they walked around the church to enter the rectory door, an old nun met them there. Even though her inexpensive gray-and-black clothing weren’t part of a habit, a simple headdress and lace-up black oxford shoes all screamed “nun”.

Max braced himself for fits from Kathleen, but she merely looked the woman up and down. “Not from my day.”

“You were here?” the nun asked. “What’s your name?”

“O’Connor,” Kathleen said almost passively, as if used to answering on command.

“Sinéad O’Connor?” The nun named a famously troubled Irish singer.

“She was in one of these places?” Kathleen’s laugh was corrosive. “I should have recognized her as a soul sister. Should I shave my head like Sinéad in penance for that sin of omission, Mother? Is my black hair still too long, too thick, too inciting?” She thrust her hands roughly through it, like a madwoman.

The old nun just shook her oddly clad head. “We are not what we were.”

“Too bad. I am.” Kathleen pushed past her, but she didn’t head for the church out front, or the brick two-story building behind it. She went around to the back, her stylish suede pumps following a broken path of grown-over inlaid stones that made her lurch from time to time like one drunk or drugged.

“You can’t—” the nun began.

“Wait here. I’ll accompany her.” Max followed, avoiding the path for the thick, more even grass.

Despite her gait, he saw Kathleen was purposefully trodding only on the old and rough stones. He remembered a child’s game from snow-bound Wisconsin. Pie. One kid pushed booted feet along to plow a circle in the deep, untouched snow, and divided it into slices. Every kid who came after had to follow his or her footsteps without falling into the unmarked portions of snow.

Max slowed, not wanting to overtake Kathleen. She was the trailblazer on old ground, plowing back in time in her own wayward fashion.

He followed her into an overgrown garden, fenced by a stone wall that tumbled down to the earth in places. On the distant rolling green hills, sheep grazed. Kathleen, looking that way, gave one disgusted bark of laughter.

Then she began lurching among the wildflowers. “I’m walking on the dead,” she said over her shoulder, not looking back to acknowledge him.

Max looked down. The inset stones were random now, inscribed with words and dates. Some were only first names. The dates all spanned young lives, as young as fourteen. Some had an inscription. Lamb of God.

Lamb to the slaughter, more like, Max thought, infected by Kathleen’s fury. A million Irish had died in the Great Famine of the 1840s. A million emigrated. Almost 5.000 had died in the Troubles between British overlords and Irish underlings since. And Irish families and authorities had disowned, shamed and condemned to hard labor in both birth and work 30,000 of their daughters, some of whom lay at last among the wildflowers, able to feel exile and pain no more.

“If I had all that IRA money you think I have,” Kathleen said. “I would buy this place. I would turn this church into the brothel it was and let the sheep in to graze on these graves. Well?” She turned to fix him with a fiery defiance.

“Your cause is just,” he said. “Your solution is a revenge fantasy. You and the world deserve more than fantasy.”

She looked away, over the fields of green. “It’s beautiful here. All this greenery is a whited sepulcher, as is the grass beneath our feet. The Church still won’t admit it was as much about money as morality. And what is the ‘morality’ of a church shaming and punishing the girls they kept ignorant of the facts of life in convent schools? Philomena was eighteen when she got out and didn’t know where babies came from. Of course they got pregnant, and then parents sent them to the nuns, who were paid by the state for each mother and child, as well as the labor the mothers had to do six days a week for pay they never got. Our names were changed, toddlers were ripped away without notice. They robbed of us of our children and we had to bow and scrape and call our brutal childless captors ‘Mother’.”

“Inhuman,” Max murmured. “So you do know something of the book or film Philomena.”

“You really can’t stay here,” came a voice. The old nun had followed them.

Kathleen’s laughter was maniacal. She took a step toward the nun, who stepped back.

“‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where I was imprisoned from birth with my imprisoned mother.”

Another step. “‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where I was never adopted out because I had become the good Father’s ‘favorite’.”

Another step. “‘I can’t stay here.’ Here, where he began ‘interfering’ with me at the age of four and every nun looked away, or her eyes narrowed as she berated me for having such lavish hair, for being too pretty, like my mother before me, dead and buried beneath our feet by then.”

Another step. The elderly nun was stumbling backward. Max didn’t interfere.

“‘I can’t stay here.’ But I had to, didn’t I, when I was pregnant at fourteen? Many of the other girls had been impregnated by their fathers or brothers or cousins, but I was like Mary, my most un-immaculate conception was courtesy of the head guy. And he would soon have another pretty little bastard of his own. That’s the only time I talked to God. I told Him to damn you all to Hell, and escaped with my infant daughter.”

“I wasn’t here then,” the nun said. “I was raised in a later generation. The institutions are gone. We’re more aware.”

“So you would have been a kinder, gentler keeper, then.” Kathleen stopped her advance and looked the woman up and down with contempt. “You still wear the uniform, as did the guards at Auschwitz.”

“Oh, that awful movie, Philomena,” the nun cried out. “Everyone knows it’s full of lies, inaccuracies and exaggerations.”

“You forget. I was here. The man who found Philomena’s lost son, Martin Sixsmith? Nuns and the church blocked him at every stage. Thousands of records had been burned. Oh, that lying movie, Philomena. The United Nations investigation ruled what the Magdalene institutions did to girls and women and their babies was torture. And the church has yet to admit responsibility.

“You had better hope there’s truth in a heavenly reunion for those mothers and babies, because I’ll send you all there to see for yourselves before I’m done.”

“You’re crazy,” the nun cried, turning to retreat into the dark, hulking church buildings behind her.

“That was quite insanely mad of you,” Max said.

Kathleen’s breath heaved out of her chest. Her hands were bloodless and so was her face, white marble with the pink veins of the fading cat scratches etched across it. Her expression was as twisted as she was, her beauty gone.

“Well done,” he added. “You have certainly done your homework on Philomena, but I think you’ve spit in the baptismal font enough for today.”

He took her arm to lead her back to the car. She stumbled beside him, silent.