Brendan Graham - The Brightest Day, The Darkest Night

‘Did you ever see a particular book – Love Elegies – with Mother?’ she asked Mary.

Mary thought for a moment.

‘No, I cannot say so, but then Mother was always reading. Why …?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mary, something … a nun’s intuition.’ Louisa laughed it off. Then, more brightly, gazing into her sister’s face, ‘You are so like her … so beautiful … her green-speckled eyes, her fiery hair …’

‘That’s if you could see it!’ Mary interjected.

‘Personally cropped by the stern shears of Sister Lazarus,’ she added. ‘That little furrow under Mother’s nose – you have it too!’

Louisa went to touch her sister’s face.

‘Oh, stop it, Louisa!’ Mary gently chided. ‘You are not behaving with the required decorum. If “Rise-from-the-Dead” could only see you!’

Louisa restrained herself. ‘I am sorry … you are right,’ she said, offering up a silent prayer for unbecoming conduct – and that the all-seeing eye of Sister Lazarus might not somehow be watching.

‘We are almost there,’ was all Mary answered with.

Half Moon Place held all the backwash of Boston life. As far removed from the counting houses of Hub City as was Heaven from Hell. It housed, in ramshackle rookeries, the furthest fringes of Boston society – indolent Irish, fly-by-nights and runaway slaves. None of which recoiled the two nuns. Nor the reeking stench that, long prior to entering them, announced such places. Since Sister Lazarus had first deemed them ‘morally sufficient’ for such undertakings, many the day had the older nun sent them forth on similar missions of rescue. Them returning always from places like this with some unfortunate in tow, to the Magdalen’s sheltering walls.

This was their work, their calling. To snatch from the jaws of iniquity young women who, by default or design, had strayed into them.

‘Reclaim the thoughtless and melt the hardened.’ Sister Lazarus’s words seemed to ring from the very portals of what lay facing them today. Half Moon Place indeed would be a fertile ground for redemption.

‘A Tower of Babel,’ Louisa said, stepping precariously under its archway into a rabble of tattered urchins who chased after some rotting evil.

‘Kick the Reb! Kill the Reb!’ they shouted, knocking into them with impunity.

A nodding woman, on her stoop, shook her stick after them.

‘I’ll scatter ye … ye little bastards! God blast ye! D’annoyin’ the head of a person, from sun-up to sundown!’

From a basement came the dull sound of a clanging pot colliding with a human skull. A screech of pain … a curse … it all just melting into the sounds that underlay the stench and woebegone sight of the place.

Further along, a woman singing. The snatches of sound attracted them. ‘The soul pining for God,’ Mary said, as the woman’s keening rose on the vapours of Half Moon Place … and was carried to meet them. They rounded the half-moon curve of the alleyway. The singing woman sat amidst a pile of rubbish as if, herself, discarded from life. The long tarnished hair draped over her shoulders her only modesty. But her face was raised to a place far above the teetering tenements, and her song transcended the wretchedness of her state.

‘If not in life we’ll be as one

Then, in death we’ll be,

And there will grow two hawthorn trees

Above my love and me,

And they will reach up to the sky –

Intertwined be …

And the hawthorn flower will bloom where lie

My fair-haired boy … and me.’

It was Louisa who reached her first, hemline abandoned, wildly careering the putrid corridor. Mary then, at her heels, the two of them scrabbling over the off-scourings and excrement. Then, in the miracle of Half Moon Place, breathless with hope, they reached her. As one, they clutched her to themselves.

Praising God. Cradling her nakedness. Wiping the grime and the lost years from her face.

‘Mother!’ they cried. ‘Oh, Mother!’

They huddled about her, calling out her name, their own names. Begging for her recognition.

‘Mother! Mother! It’s us … Mary and Louisa,’ Mary said, stroking her mother’s head. ‘You’ll be all right now. We’ll take you back with us.’

‘Mary? Louisa? It’s …’ Ellen began.

‘Her mind is altered,’ a voice rang out, interrupting. ‘Too much prayin’ and Blind Mary’s juniper juice,’ the voice continued.

‘We are her daughters,’ Mary said, turning to face the hard voice of Biddy Earley.

‘Daughters – ha!’ the woman laughed. ‘Well blow me down with a Bishop’s fart,’ she said, arms akimbo, calloused elbows visible under her rolled-up sleeves. ‘Oh, she was a close one, was our Ellie. Daughters? An’ us fooled into thinking she had neither chick nor child.’

‘What happened to her?’ Louisa asked.

‘The needle blindness … couldn’t do the stitchin’ no more. But she’s not as bad as she makes out … can see when she wants to!’ the woman answered disparagingly. ‘Fogarty, the landlord’s man, tumbled her out. Just like back home, ’ceptin’ now it’s your honest-to-God, Irish landlords here in America, ’stead of the relics of auld English decency. ’Twould put a longing on a person for the bad old days!’

Ellen, struggling to take it all in, again made to say something.

‘Sshh now, Mother,’ Louisa comforted. ‘Talk is for later. We have to get you inside,’ she said, looking at Biddy Earley.

Reluctantly, Biddy agreed, cautioning that the ‘widow-woman brought all the troubles on herself.’

Mary and Louisa, shepherding Ellen, followed Biddy down into the dank basement where the woman lived.

‘I’ve no clothes for her, mind – ’ceptin’ what’s on me own back,’ she called to them over her shoulder.

Mary would stay with Ellen, Louisa would make the journey back to the convent to get clothes. The Sisters, providential in every respect, always kept some plain homespun, diligently darned against a rainy day – or a novice leaving.

Mary then removed her own undergarment – long white pantaloons tied with a plain-ribboned bow at the ankle. These she pulled onto her mother. Similarly, and aware of the other woman’s stare, she removed as modestly as she could, the petticoat from under her habit, fastening it around Ellen. Biddy, for all her talk about ‘no clothes’, produced a shawl, even if it was threadbare.

‘Throw that over her a while,’ she ordered Mary.

Ellen again started to say something, prompting the woman to come to her and shake her vigorously.

‘Just look at you – full of gibberish … same as ever!’ she said roughly. ‘This is your own flesh and blood come for you, widow-woman! Will you whisht that jabberin’!’

To Mary’s amazement, Biddy Earley then drew back her hand and slapped Ellen full across the face.

‘You wasn’t so backward when you was accusatin’ me o’ stealin’ your book,’ she levelled at Ellen.

‘What book?’ Mary asked, shocked by the woman’s action and holding her mother protectively.

‘Some English filth she kept recitatin’ to herself. Ask Blind Mary – stuck sittin’ on that stoop of hers – about it. That and her niggerology! When, if Lincoln will have his way, the blacks’ll be swarmin’ all over us … and them savages no respecters o’ the likes of you neither, Sister !’ Biddy Earley added for good measure.

Mary didn’t know what to make of it all. All of her endless prayers answered and the joy, the unparalleled joy, of finding her mother alive after all these years. But yet, so dishevelled, and living in such a place.

Biddy Earley, settling a streelish curl beneath her headscarf, continued in similar vein. ‘Then looking down on the likes o’ me for going on me back to the sailors. Sure it’s no sin if it’s keeping body and soul together, is it, Sister?’ she asked boldly, uncaring of the reply. ‘No sin if you don’t enjoy it?’ she added, with a rasp of a laugh.