Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

“Don’t reproach me,” Father Egan said. “I’m reinforcing this mutiny with my frail presence. It’s up to you because you’re a sensible girl.”

“Must you keep drinking?”

“Never mind that,” Father Egan said.

She walked over to the kitchen table and leaned on her fist, watching him.

“You’ve been so darn irrational I can’t cope. And I know you’ve been worse since that night you had the boat out. I wish I knew what that was about.”

“Under the seal,” Egan said. “The rest is silence.”

Sister Justin shook her head to clear it of his madness.

“I don’t feel very sensible now,” she said. “I feel like a complete idiot.”

“Not at all,” Egan said. “Do you want to know what I think?”

“Yes, please.”

“I think you’re very intelligent and moral and all good nunnish things. You had an attack of self-righteousness and you decided to try the impossible. Nothing wrong with that, Justin. Fine tradition behind it.”

“You encouraged me.”

“Yes. Well, I wanted to stay too. And I respect you, you see. Believe it or not.”

“I thought I could pull it off.”

“Because you were always made much of by the order. They want to keep you. You’ve had things your own way. You’ve been spoiled, dear.”

“Oh, Lord,” Justin said. “Spoiled hell.” She folded her arms angrily and went to stand in the doorway with her back to him. “I’ve been on my hands and knees since college. I mean — I work for a living. I wouldn’t call this a cloistered life, would you?”

She heard his dry sickly laughter and turned.

“Is what I’m saying ridiculous?”

“You’ve been morally spoiled. There’s always been someone around to take your good intentions seriously — and if that isn’t being spoiled I don’t know what is.” He sniffed at his rum and drank it. “Religious women are always a good deal younger than their ages — Mary Joe’s an example. Religious men are worse. One’s always a kid. The life is childish.” He shrugged. “Believing at all is childish, isn’t it?”

Justin looked at him surprised. Perhaps, she thought, he was snapping a paradox. They were all great Chestertonians in his generation.

“You haven’t been saying your office,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “You haven’t said it for ages.”

“I consider it wrongly written down.”

She smiled, watching him polish off the rum.

“Are you serious?”

“I will — if called upon — say Mass. I will administer the sacraments. But my office is strictly between myself and God and I won’t say it their way. It’s all wrong, you know,” he said, fixing her with an unsettling stare. “They have it all wrong. The whole thing.”

“I give up,” Justin said.

“Interesting my orthodoxy should make any difference to you. Surely you don’t believe?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

“Well,” Egan said, “you’re supposed to answer it every day.”

At the kitchen counter, she took up the fish again. The right thing would be to broil it, to make a sauce with peppers and onions and greens. But he would be more likely to eat it if she simply shredded it into the soup with some shrimp. It was such a shame. Red snapper.

It went into the soup and Egan faded back toward his quarters.

Justin found herself on the veranda again. Her hands were clenched on the rail as she leaned out toward the ocean, the ebbing tide. The sea’s surface was soft blue; the sun had withdrawn beyond the green saw-toothed hills above the station.

Utter total foolishness, she repeated silently.

Her soul extended along this meditation as it might in prayer. There was nothing. Only the sea, shadowed deeps, predatory eyes. Her heart beat quietly alone, its panicked quickening like a signal to the void, unanswered, uncomforted. It beat only for her, to no larger measure, a futile rounding of blood. The desire for death made her dizzy; it felt almost like joy.

She was still leaning over the rail, half stunned with despair, when she saw a young man walking along the beach from the direction of the village. He was barefoot and full-bearded, extraordinarily blond; he wore a white shirt of the sort that required a detachable collar and faded bib overalls. When he drew closer she could see the filthy condition of his shirt and the dirt and dried blood that soiled his hands. His appearance bespoke need and for this reason she was vaguely glad to see him there. She assumed he was one of the North American kids who drifted up and down the Isthmus following the beach. They had first appeared in numbers the previous spring. Some of them were far gone with dope or alcohol. Her ready impulse was to have him come in and see if there was anything that might be done — before Campos and his men or the local ratones caught scent of him.

Justin had gone as far as the top step when the odd cut of his hair registered on her. It was crude cropping that one did not see on even the weirdest passing gringos, almost medieval, monkish. As she started down to the beach, he turned toward her and his face stopped her cold.

Although the man’s walk and carriage were youthful, his face was like an old man’s, the skin not tanned but reddened and weathered, deeply seamed around the features. The massiveness of his brows and cheekbones made his upper face as square as a box; his nose was long, thin and altogether outsized, upturned toward the tip. Elfin, she thought, staring at him, gnomish — but suggestive of carving like some sort of puppet, a malignant Pinocchio.

Two things about his small blue eyes impressed her — one was that they were not, she was sure, the eyes of an English speaker, another that they were the most hating eyes she had ever seen.

Justin had to remind herself that she was in lay clothes. But even people who thought nuns bad luck had never looked at her so.

Fascinated, she watched the man’s mouth open and she braced herself for a threat or an obscenity. His shout, though when it came it contorted his face, was absolutely silent.

It seemed that one of the words he mouthed at her was Schwein —the bared teeth savaging the lower lip. There were other words. Du was one. She had only known German as a tourist in Austria but she felt certain that German was his language. Schwein, Du.

“Beast” was the word that came to her. She was quite frightened.

Then the youth walked on, toward Puerto Alvarado. He was very big. His shoulders under the stained white shirt looked broad as an ox yoke.

She went back into the kitchen, lifted the pot lid and stirred her red snapper and vegetable soup. The young man, she realized, must be a Mennonite — there were a few of their settlements in the south, inland. They were not numerous in Tecan and it was years since she had seen a band of them in the capital, in the central bus station there. They had seemed shy, cheerful people, very clean and friendly.

It was the time of late afternoon when the color drained out of the day. Sky and ocean gentled to temperate pastels and the jungle on the hillsides was a paler green. Wandering to the doorway, she savored the breeze.

Along the beach, from the grove at Freddy’s to the point southward, there was no one to be seen. Vanished, the passing youth seemed to be a creature compounded of her fears; the hatred, the Germanness were the stuff of nightmare and bad history. Somehow her despair had summoned him.

When Godoy and his jeepload of small boys pulled up at the foot of the station steps, she ran down gratefully to join them. The boys were black Caribs and there were six of them crowded into the jeep, some with the Indian cast of eye or the shock of coarse straight hair that marked the Caribs among the black people of the coast.