Robert Stone - A Flag for Sunrise

For a moment, at Egan’s door, she thought about death and the defying of it. What was death, she wondered, and what did it mean to her? A proper essay for the novitiate, a nunnish reflection.

She rapped lightly on Father Egan’s door several times, then slowly pushed it open. Egan was sprawled across his cot, still dressed in his khaki work shirt and tan trousers, his Detroit Tigers cap on his head, the laced work boots on his feet.

Justin went toward his unconscious figure, slowed by dread. He’s dead, she thought. He’s really died. “Father?”

She stood over him looking for signs of life and after a moment she understood that he was breathing; she could see the slow heaving of his shoulders and hear the irregular wheeze of his exhalations against the mattress. His hands as well as his boots were soiled with black earth.

“Father Egan? Charles?”

She put her hand against his damp shoulder and shook him. Very slowly he raised his head from the mattress, even more slowly turned and looked at her with utter incomprehension.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Might I,” he asked, “have a paper?”

“A paper?” Justin asked in astonishment.

Egan had begun a cetaceous wallowing to right himself. Justin noticed that his pills were at his bedside and that the Flor de Cana bottle stood on his desk.

“You can’t mix those,” Justin pointed out to him. “You’ll kill yourself.”

Father Egan managed to place his feet on the floor and sat with his arms folded, head down.

“I can’t do anything about a paper,” Justin told him. “But I can point out that we have a shower. And that there’s a change of clothes available.”

“Shut up,” Egan said sourly. “Just … shut up, Justin. There’s a good girl.”

She walked to the far end of the room and considered him.

“Did you mix those pills and rum?”

“No,” Egan said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You were out last night. Where on earth were you?”

The puzzled look on his face frightened her.

“Oh, yes,” he said presently. “Yes.”

“Well,” Justin said, “may one ask where?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Egan said.

Grim suspicions assailed her. Just how crazy is he? she wondered to herself.

“I might,” she said. “Try me.”

“I was out at the ruins.”

Justin watched him, holding her position at the farthest extremity of his cluttered room. “But why?”

“I can’t tell you that. Under the seal.”

Justin went out and put some coffee on for him. He preferred the Irish tea that sometimes came from home but that morning there was none available. When the coffee was ready she carried the pot and one cup on a tray to his quarters. Egan was still sitting on the cot, staring at the scrubbed wooden floor. She poured him out a cup of the thick native coffee.

“There’s fruit in the kitchen,” she said. “And there’s mail.” In her fright at his condition she had set the letters down on his desk. She handed them over. “We’ve got Fellowship if you want to look at it. There’s a letter for you. And we’ve got a flash from the provincial.”

Egan took his mother’s letter and set it beside him.

“It’s all been opened,” Justin told him. “Whether by Campos or by someone higher I’ve no idea.”

The priest shrugged and began to remove his stained shirt.

“What does the letter from the provincial say?”

As she was opening it, he stood up and began undoing his belt buckle. “Oh, hell, tell me later. I’ve got to clean up and get to work. Answer it in whatever manner you feel’s appropriate and I’ll sign it.”

While Father Egan carried on with his undressing, Justin went outside and read their letter from the Very Reverend Matthew J. Greene, to whose directives she and Charlie Egan were bound by sacred vow.

Monsignor Greene’s letter finally and unequivocally closed the mission. It contained airline ticket vouchers and orders for them to report, prior to the twentieth of February, to the Devotionist House of St. Peter Martyr in Metairie, Louisiana. They would have been informed by the mission country’s ecclesiastical authorities, the letter went on to say, that an intervenor had been appointed by the bishop of the diocese to take charge of the mission house grounds and supplies, and to supervise the property’s transfer to the Millimar Corporation of Boston, the parent company of International Fruit and Vegetable, to whose control it now reverted. They were reminded that funds to cover the last quarter of the mission’s expenses had been disbursed and that no further funds would be forthcoming.

“There is no reply to this one, Charles,” Justin said in the empty slatted hallway. Egan was in the shower. “This is the one.”

In fact, no one among the church authorities in Tecan had informed them of anything, nor had International Fruit, which had a large district office in Puerto Alvarado. It meant, Justin thought, either that the local diocese was simply proceeding in the Tecanecan style or that someone in the hierarchy was delaying the operation for unfathomable reasons.

As for IF&V, they must be simply waiting; in spite of rumors that Millimar was planning Tecan’s first Florida-style resort at French Harbor, they seemed content to let the church sort out its minor schisms before taking over. Eventually, of course, they could go to the government — the President was by way of being a junior partner in the firm — if they saw the need for any dispatch. Things worked better in Tecan if you were IF&V.

When she went back into Egan’s quarters the priest had changed and, red-eyed, was gathering up his books.

“You can read it, Charles. It’s a final notice. We’re not replying.”

“Fine,” Egan said. He picked up the provincial’s letter, wadded it and threw it in his wastepaper basket.

“Our ticket vouchers have arrived.”

“Really?” Father Egan asked. “They’ve sent us tickets before. They must have forgotten. That’s the profligacy that goes with being tax-free. So now we’ve each got two tickets. If we hold out down here long enough maybe they’ll send more and we’ll take our entire flock to New Orleans with us.”

“We don’t have a flock anymore, Charles. Haven’t you noticed?”

“ I have a flock,” Father Egan said.

“And the order’s dissolving. Tax-free or not, they’re really broke.”

Egan looked at her blankly. “I can hit Hughie up for a thousand dollars U.S. God knows whether it’ll get here and how long it will take.” Hughie was his younger brother, a former Devotionist seminarian, now a liquor wholesaler in Seattle. “But it’ll be the last grand I get from him.”

“Do it then,” Justin said.

“Personally I’m prepared to move to a hotel in town. Or I might try to trade those vouchers in and buy myself a little house inland. Don’t stay on my account, dear.”

“It’s not on your account, Father Egan.”

So it could go on awhile she thought. And they might yet be needed.

“What’s your citizenship?” she asked Egan, possessed of a sudden thought. “It’s U.S., isn’t it?”

“It’s U.S. For over thirty years. Since just before Pearl Harbor.”

“Right,” Justin said.

Just at the door, she stopped.

“You know what’s funny?” she said. “The rest of the team — I hardly remember any of them. I mean Mary Margaret Donahue was here for five years and I can’t remember what she looked like. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Yes,” Egan said. “But it’s like you. Myself — I remember them all. I don’t forget people.”

He began to type as she went out; she walked to the veranda and commenced pacing its length. The idleness was destroying her, she thought. Egan at least had his imaginary endless book; she had nothing. As she paced, she kept watch for the fish seller and for Epifanía to come with her basket to do the laundry. The laundry, especially Egan’s, was a rotten job, yet she half hoped that Epifanía would stay away like the rest, so that she herself would have labor for the afternoon. But if Epifanía too failed to come, their situation would be even more grotesque. Pathetic as it was to have in the visits of a washing woman a last hold on duty and reason, if Epifanía and the fisherman stopped coming the place would be utterly shut off from the community of French Harbor, completely without intercourse, pastoral, social and even commercial. As though, she thought bitterly, they were there to buy fish and have their laundry done.