Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [38]
I didn’t have to go on those dawn walks in Land’s End with Fred. I didn’t have to authorize Mr. Raj’s trip to the shabby retreat house of Les Soeurs Grises in Mount Abu. I didn’t have to find out what act of charity Sister Madeleine Corveau, originally of Levis, Quebec, had performed in Devigaon the same night that Hari’d come running to her with his tales of human folly and wickedness.
Sister Madeleine spoke to Mr. Raj in the Devigaon dialect. She’d lived in the village for over forty years. Mr. Raj translated and summarized what he thought important. Fred hadn’t brought the full report with him. Too bulky, he claimed. He pulled a couple of sheets out of his sweatpants and handed them over.
“She was near death,” Mr. Raj reported Sister Madeleine’s having said.
Minutes from death. I saw her, but not right away. It was a dark night, and I had only my torch. I’d missed her at first because she had crawled under the poor woman’s skirt, the dead woman’s, may her soul rest in peace. Only when I tried to lift the dead, the dead are so heavy, no?… it was horrible, too horrible. Fortunately we kept all kinds of anti-toxins in our little dispensary. Villagers get snakebites, liquor poisoning, rabies. They come to the Soeurs Grises. The sore grease, they call us. Some stay around and find Jesus. Not anymore, you understand. People don’t want us here anymore, the country doesn’t want foreign missionaries. Now I’m a pariah. But I don’t remember French, I can’t dream of Levis.
I take it that you saved the child, Sister?
Jesus did.
Afterwards you arranged the adoption? I know your order places children in Europe, America and Canada.
We did the only right thing under the circumstances. We took the child to her mother.
But the mother was in jail, wasn’t she?
Ministering to women prisoners, especially firangi [foreign, white] women prisoners, that was one of our duties. The warden told us the mother wanted cigarettes. So first time, we came with a Bible and two packs of cigarettes. Next time we came with Faustine, and more cigarettes. That was the name we gave, we named our orphans like typhoons, Adele, Bella, Catherine … she was our sixth that year, such a pretty little imp.
The prisoner must have been overjoyed, Sister.
The damned construe the Good Lord’s interventions as curses. The woman thanked us for the cigarettes.
I dealt with that sucker punch by handing the sheets back to Fred. The sun floated out over the bay, like a balloon.
“I should be heading back,” Fred said. “I do have other clients. I have a life, you know.”
“Who’s stopping you?” I stalked off ahead of Fred. He didn’t follow.
The trail felt steep, stark, damp. A man on a mountain bike passed me slowly. Then he wheelied around. He cut two tight loops around me. He watched me, but said nothing. He had on a camouflage jacket. He hadn’t been in any wars; he’d fried his own brains. I felt sad for Loco Larry. I felt sad for the baby girl the Gray Nuns’d brought to visit the prisoner. I felt sad for all the dumped and discarded. I heard the cypresses wail.
As Ham scouted free parking not too far from Vito’s, I slipped in my question. “About Jess and you …”
They’d been involved. At one time or another he’d been involved, he said, with all the women I had met, or might meet, through him. “Serially,” he added. “I’m not a lech, if that’s what worries you.”
“That’s all you’ll say?”
He slowed down. A man in a Lexus had either just pulled into a metered spot or was getting ready to pull out. The overhead light was still on.
“That’s it?”
Ham tapped the steering wheel. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
“It’s just the body count that makes me wonder,” I said.
Lexus Man stepped out his car with a fat smile on his thin face. I thought: If I had a gun, I’d kill you. You don’t know how close you came.
Ham moved forward, still prowling for space. “You were never there, hon. It happened once in my lifetime. It was over quickly and it never came back.” He grabbed my shoulder with