Chapter 2

(....of a nascent novel...)

The old lady gives me the creeps.

It something about the way she stares at you when she’s talking to you. I swear, she doesn’t blink, she just keeps looking at you. And sometimes, for no reason, she just goes quiet, and she doesn’t care how long she stays quiet, either. I mean, most people say something—anything—to fill a silence. But she seems to grow bigger, in those silences, while you feel yourself sinking into the ground.

No, that’s not it: you feel like an eagle has swooped down, clasped you in her talons, and is carrying you off to be devoured. 

“We don’t allow smoking on this farm! How dare you! How dare you bring your filthy habits here, to the very place where the Virgin chose to make her appearance, and bring her message to the world!”

I had figured out behind the barn was a time-honored place to light up, and I was dying for a smoke, since I’d been carefully rationing them out. My grandma, she kept a pretty good eye on me, and cigarettes weren’t easy to steal—not like other stuff. So I’d kept one pack going for a couple weeks, now, and I was down to two or three left. So I took a long drag, looked away, and held the smoke in.

She struck me.

“Listen to me, boy. You think I can’t see? You think I didn’t know you were trash the moment I lay eyes on you? Yes, you and that grandmother of yours—nothing but trash. Come here with nothin’ and expect three square meals a day? Chocolate cake after dinner? Listen, boy, this is a farm, and we got plenty to do, here. So starting tomorrow, you’re seeing brother Edwin. He’ll start you on your chores for the day, and he’ll damn sure make sure you do ‘em. See that whip?”

She had led me into the barn, and now pointed to the central beam. There was a riding crop hung on a nail.

It wasn’t that she was strong, though she still had me by the forearm. No, there was something in that gaze that made you unable to resist: she could have led me into fire, if she had wanted to.

“Ain’t never done a lick of work in yer life, have you? No, you grew up easy—watching TV instead of going to school, out on the streets when you should have been studying. Stealing food for your supper, since your momma wasn’t nowhere. Nobody to make you pay any mind! Grew up with a common whore for a mother, stealing for your food, lying down every night in your filthy clothes! Well, none of that here! You’ll put in a day’s work, and get a hot meal, and you’ll be glad of it!”

“My mother wasn’t no whore,” I told her.

“Oh she wasn’t, was she? Nah, she just believed in “free” love, which meant that she fucked for food or more likely drugs. Huh—a respectable whore does better than that. Woman may be on the streets, but that don’t mean she can’t look after a child, see that he gets three square meals, and goes to school. No, but your momma didn’t do none of that, did she? Oh, I seen it all the time! Kids who needed a good spanking and somebody to tell ‘em what to do, and never had nothing. Who’s your poppa, kid?”

“Disappeared before I was born.”

“Bet he did! Bet he disappeared just as soon as his seed lodged in your mother’s womb! Hah—maybe before! So some man knocked up your momma, and she never had nothing to do but keep whoring around! Some women get some sense in ‘em when the child comes along. Pity yours didn’t!”

Suddenly, she got under my skin.

“You SHUT UP about my momma,” I shouted. “I didn’t come here to get this kinda flak. You don’t know nothin’ about her!”

“Yeah? I know she ain’t here, and I know she ain’t takin’ care of either her son or her mother. So where is she, punk? She still alive? She in prison? She on the streets, turning tricks and violatin’ every commandment put by God? Filling her veins with junk and waking up in her own puke on the street?”

She was pacing in front of me, speaking real fast, and getting louder by the minute. I realized, I was terrified of what she’d do next.

“I don’t think you know, do you, boy? Don’t think you have the faintest idea, where your mamma is. And you don’t care, do you? ‘Cause nobody never gave a damn about you—not even your granny, who you dumped here and ran out for a smoke. Oh, you make a fine pair—old woman one-step away from the grave, and a smart-aleck brat like you, don’t care about nothin’ or nobody!”

She stopped, now, and got within an inch of my face. Her eyes narrowed, and seemed to get darker as they got smaller. I could feel her breath on my lips.

“No reason I should bother myself with such trash,” she muttered, as if seeing me for the first time. “The old lady don’t have no work in her, and it’ll take brother Edwin all his day to make sure you do a thing! Out! Get offa my property! Just because the Virgin has chosen to make herself known to me, don’t mean I have to put up with every piece of trash the wind blows into my yard. Get away, both of you, and go somewhere else. Don’t have no time for every bum in the country!”

“We ain’t no bums,” I told her. “We don’t have no money, but we ain’t bums. And my momma, she made sure I went to school, every day. Sure, sometimes I played hooky, but she’da skinned me alive if she found out. Don’t you call my momma a whore!”

“Oh, so now I’ve offended little lord Fauntleroy! Yes, yes—grew up in a Christian home! Probably was an altar boy! You said your prayers every night, boy? Got down on your knees and begged God for forgiveness for all your sinning ways? Your momma teach you how to pray?”

“She wasn’t real religious,” I said. “She kinda had it, since her momma was such a nut about it! But don’t you go calling her a whore!”

“I ain’t calling her a whore—I’m calling her a plain damn fool, who gave it away instead of charging for it. And I know how she died, boy, and who was with her when she done it, and who covered up the evidence, and who took you, in the middle of the night, back to your grandma’s house, and rang the bell. Stood there until the door opened, then ran like hell before the old lady could say a word. ‘Cause there was still a lot to do, that night, and he didn’t have no time to spare with an old lady. ‘Specially one that might ask questions. Questions that man didn’t feel like answering!”

We’d been here less than an hour—had the old lady wormed it out of my grandma? Didn’t seem so, but…

…how did she know?       

When Julian Met Mary

It was the sort of day when all I could do was worry about Julian of Norwich.

“Ah, yes,” said the shade of Lady, drifting over towards my table. “’All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ Words immortalized by T. S. Eliot, in his Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets.”

She’s just given a class on poetic transitions, so of course she would know this stuff.

“Did you know Julian was the first female author in English?” I asked her. “At least, she’s supposed to be, or maybe so far as we know. Anyway, there she was, walled into her little room, which had a window out to the world, and a window into the church. Quite a metaphor, really. But what I didn’t know is that you had to have the money to support yourself. Oh, and that at the time, Norwich had 35 anchorites all living in their little cells.”

“She got walled in?”

“Yup, part of the process. Had to go get the bishop to approve; then, once it was done, that was it. No leaving until they carry you out to the graveyard. The question, of course, is what she did all day. Because it sounds quite simple to pray all day, but have you ever tried it? It takes a hell of a lot of discipline.”

“Well, I’ve been in pain. So much so that there was nothing I could do but focus on my breath, and count the inhalations from one to ten, and then start over again. And I did it for hours….”

I remember that, since I had done much the same thing last December, just after I had fallen and broken my back. And I wonder, sometimes, whether prayer isn’t just a response to pain, be it physical or spiritual.

“Well, that could be, but what about all that devotional literature and poetry? You know, George Herbert and all the rest? They didn’t seem to be in any particular pain, they were just devout, and sort of drunk on exaltation….”

“I guess,” I said. “But really, at times I wonder if becoming an anchorite really wasn’t some sort of spiritual stunt. You know, the really hard thing about following a spiritual path is to do it without anyone knowing you’re doing it. But Julian attracted a lot of attention by withdrawing. Oh, and by having all those visions, of course….”

“Well, I have a vision,” said Lady. “Ten or twelve Poet’s Passages, in all corners of the world. Then, I’ll visit each Passage for a month, each year. Do you suppose if I locked myself into a little room in each Passage….”

“It might work,” I told her. “Anyway, it worked for Julian, since everybody and his brother—religiously speaking—hoofed it over to hang out with her. Oh, and to get her to pray for them. You know, I wonder if God wasn’t good and tired of her? She was, after all, a guest who refused to leave. And every time God just wanted to sit down and put up his feet, there was Julian, praying away, clamoring for attention. I imagine him sighing and asking, ‘don’t you have some embroidery to do?’”

“So you think it was kind of a stunt, walling herself in?”

“I think it was one of the few ways that a woman could gain fame,” I said. “Though I suppose she could have become an abbess somewhere, or a scholar, like Heloise. Anyway, it’s always curious to me which revelations or visitations get accepted by the hierarchy, and which don’t. Why should we credit Julian with her sixteen visitations, but not that nutso up there in Wisconsin, who got 100,000 people up to wait for the Virgin Mary in 1950?”

“Oh dear, you’re not still hung on that woman, Marc. It can’t be healthy. You have to move on….”

“I suppose,” I said. “But there is a certain snobbishness in religion, you know. Julian is all very well, because she is all very dead, and has been for six hundred years of so. So if she tells us that she saw God, who showed her something the size of a hazelnut, and then got the answer “in a general way,” that that was all that was made….well, that we take seriously. But why should God or the Virgin Mary not be appearing today? And really, do you think either of them would bother to run by the bishop, and explain that he or she would be doing a little visitation up at the van Hoof farm?”

“Well, I certainly would,” said Lady. “Imagine if the Holy Blessed Virgin, or whatever it is that they called her, appeared in a vision to the pope, and gave him the Google coordinates to the farmstead, all the better to pin it down? Having the pope on your side goes a long way to getting the visitation approved, you know.”

“It certainly does,” I said. “Remember all that business about Fátima, and how John Paul II convinced himself that he had been the bishop seen by the three little kids in 1917? And then there was all that weird business about ‘consecrating’ the entire country of Russia, which apparently the Virgin was heavy into. So John Paul did it, and poof! In six short years, communism was toast! The wall had fallen, and the USSR dissolved.” 

“Wonderful what these Marian visitations can do,” said Lady. “You don’t suppose she could drop buy the Passage, one of these days, or maybe drop in at Poetry Night? You know, appear as a bright light coming out of the mirror above the piano? Seen by all, and wearing the ‘True Love’ medallion? Though really, if she did, I’d really like some advanced warning, so I could order up a few thousand of them.”

“Right,” I told her. “But be careful what you with for. Do you know that every lunatic would be coming into the café, not spending a dime, but using the restroom and taking a little sliver of the piano? Oh, and then after that was gone, they’d start on the stage, and pretty soon the whole place would be demolished! And can you imagine what 100,000 people must have done to that farm up in Necedah?”

She can’t.

So I show her!   

The Return of Mauricio

Death I can do, though it’s hard. But we know the routine: there is putting the cat into the cage with a towel that one of us has used, or a piece of clothing. Raf will carry the cage; I will look for the cab, since I will end up paying for it. Why? Because Raf will argue that the bus only costs 75 cents, not the 15 bucks that the cab will cost. And I will argue that the animal is sick and soon to die, and that waiting twenty minutes for a bus, getting jostled about before sitting down, and then having perfect strangers sticking their face into the cage and commenting on the cat’s health….well, isn’t that abuse?

We will be silent on the way to the vet, since what is there to say? It’s not a trip to the airport, which is the other time that we splurge for cabs: there are no beach houses waiting at the end of the journey. Instead, we will wait less time than usual for the vet to appear, since the staff too want this over. And the other people at the vet, holding their perfectly healthy dogs and cats who merely need vaccinations? They will instantly know: we not here for that.

The vet will explain the procedure, though really, we could almost do the damn thing ourselves, so often have we seen it done. There will be the muscle relaxant first, then there will be the drug that stops the heart, and then there will be that instant when the animal is simply not there. Always, always, I wonder where he goes—that cat that annoyed you every morning by walking over your bladder, the contents of which you’ve been trying push back under a thin sheet of sleep. You get up, urinate, and then go feed the cat.

During the day, if you’re about and he’s about, you address a few words to him. And while some cats simply disappear between food times, other cats seem to enjoy keeping an eye on you. If I am writing at home, it is very likely that Loquito, our male calico cat, will be in the room with me.

“Why are you standing on the floor? Standing on the floor is strictly prohibited! Stop standing on the floor, at once!”

I address such words to Loquito because his every and his only gesture is a complete “f-ck you.”

“Why is your tail up? Put down your tail immediately!”

The tail rises just a bit higher.

It may be that your cat is vocal, and that you will spend five or ten minutes several times a day having completely stupid conversations.

Cat enters room: yowl

Marc: What! What did you just say?

Cat: growl / yowl

Marc: Young man, I don’t like your attitude!

Cat: snarl / yowl / growl

Marc: You live in the LAP of luxury…

Cat walks out of the room.

At this point, you have a choice: drop the argument and get back to whatever you were doing, or follow the cat and keep the argument alive. I am embarrassed to admit how many times….

What am I trying to tell you?

No matter how many times you wonder why you are so crazy as to feed and care for an animal whose only activity is to coldly appraise and universally find you lacking, you still find yourself doing completely insane things. There was the cat—quite beautiful, completely stupid—who urinated outside the bedroom door every morning. And did you, groggy with sleep, ever remember? Of course not—each morning you stepped in it, roared in rage, and grabbed a newspaper to go after the varmint. You never caught him—or rarely—and anyway, the smacking never did any good.

And so the day came when he was in horrible pain, issuing horrible sounding groans, and…

….completely unable to pee!

You panic, you take him to the vet, you demand immediate attention since this in an EMERGENCY, so empty out the waiting room, send everyone home or to another vet because YOUR CAT NEEDS IMMEDIATE ATTENTION!

And so there we were: Raf at the head of the gurney, I at the foot. And is it enough that we have dropped everything, rushed to the vet, called off work or meetings, put our careers in jeopardy, lost multi-million dollar projects, enraged our bosses, and probably left the front door open, so distracted and distraught were we? Of course not, since we are now saying completely idiotic things.

Raf, sobbing: Oh what a little angel!

Marc, sniffling: the best, the loveliest little angel!

Raf, wailing and beating breast: Oh, the purest….

Some part of me, of course, stood back and thought, ‘this damn cat has driven me nuts…’

But now, the vet, in between us and laboring to save the life of this now indispensable animal, announces that the catheter has gotten through the blockage, or the crystalage or whatever it is, and now it’s time to pay $1,465.29 and take your animal back home, where he can…

….piss on the floor again!

If you’re an animal lover, you completely get this. Colder souls, of course, do not. But you are infinitely relieved, because you have done that awful day at the vet too many times, and carrying the cat carrier home without the cat is more than you can bear.

Yes, we have done death. But what haven’t we done?

Disappearance.

Because that’s what we were confronting, two days ago when Raf feed only three but not four cats. So was the cat with me, sleeping behind the one closable door in our apartment?

No.

It was the youngest, and perhaps the favorite, since Mauricio had come to give solace to Raf, who was heartbroken over the death of Kitty, his all-time favorite cat. Nor had Mauricio done a bad job of it: he had put his little nose into Raf t-shirt and gone to sleep there. And he would do so so often that the t-shirt grew to have a permanent and quite unsightly stain on it. Still, it smelled of him / them—so who could possibly wash it?

He did, of course, have his little faults. At first, I fell in with the belief that he was—completely unauthorized—a longhair cat. Then I took another look, and realized that he was no cat at all, but rather a skunk. But where were the stripes? Easy—he had been genetically modified. So his name got changed—as they always do in our house—to Monsanto.

That was the first problem. More serious was that he discovered that he could wedge his way through the ornamental curlicues of the balcony railing and walk on a six-inch ledge 18 feet above the sidewalk. Which he frequently did, ignoring my howls of protest / correction. And so it was easy to imagine, two days ago: he would have been on the ledge, he would have spied a pigeon, and he would have lunged. Forgetting that he was, of course, on the ledge.

So he had fallen, but where was he? Was he injured? Had someone made off with him? Had he crawled under a car, and then, perhaps seeking the heat of the motor, crawled up into the chassis? If so, what would happen if the car owner returned, started the car, and then….

With death, there is nothing to imagine. With disappearance there is nothing but imagination, and how many of those imaginations were good? Never has the street seemed noisier to me than it did two days ago: I felt an animal rage for anyone driving by with their car stereo blaring. Sure, I could take it, but didn’t that jerk know that my CAT might be under the car he was passing, and whose alarm he had just set off! Shit!

I cannot leave home, since what if Mauricio came back? Neither can I stay home, since I’m feeling dangerously close to a panic attack, because it doesn’t seem like I’ve had a break. There are, after all, no emotional reserves to call upon: I fell, I broke my back, I looked at paralysis straight in the eye for months, until that diagnosis backed down. Fine—and now I’ve lost my cat. Is this the wind God tempers to the shorn lamb?

So I couldn’t stay inside. I call Lady, and learn that she is in the café.

“I’m doing a class on poetic transitions, and I gotta be ready by Monday,” she told me.

It’s a relief to wrap my head around something other than a lost cat, so we play with the possibilities—are there some poets who are transitional? If so, whom? Whitman comes springing to mind. Anyway, it’s time to get to work, which means finding a picture of Mauricio, since we are going to crowd source his search and rescue.

“I need a whole gang of street urchins,” I told Lady, and explained: little kids are perfect for this sort of job. They have the energy, they can bend, and it’s a game for them. Three things I don’t have.

Well, the only picture I can find is a picture Raf posted on Facebook, and that was a repost from a year ago. In fact, I had taken the picture on my cellphone, and that phone, which was actually so sensible and efficient that I fell in love with it? Stolen. So the picture, burgeoning with high resolution, was in somebody else’s larcenous hands. (And I hope he moves to Saudi Arabia, and continues his career rather less successfully there.) So now we have a picture that has a resolution somewhere near the negative numbers, which means that any rescue poster is going to have to be half a page, not a full page. So Miss Taí gets right on that, since she could write the book on graphic arts, though she’s too modest to. Anyway, she comes up with the poster, but in the meantime, Lady had transitioned out of poetic transitions and transitioned into cat rescue mode.

She walks ever room of my apartment.

She counts the cats.

She watches them as they come surging into the kitchen, when I shake the food bin.

Lastly, she is out on the street, interviewing neighbors, disseminating information, giving updates. Finally, she gets right down on her knees, ignoring the pain she must be in, because she is limping. An operation looms soon in her future, but is she deterred? No, because now she has her head on the street, and her famous curls are spread out in front her, and I think that I will never see a more perfect image of a supplicating Medussa.

Alas, even she can do nothing, including walk, since now the pain has gotten insufferable. So she has called Nico, and he has appeared, and now my task is to walk the streets of Viejo San Juan, shaking the food can loudly, and calling “MAURICIO!”

Oh, and did I tell you that there are six cruise ships on this day, and that all of the cruisers are afflicted with elephantiasis, which makes their limbs swell to enormous proportions, which makes movement excruciating and very, very slow. So slow, in fact, that some of them are actually going in reverse!

Well, I do that, and then it’s time to tackle the problem with the people who count—sorry, Lady—and who are out there on the street doing business. Which doesn’t mean what you think—though there may be some of those, too—but rather Orlando the Potato King and Carlos the Street Porter. And that’s when I realized the virtue of saying hello to everyone—Sam Walton would be proud—because they instantly agree to help. So I give Orlando my number and tell him that one day I will absolutely buy one of his potatoes, drenched in sour cream and chicken and god knows what all. And I tell him to tell Carlos, the Street Porter, whom I don’t see, since he is probably on the next block, selling another relieved and eternally grateful client the “free” street parking. Yes, petty minds and evil tongues aver that Carlos is a pest, but not only is he helping you parallel park-- Dále   Dále Dále Dále Dále he is shouting—but he is also there monitoring your car, ensuring that not one thieving hand is placed on it! Because ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN, COULDN’T IT???

Yes, Carlos and I are good friends, since Carlos learned early on: ingratiate yourself with the neighbors. So he takes out the trash for one, saves a parking space for another, runs messages for a third. But what to do for me? Instantly, he knew, when he saw me fumbling around with the padlock to close the gate to the entrance of the building. “I’ll do it,” he told me, and then sprang into the role of jailor, told me I was his prisoner, and then told me he would unlock the gate and let me out only at seven the next morning.

Well, it seemed a harmless enough fantasy, since we were clearly on the honor system. After all, Carlos never actually took my keys, but handed them back civilly enough, and if he caught sneaking out without permission, his only action was to wag his finger at me and call out, “No, no, no, no, NO!” What pleasures does a street porter have? And who am I to deny him one?

Anyway, the point was that the Potato King and the Street Porter were going to have to do, because I absolutely could not do it. I had gone to get the posters printed, but that meant talking to Luis, since there is one and only one of everything in San Juan, and Luis is the village printer. But he also is a dog lover, and has a very nice chocolate labrador, and so we had to hear the story of the dog’s struggle with hip dysplasia. Oh, and then there were the two people who had cats themselves, and they had disappeared, and then what had happened? The story went on for ages, since the man had that habit of repeating significant material several times. So a long story became a saga that made Beowulf look like a tossed-aside remark. And how did it end? Like all good sagas, in death!

Everyone had a story, and worse, everyone instantly became my best friend, my brother or sister, my priest confessor. I told the details of the disappearance over and over again; I was interrogated at every turn. Why had I not closed the door on the balcony on that fatal night? The suspicion was on every breath: I was guilty of negligence, if not criminal intent, at the very least.

I could bear it no longer: I stumbled home, put my raging back to bed, and sobbed.

Oh, but wait, because we were going to the opera, so what would happen if Mauricio came back, sometime in the middle of the first act, and stood outside yowling through all of Madame Butterfly? So then it was time to convince Raf’s mom to go, which involved being initially rejected, calling the elder daughter, agreeing which story to stick to, calling Mamina back…. In the end, Mamina did what we had schemed, and what she had intended to do in the first place. She just likes to be persuaded, and what lady doesn’t?

Mauricio doesn’t come home, but Raf does, and watches what is for him a form of pornography: English Stately Houses on YouTube. But that’s not sufficient, and so when I come upon him after midnight, he’s in tears. So that’s when it’s time to crack the next bottle of wine in the kitchen, but does that do the trick? Certainly not in stopping the tears….

So the next morning was not, as you can imagine, either early or pleasant. But I did manage to eat something, drink some coffee and go out to interrogate Carlos, who told me that Mauricio had been outside our gate howling at five in the morning.

Well, if he had been that close, could he be inside the building? That would be logical, but nothing is very logical with cats, and so I have no faith that calling “Mauricio” as I went up the stairs would work. But it does, and then all of a sudden there is Mauricio, and he is running faster than I have ever seen him up the stairs, and he either leaps into my arms or I grab him. It doesn’t matter much which, since I have now opened the door and dumped him into the apartment.

So now it’s time to call everybody I had called, and go back to all the stores I had visited, and have the endless conversations about miraculous rescues that all of the animal lovers had witnessed, and now my back is hurting again. I go home, and pat Mauricio, and tell him, since someone has to be the responsible parent, “just WAIT till your father gets home! YOU’LL catch what for!”

“What for” being what I always caught, and if I never knew precisely what it was, I still caught it, and caught it quite a lot, and never liked it when caught. So I predict dire things—the worst of “what fors”—for the cat, who doesn’t look too convinced. In fact, he is back to lying on the buffet by the front door, which makes it easy to scold him in passing.

“We were worried to death!”

“Do you KNOW what you put us through?”

“Just wait till….”

And then Mr. Fernández is home, and I stick it to him to stand up and father this damn cat right, and Mauricio is lying on the floor, observing all of this.

“I’ve been telling him all day to just wait until you came home,” I tell Raf, though both of us are looking at the cat.

“Yes,” says Raf, “forget the pigeons, get the roaches!”

“That’s all,” I tell him? “That’s a ‘what-for?’ That’s the lamest ‘what-for’ I’ve ever heard! Where’s your backbone?”

So Raf tells the cat, he must never do that again, and if he ever does, he’ll catch the what-forringnest 'what-for' he’ll ever get in his life, and I join in, and we’re painting a lurid picture indeed of what ‘what-for’ could be like for this cat, when suddenly he flips over onto his back, exposes his belly to be rubbed, stretches leisurely and…

…yawns!

He’s back! 

   

 

  

    

, 

Chapter 1

(Note--can I really write a novel?)

There are those who revile me, who battle day and night to discredit me. I, a lone Wisconsin woman who has been blessed and cursed by the gift of seeing the Blessed Virgin Mary several times.

Yes, cursed, I say. For each time, I dread it: the effort of each visit will drain me for days, so much so that I will repair to my bed. But am I allowed any rest? No, for there are the faithful, yearning for a word with me, a prayer, a touch on the forehead. They travel from all parts of the country—am I to turn them away?

Only yesterday, the doorbell rang: there stood on the stoop an almost impossibly old woman, with her grandson. They had come from Nevada, or one of those Western states.

We keep the coffee on the stove; there are always cookies at hand. Because the one sure thing is that the faithful will come, and must be fed for their efforts.

Is there any thirst as great as a spiritual thirst? For surely, every last person in need seems to come to my door! And does it occur to them that they might, if they were able, bring their own food, or even some food for the staff who work so tirelessly here? No, they appear, as if their need was some sort of blessing on the house, as if I and everyone else had nothing to do all day but await their arrival.

Well, we brought them in, the old lady and her grandson, and then it became clear—what were we to do with them? For their one plan had been to get to me, here in Necedah, Wisconsin, in the year of our Lord 1972. Yes, word had reached them that we were here, and that the Virgin had graced this place, and had chosen it to receive her divine message.

A message that few can hear, apparently, in the established Roman Catholic Church. Yes, our mother church has gone astray, just as our great nation has fallen into temptation. The sanctity of the marriage vows means nothing—and woman and men grunt and cavort like barnyard animals! And so it had been with the old lady—her daughter had had a hard life. The husband drank and beat her; they moved often, never settling down, always hoping for the best, always getting poorer. The children drifted off as soon as they were able to make messes of their own lives; they returned home when the wolf was howling at the door. And one of them, a daughter, had arrived with a baby in her arms. Tired of the responsibility that a child brings, she left alone one night. Neither grandmother nor grandson ever saw her again.

Is this the land for which our founding fathers fought? For surely, the Virgin had been by their sides, as they battled the godless British, as they carved out nation—state by state—which we would become. But we have betrayed her, yes, and we have betrayed ourselves! What woman abandons a child?

Ah, I can tell you, for my work has led me to meet many of them. They are young—nothing more than children themselves—and their mother hasn’t the will or the wit to tell them some hard truths.

Boys will be boys. If you wear that tiny, tight skirt, you’re telling him that you’re nothing better than a common slut. Shun drink, which clouds the mind and allows the devil to do his mischief. Never accept a ride alone: always have a girl friend who will go with you.

My mother made sure she knew who I was with, on those rare times I was allowed out alone with a young man. Yes, and she knew their parents, and she saw them at church, and she knew who was upstanding in the eyes of the Lord, and she knew who were trash. And was she afraid to make that distinction, and act on it! Hell no, she was as likely to tell them to their face!

She wasn’t my friend: she was my mother, and she acted on it and expected me to as well. But today? Mother is off working, since there’s no man around the place to do his duty as the Lord has seen fit to appoint it. No, the man is off somewhere—doing what men do—and the woman is alone and working and tired. And so when a girl is thirteen or fourteen, and hasn’t the sense of a week old chick, well, where is the mother?

Ah, because I know where the girl is! She has been to a bar, or a party, or maybe has just been hanging out at the soda fountain. But there are plenty of men, always! Oh yes, men are everywhere, and doing nothing, it seems, but thinking about carnal pleasure. Yes, men think of nothing else, and if there is some young fresh girl who will put out, will they say no?

Of course, they are careful, very careful never to put it like that. No, they tell the girl, they have never met a woman like her, and woman who understands them, who cares for him like she does! Not like their wives, who have settled down to become nags and let themselves go. Yes, after twenty years of marriage, a woman wants nothing more than to sit down with a piece of pie, a scoop of ice cream, and a good cup of coffee. But men! Hah, any man would give up all the food in the world to lie in sin with a thirteen-year-old girl!

Well, they are fathers themselves, most of them, but does that stop them? No, no, because their daughters are not that sort. No, their daughters would never do what some other man’s daughter is doing, which is falling for a load of bull-crap about love and a rosy future. Because always the girl will believe that the man will dump his wife, will throw everything away to get married.

But why should he? Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Ah, my mother made sure that I knew that! She never minced words, or let me think that a man was any better than an animal!

Yes, men are animals!

And like animals, they grunt and groan and they think—if they think at all—of sex, pure sex. And so the girl ends up exactly where you knew she’d end up, which is to say knocked up and crying in her mother’s arms.

My mother! She would have slapped me into the middle of next Tuesday if I had come and told her any such thing! But not these mothers, because they are kissing the child and consoling her and asking themselves what they did wrong!

Well, I could tell them that!

If they’re lucky, they come to me. For we have turned to the gravest of sins in our country, we are killing our unborn children!

Yes, slaughter, it is no less than slaughter! Millions of unborn babes, sacrificed so that girls can continue to lie in sin and fornicate in front of the eyes of the Virgin herself. Each death is a knife in the womb of the Virgin herself: she gasps in horror, she doubles in pain, she experiences each abortion as if it were She who womb was being violated! Yes, they tear the child out of the womb of the Virgin herself, as she has revealed to me countless times! She suffers, she is wracked in agony, but can she turn her back? No, like me, she has no choice, no choice but to bear the unendurable agony of seeing and feeling sin scorch her very soul!

It is no privilege, let me tell you, to receive these visitations! No, I pay dearly for them, as does the Virgin herself! For all of the sins that daily are committed in this country as it turns its back on the Lord and his commandment—every one of those sins is borne by the Virgin! Yes, and the Virgin, when she reveals herself to me, brings her grief with her. For she sorrows mightily, and cannot hide it. And so I too am cast into a pit of grief! I too suffer like the Virgin! And I, too, can do nothing but watch in horror!

Yes, if they are lucky, they come to me, these girls who are just beginning to show. These girls whose mother, if she didn’t have the backbone to keep her daughter in line, at least had the gumption to get her out of town, safe in my hands, and safe from the knives of greedy doctors who make money from killing the unborn!

Yes, they come here, to the Seven Sorrows of our Sorrowful Mother for Unwanted Infants—and yes, you can laugh all you want! Laugh, laugh! But sorrowful she is indeed, and sorrowful should you be—you who laugh at the name! And if you are fourteen and pregnant, well, you can bet you’ll be sorrowful enough to have the name the word repeated a thousand-fold, one day when you break your water, and the pains start!

For I’ll have none of that business! No, a child is not some bit of tissue to be flung away into a garbage can so that you can continue your wicked life! No, the Virgin has compelled me to stand up and be counted. To start the orphanage with the name that you scoff at! To save those children who come into the world, and to give them to good families who will raise them in the light of the Lord!

I am nothing—the merest speck of sand pressed into service in the wall that cannot hold back the rising tide of filth and sin and degradation that will soon overcome us all! But pressed into service I am, and ever shall be, and like the Virgin, I suffer for every sin and every abuse ever committed!

I cannot look the other way! No, daily I must endure it. My heart rages wildly in my breast, my breath grows shallow and gasping, the energy flees my limbs, and I am left limp and near death in my bed! But is that enough?

No, because still they come, they come in buses, on foot, by car. But the doorbell clangs on, and a new face is there—hungry for love, for enlightenment. They must meet the woman whom the Virgin has chosen to reveal herself! And they must bring their sorrows, and put them on my shoulders! I, who haven’t enough to bear!

Can I turn them from my door?

No, I must greet them; I must help them, if I can. I must give them coffee and something sweet, and I must listen to their troubles, and I must send them away. Yes, I must get them out of my living room or out of my bedroom, because you can be sure—another is on the way.

Ring!

A woman from Detroit, who wants to know if the lump in her breast is cancer, and if so, should she go to the doctor? Because if I could put in a word….

Ring!

A salesman from New Jersey is worried: business is down and he’s on the road a lot, and now when he comes home his wife is angry at him.

Ring!

She’s a good girl, Mother, but she made a mistake. She’s not really like that, but it would kill her father if he knew….

So they come day and night, as if there were no place in the world except for Necedah, Wisconsin! As if there were a huge star hanging over my house, and the lost and troubled and afflicted could see only that the world over in the night sky! As if, like lemmings, there was nothing to do BUT come to me!

I tell you, it is unbearable. To have received the Virgin itself is almost more than can be borne, but to have to receive, to hear, to give aid to every lost soul is more than I, or any lone woman, can bear!

But bear it I must, and if the Virgin can stand unflinching in agony, so can I. I go talk to the ancient woman and the 7-year-old boy. They are dirty, their clothes are nothing but rags, and they are hungry. They have gotten here by busses, when they had the money, and then by the occasional lift, when the money ran out. They slept in fields, or knocked on farmhouse doors and asked to spend the night in the barn. They smell, and not pleasantly. And now, they are here, and they have, they think, arrived.

And what am I to do with them?