Jo Canon - Blessings

When I look at Beatrice, head nodding as she dozes in her wheelchair, I know I’ve had my share of blessings. We care for her like the baby none of us had. She’s sweeter, more placid than an infant; she always was. Her smile’s the same, though her mind is hidden behind steamed glass. She still knows me. When we were young the affection and fervour stored inside us like stones in fruit had to find expression somehow. We didn’t know why we were kept apart. Or why in the end Mother Superior took me aside.

‘Theresa, our mission in Africa needs you. You must go soon. God is calling you.’

For years I talked to Beatrice in my head. I whittled every conversation we’d had, shaving off meaning curl by curl. I couldn’t say why I woke in tears, or what I missed. The answer I knew lay in words. But what use were they when for weeks before I left, she would neither speak nor listen?

Except to say, ‘I’ve been praying. It’s a sin.’

A swift, sharp twisting in the throat.

When I returned to the convent years later, before she became ill, we spoke of that time. I learned that many of my letters had been kept from her. Pages were removed, their intensity censored. Did Mother Superior know what she was doing? Attachments were supposed to distract us from our calling. But what else remains? Like the tenderness I feel when I tend her frail body: all that’s left of my Beatrice now.

The mission was a scattering of mud brick, white-washed buildings outside a village: a small clinic, church, library and guest room. Each woman had a thatched round hut. I picked up the language fast, aided by the two local nuns. Chichewa isn’t difficult, with seven words for washing, but none for the emotions that sluiced through me as I quietly performed my litany of duties. My dreams in Chichewa were serene, not played out hopelessly before an audience of one.

We trained novices, a stream of young women through the years, most barely more than children. But they were mothers too, or soon became so. They’d leave the mission one weekend and come back married on Monday. A few months later they’d briefly disappear again, returning with a baby strapped on the back. It didn’t matter. No one came to see. Mother Superior’s fierce definition of sin was as meaningless here as the Christmas card of a white, plump baby Jesus she sent the mission every year.

‘Sister, I stole sugar from the shop.’

‘Sister, I had sex with a man for money.’

The novices told me everything. Not in confessional, but at my wooden table with a bottle of Fanta and two chipped glasses between us. At first I resisted. Yet they worked so hard in the fields before lessons, and worried so much about their children. I knew it was incorrect, but I absolved them.

‘Say a prayer when you pass the shop.’

‘Don’t see that man again. He’s no good for you.’

In the absence of a priest, I gave negligible penances.

Occasionally passing travellers in four-wheel drives pulled up at the village shop in a vain hunt for beer. They dithered outside, hugely pink and baffled, while children twittered like flycatchers around them. And for a few years we had a regular visitor: Ian, the young aid-agency doctor from the district hospital three miles away. He came in the land rover the first time, bumping carefully up the red dirt road with dogs and children galloping beside, to ask if our clinic might be used as a vaccination station. We had no fridge, but vaccines stay cold for an afternoon in a clay pot of water. New to Malawi, he looked around the clinic anxiously.

‘There’s nothing here.’

I showed him sheets cut in strips and neatly edged to make bandages; needles and razor blades boiled and stored in disinfectant; bottles of gentian violet. The concrete floor was swept and scrubbed daily.

‘It’s enough.’

It wasn’t, but I’d grown used to scarcity.

Later Ian would visit on Sunday afternoons, cycling beside the railway track to arrive unannounced like an angel. He talked of his work and self-doubt, the pain and poverty all around. Fifteen years younger, more hopeful than I, he foresaw change and improvement. His words slid little points of meaning into my mind. He borrowed from our library, ransacking the mildewed cartons of donated books that I was taking years to unpack. We marvelled at the titles that end up in a mission library, bequeathed from the estates of dead men far away. He drank tea and ate peanuts at my table, and gave me his delicate ink drawings to brighten my walls. My room felt meagre when he went. I’d seek out Blessings, the little boy who spent most afternoons in the shade thrown by my hut, and scoop him into my lap.

The mission was full of children. Village kids darted around, rolled through my room, or sat in a staring solemn line while I read. So many, they became one hilarious, tumbling child. They dressed in absurd rags – an old bra belted round the waist, a pair of bloomers worn like a blouse. Their names bizarre: Fatness, Trouble, Mattress. The nuns suggested more fitting ones – Mary, Peter, Margaret – but none stuck. Childhood was pitifully short. By age five or six they carried water in tin cans on their heads and scraped the soil with their mothers. But no child touched me like Blessings. He was quieter, more watchful, than the others. Whenever I sat down he climbed onto my lap. I worried about his dull skin and the orange patches in his hair. His destitute mother came and went from the village on desperate errands, staying away for weeks. She knew we would feed him in her absence. Some nights I woke to find Blessing’s hard little body tucked under my armpit.

One Sunday afternoon Ian and I were drinking tea and discussing books when an excited bunch of children ran towards us.

‘Sister, come quickly!’

Blessings lay curled in the shade of a mango tree. He’d been there all morning. I assumed he was asleep. Now I saw his chest heave with each breath; the skin between his ribs suck in and out; his glazed eyes. I pulled down one hot, dry eyelid and recognised the sick pallor of malaria.

Ian said, ‘Help me get a drip up.’

He took a needle from his pocket and tried to insert it into Blessing’s frail arm, but the collapsed veins had shrunk beneath the skin. The child lay crucified; he didn’t flinch or cry out as the point went in again and again. Ian lacerated the little boy’s arms and legs, cutting down with a razor blade to find a deep vein. The children watched silently. I pushed the doctor away and sealed my mouth over Blessing’s, tasting apple-like sweat and acrid vomit as I tried to blow back his life. I couldn’t stop. His chest rose and fell with mine, while the sun poured out on us its white, empty light.

‘Theresa, leave him now. It’s futile.’

Ian held my arm as we looked at Blessing’s body in the dust beneath the mango tree. Children sobbed and hugged each other and darted forward to touch his cooling skin. Mothers ran keening, each desperate that the dead child not be theirs. The doctor’s hand trembled and I knew he was right: there was no point, none at all.

Weeks passed then while I did little but farm. Abandoning my habit for tee shirt and chitenje, I hacked at the ground to plant the maize we’d need next year. Without my veil the sun’s hands pressed me down into the earth. Blessing’s mother returned and I led her to the little heap of soil strewn with jacaranda blossom. I hugged her awkwardly, both of us dry eyed, and murmured words of solace I no longer believed.

Unaware that I’d changed, the novices still came to my hut for tea and confession. Their sins were nothing, irrelevant frailties, compared with the monstrous, casual injustices they suffered.

I said, ‘If you sleep with him get him to use something.’

‘But sister, it’s not allowed.’

‘It’s different here. You’re allowed to keep safe. You have to look after yourself.’

And someone began to fill the God shaped hole in my heart: Ian, my friend. An impossible, foolish longing snarled my days and nights like barbed wire.

For the first time in years I studied myself in a mirror. As a young woman I was vain. There were few mirrors in the convent, but when I’d polished the one in the guest room my eyes slipped like fish to find their reflection. Mother Superior’s stern lecture on pride left me sobbing, and ever after when I cleaned glass I watched my hand, not my face. Now I held the oil lamp to my smeared image. I saw eyes in grey craters, dark triangles beneath sharp cheekbones: a gaunt, lined face. Ian had a lover, a beautiful young local woman, a nurse I supposed. I saw her once in the market. One of the girls, laughing, pointed her out and I pretended I wasn’t interested in gossip. He never spoke of her, perhaps assuming I’d disapprove. Yet it’s right and natural that a young man love and not be lonely.

Our Sunday conversations enclosed a new pain. He never guessed, I’m certain. If I weakened and my eyes searched his, I’d look away, get up and move about the room. Sometimes he looked at me curiously.

‘Are you all right Theresa? You don’t seem yourself.’

A professed atheist, he was shocked when I admitted what I’d lost.

‘But you’ve seen so many children die before Blessings. It’s hard, but we just have to do what we can. You’re burnt out, that’s all. Maybe you should go home for a bit, have a break.’

I considered the convent, my home. Mother Superior had long since died. Her replacement I heard was younger, kinder, more accepting of foibles. I remembered the cool high rooms and marble floor corridors; the clean grey morning light; the ageing good-tempered nuns, my friends. Haltingly I spoke of Beatrice.

He said, ‘Young girls get intense like that. It’s normal.’

I loved so ardently. Beatrice, Blessings, Ian: all that affection misplaced, wasted, disallowed. How could it be normal? God took my devotion and exiled me, then betrayed me at last by ceasing to exist.

‘You’ve done enough; you’re tired. Go home and see Beatrice. I’m sure she misses you. You’re a good person you know, Theresa. The best I ever met.’

Ian reached out and held my arm as he had that day under the mango tree.

That was all. And maybe it was enough.