Blood Flowers - Softcover

Mary Judith Ress, Judith Ress

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440194580 ISBN 13: 9781440194580

Verlag: iUniverse, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In 1969, Sister Meg Carney is fresh out of the Novitiate and sent as a missionary to Chile-just in time to witness the overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the aftermath of the brutal military coup, the priest she works with is murdered and she herself is the target of surveillance. Burned out, grieving over the loss of her compañero, Alfredo, and no longer the young nun who had set out so enthusiastically to bring God's word to the Chilean people six years earlier, Meg accepts an invitation from her Mother Superior to work in El Salvador where she will join Theo, her best pal from Novitiate days, and her former Novice Mistress "Queen Mum." Smugly feeling she is now a savvy missionary, Meg is soon set straight by Theo who tells her an entirely different revolution is taking place in El Salvador. Fed by Biblical refl ection rather than by Marxist analysis, Meg is soon caught up in events that bring revolutionary forces to a head. As Meg-a woman burdened by her vow of chastity-struggles with her religious vocation to serve the poor, she somehow manages to fi nd love and peace in the rawness of life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary Judith Ress is a journalist and editor who has been living and working in Latin America since 1970. Her non-fiction work Ecofeminism in Latin America won second place in "Best Gender Issues" at the Catholic Press Association in 2007. She has two grown sons and lives in Santiago, Chile.

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Blood Flowers

By Mary Judith Ress

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Mary Judith Ress
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4401-9458-0

Chapter One

October 1, 1975

Meg glanced at her watch, then settled wearily back in her seat and lit a cigarette. 2:15 p.m. Another hour before the plane landed.

On the tray table, her leather notebook with the letter she'd started glared back at her.

Dear Aunt Kay, Once again, thanks for your generous contribution for buying yet another "pagan baby" and saving it from the jaws of hell.

Dear Kay, her fat, exotic Japanese aunt from New York. Meg must have written dozens of these bread-and-butter letters from Chile during the last five years to thank her for the checks she sent to "save the pagan babies."

When had that joke about the pagan babies started? Oh yes, Meg remembered, taking a long drag on her cigarette. It was the summer she and Theo traveled to New York for a last fling before the two nuns left for Latin America-Meg to Chile and Theo to El Salvador. Meg had done her mother's bidding and paid what was to be a perfunctory visit to this black sheep relative.

It was coming back now: the surreal apartment with its profuse assortment of antiques and erotic nudes jumping off the walls, Sumio quietly floating in and out to fill the sake cups. Meg never figured out if he was Kay's servant, her spiritual son, or her lover. Kay herself in a bright orange pants suit, bejeweled to the nines, layers of fat rippling all over her body. Not sexy, yet somehow sensuous.

Meg had been about five when her Uncle Joe moved his Japanese war bride and their little son, Chuckie, from her grandparents' farm outside Pittsburgh to out-of-visiting-range Syracuse. She suspected he made the move because the family never accepted Kay's "foreign ways." Joe died ten years later and Kay moved to New York and set up a boutique-no one was quite sure what it was she sold, but family gossip had it that her aunt was doing more than just getting by.

Meg squirmed in her seat recalling that visit. She had dragged Theo along and was slightly annoyed that her friend seemed nonplused by what Meg felt were her aunt's exhibitionist ways. Yet Kay had drawn them both out-and how she probed! Why had they decided to become nuns? How did one endure being celibate when the union of male and female was ordained by God himself? Why did they want to be missionaries in Latin America? Meg had been caught off guard by the frank questions, by Kay's black pin-point eyes gazing knowingly into her soul.

"I'll write you," Kay promised as she hugged her niece goodbye. "And every once in a while I'll include some money so you can save a pagan baby or a pagan adult from the jaws of hell."

I gave your last check to a young mother of four whose husband had been picked up by Chile's secret police several months ago and has not been seen since. He was a factory worker and I guess the dictatorship thought he was a subversive.

Mario. Factory worker, fantastic guitarist, community organizer. One of the latest in a string of friends who had disappeared under the Pinochet regime.

Meg crushed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the arm of her seat and snapped shut the metal top. That's the last one, she promised herself. No smoking in El Salvador.

With six years of experience in Chile under her belt, she was now heading for another country under military rule. From what she'd read, El Salvador had been headed by one general or another for the last hundred years. Even so, it can't be as bad as Chile, she thought. Meg glanced at her dull, scuffed reflection in the plane's window. She could make out some gray in her sandy blond hair, some lines around the eyes-they seemed a darker blue then the last time she looked in a mirror. How long ago was that? She couldn't remember. She tried out the old winning smile she knew was her best asset. It still worked if she tried hard enough, she thought, sighing with relief. Just a bit out of practice. Funny how her mouth felt as if it had tightened over the years. Well, no one, not even Alfredo, ever praised her for her voluptuous mouth.

Meg appraised the rest of her and decided she was still relatively attractive. Five feet four and 120 pounds with the map of Ireland printed on her face, as her Da used to say. Back in the Novitiate, Molly had convinced her that she was Aphrodite incarnate. "You prove all my relatives wrong, Meggins," Molly was fond of telling her. "My Uncle Micky thinks the convent is a stomping ground for the world's plainest women. Uncle Charlie bets that most nuns have been jilted by their fiances. And my cousin Bridie believes we're all closet lesbians."

Because she was beginning a new mission, Meg had donned her lightweight gray rayon suit, complete with the mission cross on her lapel, and her sensible black pumps, the prescribed dress for a Sister of Charity. But she felt like a cutout that no longer fit. She wondered if she could go back to her hippy nun look of jeans and a sweat shirt once she'd rolled up her sleeves and got to work in El Salvador.

She leaned back and closed her eyes. Meg had to admit that she was burnt out. She was certainly no longer the young nun who'd set out so enthusiastically in 1969 to bring God's word to the Chilean people. Mother Ursula was probably right to reassign her. Besides, she knew that every move she made was closely watched by the secret police. She didn't mind them stalking her, but she didn't want to endanger Madre Rosa and Molly and her friends back in La Bandera, the shantytown on Santiago's south side where she had worked these past six years.

She reached for another cigarette, then remembered her resolution and restlessly folded her hands in her lap. Here she was, a thirty-four-year-old nun, a supposed expert in bringing Christ's love to Latin America's poor. That's what being a Catholic missionary was all about, wasn't it? God knows that message had no edge these days.

Good Lord, was she actually praying? Meg opened her eyes and sat up. How long had it been since she'd really prayed? How long since she'd felt God's presence, felt him breathing down her back? She fleetingly remembered a line from her Novitiate journal: "I want to act on a Big Stage, be part of a mythic epic where good conquers evil. I want to slay dragons, battle demons, and forge common pale flesh into sainthood. I want to get inside God!"

She absently twirled the silver ring on her left hand, a symbol of the religious consecration she made so solemnly on that July day in 1969. Who in the hell was she wedded to now? God? The Sisters of Charity? The Chilean people? The memory of her martyred Alfredo?

Meg glanced down at her weather-beaten notebook with the breastplate of St. Patrick engraved on the cover. A gift from her mother on Profession Day. She pulled out the photos she kept tucked inside the jacket. Despite her melancholy mood, she smiled as she cupped the first one in her hands for a moment, as if to warm it. The Three Musketeers! There they were-two versions of them-encased in a yellowing plastic badge embroidered with Theo's fine needlework. On one side, a photo of the three of them together on their Mission Sending Day. The date scrawled underneath was August 15, 1969. In dark suits, white blouses, and their newly placed mission crosses around their necks, they stared into the camera wide eyed, apprehensive about where their adventures in Latin America might take them. Although it was a black-and-white mug shot, Molly's hair was still a wild...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1440194580
• ISBN 13: 9781440194580
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 284
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland