Could that all be true? She didn’t trust this joker; Byrne had erudition enough but played it for laughs.
Our forefathers had a custom of (in the Hibernian idiom) fasting against an offender or debtor, that is, starving conspicuously outside his door. Saint Patrick himself is said to have fasted against his Maker on his namesake mountain in Mayo, with noted success: he shamed the Almighty into granting him the right to judge the Irish in the Last Days. In India, too, protest by means of doorstep fasting has become so prevalent that the Viceroy is proposing to ban it. As to whether little Miss O’Donnell is expressing some juvenile grievance by passing up four months of breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, this correspondent has not yet been able to determine.
Lib wanted to throw the paper in the fire. Had the fellow no heart? Anna was a child in trouble, not a joke for the summertime entertainment of newspaper readers.
“What does it say about me, Mrs. Lib?”
She shook her head. “It’s not about you, Anna.”
To distract herself, Lib glanced at the headlines in thick black, matters of world importance. The general election; union of Moldavia and Wallachia; Veracruz besieged; ongoing volcanic eruption in Hawaii.
No use. Lib didn’t care about any of it. Private nursing was always narrowing, and the peculiarity of this particular job had intensified the effect, shrinking her world to one small chamber.
She folded the paper into a tight stick and left it on her tea tray by the door. Then she checked every surface again, not because she still believed there was some hidden cache that Anna crept out to eat during the nun’s shifts, but just for something to do.
In her nightdress, the child sat knitting wool stockings. Could Anna have some unvoiced grievance after all? Lib wondered.
“Time to get into bed.” She beat the pillows into shape so they’d keep the girl’s head up at the correct angle. She made her notes.
Dropsy no better.
Gums ditto.
Pulse: 98 beats per minute.
Lungs: 17 respirations per minute.
When the nun came in for her shift, Anna was already dozing.
Lib found she had to speak, even though the woman resisted her every overture. “Five days and four nights, Sister, and I’ve seen nothing. Please tell me, for our patient’s sake, have you?”
A hesitation, and then the nun shook her head. Even more quietly: “Perhaps because there’s been nothing to see.”
Meaning what—that there’d been no surreptitious feeding because Anna was indeed a living wonder who thrived on a diet of prayer alone? A fug of the ineffable filled this cabin—this whole country—and it turned Lib’s stomach.
She spoke as tactfully as she could. “I have something to say. It’s not about Anna so much as us.”
That hooked the nun. After a long moment, she said, “Us?”
“We’re here to observe, aren’t we?”
Sister Michael nodded.
“Yet to study something can mean interfering with it. If one puts a fish in a tank or a plant in a pot for purposes of observation, one changes its conditions. However it is that Anna’s been living over the past four months—everything’s different now, wouldn’t you agree?”
The nun only put her head to one side.
“Because of us,” Lib spelled out. “The watch has altered the situation that’s being watched.”
Sister Michael’s eyebrows soared, disappeared behind the band of white linen.
Lib pressed on. “If by any chance there’s been some subterfuge going on in this house over the past months, our surveillance must have put an end to it, beginning on Monday. So there’s a very real possibility that you and I are the ones preventing Anna from getting nourishment now.”
“We’re doing nothing!”
“We’re watching, every minute. Haven’t we pinned her like a butterfly?” The wrong image; too morbid.
The nun shook her head, not once but over and over.
“I hope I’m wrong,” said Lib. “But if I’m right, if the child’s had nothing for five days now…”
Sister Michael didn’t say That couldn’t be or Anna needs no food. Her only reply was “Have you noted some serious change in her condition?”
“No,” Lib admitted. “Nothing I can put my finger on.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then, what, Sister?” Was God in his heaven and all right with the world? “What do we do?”
“What we were hired to do, Mrs. Wright. No more, no less.” And with that, the nun sat down and opened her holy book like a barricade.
This farm woman who’d ended up in the House of Mercy was no doubt a good soul, Lib thought in exasperation. And probably intelligent in her own way, if only she could let her mind roam beyond the boundaries prescribed by her superiors and their master in Rome. We vow to be of use, Sister Michael had boasted, but what real use was she here? Lib thought of what Miss N. had told a nurse she’d sent back to London after only a fortnight at Scutari: At the front, anyone who’s not useful is an impediment.
In the kitchen, the Rosary had begun. The O’Donnells, John Flynn, and their maid were on their knees already as Lib passed through, all of them chanting, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Didn’t these people hear what they were saying? What about Anna O’Donnell’s daily bread?
Lib shoved the door open and went out into the night.
Sleep led her, over and over, back to the base of that cliff pictured on the holy card, the one with the cross looming at its highest point and the gigantic red heart beneath it, pulsing. Lib had to mount the staircase hacked into the rock face. Her legs strained and shook under her, and no matter how many steps she climbed, she never got any nearer the top.
This was Saturday morning, she realized when she woke in the dark.
When she reached the cabin, she saw the washing stretched on the bushes, looking wetter than ever after yesterday’s rain.
Sister Michael was by the bedside watching the rise and fall of the small chest under the tangled blanket. Lib’s eyebrows lifted in a silent question.
The nun shook her head.
“How much water has she taken?”
“Three spoons,” whispered Sister Michael.
Not that it mattered; it was only water.
The nun collected her things and went out without another word.
A square of light moved slowly across Anna: right hand, chest, left hand. Did children of eleven generally sleep so long? Lib wondered. Or was it because Anna’s system was running on no fuel?
Just then Rosaleen O’Donnell came in from the kitchen, and Anna blinked awake. Lib moved away to the dresser to allow the morning greeting.
The woman stood between her daughter and the pale lemony sun. As Rosaleen leaned over to engulf the child in her usual embrace, Anna put her hand up flat against her mother’s expanse of bony chest.
Rosaleen O’Donnell froze.
Anna shook her head, wordless.
Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened up and put her fingers to the girl’s cheek. On the way out, she gave Lib a venomous look.
Lib felt shaken; she’d done nothing. Was it her fault if the girl had finally had enough of being fawned over by her hypocrite of a mother? Whether Rosaleen O’Donnell was behind the hoax or had merely turned a blind eye to it, at the very least she was standing by now while her daughter began her sixth day of fasting.
Refused mother’s greeting, Lib noted in her memorandum book. Then wished she hadn’t, because this record was supposed to be limited to medical facts.
On her way back to the village that afternoon, Lib pushed open the rusty gate of the cemetery. She was curious to see Pat O’Donnell’s grave.