Fishing the Sloe-Black River Read Online Free

time.”
    Over tea and scones they begin to melt, these women. They surprise me with their cackle and their smiles. They ask of the old place. Brigid, they say. What a character. Was she always like that? The holy spirit up to the ears?
    Two nuns there had spent the last few years with her. They tell me that she had been living in El Salvador in a convent outside a coffee plantation. One day recently three other nuns in the convent were shot, one of them almost fatally, so Brigid slipped out to a mountain for a few hours to pray for their health. She was found three days later, sitting on a rock. They look at me curiously when I ask about her fingernails. No, they say, her fingernails were fine. It was the lack of food that did it to her. Five campesinos had carried her down from the mountain. She was a favorite among the locals. She had always taken food to the women in the adobe houses, and the men respected her for the way she had hidden it under her clothes, so they wouldn’t be shamed by charity. She’d spent a couple of weeks in a hospital in San Salvador, on an intravenous drip, then they transported her to Long Island to recover. She had never talked of any brothers or sisters, though she had gotten letters from Ireland. She did some of the strangest things in Central America, however. She carried a pebble in her mouth. It came all the way from the Sargasso Sea. She learned how to dance. She reared four piglets behind the sacristy in the local church. She had shown people how to skin rabbits. The pebble made little chips in her teeth. She had taken to wearing some very strange colored socks.
    I start to laugh.
    â€œEveryone,” says one of the nuns with a Spanish accent, “is allowed a little bit of madness, even if you’re a nun. I don’t see what’s wrong with that.”
    â€œNo, no, no, there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just thinking.”
    â€œIt does get cold down there, you know,” she replies.
    Someone talks about the time she burned the pinto beans. The time the pigs got loose from the pen. The time the rabbit ran away from her. Another says she once dropped a piece of cake from her dress when she knelt at the altar, and one of the priests, from Wales, said that God gave his only begotten bun. But the priest was forgiven for the joke since he was not a blasphemer, just a bit of a clown. The gardener comes in, a man from Sligo, and says: “I’ve seen more fat on a butcher’s knife than I have on your sister.” I leave the scone raisins on the side of the saucer. I am still laughing.
    â€œCan I see her?” I say, turning to the nun who opened the door for me. “I really need to see her. I have a friend waiting for me outside and I must go soon.”
    The nun shuffles off to the kitchen. I wait. I think of a piece of turf and the way it holds so much history. I should have brought my sister a sod of soil. Or a rock. Or something.
    An old nun, with an African accent, singing a hymn, comes out of the kitchen, carrying a piece of toast and a glass of water. She has put a dollop of jam on the side of a white plate, “for a special occasion.” She winks at me and tells me to follow her. I feel eyes on my back, then a hum of voices as we leave the dining area. She leads me up the stairs, past a statue, eerie and white, down a long clean corridor, toward a room with a picture of Archbishop Romero on the door. We stop. I hold my breath. A piece of turf. A rock. Anything.
    â€œGo in, child.” The nun squeezes my hand. “You’re shaking.”
    â€œThank you,” I say. I stand at the door and open it slowly. “Brigid?” The bedclothes are crumpled as if they’ve just been tossed. “Brigid. It’s me. Sheona.”
    There’s no sound, just a tiny hint of movement in the bedsheets. I walk over. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there inside them. Her hair is netted and gray. The lines on her