If you listen closely to the wind, you will hear beneath its rush the voices of dead children crying out to their lost mothers. Theirs must be a beautiful place, though lonely as they fly over woods and fields, down ridges and along streams, singing to themselves in the darkness.
We knot rags and tie them to the ends of sticks, soak them in kerosene. The rank smoky smell recalls the lamp at Uncle Don's lodge on the lake where Jack and I went to swim on hot nights. Afterwards we'd lie naked on the shadowy porch drinking beer and watching moths batter themselves against the lamp's chimney. Sometimes one got inside and, overcome by the heat, dropped sizzling into the flame.
It's the mothers who're lost, not the children, Father John tells us. No child of God is ever lost. What does he mean? In the daylight only the mothers are there, some angry, some crying, some whose faces show nothing at all. To us. God knows what's in their hearts, Father John says.
There's a scene from Madame Butterfly: A chorus of workmen come to her house at night in a torchlit column that winds back and forth in bobbing curves down a wooded hillside. The music is serene, hopeful. It grows softer and softer, finally fades away.
Ahead the torches of our group jerk and wave, stab up into the midnight sky, cut fiery arcs in the darkness. We are nothing like Madame Butterfly in our haste and anger. But our concern, finally, is the same. As it has always been for every woman.
Jack was a good boy. He wanted to marry me. But he was only a boy, and I didn't want to marry him. Not him nor any boy. Not then.
Squad cars with flashing lights move in slow arcs through the clinic parking lot. They halt. Officers wave flashlights and stand in a line separating us from the building.
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What is that beautiful place where the children persist? Where
they wait for their mothers' deaths? Nowhere we are allowed to know.
Even imagining its peacefulness may be a sin, because the thought
of it somehow excuses the act that put the children there. Father
John says so: We must never acknowledge the act, only its consequences.
Jack went with me. He was more worried than I was. Then. The counsellor talked to us: "Are you sure you want to do this?" Jack wasn't. I was. Then.
There are shouts, Father John's thin tenor chanting "God have mercy on you." A torch arcs through the darkness, lands on the clinic's roof sputtering like the moth in the lamp chimney.
A crash of glass. Light brightens behind a patrol car, races beneath, around, over it and the car explodes in a roar of flames. Curses, screams, fleshy thwacking of billy clubs. More torches fly in the night. Then quick flashes, an instant later bangs.
Does one sin justify another? Father John said we can't make such discriminations. Sins, part of our lives, occur in time connected by their own causal fabric: How I act makes other people do what they do, which causes me to react, on and on.
Jack went to seminary. He's a priest somewhere. Our baby went to limbo. The policeman went to the hospital. I went to jail. Father John went to his grave.
What does it mean? Do the children in their beautiful place sing about our deeds or are their songs of things we can't know? Do they — would they — even recognize us their mothers? Are we that small in God's design?
