‘Foreign Devils!’
The insult was thrown at Mary by the younger of the two with smallpox when first she came to tend them. It did not bother her. The young man from ‘up New England way’, as she subsequently found out, had probably never seen a nun before. To many like him, dark stories about nuns and nunneries had been told as a child. Just as you would tell stories of ghosts or pookahs, she knew, to frighten young listeners into obedience, or staying in bed once put there!
New Englanders, those from her own state, Massachusetts, were the most prejudicial.
To Abner Seaborn, nuns were aberrations. Foreign devils in strange garb. He repeated the well-worn quote to her that nuns were ‘Mournful prisoners in their convent doomed by unhappy love affairs to lives of sinful indolence.’
‘The Puritan Streak’, Louisa dismissed it as, fed by lurid novels such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel Dieu Nunnery in Montreal, in whose pages could be found stories of infants born to devilish Romish liaisons between priests and nuns. The infants would then be murdered and buried in convent basements. The myths perpetuated by this novel – published a quarter of a century earlier – and many since – still lived on.
The young man spoke again to Mary, ‘I’m a Christian man and I don’t hold with no Romish practices. I know all about them!’
‘What do you know about them?’ Mary asked patiently.
‘I heard a good and holy man – the Reverend Lyman Beecher – preach that, “The Catholic Church holds now in darkness and bondage nearly half the civilised world. It is the most skilful, powerful, dreadful system of corruption to those who yield to it, and of slavery and debasement to those who live under it.” And it frightened me so, that I remembered the Reverend’s words by heart,’ Abner Seaborn said, proudly.
‘Oh!’ was Mary’s only reply, not that she thought her own Church lived out the Christian teachings as Christ would have wanted, anymore than did the Reverend Beecher think it. She wondered what the Lord would say on Judgement Day about the Catholic Church’s silence on another kind of bondage? That which bound one person in servility to another. Or the Church’s abetting of it by deeming the black people to ‘have no souls’?
‘If they have no souls as the Church says, then how could they ever be saved?’ she had wondered to Louisa.
‘Oh, they have souls but misguided ones,’ Louisa had argued, ‘they need to hear the word of God.’
‘But if the only word of God they hear is that they are less than human and bound to be bound, then how will they ever listen to it?’
‘This war will change all that,’ Louisa answered. ‘The war is the word of God speaking. When the black people are freed, they will fall to their knees in thanksgiving.’
Mary thought the war more the word of Mammon speaking, than the word of God.
Whatever about souls, and those without, an the word of Mammon, Abner Seaborn had fever. The smallpox had seemed to over-run him quickly. Even so, when she tried to open his shirt, dampen his fire with the cold poultice, he slung her hands away.
‘Begone, Lucifer!’ he shouted at her. ‘You ain’t gittin’ my Christian soul!’ And he called on all the biblical demon-slayers he could muster to defend it from the ‘Winged Whore’ who had come to seize him.
Mary waited, until his rantings tired him. First, she mopped his brow, dampening his eyes until they closed, then dapped the raging pulse in his neck, all the while whispering to him, ‘Hush now, little Abner Seaborn – you’ve a big voice for a little man.’ Then she opened his shirt and daubed his boy’s hairless chest. ‘But you’re a brave little man to be out here fighting this big man’s war.’
She shouldered him over, starting with his back. He was only a child, maybe fifteen, she thought. He should still have been running around a New England farm, getting into mischief, being scolded by a loving mother. A fall, bruised knees, would yield an embrace. Arms around his small boy’s shoulders, the miscreant safely folded into forgiving skirts.
She looked at those shoulders now, too slight for a gun, and covered with angry pustules. Gingerly, she applied the poultice – bread-soda – all she could get. It had warmed in her hands from contact with him. She dipped it into the small billycan of water – the best ration doctor would allow. Its temperature was barely less than that of the poultice. Still, she wasted not a drop in the wringing out of it.
He murmured something.
‘There now, little fellow! There now!’ Mary answered, as she re-applied the sodden bread-soda, wondering what good it would do.
‘Your God is my God – your devils, mine too!’ She prayed over him for a speedy deliverance to the archangels and martyrs he had earlier summoned against her. Then she resettled the shirt on his back.
‘He won’t come out of it, Sister … will he?’ the other man, a Sergeant Doherty, asked.
‘I don’t suppose he will, Sergeant,’ she said, seeing his eyes fix on her answer.
‘I’d be better entirely if I was out there, charging a Rebel breastworks, taking a sight o’ them with me when I go, than malingerin’ in here!’ he said defiantly.
She laughed. ‘That you would, Sergeant Doherty, but you’re staying put here.’
‘But … !’ he started to argue.
‘No buts,’ she said firmly. ‘And I hold rank here!’
Afterwards, she wrung out the poultice as best she could. She would need it again. Provident in all things, the water Mary also kept. Water, even used water, was better than none.