7
"'Of all these people, the Belgae are the… the most courageous because they are far… farthest removed from the… '"
Sister Maggie suppressed the urge to translate the difficult word for the little girl, opting instead for simple encouragement.
"Keep going, Fina. You've got it so far."
Big brown eyes glanced up at her, then refocused on the text.
"'Farthest removed from the… the culture and civilization of the Province.'"
"That's wonderful! You are so good at this."
And she was. Little Serafina Martinez might be only nine but she was already reading from Caesar's Gallic Wars—not fluently, of course, but her grasp of Latin vocabulary and sentence structure was beyond anything Maggie had ever seen in someone her age. Knowing how to speak Spanish didn't hurt, but still…
And language wasn't Fina's only strong point. She was a whiz in math too, already doing simple algebraic equations.
No question about it: This girl was the brightest child Maggie had encountered in nearly twenty years of teaching. Best of all was her hunger to learn. Her brain was a sponge, sucking up everything that came within reach. The child actually looked forward to her thrice-weekly after-school sessions with Maggie.
"I think that's enough for today, Fina. You did great. Pack up your things."
She watched Fina stow her Latin book in an oversized, overstuffed backpack that must have weighed as much as she. Well, perhaps not that much. Fina still had her baby fat, but less of it this year than last. And were those budding breasts beginning to swell beneath the top of her plaid uniform jumper?
Fina wasn't one of the cool kids in school. Makeup wasn't allowed in St. Joseph's Elementary, but already some of the girls were starting to strut what little stuff they had: shortening the hems of their jumpers up to thigh level, pushing their knee socks down to their ankles. Fina remained oblivious to that. She kept her hair unfashionably short and, if anything, her jumper was overly long; she kept her socks all the way up to her knees. But she had plenty of friends; her easy smile and winning sense of humor guaranteed she'd never be a social outcast.
But Maggie worried about Fina. The child was approaching a critical juncture in her life. When her hormones kicked in and ignited a growth spurt, her baby fat would very likely rearrange into more womanly curves. If she turned out to resemble her mother, even remotely, the boys would start to circle. And then she might have to decide: Be popular or be smart.
Maggie had seen it happen so many times—bright children dumbing down to be with the "in" crowd—because cool kids found school "boring"; cool kids didn't care about anything except what was pulsing through their grafted-on headphones; and cool kids certainly didn't get A's.
If Fina stayed in St. Joe's, Maggie was sure she or one of her sister nuns could keep her on the road to academic excellence and help her reach her full potential. But Maggie feared this might well be Fina's last year here.
Maggie's too if those pictures were ever made public.
"Any word on your father?" she asked as the child began to struggle into the straps of her backpack.
Fina paused in her efforts, then shrugged the pack onto her back. Her lips trembled.
"He's going to jail."
Maggie had known this was coming. For years her father, Ignacio, had been in and out of rehab for cocaine. Last year it looked like he'd finally made it. He'd found a decent job that had eased the family's financial burdens. Even so, the tuition cost of sending four children to St. Joe's, despite the break the parish allowed for each successive child, strained their budget to the limit. But they'd been getting by. And then Ignacio was caught selling cocaine. It wasn't his first arrest, so this time he was sentenced to a jail term.
Maggie smoothed the child's glossy black hair. "I'm so sorry, Fina."
Fina's mother Yolanda was already working three jobs. Without her husband's income she was going to have to pull her children out of St. Joe's and send them to public school. They'd wind up at PS 34 up on East Twelfth. Maggie knew some good teachers there, but it was an entirely different atmosphere. She feared the public school meat grinder would chew up Fina and spit her out. And even if she did manage to keep her head, no way could she receive the one-on-one guidance Maggie offered.
She'd gone to Sister Superior and Father Ed, but the parish was tapped out. No more financial assistance available.
So Maggie had searched elsewhere for financial aid. And as an indirect result of that search, she was now being blackmailed.
How could something begun with such good intentions have turned out so wrong?
Maggie knew the answer. And hated it. She'd been weak.
Well, she'd never be weak again.
She walked Fina out to the late bus and saw her off. But instead of returning to the convent, she unlocked the door to the basement and entered the church's soup kitchen. The Loaves and Fishes served a hearty lunch every day. Volunteers from the parish ran it during the week, with Maggie and the other teaching nuns pitching in on weekends and holidays.
She wound her way between the deserted tables toward the rear. Just outside the kitchen door she grabbed a chair and dragged it through. She set it before the stove and turned on one of the burners, turning the flame to high. She removed the two-inch-long steel crucifix from around her neck, then pulled a pair of kitchen tongs from a utensil drawer. She seated herself and pulled her skirt up to the top of her thighs. Using the tongs, she held the crucifix in the flame until it began to redden. Then she took a deep breath, stuck a dish rag between her teeth, and pressed the crucifix against the skin of her inner thigh.
Sister Maggie screamed into the towel but held the cross in place as the smoke and stench of burning flesh rose into her face.
Finally she pulled it away and leaned back, weak and sweaty.
After a moment she looked down at the angry red, blistering cross, identical in shape and size to three other healing burns on her thighs.
Four down, she thought. Three more to go. One for each time she'd sinned.
I'm sorry, Lord. I was weak. But I'm strong now. And these scars will remind me never to be weak again.