visitor’s chair.
“Did Aggie not tell you why I wanted you to come?” He smiled at her, looking sincere. “I’ve got a lot to ask your forgiveness
for.”
Amy clenched her jaw. “Too bad you can’t ask Mom,” she said, not bothering to hide her bitterness.
“It is too bad,” he agreed. “I’ve asked God to forgive me, over and over.”
Amy stood up. “Yeah, well, that’s great, Daddy, and I’m sure it makes you feel better. But frankly, it’s a little late! And
quite
frankly—” she almost said it. Almost left.
But if there was anything to this, anything at all, she could not in good conscience abort the process.
She sat back down.
And stayed two weeks, long enough to get her father home and settled on the road to recovery.
When she finally got back to Bermuda and aboard Care Away, she and Colin had a fight. A horrendous, unprecedented fight—in
which things were said that could not be taken back. Things that made it impossible to remain on the boat a moment longer.
She had taken Jamie with her. To Georgia.
15 fathers and sons
That Saturday was Brother Bartholomew’s birthday. His fiftieth birthday. The worst birthday of his life.
Sitting in the chair in the one-room cottage that measured ten feet by eighteen feet, staring at the lintel of the door on
which he had just struck his head, Brother Bartholomew wondered if he had ever been so miserable. Not even as a corpsman in
Viet Nam, and certainly not in nearly twenty years in the friary. This was the worst.
This was—
wretched
.
In a way, that doorway summed up everything. The cottage had been built two centuries earlier, when the height of the average
Bermudian had been five-foot-four. Bartholomew was six feet. As long as he remembered to duck, he was fine. The trouble was,
he kept forgetting.
And that bed! He glared over at “the rack.” He called it that, not as a colloquialism left over from his Marine Corps days,
but as a medieval instrument of torture. Nor could he blame the rack on eighteenth-century Bermudians; it was a thoroughly
modern invention, a bed that could be folded in half to masquerade as a sofa, if he ever had any company. Which he never did.
Like the door, it was just under six feet tall, with arms at both ends. Which meant that anyone his height or taller could
not lie out straight on it, even if he slept diagonally. Plus, there was a hard ridge down the middle, where the fold was.
If he was exhausted, he might get three hours of sleep before the rack contrived to awaken him.
He would have simply put the mattress on the floor, were it not for the cockroaches. If there was one creature on earth that
Bartholomew purely loathed, it was the cockroach. To him, they were worse than snakes or spiders; they seemed the embodiment
of evil. They came out only at night, and no matter how many you killed, there was always one more.
“Happy Birthday!” he exclaimed aloud, to break the silence. That was another thing: In the cottage the silence was so total,
it actually seemed to have a ringing quality to it.
The sad part was, his birthday had not started off that badly. When he had returned to the cottage from a morning of edging
grassy footpaths, he found that the sisters had left some ripe oranges for him, picked from the property’s little citrus grove.
With them was a manila envelope with his name on it.
It was a fax from home, from the young people in the calligraphy guild. They had composed and beautifully lettered a greeting
in Latin:
Diem Natalem Age,
Frater Bartolomeo,
tibi Deum precamur
—Happy Birthday, Brother Bartholomew, we’re praying for you.
He could have cried.
Homesickness, like breaking surf, had washed over him before. Yet he’d always been able to regain his footing and shake it
off. But this was a tidal wave—and for once, he gave in to it.
In his mind he was back in the friary’s
Scriptorium
, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Through the open window
“Did Aggie not tell you why I wanted you to come?” He smiled at her, looking sincere. “I’ve got a lot to ask your forgiveness
for.”
Amy clenched her jaw. “Too bad you can’t ask Mom,” she said, not bothering to hide her bitterness.
“It is too bad,” he agreed. “I’ve asked God to forgive me, over and over.”
Amy stood up. “Yeah, well, that’s great, Daddy, and I’m sure it makes you feel better. But frankly, it’s a little late! And
quite
frankly—” she almost said it. Almost left.
But if there was anything to this, anything at all, she could not in good conscience abort the process.
She sat back down.
And stayed two weeks, long enough to get her father home and settled on the road to recovery.
When she finally got back to Bermuda and aboard Care Away, she and Colin had a fight. A horrendous, unprecedented fight—in
which things were said that could not be taken back. Things that made it impossible to remain on the boat a moment longer.
She had taken Jamie with her. To Georgia.
15 fathers and sons
That Saturday was Brother Bartholomew’s birthday. His fiftieth birthday. The worst birthday of his life.
Sitting in the chair in the one-room cottage that measured ten feet by eighteen feet, staring at the lintel of the door on
which he had just struck his head, Brother Bartholomew wondered if he had ever been so miserable. Not even as a corpsman in
Viet Nam, and certainly not in nearly twenty years in the friary. This was the worst.
This was—
wretched
.
In a way, that doorway summed up everything. The cottage had been built two centuries earlier, when the height of the average
Bermudian had been five-foot-four. Bartholomew was six feet. As long as he remembered to duck, he was fine. The trouble was,
he kept forgetting.
And that bed! He glared over at “the rack.” He called it that, not as a colloquialism left over from his Marine Corps days,
but as a medieval instrument of torture. Nor could he blame the rack on eighteenth-century Bermudians; it was a thoroughly
modern invention, a bed that could be folded in half to masquerade as a sofa, if he ever had any company. Which he never did.
Like the door, it was just under six feet tall, with arms at both ends. Which meant that anyone his height or taller could
not lie out straight on it, even if he slept diagonally. Plus, there was a hard ridge down the middle, where the fold was.
If he was exhausted, he might get three hours of sleep before the rack contrived to awaken him.
He would have simply put the mattress on the floor, were it not for the cockroaches. If there was one creature on earth that
Bartholomew purely loathed, it was the cockroach. To him, they were worse than snakes or spiders; they seemed the embodiment
of evil. They came out only at night, and no matter how many you killed, there was always one more.
“Happy Birthday!” he exclaimed aloud, to break the silence. That was another thing: In the cottage the silence was so total,
it actually seemed to have a ringing quality to it.
The sad part was, his birthday had not started off that badly. When he had returned to the cottage from a morning of edging
grassy footpaths, he found that the sisters had left some ripe oranges for him, picked from the property’s little citrus grove.
With them was a manila envelope with his name on it.
It was a fax from home, from the young people in the calligraphy guild. They had composed and beautifully lettered a greeting
in Latin:
Diem Natalem Age,
Frater Bartolomeo,
tibi Deum precamur
—Happy Birthday, Brother Bartholomew, we’re praying for you.
He could have cried.
Homesickness, like breaking surf, had washed over him before. Yet he’d always been able to regain his footing and shake it
off. But this was a tidal wave—and for once, he gave in to it.
In his mind he was back in the friary’s
Scriptorium
, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Through the open window
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