Chapter 27 #2
Joseph felt his strength draining and stopped. All those years at seminary, he’d not fully realized how often his duties as a Priest would resemble those of a doctor—how often sick calls, Last Rites, and even Baptisms would bring him into contact with the distressing failings of the body.
“Father Lazare.” Even with her terrible burden, Hannah bobbed a curtsy. “Miss Teresa will be glad you’re here; but we need a few minutes yet.”
Joseph nodded mutely and watched her carry the bedclothes down the staircase.
“Don’t suppose you want me to announce you, then,” observed his young guide.
“No, thank you.”
The boy disappeared after Hannah, and Joseph stood alone on the veranda.
Curtains concealed the bedchamber’s interior, but through the open triple-hung window, he heard the familiar voices of his father and sister.
The rustling of cloth, the splashing of water, and the low voices of black women.
From these sounds, Joseph understood Hannah’s comment: the bed and Tessa’s own garments were being changed.
On a bench outside the chamber, Joseph set down his portmanteau.
He opened it and withdrew his soutane, as much for warmth as formality.
As he fastened the long line of buttons, Joseph tried to remember when Tessa had expected this child.
She’d carried it less than four months, by his estimation—closer to three.
Another maid emerged from the bedchamber, carrying a bloody basin.
Joseph fished in his portmanteau for his breviary, hoping it would steady him.
He should find his notes, the verses Father Baker had recommended for miscarriages.
But the renewed conversation inside the bedchamber drew his attention.
At first, the sound of Tessa’s voice gave him solace: it was irrefutable proof she had survived. Then the words dispelled peace with pain: “Am—Am I deformed in some way?”
Joseph sank onto the bench. For a moment, he was thirteen years old again, exposing himself to Dr. Moretti, waiting for approval.
He had purchased his Priesthood by surrendering his modesty.
These past few hours, how many people had seen Tessa even more vulnerable, even more ashamed?
That was the cost of her motherhood. But she was not a mother.
A mature black woman, probably the midwife, responded to Tessa first, her voice heavy with compassion. “No, honey.”
“You are perfectly formed,” Joseph’s father assured her.
“Then why couldn’t I hold onto Bean?”
“I wish I could give you an answer,” Joseph’s father sighed. “The truth is: most of the time, we cannot explain why a pregnancy fails.”
“I must have done something wrong,” Tessa argued weakly. “I should never have left the city; I shouldn’t have—”
Joseph’s father interrupted: “You did not cause this by riding in a carriage or walking up stairs or anything else.”
Hélène spoke up next. “If you want to blame someone, blame me.”
“You?” Tessa asked. “Ellie, how could this possibly be your fault?”
“I told Bean to hurry up, didn’t I?” Her voice broke. “I told her we couldn’t wait to meet her.”
“Sometimes, the good Lord just gathers these little ones to Himself right away,” the midwife soothed. “Sometimes, it’s a mercy, I think. In Heaven, your Bean is never going to feel hungry or sick—she is safe and happy and waiting for you, Miss Teresa.”
For several long moments, Joseph heard only muffled sobs.
“What I do know is this,” his father continued. “My own wife suffered such a loss, and so has Cathy. A miscarriage does not mean you cannot have healthy children.”
“But I want Bean,” Tessa whimpered. “May I hold her again? Please? Just a few minutes longer?”
Joseph heard water splashing again, then Tessa’s breath hitched anew.
“You take as long as you need, honey,” the midwife said.
“Oh Ellie, she must have been terrified!” Tessa cried. “I am so sorry, Bean!”
Joseph closed his eyes. This was not the first miscarriage he’d attended.
A few months ago, he’d arrived in time to speak the cold, conditional words: “If thou art a human being, I baptize thee…” What else would it be?
Its mother still loved it desperately, no matter its appearance, no matter that it clung to life only long enough to receive the Sacrament.
He’d been glad for the Latin; he’d hoped the mother had not understood.
Joseph made himself stand, clutching his breviary against the chest of his soutane, begging God to give him the right words.
His father strode through the triple-hung window, blocking his path. Above the waist, his father was stripped to his shirt and smeared with blood, yet he frowned at Joseph’s attire. “If you are going to increase that young woman’s misery, turn around right now.”
Joseph did turn around, but only because someone was approaching. Hannah. He returned his attention to his father. “Do you think I am heartless?” Joseph hissed.
“No, but your Church often is.”
“It’s not—” It’s not my Church, it’s the Church, he would have said.
But his father had already moved past him to ask Hannah where he and Hélène might change their clothes.
Cautiously, Joseph entered the bedchamber. Hélène moved from her friend’s side to ask: “Joseph, Edward and his father think that because Tessa hadn’t felt Bean moving yet, she didn’t have a soul yet. Is that true?”
This explained their behavior, though it did not excuse it. Joseph shook his head. “Bean has a soul—as immortal as yours or mine.”
Tessa raised her bloodshot eyes to him, but only for a moment.
Hélène promised to return soon, and the midwife left them too.
Propped on pillows, Tessa was swaddled in a baggy blue dressing gown with her knees drawn up beneath the bedclothes.
On this support, she cradled in both hands something so small Joseph could not see it even as he came to stand beside her.
She sheltered it as one might a baby bird fallen from its nest. As if its stillness were temporary.
As if sheer will might infuse it with life again.
“Edward wouldn’t even look at her,” Tessa whispered.
Joseph gathered the courage to share her pain.
The sight was more terrible than he had imagined—not because the little body did not resemble a child, but because it did.
What Joseph saw first was an impossibly tiny hand, balanced on Tessa’s thumb—utterly perfect yet fragile as glass.
Ears, nose, and mouth, already formed. Bean’s skin was translucent, revealing the delicate tracery of arteries.
Her eyes were veiled promises beneath the surface, just like a baby bird’s.
Tucked into a folded handkerchief, she filled Tessa’s palm, but nothing more. Three inches? Four?
“I baptized her as quickly as I could,” Tessa said. “I know the mother isn’t supposed to do it, but no one else knew how.”
For a moment the image seared through him: Tessa alone but for the slaves and the tiny being in her trembling hand, ignoring her own agony in order to save her child. Of course she was a mother, no matter how brief her daughter’s life. “Bean was born alive, then?”
Tessa closed her eyes and shook her head. “The Baptism wasn’t valid, was it?”
Joseph stared at his breviary. “No. I’m sorry.
” Did his father expect him to lie? Tessa had been a catechist; she knew this truth as well as Joseph did.
It was right there in the Gospel of John and in Bishop England’s catechism: “Is Baptism necessary to salvation? Yes; without it, we cannot enter the Kingdom of God.”
“My daughter is damned?”
Yes. But he must soften this. “Are you familiar with Limbo?”
“Isn’t that part of Hell?”
That was how Albertus Magnus had conceived it; Limbo meant “border.” Saint Augustine believed unbaptized children suffered the pains of Hell, only to a lesser degree than wicked adults.
Scripture simply did not address the fate of unbaptized children, and the Church had never explicitly confirmed or denied the existence of Limbo.
In the absence of a clear revelation, theologians could only speculate about where and how such souls would spend eternity.
But in Joseph’s experience, people were even more reluctant to accept “I don’t know” from a Priest than they were from a doctor.
“We do not believe unbaptized children suffer the pain of fire.”
“Is their banishment temporary, like Purgatory?”
“No.”
“Bean cannot ever enter Heaven?”
“Although she committed no fault of her own, because she wasn’t baptized, the stain of original sin has not been—cannot now be—washed from her soul. So she can never enter the presence of God.”
“Because of my sin?”
“Because of Eve’s sin, and Adam’s.” Transmitted to her through you.
Tessa stroked her daughter’s tiny head. “Bean won’t have to spend eternity like this, will she? She’ll have a better body than I could give her? Her eyes will open, and she’ll be able to run?”
Joseph clung to Politi’s theory: “Yes. At the Resurrection of the Dead, even unbaptized children will be given perfect bodies. She will be a young woman.”
“Can I see her, then? Can I—”
“No.”
Tessa’s grief leaked unceasingly, from her eyes and her nose. “I tried! I tried, Bean!”
The Stratfords offered Joseph breakfast. He ate without tasting anything.
He searched for a gentle way to tell Tessa that Bean could not be laid to rest in consecrated ground.
But she already knew. They decided to bury the little girl there on the plantation, at the edge of the Stratford family plot.
Hélène helped Tessa fashion a casket from a jewelry box.
Inside, they also placed a single kidney bean from the kitchen.
Liam carried his sister to the cemetery as if he were rescuing her from a collapsing house.
One of the negroes brought a chair for her.
Another slave bore a shovel, but Joseph’s father took it from him and dug the little grave himself.
Hélène carried the tiny casket. The elder Mr. Stratford did not join them, and Edward looked as if he would rather be anywhere else.
Joseph was forbidden to perform funeral rites, but he offered a prayer: “Lord, as we commit the body of this child to the earth, we commit her soul to Your judgment. Though You have not revealed to us the full fate of these little ones, we trust in Your infinite mercy.”
He read from the Psalms: “Show me Thy truth… Have mercy upon me, for I am desolate…”
Joseph closed his breviary. Tessa sat motionless, staring down at the fresh grave. Liam and Hélène stood on either side of her. Tessa gripped their hands so tightly that her knuckles were white, as though she might fall into the earth if she let go.
After several minutes of silence, Liam inquired gently: “Tessa, are you ready—”
Instead of answering, she murmured: “Will it be like she never left my womb?” Tessa glanced to her brother. “Do you remember the Irish name for Limbo?”
He nodded. “Dorchadas gan Phian. Darkness without Pain.”
“Is that right, Father?” Tessa asked.
Joseph hesitated. Most of the theologians who argued against the pain of fire argued for the pain of loss.
Other writers, like Saint Thomas Aquinas, concluded that unbaptized children must remain ignorant of their exile from Heaven.
“Bean isn’t suffering,” Joseph answered. “She doesn’t know what she’s lost.”
But Tessa knew.