The Nun and the Gardener

Fiacre gets down off his bike and leans it against a bench to watch over the beginning of another day, the making of a morning. Not even the slightest, quietest breeze rises to stir the mist that hangs lightly in strands among the branches, and the river flows sluggishly, its murmuring waters dark and deep and dappled, but mostly cold. The sun has yet to climb up from behind the low, distant mountains, but it has already brightened the sky with its influence and scored the underside of the few, scattered clouds with an intense orange border. Mornings are for reflection, for reconnecting with what lies above and beyond, a time when, before any other person can intrude upon the day, Fiacre leaves his room at the orphanage ahead of the tears and shouts that greet and spoil every perfect new beginning. His thoughts aren’t always clear, aren’t always good, but he tells the Sisters he needs to go to re-establish some kind of contact with God in the early morning, to make sense of orphans’ tears and broken hearts, to let God’s good earth honey his heart with love for the unloved. That’s what he tells the Sisters. Sometimes that’s what he tells himself, but his heart sneers at his sugar-coated lies and they make him feel ever so slightly guilty about taking a head-long plunge into the beauty of the morning. He remains instead the cynical observer, the outsider, embarrassed before the God he mocks as the one who was not, is not, and nevermore shall be. That’s what he tells himself. That’s what he feels. When the sun finally slips up over the horizon Fiacre returns to the orphanage ready to hear and hopefully heal the tears, to make children laugh and to help them to ready themselves for the futile task of finding love in a loveless world. He spends some of his days preparing the convent ground to receive seed that will grow and bear fruit. From time to time he prepares the same ground to receive the wizened, twisted, wasted body of a dead Nun that will decay without having borne fruit. But unknown, and probably in spite of himself, he daily prepares the hearts of young orphans to be receptive to love if it ever comes their way. Sister Mary slips out of the convent door and climbs the low hill that lies between the orphanage and the river. From the bench under the tree she notices Fiacre leaning on his bike and doubts again the pose of his nature-inspired devotion. She finds his distant presence rude and intrusive, something to spoil the beauty of God’s morning, something that interrupts her precarious, unstable serenity. Fiacre had been a difficult boy during his time at the orphanage. “Thran” and “unteachable” where the words she used in the reports she wrote on him at the end of every school year. “No liking for learning”. Against her advice the Monsignor had kept Fiacre on as a handyman when he passed his sixteenth birthday. He was someone the older children could look up to and it was probably a good idea to have a man they knew well always at hand to help with the heavier work that the aging Sisters were no longer able for. With a supreme effort Sister Mary concentrates on the spiritual discipline prescribed for that early hour but as usual it is fruitless, and the dread and futility of the morning’s English class weigh heavily in her heart. As she watches Fiacre the unbidden thought comes to her mind of the day when his rough hands would lift her dead, never-loved body into a coffin. She imagines him arranging her arms and legs and nailing down the lid, of lowering her unceremoniously into the grave he will have dug for her. She shudders at that thought, partly from revulsion, but also with a strange subconscious delight as she half recognises that being moved from her death bed will be the only occasion in her sixty or so years that the hands of a man will have touched her in so intimate a way, to do for her what she will never be able to do for herself