Michael Malone - Weebly

her this evening at the hospital, where he had chastised
a reporter who had sneaked into her room with a tape
recorder to ask what it felt like to be raped and lose her
husband. Father Crisp had known Judith since the year
of her birth. That is, the year she was found by the then
young priest beneath a Station of the Cross at the
Church of Our Lady of Mercy.
It had been beneath the Station depicting Simon the
Cyrenean's carrying Christ's Cross for him that the
mother (perhaps consciously, more likely by the divinity
of coincidence) had put down her burden in its
cardboard box. This girl, Judith's mother, left Dingley
Falls the next day, Holy Saturday, and went to Ontario,
where she married an older man for whom she had
cared as a practical nurse, and after he died, had
married again, and had had other children. No one in
town knew the parentage of Judith Haig, whom the
nuns took in. The old town librarian Gladys Goff, neatly
stitching together her genealogical quilts of the best
families, knew nothing of wholly private connections
and would not have sewn in such names if she had. For
Judith's mother had herself been illegitimate, the only