Free Sign of the Cross by Anne Emery Page A

without anyone seeing him, I don’t know. He had everyone’s attention now, though. We’d see his head, then he’d go under. It was really frightening. Father Burke swam out to get him. You know how you hear about drowning people dragging down their rescuers? I can believe it. Georgie was only around twelve, and not all that big, butFather Burke had quite a time getting hold of him and hauling him in. Georgie choked up a lot of water but he was all right. Naturally, the times being what they were, the priests lit into him and gave him h-e-double-hockey-sticks.
    “They let us have the rest of our day, thank the Lord, but it wasn’t quite the same after that. Food was delicious, though. The sisters must have dug into their own pockets for it. It was only on the way home on the bus that we started to feel how sunburned we all were. One of the kids jumped on Father Burke’s back, fooling around, and the poor man looked as if he wanted to scream. And Georgie threw up in the back of the bus just before we pulled off the highway into Halifax. Father Chisholm shouted at the driver to stop, and he jerked the bus over to the shoulder. What came out of Georgie slopped all the way to the front where I was sitting. I screeched and pulled my feet up and my sandal flew off and into the mess. Father Burke said in a loud whisper: ‘You’d better tell Sister you lost your shoes at the beach, Eileen. It’s all right. You can come to me for confession. Say a Hail Mary now for the lie and get it over with. Whisper it in my ear.’ He lifted me over the back of my seat and sat me down beside him. He said: ‘And don’t be slurring any of the words together, or it doesn’t count.’ Then we all got the giggles. You know how kids remember things like that forever. Georgie wasn’t the most popular boy in the home, let me tell you. Didn’t have the beach trip again till two summers later.”
    I asked what else Eileen might be able to tell me about Burke. Here was someone who had known him when he must have been in his late twenties. But her response was disappointing.
    “Oh, I hardly knew him, really. The kids didn’t get to know the priests very well at all. They were quite remote figures to us, even the young ones, except for those rare occasions like the beach trip. Father Burke helped out in the office occasionally, doing what, I don’t know. But he did teach us music twice a week, and that was fun.” She focused her gaze on the gallery of photos. “I wonder what became of all those children. God love them.”
    I was silent for a few moments, then said I had to go see Tyler MacDonald.
    “Off you go, then.”
    Off I went with visions of glory, for my client of course, not for me. If I hadn’t gleaned much new insight into Father Burke, at least I had a minor story of heroism if I ever needed it. “My Lord, I have one more witness to call, a man who cut short his appearance at a pediatric surgeons’ conference in Toronto to speak on behalf of my client, who, as we shall soon hear, is a saver of lives, not a killer. Dr. George McWitness will tell the court how, if it hadn’t been for Father Burke, Dr. McWitness would never have grown up to be the country’s top —” Sure. I hoped and prayed we would not get to that point. And I thought poor Georgie, if he had survived this long, was more likely known to police than to the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons.
    One thing I noted: Eileen Darragh had managed to get Father Burke’s name into the conversation without once blushing. Eileen had been at St. Bernadette’s all her life. She had met Burke when she was a child and he a young man. A plain little girl who had been singled out for a few moments of priestly attention on a bus trip. The woman could be forgiven if she felt a bit proprietorial. This could be a godsend if we ever needed a supporting witness.
    Tyler MacDonald was a tall, nice-looking kid in jeans and a Dalhousie University sweatshirt. I found him shooting