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stairs, scalding yourself in the kitchen. Patrick was always hurting himself, and being “disciplined.” He’d had asthma before Craigmillnar, that had not been treated. He got sick, he was never well but always coughing, puking. He coughed so hard, his ribs cracked. We begged the nuns to help him, to take him to a hospital, we thought that we could take him ourselves if we were allowed, we knew that pneumonia had to be treated with “oxygen” but the nuns laughed at us, and screamed at us to shut up. Mother Superior Mary Alphonsus knew of such things, and did not care. She had her own TV in her room. She ate well, she favored sweets. She had a heavy woolen coat and good leather boots for our terrible winters.
    He died in January 1953. We had last seen him in the drafty, dank place called the Infirmary. He could scarcely breathe. There was a terrible wheezing in his lungs. It sounded like a wheezing of air from another part of the room—we kept looking up at the windows, that were so high, and ill-fitting. Patrick was shivering, yet his skin was burning-hot. His eyes were enormous in his face. His teeth chattered. He could not speak to us—he was too sick. Yet he clutched at us—his hands clutching ours.
    He was let to die. They killed him. Asthma and pneumonia, poor Patrick couldn’t breathe. Suffocated and none of them cared. And his body buried in the paupers’ cemetery with the others.
    They hadn’t even let us know, when he died. A few days passed, before we were allowed to know.
    In St. Simon’s churchyard, the nuns and the priests of Craigmillnar are properly buried, with marble headstones. Facts of their birth-dates and death-dates are inscribed in stone. But the children’s bodies, at the back of the cemetery—there are only little crosses to mark them, crowded together. Dozens of cheap little rotted-wood crosses, each at an angle in the earth. And Patrick, who would have been your youngest uncle, among them.
    All their bones mixed together. As if their child-lives had been of no worth.
    She had not commented, when the inquiries had first begun a few years ago. The pedophile priests had been protected by their Bishop, also. But investigators for the county and the state began listening to complaints and charges against the Craigmillnar staff. A younger generation of prosecutors and health officials, taking the lead of investigators in other parts of the country. Journalists who weren’t intimidated by the Church because they weren’t Roman Catholics.
    Yet, she held her ground. She hid behind a lawyer, the Church provided a lawyer to protect her, because of her position and rank. She had refused to give testimony. She had not been arrested, as some others had been in situations like hers. She’d been served a subpoena to speak before a grand jury in Oybwa County, but had suffered a “collapse”—and so had a medical excuse. With the excuse of being “elderly”—in her late seventies—the woman was spared further “harassment” by the state.
    Journalists referred to Sister Mary Alphonsus as the “Angel of Death of Craigmillnar” since so many children had died in the home during her years as director: the estimate was as many as one hundred.
    Sister Mary Alphonsus was reported to have asked: how one hundred was too many ? They were poor children, from ignorant families, they’d been abandoned by their parents, or by their (unwed) mothers—they were the kind of children who made themselves sick, eating too much, stuffing their bellies, refusing to wash their hands, playing in filth, fighting with one another, falling down stairs, running outdoors—that they would get sick was hardly a surprise, yes and sometimes one of them died. Over twenty-six years it came out to only three or four a year who died, out of the 350 children at the Home: how was that too many ?
    In the Sign of the Ram we’d been