Church authorities

The Church authorities shape the aftermath of Maggie’s death through secrecy, relocation, and a negotiated burial. By arranging for Matthew Mackie to leave and ensuring that records were destroyed and replaced, they suppress the account of a priest, a baby, and a suicide; the bargain also secures Maggie a grave in the Garden of Eternal Rest, the place Mackie later returns to in an attempt to remain close to her.

Institutional Control and Concealment

In Mackie’s account, Church authorities arranged his sudden departure for Ireland and found him work at a teaching hospital in Kildare. Existing records were destroyed and new ones created, while the institution sought to remove him from the situation and avert trouble and scandal. The account makes the Church’s influence practical as well as reputational: it could move a priest, place him in a new job, and alter the documentary trail around what had happened.

Mackie says that only he and Sister Mary saw Maggie’s body hanging. He does not know what explanation the Church ultimately gave, but says it was not the truth involving a priest, a baby, and a suicide. The concealed account thus depends not only on his removal but also on the absence of a public version that would expose those circumstances.

The Bargain Over Maggie’s Burial

Mackie describes his departure and Maggie’s burial as parts of a deal. He would leave without telling anyone; in return, he asked that Maggie be allowed to rest in the Garden of Eternal Rest. He says she would not have wanted to go home, and that St Michael’s Chapel was the only other place she knew. The burial arrangement therefore offered him a way to honor her wishes within the narrow choices he believed remained.

Sister Mary agreed, according to Mackie, and the arrangement also protected her from questions. If Mackie had left suddenly while Maggie was sent away for burial, people might have connected the two events. The car originally coming to collect Maggie instead took Mackie: they traveled through the day to Holyhead, and he went back to Ireland. The exchange joined private grief to institutional self-protection, with the burial permitted partly because it helped keep the circumstances from inviting scrutiny.

A Secret with a Long Afterlife

Mackie remained in Ireland until he heard that Sister Mary had died. He then left his job, packed a case, and returned to stay as near to Maggie as he could. Sister Mary, too, was buried in the graveyard; Mackie points to the cherubs on her headstone as a visible trace of her presence there. His return shows the lasting consequence of the bargain: the Church’s intervention could relocate him and suppress records, but it could not end his attachment to Maggie or his need to come back to her resting place.

The authorities’ decisions also explain why Mackie had tried to prevent the bodies from being moved. He regarded preserving Maggie’s grave as the only thing he could still do for her and a way to seek final peace, apologize, and affirm that he still loved her. He had carried the memory of their unborn child as a boy named Patrick, though he acknowledged the child might have been a girl. Against that intensely personal remembrance, the Church’s earlier management of the affair appears as a system for containing scandal; the grave becomes the one place where Mackie’s suppressed history can remain present.