They hadn't started eating the rabbits because they liked the flavor, exactly. It's just things had gotten so lean, and there were rabbits everywhere. Amy stopped at the store after work, bought paprika, peppers, dried pintos, and they ate the stew together over rice, listening to the radio, which was still, like some sort of miracle, free. Bobby got used to the gamey flavor of rabbit stew quickly, came to appreciate the way the stringy tendons caught between his teeth. It had taken Amy three attempts at the recipe before she could eat the rabbit without gagging.
“Hot sauce saves the day,” she'd said finally, grimacing.
“Look, we don't have to eat the rabbits,” he said. “We could just get a ham hock or something.”
“Maybe not,” Amy said. “But it's all part of the frugality game, right?”
“What?” Bobby asked.
“The post-recession survival game,” Amy said. “It's like we get poor-people virtue points for any crazy we teach ourselves to tolerate. Like eating rabbits out of the yard just because they're free.”
Bobby had run his hand over Amy's shoulder and down her back, his fingers caressing her shoulder blades, his mind a panic of wings in a graceful, frantic migration, his hands searching for a tether. He thought of the misery they'd endured: the missing mortgage payments, the months of wondering how long it would take the bank to come for them, whether they'd take the house in February, in May, in September, the neighbors watching out their windows. Amy had taken it all in stride. Only now could he see the traces of bitterness on her characteristic light heart.
Now, he saw Amy, backlit by the sunrise, walking toward him. He caught a whiff of rabbit before he could see what she was carrying, and he knew she'd found the skins he'd been curing on a rack in one of the sheds.
When she was close enough that he could see the worry in her eyes, she handed the pelt to him. “What's your plan for these, Bobby?” she asked, her nose wrinkled even as she ran her fingers through one of the furs, touching it in a way they had stopped touching each other.
“Thought I'd make a coat,” Bobby answered.
Amy looked at him for a long time, as though she was deciding how serious he was, how concerned she had to be. She took a deep breath. She took one of his hands. “Babe. Be cool. A blanket, maybe.”
Bobby thought then that it did seem a bit much, a coat handmade from rabbit skins. He'd be likely to wear it even when he wasn't at the mill, and then what? He'd felt for a while now that his instincts about how to live had gone wobbly, that he was drifting slowly out of the community, caught in a riptide of ever-developing eccentricities, interrupted in becoming whatever it was he was going to become, the Great Recession and his own bad choices reacting like the baking soda and 7Up of his third-grade science project, either thing on its own benign, uninteresting, but erupting in combination, leaving a sticky coating all over his life, flies buzzing and biting. It took so much effort to do even simple things, to just exist. He wanted to bounce back, to believe in an inevitable recovery, but the world did not feel particularly elastic.
Amy surprised him then, put both her arms around his shoulders, pulled herself close to him, and he held her around her waist, closed his eyes, felt the heat of her breath spread across his neck. He let the rabbit skin drop to the ground.
Amy pulled back, made eye contact. “Bobby,” she said, “you keep making all this into something it's not, like it's the end of everything, like we'll never recover, and I can't . . . I'm going to need you to buck up a little, okay?”
“I'll try, Amy. Really I will.” Bobby pulled her into a close embrace then, caught the flash of the metal roof of the processing building behind her, brief, lovely, light like the spark of Elmer's old arc welder, the kind of light Bobby knew better than to look at directly, beauty that could sear his retinas. He felt the warmth of his wife pass clothes to skin, skin to muscle, muscle to bone, bone to cells, and he felt himself absorbent, porous, greedy for more.
BOBBY HAD GONE BACK to the last days of the Falcon project focused, calmed by a new sense of control. He saw the whole job, his next steps and the steps to come, lay themselves out in front of him. He just needed to get this car running and other cars would follow, and all the locks of his life would start to release, and everything that had been closed would open. He'd accepted that even if there was some sort of Quantitative Easing process for conjuring luck, it would be just like the cash the Fed printed during the recession, the lucky people getting all the new luck just like the rich people were somehow getting all the new money. He didn't have to use that as any kind of measuring stick for his own life, didn't need to measure his worth at all so much as remember it, touch it from time to time, protect it in the deep core of himself.
When Marcia saw the Falcon, when Elmer started it up, she winked at Bobby. “Sharp car,” she said. “Let's cruise.”
Amy held his hand in the backseat, her body close to his. They drove past the gnarled cottonwoods between the quarry ponds and the river, the leaves so yellowed that the slightest breeze liberated them from the tree, sent them trembling in whirling spirals, first away from the trunk, then down to the roots. Elmer found Marty Robbins on the radio, sang along as they headed west toward the foothills, all four windows open to the bluest of big skies, the cumulus-puffy promise of a sun-bright October day.
Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012
IN THE VESTIBULE OF St. Paul's Catholic Church, set off from the main sanctuary, tiny flames shimmer inside blood-red votive holders. There are shelves and shelves of them. The smell of matches and candle wax and the vague remnants of Sunday's incense make the air feel rich, tangibly holy. Sister Agnes Mary, age seventy-four, has risen early every morning for over fifty years to pray in this vestibule. She prays with her mother's old rosary, worrying the beads—magnesite, amethyst—between her fingers. For years, her morning prayers were full of gratitude for the routines of her life, happy prayers, full of certainty and light, fresh air in the stale sanctuary. Those prayers wandered and spread, rose as though drawn by a magnet toward heaven, escaped through stained glass.
Yesterday, when Sister discovered that the church planned to approve a new oil and gas drill site just behind the playground at St. Paul's Catholic Primary School, she went directly to the new priest, Father Morel, with her opposition. Father Morel, a grim liturgical leader, recently arrived from Argentina. He is twenty-eight years old, but his youth does not translate, as she hoped it might, into progressive thought.
“It's too close to the children, Father,” she said. “They won't be able to—”
Father Morel put a hand on her shoulder. Sister felt it as though he'd placed it over her mouth. “There is nothing to worry about, Sister,” he said, smiling the same smile Sister had given to the kindergartners she used to teach, condescension dressed up as kindness. “And if you persist in worry, lift your worry up to God.”
Sister could feel him looking past her, as though she had already gone to join the saints. Sister thought to snap her fingers in his face, poke one of his eyes, make him certain of her still-living presence in the world through some madcap Laurel-and-Hardy-style violence. Instead, she stared at the stained-glass windows behind him. One portrayed the Virgin Mary kneeling at the base of the cross in submissive, sorrowful prayer. Another depicted Mary serene, cradling a swaddled babe. Sister had been praying the glorious mysteries on the rosary, deep into the coronation of the Virgin. Sister prefers the Mary of Revelation—pregnant belly rounded like the moon under her feet, twelve stars shining in her hair, defying the demon dragon that intends to eat her newborn infant. Sister has never seen Revelation Mary in stained glass.
Sister knows better than Father Morel about the possible harms of the drilling project. The church supported Sister through a PhD in ecology when she was a novitiate, and then it asked her to spend her lifetime as a kindergarten teacher, tying shoelaces and zippering jackets, which she did without complaint,
which she came to truly love. Now, her aching joints burn despite the pillow she places between them and the wooden kneeler. She has belonged to her order, to the church, to God, and she once found solace in that belonging, was ever obedient to it. Now she struggles with what, exactly, her faith demands, how to behave when she suspects that God's laws and the church's laws are not an exact match.
Mano, Sister's younger blood sister by eight years, arrives and kneels on her right side. Mano's hair is wind-tousled, spruce-scented. Ruth, Sister's other blood sister, a year older than Sister herself, kneels on her left. Ruth smells like burnt toast. Her sisters often meet her for morning prayers, and Sister is glad for their company. There are no other nuns left at St. Paul's—some have died, some have moved to convalescent homes, one is in prison for writing Bible verses in blood on nuclear warheads after breaking into a secure facility. Sister has always seen this last act as vanity, action to get attention more than action to do good, but now she feels more confused than certain. She doesn't know whether a lifetime of prayers for a broken world, prayers she has fervently delivered, is sufficient. Her prayers have become heavy with her doubt.
“Father Morel,” Ruth says, “is planning to let John March put a gas drill rig on the vacant lot behind the school.”
Ruth likes to be first with the news. Sister is fine allowing this.
“Right there behind the playground?” Mano asks. “So close to the children?”
“These ridiculous men,” Sister says, shaking her head, “and their nonsense ideas.”
“Fracking,” Ruth says. It sounds like spitting. Ruth has long been suspicious of the increased air pollution from fracking in town, tells Sister and Mano stories she hears of miscarriages, stillbirths, preemies that fit in the palm of someone's hand. Ruth is a retired labor and delivery nurse, has delivered half the population of Greeley, Colorado. Sister taught kindergarten to the Catholic ones. Sister loved those children, loves her sisters' children, loves all children. Mano painted landscapes and portraiture for money, built found-object sculptures for art. Now retired, the sisters drink coffee, play gin rummy, volunteer a few hours a week.
“We should call our senators,” Mano says. Mano is their activist. Member of the Sierra Club. Avid reader of Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey. “Make signs. Picket the corners.”
Ruth pokes Sister in the ribs, then points toward the ceiling. “What does your husband have to say?” Ruth means God, of course. She likes to tease Sister. It's lighthearted, this teasing. Ruth's love language.
Sister shrugs. “Man of few words,” she says. Mano and Ruth giggle.
“The silent treatment,” Mano says. “Sounds like all three of my marriages.”
“Maybe he thinks that after all these years he shouldn't have to tell you what to do,” Ruth says. “Maybe he thinks you should just know.”
“Well I don't. It's maddening.” Sister detangles the beads from her fingers, wraps them loosely around her wrist instead. Her sisters are having fun. She tries to relax.
Mano nods. “That exact kind of maddening caused two of my three divorces.”
“She can't divorce God,” Ruth says.
Her sisters look directly at her. Their dresses rustle. Their shifting weight makes the old kneelers settle and pop.
“You two,” Sister says, “are really snagging my knits.” This makes all three of them laugh, their departed mother's favorite way to chastise them.
Sister returns to her knees and to the rosary. She keeps the Book of Revelation clear in her mind's eye—Mother Mary sprouting eagle's wings to escape the beast, riding the thermals above the solace desert. Mary stalwart, borne by her solitary strength and faith. Mary rewarded.
SISTER WRAPS A SCARF around her ears, bundles herself into a black woolen coat that hangs to her knees. It is two in the morning. She can see her breath in the near-frost chill, and the air soothes the constant arthritic ache in her joints, like fire doused to smoldering embers. Above the rooftops of the ranch houses, Sister can see the flare stacks of new gas wells burning. If she spins where she's standing, she can see five burning flares, but she knows there are hundreds, maybe thousands, in her county alone. They don't smell like anything unless she stands right underneath them. Close up, Sister smells engine grease, animal offal, wet clay—the bowels of the earth and the chemicals that strip them wafting together after the burn. Above the actual flames, the fumes and the heat distort the view, a world scrambled into waves, unrecognizable. Beyond that space, the chemicals are swallowed by the big-sky atmosphere and become invisible, which makes it easy to forget that they are still there.
She carries two gallons of bleach in a heavy canvas tote bag, and the pain in her shoulders and neck begins to spread down into her forearms, her fingers and hands, and then even her heart and her belly radiate the ache. Tonight, Sister will execute a plan she's been working out for days. She hopes it will bring her close again to God. She worries it might push him further away. She notes the absence of direct answer to her prayers, contemplates the obvious lack of instructive miracle. She is grateful for the internet, for the wealth of information available to even an aging nun, the ways the invisibility of age might shield and protect her, the ways it might be a veiled, sharp-edged gift. Floodlights illuminate the playground—the swing set, the spiral slide, the basketball hoop posts wrapped in foam to keep the children from harm should they run into them.
Behind the playground, the proposed fracking site sits dark under starlight and gilded crescent moon. There are no fences or gates surrounding it. A single bulldozer sits lonely on the empty lot. She is a little afraid, but her backbone, sturdy and expansive, a tree trunk of mud and twigs, ice and granite, has widened with new rings. The machine's cap opens just as the website said it would, and she pours both gallons of bleach into the oil reservoir.
Sister does not know whether her efforts will ultimately change anything at all, but for this moment, her joints have stopped aching. When the pain returns, suddenly, she closes her eyes. She imagines her doubt and her fear encapsulated by her pain. She imagines holding all of it in the palm of her hand, white-hot, imagines placing it humbly on an altar.
Please accept this offering, she prays. Turns out she can't, after all these years, give God the silent treatment. She believes that He has seen her, that He always sees her, even when He doesn't respond.
Sister returns to the candle glow of the vestibule off the main sanctuary. She does not know whether to expect a blessing or a punishment. The silence sits still in the chapel air, breaks into particulates, clings like incense smoke. At dawn, there is a mini-Mardi Gras moment when sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows and lights the hard wooden pews with flecks of purple, gold, green. This beauty is neither miracle nor God's voice. Sister sees this beauty every day, like the sunrise, no matter how she behaves.
SISTER WALKS TO THE house she grew up in, a few blocks away, where Ruth and Mano live together. It is late May. The dogwood trees along the sidewalk tremble in brilliant, full pastel bloom. The early tulips are stripped and spent, but the late-bloomers are opening in yellows and purples—Easter colors, come months too late. The morning sky is opening, brightening into blue. A few wispy cirrus clouds drift at high altitude, moving slowly away from the Rocky Mountain range in the west.
Sister arrives to find Ruth and Mano asleep in the living room, snoring drunken staccato harmonies. A jar of olives, festive in green and red, sits next to an assortment of open bottles—vodka, gin—on the kitchen table, which makes Sister remember their father's delicate way of saying that he was plenty drunk enough.
“No thanks,” he'd say, waving away a fifth or sixth martini, “I'm halfway through a jar of olives already.”
Sister fills the coffee percolator at the sink, the weight of the water intensifying the arthritic ache in her gnarled, swollen knuckles. She lights the burner and sits back down at the table. She smiles at her drunken, sl
eepy sisters, both blinking themselves awake. She doesn't worry about their drinking. It looks more like fun than sin.
Sister unpins her gray veil, lays it over the back of an empty chair.
“Look out, Mano,” Ruth says, holding onto the n just a bit long, “Sister took off her veil. This party is about to go wild.”
“Stop it, Ruth,” Mano says. “Sister always follows the rules. We should encourage this sort of thing.” Mano, the darling youngest, the buffer.
“What would Father Morel say?” Ruth says. She winks at Mano.
“There is no stone tablet, anywhere, with decrees about an itchy veil.” Sister is working on loosening up. She can no longer discern, through contemplative prayer and meditation, the clear difference between God and the law. She thinks on this all the time.
“Hard to know if I can trust you,” Ruth tells Sister, “without your veil on.”
Gretchen, Ruth's great-granddaughter, walks into the room. She wears soft flannel pajamas. Her long brown hair has tangled like a rat's nest, and when she rubs her eyes with two tiny fists, Sister can see chipped pink polish on her fingernails. Sister is happily surprised, feels her love for this child warm her body, a tidal surge of joy that lifts her aching shoulders.
“Sister's here,” Gretchen says, delighted. Sister can see herself, can see Ruth and Mano, through Gretchen's eyes. She and her sisters have become soft, roly-poly. They are huggable, like giant teddy bears. They carry shortbread cookies in their sensible purses.
“Marilyn's been put on bed rest,” Ruth says. Marilyn, Gretchen's mother, Ruth's granddaughter, is eight months pregnant with her second baby.
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