by Ron Hansen
She can see a hundred fireflies out her window. Each is a red dot, then a line, like a pen of red ink crossing a t. She goes on writing for half an hour and then stacks the pages before folding them inside a white envelope on which she prints “Confessional Matter.” She carries it to the prioress’s suite on the way to Compline and hurriedly puts it in the mail slot.
Extracts of an Inquiry into Certain Wonderful Events at the Priory of Our Lady of Sorrows, Having to Do with Mariette Baptiste, a Youthful Postulant Here, as Carried Out by Reverend Henri Marriott for the Sisters of the Crucifixion, and Faithfully Recorded by Sister Marguerite in the Winter Months of This Year of Our Lord, 1907.
—We are talking now with Sister Philomène.
—Yes, Father.
—And you are how old?
—Twenty-five.
—And you have been here…?
—Three years now. I entered just after my college graduation.
—How were you christened?
—Janet Keating.
—Sister Marguerite is just taking down what we say.
—I see that.
—You should know that she is, for these purposes, no more than a hearing and writing machine. She has promised on pain of excommunication not to whisper a word of these proceedings.
—We know each other well, Father.
—Of course. And you know Mariette just as well?
—Even better.
—How is that?
—She is my friend.
—Have you a particular affection toward her?
—We have rules against that here.
—But were you to meet another sister in the hallway, I presume you’d be a tad happier if that sister turned out to be Mariette?
—I have been very happy here. Even before she came.
—You needn’t hide honest feelings from me, Sister Philomène. Your own holiness and obedience are not being discussed here.
—She is my particular friend.
—Well said.
Mass of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Sister Philomène and Mariette are working with Sister Agnès in the laundry. Weak rain is easing down the cellar windowpanes, and two frail light bulbs hang from green electrical cords woven through the joists overhead. Sister Agnès is at an ironing board while Mariette and Sister Philomène crank rinsed corporals through old hand mangles.
Warm water that smells like grapefruits is sheeting grayly on the rollers as it presses from the wet linen.
Sister Philomène has a prayerbook open on a white cupboard that holds boxes of soap and starches, and she’s whispering a novena to Saint Joseph as she turns a green iron wheel. She shows greater effort and then stares with astonishment at the rollers, seeing her white habit somehow caught up in them and rumplingly squeezing through.
Sister Philomène bashfully tugs her habit out before grinning forgivingly at Mariette.
Weeks later Sister Philomène is sitting in formation class with the four other novices while Mother Saint-Raphaël first upbraids them for their tepid essays on spirituality and then invites the postulant to read from an exam that Sister Saint-Denis has just corrected. Each of them hates Mariette as she stands there prettily, shyly, with shaking hands, and reads:
“We know from Church teaching that the soul has no true pleasure but in love. And we know from our experience that extreme bliss can only come from extreme passion. When we unite these ideas, we see how important it is for God to be away from us and be the one we pine for but cannot have, for desiring God invigorates us. Desiring him, but never fully having him, we cannot grow tired or slack. We know the joy of his ‘hereness’ now and then, but were his distance and indifference all we had, it would still be sufficient if we sought and cherished it.
“Even for the complete and immediate possession of his heart, I would not have passive tranquillity. And so I prize my hours of penance and rapture as the greatest blessings that were ever mine, and I would rather be condemned to know him no more than to know him without feeling the ardor and fervor that his presence inspires.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël stops her there and gives Mariette permission to sit with the novices as she takes up the theme of Christ’s passion versus theirs. Sister Geneviève is giggling at something Sister Pauline has said, but Sister Philomène leans toward the postulant and whispers, “Will you please let me read that for meditation?”
Mariette smiles and hastily writes slantwise on her exam before she passes it. Sister Philomène reads, “I knew you’d understand,” and hides it inside her textbook.
—And you became friendly?
—Yes.
—You knew little about her till then?
—We have no histories here. We try to live wholly in the present, just as God does.
—Yes?
—We talked about our childhoods. She dressed her dolls as Jesus and Mary, just as I did. She played in a habit just like the one that her sister Annie wore. She whipped herself with knotted apron strings. She rebuked temptations against chastity by lying naked on thorns.
—She seems to me quite ordinary.
—Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?
In November. Sister Philomène has shoved the six great refectory tables against the walls so the floorboards can be scrubbed, and Mariette is with her on her hands and knees, scouring the wood with sand and powdered lime and a pig bristle brush.
Water shines on a floor darkened to a sienna brown and Mariette’s black habit and scarf are mirrored as she works.
She is barefoot and her skirt is pinned up as high as her thighs in order to protect the habit’s cloth from stain. Faint brown hairs stir on her calves as she moves. Her heels and toes are pink with callus.
She stops scouring with a shocked expression and she hesitantly rises up until she’s kneeling there with her hands joined in prayer. Her wet blue eyes are overawed as she stares ahead at a wall and she seems to be listening to something just above her, as a girl might listen to the cooing of pigeons.
Shutting her eyes, she talks voicelessly, with great passion, and opens her hands as priests do at the pax vobiscum. And then she swoons as though she’s lost herself and has become only her clothes.
—Was she in ecstasy?
—She said so.
—And what else did she tell you?
—She said, “Where was I?” And then she seemed to be recollected and she said Christ had talked to her.
—About what?
—She said she couldn’t tell me. She’d been told to hide His words in her heart.
—And it’s your opinion that she was speaking the truth.
—Oh yes. I think she’s a saint.
Ember Day. Mass of Saint Januarius, Bishop, and
His Companions, Martyrs.
Sister Saint-Estèphe wakes up after an hour’s sleep and after a great deal of restlessness goes to the chandlery. She heats paraffin wax and stearic acid in a saucepan and then stirs in a hot mixture of bayberry wax and a purple dye. She prays the joyful mysteries of the rosary while scouring her candle molds, then carries the saucepan to an iron trivet on the windowsill and, just after midnight, walks down to the dim oratory to adore Our Lady of Sorrows. She’s just getting used to the church’s darkness when she hears the hush of a habit, and she’s surprised to see their postulant kneeling in her stall.
She handsigns, Each night, here?
Yes.
Sleep, when?
Don’t.
Mass of Our Lady of Ransom.
Chapter and Compline. Every sister in choir is affectionately following Reverend Mother Céline as she fluently strolls up and down the oratory, first giving a short report of international events, and then talking about Sister Antoinette’s worries for the late-September grape harvest, and going over their next week’s assignments in the winery, grange, hallways, scullery, laundry, milking barn, or orchard. She then gets a church basket of handwritten notes from Sister Catherine. “We shall now pray for our
petitioners.”
Each petition is gradually unfolded and read aloud to the sisters in order to request their intercession for the health of a child with impetigo, for a farmer whose faith has left him, for a hot-blooded girl who’s run away, for a mechanic who’s lost half a foot in a steam-powered thresher, for an ill, tired, and friendless widow who’s asking God to please let her die. When she has read them all, Mother Céline lowers her head and raises her folded hands to her mouth as though forbidding her own speech. And Mariette thinks, I have been here forty days and she hasn’t talked to me since the first.
Their mother superior then says, “We shall also pray for one of ours who is undergoing great torment.”
Mariette gazes around the oratory. Each nun stares at the prioress in common. Each stares at her separately.
Mass of Saints Isaac Jogues, John de Brebeuf, Charles
Garnier, Anthony Daniel, Gabriel Lallemant, Noel
Chabanel, John de Lalande, and Rene Goupil, Martyrs.
White clouds travel and infest the horizon. Fruit trees shift their feet like hired hands. Sister Marthe is standing on a paint-spotted ladder inside a pear tree so that her wooden sabots alone are unhidden until a great branch cracks away and her ripsaw flashes silver in the sun.
Mother Saint-Raphaël is hoeing weeds around a garden bench as Mariette kneels with pruning shears and snips back the wood canes on pink rosebushes. Sister Claudine is fifteen yards away as she heaves and shakes ammonium sulfate onto a tilled flower bed. Every now and then she pauses and stares at the postulant with envy. Why, Mariette cannot understand, for Mother Saint-Raphaël hoes in silence. Even when Mariette chats about trifles and foolishness, she sees the mistress of novices frowning at her, as if trying to find a hidden character behind the girl’s eyes. And Mother Saint-Raphaël only sighs when Mariette talks about religion.
She is surprised, therefore, when she pricks the heel of her hand with a thorn and irritatedly presses up a bead of blood, and Mother Saint-Raphaël interestedly kneels opposite her and holds Mariette’s hand in both her own. “Oh my dear,” she says. “Are you badly hurt?”
“Oh no; just a thorn.”
“Shall I get something for it?”
“I’ll be fine, truly.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël puts spit onto her forefinger and softly caresses the blood from the wound, and there’s such an odd confusion of feelings in the grandmotherly face that Mariette hesitantly wrests her hand away.
Everything changes in Mother Saint-Raphaël then, as if a great door has slammed shut inside her. “Don’t misinterpret simple tenderness,” she says.
Mariette travels between worry and sympathy before she replies in humility, “I have, Mother. I see that now.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël gets up with effort and goes back to work and hoes with a kind of urgency. And when, just before meditation, she walks with Mariette to the tool room, she says, “There’s a great deal about you that troubles me.”
Mass of the Dedication of the Basilica
of Saint Michael the Archangel.
Walking into the oratory for Prime, Sister Léocadie holds her stomach and whispers to Sister Pauline, “I have cramps.” And at the pause before the reading she faints, wrenching and hurting the pew in her slow heavy fall. Every nun stays as she was until Mariette anxiously lays down her Psalter and gets up from her stall.
Sister Léocadie is paper-white and woozily slumped against the pew, but she pulls away in horror when the postulant tries to help her, hissing, “Don’t, Sister! The mistress!”
Mother Saint-Raphaël takes four steps out onto the oratory floor and scowls at Mariette and then Sister Léocadie until the ill novice kneels upright again. Mother Saint-Raphaël then pettishly withdraws to her place in the choir.
Sister Léocadie is punished at Mixt by being ordered to prostrate herself on the floor as if she’s been nailed facedown on a crucifix. The sisters hesitate only to inchingly lift up their skirts before stepping over her. When it is Mariette’s turn, however, Sister Léocadie senses her halting and slowly descending to the floor and joining her on the cross beside her. And Mariette stays like that, simply praying, until Mixt has ended.
—Was anything said, Sister Léocadie?
—Yes; I told Mariette she’d go hungry now. She just answered that she’d had Christ’s body at Mass and that was food enough.
—Was she trying to impress you with her piety?
—I don’t think she thinks about it.
October 2nd. Mass of the Holy Guardian Angels.
Horses shamble lazily up a knoll and browse the grass near their hooves.
The skies are gray as habits and all the greens are darkening with a faint and chilling mist.
Twenty-six nuns are hunching along the grapevines in their sabots and jean aprons and dusters, snapping grape bunches from their stems and skidding wide French baskets along or teaming on the handles to tiltingly carry them to the pig wagons on the roadway.
The psalms of Terce and Sext are recited in the vineyard and the sisters pray the Angelus while slouching tiredly in to dinner. Work replaces Méridienne and classes, Nones are read privately by the water tank, and the grapes are crushed just before Vespers, Sisters Aimée, Virginie, Marthe, Félicité, and Mariette tying their habits as high as their thighs and getting up into the great oaken vats to walk and trounce and slop in the oozing grape juice and skins. And then the prioress humbly walks out to them with plush white towels and a copper verrière, and she kneels before the sisters who have trodden the grapes as she gently washes their feet.
Mass of Saint Francis of Assisi, Confessor.
Class. Waving her hand eraser over the blackboard like a fat farmboy in wild hurrah, Sister Saint-Denis gets rid of her drawing of the Great Chain of Being and then tries to think what she can say to use up the five minutes until Sext. Were her habit red and she bearded white, Sister Saint-Denis could play Santa Claus. She merrily smiles at Mariette and asks, “Are you still liking our convent?”
“Oh yes, Sister.”
“We are like the tides here. We come and go. We don’t hurry; we don’t worry; we try not to wrestle too much with our inner torments and petty irritations.”
Shutting her textbook on a pencil, Mariette glances up. “Have there been complaints about me?”
Sister Saint-Denis gives it some thought before saying, “You haven’t been mentioned.” White checks shine in dark eyes rich as plums. “Which is not such a good thing outside, but here in Our Lady of Sorrows is not so very bad.”
“I have to learn that.”
Sister Saint-Denis says, “Ever since I have grown older, I have forgotten all my hard penances and fasting and have given particular attention to our Redeemer, in whose presence we live. And I have realized how much simpler it is to pray and keep united with God when I see Him as the source and sum of everything I do. When I walk, I owe it to God that I still can. When I sleep, it is with His permission. My breathing, my happiness, even my being a woman—all are His gifts to me. So it is my prime intention that whenever I do these practical things, they will be contemplative acts of praise and thanksgiving repeated over and over again. Even when it seems impossible to believe that some pain or misery is from God, I try to believe it and thank Him for it. You should try such a prayer, Mariette.”
—And she said she’d try?
—She said she didn’t have the patience for it.
—Meaning what?
—Well, I presume she meant she’s too zealous. She meant she’s still infatuated with our sisterhood. Even our worst penances are too easy for her. Hundreds of postulants have been that way at times.
—And so, you do not find her fanatical?
—Christ shines from her. She is Christian perfection. She is lovely in every way.
Mass of Saint Bridget, Widow.
Hard white sunshine heating the frost, and the blue sky high and wide behind iron-gray trees tattered by golden leaves. The hills are tan and rose and magenta. Chimney swi
fts toss and play in the air. Sister Anne and Sister Agnès heave heavy avalanches of wash onto a gray wool blanket and then go inside for more, and Mariette hangs sweet wet sheets on the clotheslines until she is curtained and roomed by them.
Sister Agnès slinks through a gap in the whiteness with a straw basket of underthings that they silently pin up in the hidden world inside the tutting, luffing, campaigning sheets.
Half an hour passes. Wind tears at their work. Sister Agnès aches from reaching. She blows the sting from her reddened fingers. She watches the postulant as the tilting sheets wrap around her and shape her. She watches the girl as she tenderly releases herself, as though tugging a ghost’s hands away.
Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Mariette goes to the scriptorium with Sister Hermance, Léocadie, and Pauline after Sunday Nones but is intrigued into an hour of talk about mystical theology with Sister Marguerite and cannot get away. She sees the novices try to disappear within the peach sunlight at the great table, reading sixteenth-century books with hard pages that turn with a tearing sound. And underneath that she hears the librarian going on and on about the Desert Fathers.
And then she abandons herself to God’s will and hears Sister Marguerite teaching her, “When Saint John of the Cross prayed before the crucifix, Our Lord is supposed to have asked Him, ‘Dear John, what will you have from Me in return for the service you have done Me?’ Unhesitatingly, that great saint replied that he wanted ‘naught but suffering and to be despised for Your sake.’”