by Ron Hansen
She hesitates and, blushing with embarrassment, turns to the priest as if she’s just remembered that he’s there. Père Marriott is quiet for a moment and heaves himself up. “Shall I get you more tea?”
She shakes her head.
“Each phrase there, was it your own?”
“Excuse me?”
He does not turn, but tips the teakettle so discreetly that the hot water twines soundlessly into his cup. “Isn’t it possible for me to believe you had formulated that answer in your head before visiting me here? You could have borrowed, for example, from the books you have been reading.”
“Yes, it is possible for you to believe that.”
“And is there another explanation?”
“Christ was my teacher.”
Expressionlessly, he carries his teacup back to the kitchen table while saying, “Tell me how it was, praying, just yesterday.”
She hears firewood wheezing and thudding apart inside the iron stove. She sees red peppers on his kitchen sill and a knife and fork upright inside a milky glass. “I felt greatly upset at first because of Annie, Mother Céline; but as I began to meditate on the crucifixion and Christ’s own trials in this world, I became rapt in thought and I found myself again before Jesus, who was suffering such terrible pain. He was horrible with blood and his breathing was hard and troubled, but his pain had less to do with that than with his human sense of failure, injustice, and loneliness. An unquenchable desire to join him in his agonies took hold of me then, as if I could halve his afflictions by sharing them, and I beseeched Jesus to grant me that grace. And, in his great kindness, he gratified me at once. Kneeling there below his cross, I saw that blood no longer issued from his wounds, but only flashing light as hot as fire. And all of a sudden I felt a keen hurt as those flames touched my hands and feet and heart. I have never felt such pain before, and I have never been so happy. I have no memories of the hours passing, I have only the memories of a kind of pleasure and contentment I haven’t ever known, a kind that made me love the world as he does, and hearing him whisper just before dawn that I ought to go to you.”
“Christ mentioned my name?”
“‘See Père Marriott,’ he said.”
“Well, that makes me very happy,” the old priest says, and then he half rotates in his chair and takes off his round spectacles.
She hears Sister Anne ringing the tocsin for Sext but before she asks permission to go, she says, “When the pains started in September, I had no idea what they truly meant. And then I persuaded myself that all sisters espoused to Christ by their vows would have experienced his wounds. You can’t know how stupid and innocent I was! Even yesterday, even after all my reading, I had no true understanding of what was happening to me and at first I hoped to keep it secret, but Christ told me that was impossible in the midst of the priory and with my hands and feet bleeding freely. And now I wonder if I haven’t made it all up in some way, or if it’s even possible.”
Père Marriott slowly puts on his glasses and thinks for half a minute and then smiles up at her as he says, “I don’t believe it’s possible. I do believe it happened.”
Mass of the Holy Innocents, Martyrs.
Four or five minutes into collation, Sister Saint-Estèphe finishes the reading of The Soul’s Journey into God by Saint Bonaventure, shuts the book, and hobbles down to the dining room floor. Mariette, whose turn it is next, then stands and curtsies to the prioress and tries not to show the pain in her feet as she hushes across to the great tree of the pulpit and goes up.
She hears a kitchen door, Sister Saint-Luc humming her handsigns, hot coffee purling into a lifted tin cup, and just below the pulpit a scritching knife. She breathes in and recites:
“We begin tonight The Book of Privy Counseling by an unknown Christian mystic from the fourteenth century.
“Chapter one. ‘When you go apart to be alone for prayer, put from your mind everything you have been doing or plan to do. Reject all thoughts, be they good or be they evil. Do not pray with words unless you are really drawn to this; or if you do pray with words, pay no attention to whether they are many or few. Do not weigh them or their meaning. Do not be concerned about what kind of prayers you use, for it is unimportant whether or not they are official liturgical prayers, psalms, hymns, or anthems; whether they are for particular or general intentions; or whether you formulate them interiorly, by thoughts, or express them aloud, in words. See that nothing remains in your conscious mind save a naked intent stretching out toward God.’”
She pauses and sips from a water glass, and she is surprised to see that the sisters have stopped eating and are peering at her with affection, disfavor, or fascination, as if there are hidden meanings to be augured from the book’s pages just because it is she who is reading them.
She looks down at the next sentence but hot tears blur it. She tries to think but cannot. She hears silence and embarrassment, and then after a while she hears Mother Saint-Raphaël announce “Satis” and Mariette goes down among them again.
New Year’s Eve. Mass of Saint Sylvester,
Pope, Confessor.
Chapter. Just beyond the great doors into the oratory, externs and novices await Compline with Mariette, saying rosaries or simply leaning against the hallway walls with their eyes tightly shut, hearing everything.
In choir, Sister Saint-Pierre is whispering, as always, “Tout pour Jesus.” She coughs into her habit sleeve and sits honestly upright again.
Sister Saint-Denis gives her great weight to the right arm of her stall and thinks how gorgeously tender and kind Jesus continues to be, untying and gathering her to Himself in a new way through the glorious mystery of His five wounds.
Sister Véronique touches a handkerchief to her sore pink nose. She then fastidiously refolds it and tucks it under the green rubber band on her wrist that also holds a flat pencil.
Sister Marthe scratches a pepper sauce from her thumbnail. She slyly offers it to Sister Saint-Michel, who reddens while trying to hide her giggles.
Sister Félicité tries to spell out the word that Sister Virginie’s knuckle is printing surreptitiously on her upper thigh: “Mariette.”
Mother Saint-Raphaël uncertainly walks up to the altar of Our Lady of Sorrows and kisses it and turns. She orchestrates the silence for a while before she looks down through half-glasses to her handwritten statement and reads:
“We may have heard our sisters using the word ‘stigmata’ and not understood them. Well, the word has its origins in the Greek for tattoo. Stigmatics are people who bear in their bodies the injuries of Christ’s crucifixion. Saint Francis of Assisi is the first person to have been privileged by them, in 1224. A fellow Franciscan wrote of him that ‘his hands and feet had as it were piercings made by nails…while his side appeared to have been lanced, and blood often trickled therefrom.’
“Some three hundred instances of the phenomenon have been confirmed since then, generally among women and generally among the Catholic religious, although Protestants and unbelievers have been surprised by them, too. We here may have heard of Louise Lateau of Belgium and Anne Catherine Emmerich of Germany, both famous in the century just past for their ecstasies and bleedings. We probably have not heard of all those frauds and impostors who impressed Christ’s wounds on themselves for their own purposes.
“There was a Scottish philosopher named David Hume who said it is contrary to our experience for miracles to be true, but that it is not contrary to our experience for testimony about them to be false. We have all lately heard gossip about peculiar things that have happened here and seem to be miraculous. We may rejoice to have these wondrous deeds in our midst, and yet we cannot forget that we have a hard and fast duty to truth. Wisdom demands of us the prudence and reserve to ask our postulant to explain herself.
“I know that we have not all been persuaded that Mariette did not create or provoke these precious wounds, whether unwittingly or for some ulterior motive. And yet Reverend Marriott and I are agreed in giving no
thought to having doctors look at her, for that will only garner us fame, publicity and quarrels. You may be assured, however, that if we find that our postulant is shamming or is so deranged that she could purposely hurt herself, she shall not remain in our haven for one more day. Having said that, we both feel that if these indeed are preternatural gifts from God, then in His giving them to one of ours in the cloister He has gone to great effort to keep the stigmata hidden from the world. In our midst Mariette shall pass the hours unhallowed, unhindered, and unobserved. Shall we disrupt our orderly lives and sabotage God’s plan for Mariette and His faithful servants by making everything public?
“Wondrous things do happen here, but they take place amidst great tranquillity. We shall make it our duty to preserve that. We shall try to find a natural explanation for these phenomena if we can, and we shall deny they are holy gifts to Mariette until there is no other alternative. We know there are miracles in the gospels, but we show them disrespect if we dispose ourselves to believe in the simply fabulous. And we must keep in mind that there are a good many more pages in holy scripture that show how little pleasure God takes in astounding us with His power. Let us therefore be wary of hallucinations and tricks and whatever seems wonderful or surprising. And let us remember that sainthood has little to do with the preternatural but a great deal to do with the simple day-to-day practice of the Christian virtues.”
Mass of the Circumcision of Our Lord.
Cold and calm under mackerel skies that pink in the sunset.
A mother skunk and four kittens find the food in the high, frame compost heap.
Sister Aimée is halfway through The Book of Privy Counseling and salt pork is in the stew.
Evening recreation is taken in the haustus room, where Sisters Honoré, Véronique, Philomène, and Saint-Denis perform four concerti by Vivaldi while five or six professed sisters worriedly stare at their postulant.
After Compline, Mariette gets into her nightgown and kneels on the floor to hastily pen another letter, her hand moving with great speed and urgency across the page.
1 January 1907
At this hour when your servants here are at rest and seem to be content in their repose, I find myself enjoying a happiness that the sweetest sleep could not afford me. I have to write to you now, I cannot wait, I have no way of containing these feelings. Hear how my heart speaks to you and hurts for you to reply to it. See how it consecrates to you its sleepless hours and its impatience. I have grown jealous of all who befriend you, yet it is my fondest wish to find you more admirers. Every thought I have is of you. Every sentence I speak that is not about you seems empty and without purpose. Were it necessary to give up all the worldly pleasures of my life to gain one instant of happiness for you, I would do it without hesitation.
Mass of Saint Genevieve, Virgin.
Everything but houses and trees are in the great white stomach of winter, and gray doom is in the skies. Externs stand at their windows in knitted black sweaters and watch as a cruel wind sharks what it can.
Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus.
Timbers, sawhorses, and hovering dust in a milky chute of sunlight.
Chisel and adze and some sixpenny nails thorning a green tarpaulin.
Sister Marie-Madeleine hunkers in a jean carpenter’s apron as she nudges an oak plank a half-inch on a floor joist and then hammers a nail flush to the wood with five hard damning blows.
Sisters Geneviève and Léocadie are in the scriptorium composing histories of Trent for their course in ecclesiology. Sister Geneviève is getting a footnote when she sees a house spider with long legs as delicate as hairs tentatively walk sideways onto an open book, and she uses her pencil to slowly chase it this way and that on the page.
A gardener’s ladder is angled against the freshly painted refectory wall, and Sister Véronique is in difficult balance as she prints above the fifth window in beautiful calligraphy, “Eat and drink that which is offered to you. Luke 10:7.”
Mariette is carrying six gray blankets in the hallway when she woozily tilts against a wall and skids forward until Sister Monique puts down her floor mop and hurries to her. And Mariette is white as paper when she looks up and faintly says, “Will you please take me to Jesus? I need him.”
“Shall we go to the Blessed Sacrament?”
“Yes; please.”
Keeping her upright by her left elbow, Sister Monique helps the postulant to the oratory. Halfway there, Mariette slackens to her knees and shyly looks up. “Oh, Sister, I’m so ashamed!”
“You’re ill.”
“No,” she whispers. “Look at my hands.”
Blood is trickling down the front of her habit, and her hands are red with fresh wounds.
Mass of the Epiphany of Our Lord.
Second rising.
Sister Catherine hears the first of the three psalms of the Hour as she hunches over the dresser in the priest’s sacristy, fastidiously laying out his white chasuble and stole and maniple for Mass, and putting atop them his underthings, the white-tasseled cincture and ankle-length alb and the hood that is called an amice. She pours Sister Antoinette’s own red wine from a gunnysacked bottle into a fancy glass cruet and fills its twin with fresh snow water before taking the pair to an Empire table beside the high altar. Easing down to the Communion rail, she unlatches it and half genuflects and without haste walks down the main aisle to the narthex in order to open the great doors for the half-dozen villagers who generally attend Mass on holy days.
And she is astonished to see that in spite of the darkness and the earliness of the hour, thirty people or more have been patiently waiting outside the church, and six press forward to hand her charlotte russe in a copper mold and jars of sweetmeats and preserves.
“Oh, you are too kind!” Sister Catherine says.
And a Czech woman asks, “Is she there?”
An hour later, at Holy Communion, Père Marriott holds a gold ciborium in his hand as he goes down the three steps from the high altar to the great oaken grille, where Sister Catherine unfastens the half door above the oratory Communion rail. Each sister stands prayerfully with folded hands and floor-lowered eyes until her turn has come, and then she kneels to receive Christ in the Host. And as the prioress and professed sisters are replaced at the rail by the externs and novices and Mariette kneels for Holy Communion, Père Marriott hears the shoe noise of people in the church behind him hurrying up the side aisles or shifting positions in their pews in order to catch a fresh glimpse of the famous postulant. And she cries with shame as she receives the Host, then stands and hides her face in her bandaged hands.
Mass of Saint Baldwin, Martyr.
Jan. 10th, 1907
My dear Sisters:
May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
We pray that the sisters below will talk confidentially to Reverend Marriott in Mother Superior’s rooms on matters pertaining to the postulant, Mariette Baptiste:
Sister Catherine, Sister Saint-Pierre, Sister Agnès, Sister Saint-Denis, Sister Philomène, Sister Geneviève, Sister Hermance.
Everyone else is invited to write their impressions of our postulant so that the spirits of good or evil that have moved her here may be truly discerned and her progress in Christian perfection may be determined.
Your, poor in holiness,
Mother Saint-Raphaël
Sister Philomène hurries down to the visitation parlor next to the prioress’s suite but halts her stride just outside the door and humbly enters. Elderly Sister Catherine is sitting there on the forward few inches of a tapestried Empire chair and hissing the rosary prayers in half-whispered French.
“Benedicite,” Sister Philomène says.
“Dominus.”
Sister Catherine holds out her ear as Sister Philomène tries, “Je suis après toi, je pense.” I am after you, I think. And then Sister Marguerite is behind her. “Soeur Catherine?”
She smiles. “Maintenant?” Now?
Sister Philomène helps her up
and ineptly walks her to the prioress’s suite. And when the door is closed, Sister Philomène hears Père Marriott saying, “Nous parlerons enfrançais s’il vous plaît.” We’ll speak in French if you like.
“Anglais serait pénible pour moi.” English would be hard for me.
Sister Philomène holds her hands tight to her ears as she waits her turn in the hallway.
Mass of Saint Hyginus, Pope, Martyr.
Mariette is in the scriptorium at the twelve-person library table, hurriedly sketching on the blank sides of a hundred used papers. She no sooner finishes a sketch than she hates it and hits it aside and with great fury tries another. Her hands are pink and raw with household work. Where just a few days ago there were blood-red holes she could hide a penny in, there are now only faint and tender healings and soon these, too, will go away.