Sisters of Sorrow

by Axel Blackwell

  Sisters of Sorrow

  Axel Blackwell

  To the 796 children who died in the care of Sisters of Bon Secours at The Mother and Baby Home of Tuam, Ireland. May they finally find peace.

  Part One

  Into the Night

  Chapter 1

  Anna Dufresne sat on the edge of her cot in the predawn hour, staring down at her mummified pinky finger. It lay in a stained hollow beneath her pillow, like the baby teeth she used to hide for the Tooth Fairy. Anna sighed. Once, she had fantasized about waking to find that the Finger Fairy had replaced her pinky with a key. But that was last year, when she had been a little girl.

  Anna lifted the finger and dangled it by its leather thong. Misty gray light drifted through the high windows, settling over the dormitory hall like fine dust. In the gloom, her finger could have been a gnarled twig or a bit of root. The nail had fallen off. Only the tiny knob of bone, at its knuckle end, distinguished it as having once been part of her.

  Anna dropped her hands, and the finger, into her lap. Jane, the other head girl in the room, stirred. She rolled over and faced Anna.

  “Morning, Pinky,” Jane said.

  Anna didn’t reply.

  “Sister Eustace says we’re getting a new little rat today,” Jane said, wiping her nose.

  “Yes, I heard. She’s only six. Her brother is coming too, I think,” Anna said. “And they are not rats.”

  Jane snorted. “Well, whatever she is, she will be sleeping on your side. I have more than enough vermin over here already.” She yawned, stretched and sat up on her cot.

  “She will sleep where ever Sister Eustace places her, Jane.” Anna tied her pinky finger around her neck by its leather thong, her remaining fingers moving with practiced ease.

  “Oh, what a lovely pendant,” Jane cooed. “Such finery for M’lady.”

  “Ah, my dear Jane,” Anna said in a tired voice, “the ivory around my neck is simple next to the radiance of the rubies on your cheek.”

  Jane’s cheeks flared with angry color. Her bright flush eclipsed the infected red pimples covering her face. She leapt to her feet and balled her fists. “I’ll put some rubies on you, Anna Dufresne!”

  Jane lunged. The iron legs of her cot screeched against the cold stone floor, echoing up and down the dormitory hall. Anna flinched. Jane shoved Anna backward onto her cot, pinned her shoulder, and raised her right fist.

  “You tell me you’re sorry, or I will make you sorry!” Jane said. She was sixteen, two years older than Anna. And Jane could hit – hard.

  “I’m sorry, Jane,” Anna said.

  Jane hesitated, some of the anger deflating.

  “Jane,” Anna said, “the bell…”

  A mean smile replaced the rage on Jane’s face. She gave Anna a light slap, then released her. “Well then, you had better start getting ready, hadn’t you?” She grabbed one of Anna’s shoes from under the cot and flung it into a dark corner of the hall. There was a muffled thonk and a child cried out.

  “Oops,” Jane said and giggled.

  Anna scrambled off the opposite side of the cot, toward the shoe.

  Behind her Jane called, “That new rat is sleeping on your side.”

  Anna said nothing. She waded through the piles of straw that served as bedding for her fifteen wards. The younger girls, roused by the commotion, woke, rubbed their eyes, picked straw out of their hair.

  “Who cried?” Anna asked.

  “I didn’t cry, Miss. I just…I just…” It was Mary Two. “I found your shoe,” she said, holding it aloft. Mary could be whiny sometimes, but she was a good worker. Her dad had been hanged for rape and her momma ran off to be a prostitute in Chicago, according to Sister Eustace. Mary had been here since she was seven.

  “Did it hit you in the face?” Anna asked, taking the shoe.

  “No Miss, just my arm.” Mary held out her right elbow.

  Between the dim light and the scrim of filth on Mary’s arm, it was impossible to tell if the shoe had left a bruise. “You’ll be fine, Mary, get dressed.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “Somebody make sure Lilly is ready when the bell rings or you all get half rations at breakfast,” Anna said, surveying the heaps of straw. Lilly was her youngest charge, a five-year-old waif. Sister Eustace hadn’t told Anna her history.

  Ashen morning light strengthened through the narrow windows. Behind her, one of Jane’s girls lit the candles in the chandelier. Anna’s girls all appeared to be awake and moving. Jill was the only one who tended to over sleep, but she had been curled up against Mary Two when the shoe hit. She had scrambled to her feet as soon as Anna started moving in their direction.

  Anna returned to her cot and dressed, slipping a rough-cut work dress over her nightshirt and pulling a shawl around her shoulders.

  “Thank you for not throwing my other shoe, Jane,” she said.

  “You are welcome, Anna,” she paused, “and I am sorry I hit you. That wasn’t necessary.”

  “Oh, did you hit me?” Anna asked, pulling on her shoe. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “Well, then I’m not sorry!”

  Anna looked up at her, smiling. “Me, neither.”

  Jane’s face hardened, and her flush returned. Then, high up in the single stone tower of The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum, the bell rang. All emotion dropped from Jane’s face. Both girls ran to the arched oak door at the end of the hall and started calling the names of their charges.

  Anna: “Elizabeth, Mary One, Lilly…”

  Jane: “Miriam, Sarah, Norma…”

  As they called each name, the girl belonging to it fell in line behind either Jane or Anna. The bell pealed out its third bong.

  Jane called, “Joan?”

  Joan, the oldest girl on Jane’s side, called back, “All here, Miss.”

  The bell struck four.

  Anna called her oldest, “Lizzy?”

  Lizzy called back, “All here, Miss…”

  Fifth bong.

  “…and Betty’s shoes are on the right feet.”

  The girls tittered with nervous laughter. Many of them making quick inspections of their own shoes. Anna glared at Lizzy, who pretended to ignore her. Then, the bell struck its final note. The laughter ceased and the girls froze, standing straight as soldiers. Keys jangled in the lock beyond the oak door. Anna heard Lizzy’s harsh whisper, “Breathe!” then Mary Two’s quick gasp of inhalation.

  The lock clicked. The door swung silently open. Sister Eustace and Sister Martha strode into the hall. Another sister, one Anna did not recognize, stood in the open doorway, covering her nose with a handkerchief.

  Sister Eustace and Sister Martha walked between the two lines of girls. When they reached the end of the line, they turned and walked back to the doorway. After conferring with Sister Martha, Sister Eustace addressed the girls.

  “Ladies, your hands.”

  Jane and Anna held out their right hands, knuckles up. A leather crop appeared in Sister Eustace’s hand, slipping out of her sleeve as quick and smooth as a gambler’s draw. She tapped Anna’s hand with the crop. Then, she struck Jane’s hand, but only hard enough to produce a light snap.

  “Your cot is out of place, Jane,” she said. “Other than that, all is in order. Before you leave for breakfast, let me remind you that today is laundry day. We will be collecting your bedding this afternoon while you are at the factory. The blankets will not be dry until tomorrow. I have asked Abbess McCain to turn up the boiler for this wing tonight. She said that she would base her decision upon your performance at the factory today. Therefore, I strongly recommend that you meet your quota. Anna, after you feed your girls and take them to the factory, you will report to my office.”

  “Yes, m
a’am.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot, we have a new sister with us.” Sister Eustace turned to the woman standing in the hall. “This is Sister Dolores. She has come all the way from Florida. I expect you to remember her name, and to make her feel welcome here.”

  Sister Dolores lowered the handkerchief from her nose. She nodded a greeting at the girls, but said nothing. Her hands fidgeted, wringing her handkerchief. She looked terrified. St. Frances was a very long way from Florida. She had probably come to the orphanage as voluntarily as any one of the orphans had.

  “Well, then,” Sister Eustace said. “Off with the lot of you!”

  Anna and Jane sat at the table with the four other head girls. Two hundred or so younger children sat in little circles on the stone floor. Across the dining hall, five head boys huddled around their own table. The sixth chair at the boy’s table sat empty. Daniel Seabrook, who had occupied that seat for as long as Anna could remember, had been killed last week when a column of poorly stacked crates toppled. Looking at Daniel’s empty chair, Anna suddenly understood why the little ones sat on the floor, why they were not assigned seats. Seeing a new empty chair every time the factory took a child might make the sisters uncomfortable.

  Anna turned her attention back to her own girls. Sister Evangeline had kitchen duty this morning. She hauled a cauldron of weak porridge from one cluster of children to the next. Lizzy called Sister Evangeline The Woodpecker. Frizzy red hair sprang from beneath her coif and jetted over her bandeau in little puffs. Her nose jutted out of her face like a sharp beak.

  The Woodpecker dumped a ladle full of porridge into Anna’s bowl, then stooped down close and said, “You best be certain to be upstairs soon as the bell strikes seven.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Anna replied.

  After Sister Evangeline served the remaining head girls and moved away, Jane leaned over and whispered, “What have you done now, Anna?”

  Anna slurped thin gritty gruel from a tin spoon and shrugged.

  “We need you at the factory. Today of all days. When you get in trouble, we all suffer.”

  “I didn’t do anything, Jane. I do not know why Sister Eustace wants to see me. Maybe I am to be adopted,” Anna said with a wry grin.

  “Who would want you?” Jane asked. “And, this is not a thing to joke about, Pinky. If we miss quota we will freeze to death tonight.”

  “Stop calling me Pinky, pimple lips,” Anna said.

  “If you mention my complexion one more time, Pinky, I swear to Christ, I will smother you to death with your own pillow!”

  “We will not have any pillows tonight, Jane, and you will have forgotten by tomorrow.” Anna lifted the tin to her lips and drained its contents. The bowl hid most of her face, but she continued to smile at Jane with her eyes.

  Jane wanted to stay angry, but the older girl couldn’t help grinning a little. Finally, she said, “What are we going to do, Anna?”

  “You, Jane, are going to make quota. You are going to scream and yell and beat on your girls until they pound out enough Frances de Chantal shoes to keep you alive for another night.” Anna snapped her fingers at Lizzy, who was laughing a bit too loudly. “I am going to go to Sister Eustace’s office and likely get screamed at and beaten, too. Then I’ll come help you make shoes.”

  Jane sighed. “I think we should form a coup.”

  “Ha. We could mutiny, like on the Bounty,” Anna said. “You would make a wonderful Abbess McCain.”

  “If I were the Abbess, I wouldn’t make you wear that awful finger around your neck.”

  “No, you’d cut off my other pinky and make me wear them both as earrings.”

  “And you’d deserve it,” Jane said, scraping the last of her breakfast out of its bowl.

  Sister Elizabeth blew her whistle. The children rose, lined up, and filed out of the dining hall, depositing their bowls and spoons in a washing trough as they went. Jane and Anna walked side by side down the corridor to the stairway. Their girls trailed them in neat lines.

  “Listen, Jane,” Anna said, “I honestly don’t know why I have been called to see Sister Eustace.”

  “It can’t be anything good.”

  “No,” Anna said, “it can’t.”

  “I’ll make sure Lizzy gets your girls out tomorrow morning if…if you haven’t returned.”

  “Thank you.” Anna smiled at her. She paused, then added, “If you get behind today, tell Lizzy I said to call out the reserves.”

  “The what?” Jane asked.

  “You have to say it just like that. Call out the reserves. That’s our little code.”

  They had reached a broad stone staircase that descended into the factory. The air was heavy with the scents of leather and dye, hot copper and burning coal. The presses and stitchers and cutters and mills thrummed, pounded, hissed – hungry machines, eager to devour their young operators. The industrial din would soon make conversation impossible. Anna finished quickly.

  “We always put a pair of shoes aside when we are ahead of quota. There’s a stash – a couple dozen pairs. Lizzy knows where. If you are not going to make quota honestly, tell her I said to call out the reserves. She will find you enough shoes to buy some heat tonight.”

  “Why, Anna, you are a little devil.”

  “And you see where it has gotten me?” She reached out and squeezed Jane’s hand. Jane startled, but squeezed back.

  The bell began to strike seven as they passed into the factory. The roar of machinery drowned out whatever Jane said next, which was fine by Anna. She yelled for Lizzy to get the girls to their stations, then turned and fled back up the stairs toward Sister Eustace’s office.

  Chapter 2

  The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum was a fortress-like structure consisting of two long wings joining at a center rotunda. The factory occupied the entire lower floor of the south wing. The top floor housed the dining hall, kitchen, and the nuns’ living quarters. The orphans slept in the dormitory halls of the north wing. The north wing stood as tall as the south but was only a single story, with high, vaulted ceilings. Anna had heard tell of a basement below the north wing, but she had never seen it.

  All the offices were located in the rotunda, the Great Round Room. It served as the main entrance to Saint Frances de Chantal, featuring massive oak double doors, and a high domed ceiling and mosaic marble floor. A wide balcony wrapped around two-thirds of the rotunda’s mezzanine level, terminating on either end in broad staircases that swept down to the double doors. Sister Eustace’s office was on the mezzanine level.

  Anna could have entered the Great Round Room directly from the factory, but the orphans were not allowed to use the formal staircases. Instead, she climbed the back stairs from the factory to the kitchen, then exited the kitchen onto the mezzanine’s balcony through a narrow service door.

  Anna sat on the wooden bench outside Sister Eustace’s office, waiting to be summoned. She stared over the railing and out across the empty dome of the Great Round Room. Pairs of sisters hurried up and down the stairs, or back and forth over the balcony, carrying boxes or files or stacks of linen. They chattered in hushed tones, until they saw Anna, at which point they fell silent and hurried past.

  Anna felt she had been sitting on the very hard bench for hours when the bell struck a single note, indicating the time was seven-thirty. The bell hung in its tower, sixty feet above the center of the rotunda. Anna liked to stand on the star at the middle of the Great Round Room and stare up at the bell, imagining the view from up there. She liked to watch the pigeons that occasionally flew in through the openings at the top of the tower.

  What would it be like to be one of those pigeons? Anna wished she could flap noisily around the enormous dome until Abbess McCain herself came out to see what was causing all the commotion. Then her pigeon would fly up to the bell, plop a dropping on it just for spite, and soar out of the fortress to discover whatever may lie beyond its walls. She especially wished that right now. Her breakfast was not sitting eas
ily in her stomach. Her underarms were damp, despite the morning’s chill, but her mouth was quite dry.

  When the call finally came, Anna stood so quickly her head buzzed, and her vision clouded over briefly. One knee popped. She straightened her dress, opened the door and walked into the office.

  She stood before Sister Eustace’s expansive desk, hands clasped behind her back. The sister fussed over a stack of papers, ignoring Anna. Beyond the old nun, double glass doors opened onto a white stone patio, providing a glimpse of the grounds around Saint Frances. Anna had arrived at the orphanage when she was nine and had not seen the outside since that day, five years ago.

  Through the doors, she could see a luxurious grass lawn surrounded by a dense forest of fir trees and madronas. On the right edge of the view, the lawn dropped away over a steep hill. A thin ribbon of blue lined the edge of the horizon just beyond that drop, the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Strait connected the Puget Sound to the Pacific Ocean. The Pacific Ocean connected to every other place in the world. More than anything else, Anna wanted to see the ocean, maybe even swim in it someday – if she ever learned to swim.

  “Anna!” Sister Eustace said.

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Anna snapped her eyes back to the nun.

  “Stop gawking.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “You called for me, ma’am.”

  “Of course, I called for you, child! But why? What have you done that has necessitated me calling for you?”

  Anna wrung her hands behind her back. “Ma’am, I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Come, now! You are at all times up to some wickedness!” Sister Eustace snatched up the leather crop and pointed it at Anna. “Have you been hoarding blankets again? Or trying to climb out the dormitory windows?”

  “No, ma’am. I promise. The windows are much too narrow for me to squeeze through.”

  “Ah! So you have tried it.”

  “Just once, ma’am, and that was long ago.”

  “Whatever for?” Sister Eustace nearly sprang out of her chair. “Don’t you know a fall from that height would kill you? The wolves would have eaten you right there on the lawn.” Blood drained from Sister Eustace’s face, and she settled back into her chair. “The wolves or something worse.”