Sisters of Sorrow

by Axel Blackwell

  By the time she reached the grate, she was too spent to be startled. The blockage was gone. Her sack, which had been half-full, now lay flat and neatly folded beside her trowel. Anna tried to make sense of what she was seeing. Someone else had to be in the pipe. That was the only possible explanation, a young boy. How was it that neither she nor Sister Elizabeth had seen him?

  “He must have come through the grate.” Echoes of her whisper hissed through the pipe. “It must not be secure.” A glimmer of hope re-ignited the life in her eyes. The mist had condensed heavy around her, and her lamp grew dim. She peered through the fog at the iron bars.

  Can I open it and slip away? Could it be that easy?

  Wrapping her fingers around the center bar, Anna heaved it forward. It didn’t budge. She pulled it toward her with all her remaining strength, but only succeeded in dragging her body forward until her face pressed against the bars.

  She coughed a short laugh, then dissolved in sobs, slumping flat against the curved and slimy bottom of the pipe. She lay there crying, weakly thumping the bars with one fist. The echoes rose and fell as the mist thickened.

  Then, she heard the whisper.

  “Stop that.”

  Anna snapped her head up so fast she dented her tin helmet on the top of the pipe.

  “Stop crying.” This whisper was not an echo, and it did not echo. It was crisp and close. Anna could almost feel the breath in her ear.

  “Who is there?” she asked.

  There was no response for so long Anna began to wonder if she had imagined it.

  Then it came again. “You are Anna Dufrense, the little girl with the finger around her neck?”

  The whisper was so close, but Anna could get no sense of the speaker, boy? girl? child or adult? She couldn’t tell. “Yes…”

  “Clever in your thoughts and stupid in your actions.”

  “Who are you? Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m where you want to be,” it said, “outside.”

  Anna pressed her face against the grate, peering into the swirling fog.

  “My name is Joseph, Anna, and I can help you, but you must listen carefully.” The whisper now softened, sounding like the boy who had answered Sister Elizabeth. “If you come to me, I will keep you. I promise. Abbess McCain will never find you.”

  “How?” Anna pleaded, “How can I get out?”

  “I left you something, Anna, under the trowel. Hide it in your shoe. Meet me in the factory, five nights hence, behind the main boiler, at ten o’clock.”

  Anna lifted the trowel. Beneath it lay a long black key. She reached for it gingerly, terrified that it would prove to be as insubstantial as the swirling mist. But when her fingers closed around it, it was cold, and heavy. She stared at it as if it were an enormous diamond or an ingot of gold rather than a simple iron key.

  “And Anna,” this was the clear, sweet boy voice she had heard earlier, no longer whispering, but further away, “be sure to bring your finger.”

  Anna looked up from the key. The glow of her dimming lamp seeped into the haze. Beyond the grate, something twinkled. Eyeshine. Two large yellow disks pierced the fog, floating in mid-air. Anna’s breath caught in her throat. A second later, the eyes turned away and vanished.

  Chapter 5

  The rest of the evening concluded without further incident. A herd of boys hauled two cartloads of sea junk from the drainage chamber and dumped them on the beach. Normally, Anna would have jealously envied the boys for being allowed outside, even for just a few minutes. This evening, her thoughts were too cluttered to even notice.

  Once the boys had left the warehouse, Sister Elizabeth filled a large laundry vat with tepid water and ordered Anna to bathe before going to dinner. “You are filthy!” she exclaimed. “You smell like sewage and seaweed.”

  Anna tossed her sodden, soiled work dress and under garments into the potato sack. She bathed as quickly as possible and dressed in a clean but equally threadbare uniform.

  At dinner, fish stew and toast, Jane teased her about the bright red welt on her cheek and the blood in her hair. She said it served Anna right for playing hooky at the factory. Anna wondered, absently, how she had gotten blood in her hair, but for the most part, she didn’t hear much of what Jane said. Jane prattled on between bites of toast, goading her about her missing finger, taunting her about being Abbess McCain’s favorite.

  “The trowel,” Anna interrupted.

  “What?” Jane asked, happy to finally get some response from her.

  “Sister Elizabeth threw a trowel at my head,” Anna said. “That must be where the blood came from.”

  “I guess that would do it,” Jane mused, “but I would have used a brick, considering the thickness of your skull.”

  Anna smiled, “Yes, you probably would have.” She almost added, I’m going to miss you, but thought better of it. Jane continued heckling, and Anna, whose toes restlessly curled and uncurled around the key in her shoe, continued ignoring her.

  After dinner, Anna walked down the back stairs and into the Great Round Room, struggling not to limp on the lump in her shoe. Her girls followed her through an oak door into the dormitory wing. A corridor stretched out before them, lined with doors on either side. Between the doors, ragged tapestries hung, depicting unicorns and dragons, martyrs in gruesome passion, saints with crooked heads, witches burning at stakes. A single bookcase stood lonely and forgotten half way up the hall.

  The bookcase once held secret treasure, back when Anna was a little girl, back when Rebecca had been the head girl and both of them had ten fingers each. Now, only encyclopedias and massive theology tomes burdened its shelves, including several well-worn copies of Malleus Maleficarum. Rebecca had told Anna that Malleus Maleficarum was German for The Witch Hammer. She said it was pretty funny, but Anna refused to touch any of the proper books, just on general principle.

  Anna looked back over her shoulder. Two long tapestries hung on either side of the door through which they had just walked. These tapestries covered the wall from the floor to the vaulted ceiling of the twenty-five foot high corridor. Between them, near the ceiling, a circular window opened into Abbess McCain’s private office. The Abbess’s silhouette darkened the stained glass, her arms folded, her keen eyes peering through the small bit of clear glass at the window’s center.

  One of the girls bumped into Anna. She realized she had stopped in the middle of the hall. Mary One and Mary Two each took one of Anna’s elbows and pulled her into their dormitory. Behind her, Lizzy whispered to Jane, “What’s the matter with her, do you think?”

  “That trowel must have knocked the sense out of her,” Jane said, adding loudly, “not that she had much to begin with.”

  All the girls stared at Anna. She thought back over dinner, Jane’s rhetorical onslaught had been much more intense than usual, and the girls had been staring at her then as well.

  “What?” she asked, after Sister Eustace had counted the girls and locked the arched door behind them. “What is it? Have I grown a tail?”

  The little ones giggled.

  Jane said, “A tail would suit you, to go along with your pitchfork and horns.”

  More laughter mixed with gasps.

  “Anna!” Lizzy said, “You haven’t asked us about the quota!”

  Anna looked around the room. The piles of gray blankets were gone. Her cot was bare, no blanket, no pillow, not even the waffle-thin mattress remained. Laundry day, she remembered. Is it still laundry day?

  “Well,” she asked, “did you make it?”

  “We made it!” Lizzy threw her arms in the air. “We did have to, ‘call out the reserves.’” She added, with a ridiculously overt wink. “But we made it, with two pairs to spare.” She held two fingers out to Anna.

  “Sister Eustace promised to run our radiators tonight,” Jane said. “We’ll see if it does any good.”

  The girls heaped all the straw into great nests around the two radiators. Anna put her smallest girls closes
t to the heat, then snuggled all the rest up to them. We really do look like a litter of rats, she thought as she curled around Lizzy.

  The radiator banged, as if someone had hit it with a mallet. It hummed, then banged again. It hissed, then vibrated, then rattled. It banged five or six more times in quick succession, before settling in to a routine of random clanks and hisses. That’s going to keep me up all night. I just hope Mary Two doesn’t pee herself again.

  Anna still wore her shoes, hoping they would keep her feet warm and fearing she would lose the key if she took them off. Her toes prodded and caressed the iron. She sank deeper into the straw as the girls nestled together. Her mind flashed the images of the day. Sister Elizabeth dashed to pieces in the pipe, swept away like the refuse in one of those new flushing toilets. Her own drowned face floating lifeless below the surface of the water. The face of her baby brother who drowned all those years ago. The black iron key lying on the burlap sack, hard and heavy and real. And the eyes. Those disembodied yellow disks hovering in the mist and darkness. Those eyes promising to take her away from here, promising to rescue her and protect her and care for her. Those eyes following her down into dreamless sleep, undisturbed by the radiator’s racket or the squirming nest of rats.

  Chapter 6

  Life at The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum was a study in monotony and exhaustion. Days bled into weeks and weeks into months. The routine had become a horrible opiate, hypnotizing the little workers until thoughts were muddled, individual personalities were ground down and nothing was said or done or thought, except for ‘the next thing that must be done.’

  In this state, months had slipped away without Anna noticing. Seasons had come and gone and come again while she had no sense of their passage. But now, with the key wearing a blister on her sole and a hole in her sock, every hour felt like days. Every cruel word, every lash of the crop seemed an insufferable evil. The five days felt to her like a sentence far greater than the four more years she had been expecting to live in the Asylum.

  During dinner, three days after Anna’s encounter in the pipe, Lyla announced there had been a death on her hall. Lyla was one of the other head girls. She claimed to be Italian, but Anna had overheard Sister Eustace say that she was half Negro, “which is why they sent her to us rather than to one of the favored institutions. Her white mother is still alive, probably the father, too. But what would they have done with a thing like that?”

  It didn’t matter to Anna what Lyla was. In here, everyone was equally wretched.

  “Amy caught cold on the night we had no blankets,” Lyla explained. “There was never much to her to begin with, and she wasn’t able to eat the next day. Then, she got the pneumonia, I guess, started coughing so much. When we woke this morning, she was gone.”

  Lyla told the story without emotion, as if she were reporting the number of shoes she had boxed and crated that day. Anna knew the inner distress she felt, and knew the danger of admitting sorrow in a place like this. She had lost more than one little girl in her care, and she had expected to lose more. Maybelle, the mute who had been added to her fold just a few days ago, probably wouldn’t last the year. But Anna planned to be long gone before she lost another one.

  “They buried her at sea while we were working today,” Lyla continued. “She had always wanted to go on the boat. She wanted to see the ocean, again. I guess we all get to ride on that boat at least one more time.”

  “I saw the ocean,” Anna said. “Sister Eustace has a balcony off of her office that overlooks it.”

  “We all saw the ocean, Anna, when we came here,” Jane said.

  “But I saw it just three days ago. It was beautiful,” Anna said. “When I leave here…”

  She stopped. The other girls looked at her with a mix of wonder and disgust. Every child in the building would have sold their soul to escape Saint Frances, but only the little ones, or the perpetually stupid, expressed a hope of ever leaving.

  Jane bailed her out, but only after letting her fumble for words and come up short. “She has been behaving very oddly ever since Sister Elizabeth hit her in the head with a shovel.”

  Lyla nodded, still eyeing Anna. The other girls relaxed a bit.

  “It was a trowel,” Anna said. “I only meant to say that I would like to swim in the ocean someday.”

  Cheryl, a redheaded head girl with more pimples than Jane, and fewer teeth, choked on her fish stew. “Anna! That’s horrible! Every child that ever died here has been dumped out there.”

  “Yeah,” added Jane, “and all the sisters, too.”

  “Never mind,” Anna mumbled. She spooned chunks of fish out of the thin broth.

  “Just think of all those bodies bobbing around down there,” Cheryl said.

  “Cheryl, please!” Lyla said, her eyes glistening with moisture. “When they go into the water, the Lord takes them,” Lyla insisted.

  “My parents were buried at sea,” Ester, the oldest of the head girls, said, “and the Lord took them. And that is all we will hear of that.”

  The girls fell silent. Anna wondered if the Lord had taken her baby brother when he went into the water. She thought it was probably different with bathtubs. Would the Lord have taken Sister Elizabeth if Anna had flushed her down the drainage pipe? Would He have taken Anna? She felt the key pressing against the bottom of her foot and decided that didn’t matter anymore.

  The following morning at breakfast, the new sister was among the nuns serving the meal. Anna startled, suddenly remembering Sister Dolores, the spy. So much had happened down in the cisterns, Anna had completely forgotten the conversation she had overheard. The conversation that almost killed me, she thought. The conversation that almost made me a killer. But, here was Sister Dolores now, who was not what she claimed or appeared to be.

  Sister Dolores had the look of a dog who had been beaten its whole life, yet still yearned to please its master. She hopped eagerly to the demands or requests of the other sisters and forced a smile in reply to every comment. As Anna watched her, however, Sister Dolores looked up from the cauldron of porridge she was stirring and locked eyes with Anna. A true smile spread easily and warmly across the sister’s narrow lips. Anna felt a sudden embarrassment for staring, as well as some deeper uneasiness.

  Sister Dolores straightened her back, still smiling at Anna. She reached into her habit and very deliberately fingered her crucifix. Anna copied her gesture, coming up with her mummified pinky rather than a silver cross. Sister Dolores’s smile twisted just a little, taking on a knowing, satisfied appearance. She casually looked away from Anna, back to the cauldron, reacquiring her subservient posture.

  She is a spy! What did they think was her purpose here? Did they know? Anna couldn’t remember, except that she may have come to rescue someone. Obviously, Sister Dolores knew something about Anna. Is she here to rescue me? How would she even know me? Anna couldn’t begin to imagine.

  “Anna!” Jane snapped.

  Anna looked up to see all five of the other head girls staring at her. She glanced around, confused.

  “Put that thing away,” Jane said. “What has gotten into you?”

  Anna was still holding her finger. She stuffed it back into her dress, then bent over her porridge and did not look up again. She spooned the sludge into her mouth and thought about Sister Dolores, the spy.

  I have to warn her.

  No, stay out of it.

  If she is here to rescue me, and they catch her…

  You don’t need her help, you have the key.

  That’s right, I am leaving tonight, I can risk warning her. Abbess McCain won’t find out until after I am gone.

  If you warn her, she will want to know how you found out. If you tell her, she might turn you in.

  But if I don’t warn her… What if she was the one who left the key?

  How could she have done that?

  How could anybody? But if she is the one helping me escape, and she gets caught…

  The whistle ble
w, signaling the end of breakfast. Anna surveyed the hall. Hundreds of children shuffled into rows. The racket and clatter of feet and benches and tin utensils filled the vaulted chamber. Most of the sisters collected in the kitchen behind the stone archways separating it from the hall. Sister Dolores dragged a mop bucket across the floor toward the hall’s exit.

  Anna grabbed Lizzy’s sleeve and whispered, “You take the girls to the factory, Lizzy, I’ll be right behind you. “

  “Anna, no,” Lizzy whispered.

  “Do it, Lizzy. I promise I will be there in no time.” Anna darted off before Lizzy could protest further.

  She hurried along the wall, as inconspicuously as possible, toward Sister Dolores. The nun mopped around a section of floor near the corner. She was out of view of the rest of the nuns. Anna had never seen the sisters mop the dining hall. But, then again, she had never lingered in the hall after the whistle.

  The key in Anna’s shoe had worn the skin away in two places, and she couldn’t completely hide her limp as she scurried toward Sister Dolores. When she was close enough to whisper, the nun looked up from her mopping. She looked first puzzled, then annoyed.

  “Why aren’t you at the factory?” She demanded.

  Suddenly, Anna decided this was a bad idea, a very bad idea. She turned for the door.

  “Wait a minute. You stand right there. I asked you a question,” Sister Dolores said. “Why did you not go to the factory with the other children?”

  Anna tried to speak but couldn’t think of any words, at least not any words for Sister Dolores. For herself she thought, stupid, stupid, stupid…

  “You came to tell me something,” Sister Dolores said. “What is it?”

  Anna’s mouth bobbed open and closed like a clubbed salmon. She halfheartedly pointed toward the door. Finally, a thought came to her, from Jane, of all people. Tell her you get really confused ever since Sister Elizabeth hit you in the head. She said, “I get…” and abruptly stopped.