Sisters of Sorrow

by Axel Blackwell

  “Where I come from, girls who faint get eaten by machines with needle teeth.” She offered her hand to him again.

  “Oh,” he said, cautiously accepting her hand.

  “I think I probably would have fainted, too, if I’d been thrown into the sea and pulled down by a sea monster,” she said. “What happened next?”

  “I woke up down there,” he pointed toward the cistern in the alcove at the far side of the basement. “Somebody was draggin’ me through a pipe or a tunnel. In the dark, I thought it was a somebody, later on I found out it was a something – that Joseph thing I told you about.” Donny shuddered. “At first, I thought he rescued me, an’ I was relieved. Then, when I caught a peek at him in the dim light, I knew I’d died an gone to hell. He looked just like the devil – if the devil was made out of dead animals and fish all stitched together.

  “I’ll tell you another shameful thing,” Donny sighed, “when I saw that, I screamed.” He shot Anna a mischievous glance. “I screamed like a little girl.” Donny gripped her hand more tightly in case she tried to yank it away again.

  Instead, she said, “That doesn’t offend me, Donald. I am not a little girl.”

  “No, I suppose you ain’t, not if you come from a place where they feed little girls to machines with needle teeth. Where did you come from, anyway?”

  “I was at the orphanage, at Saint Frances. But finish your story,” Anna said. “I need to know about Joseph. He rescued me from that place. He rescued you, too. I thought he was going to meet me here. And help me.” Her words trailed off at the end as she stared into the alcove.

  “He didn’t rescue me, not on purpose, anyway. I don’t think he means to help anybody. When I screamed, he screamed back, an’ not a scared scream, an angry scream, cussin’ an’ swearin’ – juss like the devil, stompin’ up an down… only his feet weren’t feet. I don’t know what they were, seaweed or octopuses… something wet an’ sloppy. I just don’t know, but he sure was havin’ a fit.” Donny shook his head slowly and whistled. “He was madder’n that nun that tossed me out.

  “When he finally settled a bit, he said I’s s’posed to be dead. Said the only reason he pulled me out was to get my parts before the crabs and dogfish nibbled ‘em down to nothin’.

  “Then he pulled me up here, into this room an’ just plopped me up against the wall. I started sayin’, ‘please don’t kill me,’ and he got mad again, cussin’ an’ such. Then he said, ‘I can’t kill. I can’t kill you.’ Just like that, said it twice, then he said, ‘You’ll die here soon enough, then I’ll come get your parts, I’ll come get your parts.’ Then, he kinda oozed over the side of that well and dropped in. He kept on repeating ‘I’ll come get your parts,’ as he moved away down there.

  “I been stuck here ever since. Probably would have died today or tomorrow if you hadn’t come along.”

  “You said he didn’t have feet. Are you sure about that?” Anna asked.

  Donny gave her a puzzled look. “Yeah, I’m sure. I didn’t see much of him, ‘cause I was layin’ down while he was draggin’ me, and it was dark, but I did get a good look at where his feet should have been. He didn’t have any. Why do you care about his feet?”

  “When I saw him last night, he had a foot, a nun’s foot and leg. It was from one of the sister’s I k…one of the sisters that died in the explosion.”

  “What explosion?” Donny asked.

  “I don’t think he plans on eating us, Donny. I don’t think that’s what he wants with our parts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This was a trap,” Anna said, talking out loud but only to herself. “This was a trap, and I walked right into it.”

  She surveyed the room again. The walls offered no exits, no doors, no windows, not even a wide crack. The rotten staircase never would have held her, even if she hadn’t dropped onto it headfirst. Now, two steps dangled from the underside of the decayed floor joists. The remainder of the staircase lay in broken ruin across the basement floor. Only the cistern offered hope of escape.

  “What does he want with our parts, Anna?”

  She looked back at Donny. “I don’t know for sure, but I think he – it, might need…parts, like arms and legs and fingers. He’s made out of pieces, lots of pieces of…pieces of dead things.”

  “That’s why he wants us dead?” Donny asked.

  “But why not just kill us?”

  “He said he can’t,” Donny said.

  “But why not?”

  Donny shrugged, “Maybe he’s a pacifist, like them Amish?”

  “I don’t think he’s Amish,” Anna said.

  They sat together in the filtered, fractured shafts of light under a ceiling of dry rot and brambles. Anna wondered where her finger was and what exactly it might be doing. She wondered if Joseph laid this trap for her specifically because of her dead finger. She thought about the nun’s leg, attached to Joseph, and wondered how many parts she had scattered across the grounds of Saint Frances. How did Joseph get that leg from the coyote? Did the coyote bring it to him?

  “My sister isn’t here.” Donny interrupted her musings.

  “What?”

  “My little sister,” he repeated. “She was on the boat. I figured those crazy nuns woulda tossed her off, too. So she couldn’t tell what they done, you know? But, she ain’t here. Do you think, maybe, they didn’t drown her?” His face darkened, “Or, maybe Joseph was too busy with me an’ she just sunk.”

  “Wait a minute, Donny,” Anna said. “What’d you say your last name was?”

  “Lawson.”

  “And your little sister, is she a tiny blond girl named Maybelle, who can’t speak?”

  Donny’s eyes popped as big and shiny as brand new silver dollars. “Why yes! Have you seen her? Is she okay?”

  “I saw her two days ago, I think it was two. She was fine then.”

  “Now, hold on. You say she can’t speak? We never could get Maybelle to shut up. She ran her mouth as constant as that dripping windmill. Maybe it ain’t the same Maybelle.”

  “No, it must be her. The Maybelle at Saint Frances had a brother named Donald. And you look just like her,” Anna said. “Saint Frances is a bad place, Donny. She thinks you’re dead. Maybe the shock made her mute.”

  “Well, then, we gotta go find her,” Donny said, struggling to stand.

  “Hey, take it easy. Sit down.” She restrained him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “No, when they took momma away, she told me, come hell or high water, Maybelle and me gotta stick together. I can’t never leave her,” Donny said. “We gotta go get her.”

  “We can’t just ‘go get her,’ Donny. Abbess McCain, she runs the place, she has every sister on the island looking for me. They are trying to kill me.”

  “They already killed me,” Donny said with smug contempt, “didn’t do too good a job of it, did they?”

  “You don’t understand. She said she was going to cut off my head and hang it on her wall! She already cut off my finger. Look!”

  Donny startled when she thrust her diminished left hand in his face. He took hold of it in his own hand, gawking at the white stub of knuckle where her pinky should have been. After a minute, he looked up into her eyes and said, “My sister is in a place where they cut off little girls’ fingers, and you think I oughta leave her there?”

  Anna opened her mouth to reply, but didn’t know what to say. She pulled her hand away.

  “You can’t even stand up, Donald,” she muttered, after a pause. “You can’t get out of this basement, can you?”

  Donny glared at her. “I can too stand up,” he said. ”You’re runnin’ away from that place, ain’t you? You’re scared to go back?”

  “Of course I’m scared,” she said. “The only reason you’re not is because you don’t know anything about it.”

  “I know enough,” he said, nodding at her left hand. “If your little sister was in a place like that, would you run off an’ leave her?” Anna’s other h
and still rested on his shoulder. He brushed it off and tried to stand.

  Anna watched him, letting his words sink in. She thought of Lizzy and Jane and the Marys. She thought of Ephraim.

  Donny got his feet under him and pulled himself up the wall until he was standing. “‘Cause if you’re that kind of coward, I don’t need you.”

  “I’m not a coward, Donny. I…” She thought of several examples of her courage, not the least of which was taking the blame for her brother’s murder. “I…” she began, but none of the examples were stories she wanted to tell. “I don’t think you should call someone a coward when you don’t know what they’ve done,” she said, “or what’s been done to them.”

  “I’m not running out on my sister,” he said. The effort to stand took its toll. He trembled now, as if he were very cold. His bravado deflated to petulance. “I’m not leaving her in a place like that.”

  I’m not a coward, Anna thought, not a murderer either. She looked at Donny, shivering in the basement’s dusty light, and wondered about Ephraim, If he was still alive would he have come to save me?

  She remembered Little E, just a toddler, wrapping himself around her leg as she tried to leave for school every day. She remembered him stomping on a roach that had terrified her mother.

  “My brother would have come for me,” she said.

  “’Course he would. That’s what brothers do.”

  “Sit down, Donny, save your strength.” She patted the floor beside her. “We need to talk about this.”

  Chapter 17

  “I am not a coward. It’s just that I don’t know what to do. We are on an island, there’s nowhere to go.” Anna pulled the half-eaten potato out of her pocket.

  Donny reluctantly sat down again, a few feet from Anna. “Where were you planning on going when you got out?”

  “Here, I guess,” she said. “I didn’t know where I was going. I just needed to get out. Joseph gave me a key and told me how to escape. He said to come here and he’d keep me safe. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he is.”

  “Well you know now, don’t you?” Donny said. “That home can’t be as bad as being down here. Maybe them nuns are crazy and mean, but at least they fed you, right? At least they aren’t gonna eat you…or chop you up for spare parts.”

  “It’s bad, Donny.”

  “If it’s that bad, I ain’t gonna leave Maybelle there.”

  “Donny, we are stuck in this trap. The only way out is…” Anna nodded toward the opening of the cistern. “You said yourself that you’re too scared to go down there.”

  “I didn’t say I was ‘scared.’ Besides, that was before you told me ‘bout Maybelle needing rescued.” Donny looked down at his hands. “I might not be so scared if I had someone to go with me.”

  Anna leaned her head back against the wall, looking up toward the broken floorboards.

  “You got out of there, Anna,” he persisted. “If you got out, you can help me get Maybelle out.”

  “It’s not that simple, Donny. Everything has changed. I don’t know how things are there, now that I left.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Anna sighed. She handed Donny the potato. “Eat this.”

  Donny looked at the potato but did not take it.

  “Donny, if you want to help Maybelle, you need to eat.”

  He slid across the floor to the wall beside Anna. He accepted the spud and took a bite.

  “I escaped by blowing up the factory. Exploded it to smithereens.”

  Donny choked and spit chunks of half-chewed potato across the dismal basement. “You blew it up?”

  “It was kind of an accident…I mean, I didn’t really know…” But that was a lie.

  You knew it would explode. You knew people would die. The other Anna said in her head. I thought we decided to stop lying, especially about murder.

  “I blew up the boiler,” she tried again, “Joseph told me to. I thought he was helping me. I think some of the nuns may have died, maybe a lot of them.”

  Donny chomped into the spud, staring at her wide-eyed. Around the mash in his mouth he asked, “How many of ‘em did you get?”

  “Donny! I didn’t want to get any of them. I just couldn’t stay there any longer. I had to get out. And…” She wiped savagely at the tears on her mud-caked cheeks. “I thought I was a murderer. I thought I had murdered Ephraim – and momma, too – so it didn’t matter if I killed some evil sisters. But I didn’t kill Little E, I never did,” she sniffed, “so I wasn’t a murderer after all, but now I am. And all my girls are probably going to die because nobody is going to feed them because of what I did, and I think I knew that too when I did it, but I just couldn’t stay any longer.”

  Anna buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Her shoulders bounced up and down as she lowered her head between her knees. “I couldn’t stay. I didn’t want to leave them like that…but I couldn’t do it…I couldn’t stay. I killed the sisters and that’s going to kill everybody.”

  Her sobs and gibbering echoed around the small room until the basement reverberated with the sounds of her grief. The torment and anguish of the last five years, pent up behind wall after wall of self-preservation and robotic obedience, poured out of her like puss from an infected wound. Donny, looking as mortified as if he were seeing and attempting to tend to such a wound, awkwardly patted her shoulder.

  Anna wept on, barely noticing him. When the patting didn’t work, Donny slid up against her and wrapped his arm over her shoulder, making shushing sounds. Other than holding his hand earlier, it was the first time a boy had touched her since her father had handed her over to Abbess McCain, five years ago.

  Under any other circumstances she would have pulled away, half embarrassed, half disgusted. But here, in the waterlogged basement, so completely disconnected from familiar experience, Donny’s touch imparted an odd, profound comfort. For five years, Anna had starved – starved of food, starved of hope, starved of comfort. However taboo it may have been, Anna leaned into Donny’s one-armed hug, crying into her hands until she slept.

  Late afternoon sun pierced the blackberry vines. Spears of light dappled one basement wall or sparkled off the surface of the water on the floor. A finch perched on the bit of staircase that still dangled from the floor joists, but it flitted away as soon as Anna raised her head. Donny’s arm had slid off of her, but they still rested against each other at their shoulders. His head hung down, with his chin on his chest. The last of the potato had rolled out of his hand and bobbed in the stagnant water.

  Anna sat up. Donny startled awake, blushing, and sliding away from her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “I guess I really upset you.”

  Anna smiled. It was a weary, battered smile, but it warmed her inside and seemed to solidify and call to order the jumbled chaos of emotion in her head. “I have to tell you something…”

  “If it’s about me putting my arm around you, I juss did that ‘cause you were crying so hard. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  “No, it’s about your sister…and my sisters.” Anna swallowed, then continued in a deliberate tone. “I have lived at Saint Frances since I was nine years old. I’ll tell you all about it if you like, but the important thing to understand is this, I would rather die right here in this hole than spend another night inside that hell.” She wiped a coagulation of tear-mud and snot off her face. “I will never return to that. No matter what.”

  Donny’s face hardened and his hands balled into fists, but Anna held up a hand, a wait-a-minute gesture.

  “But that’s okay,” she continued. “I can’t go back, even if I wanted to. They will kill me the moment they lay eyes on me. So it doesn’t matter, don’t you see? They can’t do any worse than kill me, and I’d die anyway if I stay here.”

  “So, then, you will help me get Maybelle?”

  Anna scoffed, and looked away. “I used to be brave.” She held out her left hand, as if examining her nails. “I had a friend when I first arriv
ed at Saint Frances, Rebecca Fontan. She was the head girl before me. They cut off her little finger, too.” She looked up from her hand to Donny’s green eyes. “Do you want to know why?”

  “Probably not,” Donny said.

  “Well, you need to know, Donny. If you are asking me to return to Saint Frances, you need to understand what you’re asking,” Anna said. “And you need to understand what you are getting yourself into.”

  Donny studied his hands, “Tell me.”

  “They cut off my finger because I stole a box of books out of Abbess McCain’s office. They claimed that they cut off Rebecca’s finger because, as the head girl, she was responsible for my actions.” Anna stared at Donny, though he still didn’t look at her. “The real reason was just sheer meanness. They cut off her finger because she was my friend.” After a pause she added, “That’s the kind of place you are asking me to return to.”

  “It doesn’t make no sense, though,” Donny said. “I mean, they’re nuns. I ain’t Catholic or nothin’ but I always thought nuns were s’possed to be good. What’s wrong with ‘em?”

  “Not these nuns, Donny. Why’d they send you and Maybelle here? Because nobody wanted you back home, right? Same with me, everybody knew my name, all across the state. I was the little girl who killed her baby brother. After my mother died, none of the homes would take me. Saint Frances is where they dump the kids nobody ever wants to see again.

  “It’s also where they dump nuns nobody ever wants to see again – the ones that really embarrass the Church. All the sisters of The Saint Frances de Chantal Orphan Asylum have dark secrets. They are dark secrets.

  “None of them want to be here, but in most cases it was either here or jail, or execution. I know that at least two of the sisters were sent here after they killed someone. They resent the orphans, blame us for their exile, take their anger out on us. And no one checks up on them. Everyone else is happy to forget that any of us exist.”

  Donny was looking at her now. His jaw clenched, then jutted, then relaxed. His green eyes widened, as if in sudden understanding, then narrowed as if scheming. His lips pursed, then narrowed. Twice he opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again, continuing his contemplation.