Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  And every day she flew back and forth on the swings. Rita saved a place for her, and the black eyes blinked their thanks, unsmilingly. Not even rain brought her inside.

  She moved into the youngest girls’ dormitory and learned to make her bed smooth and tight each morning. At recess she played ring-around-the-rosy and hopscotch, though she wouldn’t play tag or hide-and-seek, and she didn’t seem to understand pitch-and-catch. She always tossed the ball straight up in the air. On rainy days, when the children took crayons and sheets of brown paper and drew pictures, Mary Woods only scratched up and down across the sheets. Rita drew a house for her, and a stick figure of a girl in a pink dress; Mary Woods shook her head and tore the paper into shreds.

  When the children planted flower gardens, Mary Woods was the most faithful and careful of all. Her hands, no longer clumsy, brushed the seedlings gently. She watered by handfuls, dripping it carefully between her fingers. She weeded; she picked off mites and fly larvae. And when the blooms came—sweet William, cosmos, zinnias—she inspected each flower carefully, staring into them one by one, as if she were searching faces and trying to remember, as if she had known them before, as if they were friends from another time and place.

  Rita, cleaning out a storage cupboard, found a large box of colored chalks and gave it to Mary Woods, who stared blankly, uncomprehending.

  “Mother of God,” Rita said, “but you try my patience.” They found a blackboard, old and cracked, in a back room that had been a classroom once, years ago, when children were taught at the orphanage. It was a storeroom now, filled with broken tables and chairs, spare window sashes, shutters, doors, and a large broken prie-dieu.

  Rita Landry cleared a way to the blackboard. “Now I will show you. This is what you do.” With a green chalk, Rita drew a smiling round moon face and a daisy on its stem. “Like that.”

  Mary Woods stood for a long time, head crooked slightly to the side. Perfectly still. Animal still. Then very slowly, as if she were a cat approaching a bird, she stepped up to the blackboard. One hand, large at the end of its skinny arm, reached out, began rubbing at the chalk images. Slowly at first, then faster and harder, spitting on her palm, Mary Woods erased the pictures Rita had drawn.

  “Fine,” Rita said. “You do what you want.”

  All the next week, Mary Woods drew on the blackboard. She refused to go to the play yard or to story reading; weeds sprang up in her flowers. By the time the colored chalks were used up, her picture covered almost all the cracked expanse of board, a crowded tangle of colors and shapes. There was a green field with fire and flames running through the grass, exploding in the crown of a pine tree. There was yellow sun and there was rain, pouring straight down in heavy gray sheets. There was sky and moon and a ragged small cloud. The images were pressed together, so that the line of a tree trunk was also the back of a rabbit; the line of a river was the blade of a knife; the moon held a curled cat’s tail.

  Once the chalks were gone, Mary Woods went back to the swings and the playground. There she stole more chalk from a game of hopscotch and covered the concrete walks with huge sprawling pictures.

  “Messy.” Sister Bernadette sent out two girls from the laundry with buckets of hot water.

  Mary Woods saw her work disappear under the suds and the brooms. One among a small crowd of children, she watched, curious but not very interested. As if it had nothing to do with her.

  Rita was put in charge of the dormitory for the youngest girls, a long high-ceilinged room lined on each side with small iron cot beds. Sister Marie Augusta, who had had the job for years, moved out of her small curtained cubicle with a sigh of relief and a tight wintry smile. She took down the crucifix her sister had sent her and the rosary that had been blessed by the pope. She put crucifix and rosary in one pocket, her missal in the other, looked a last time down the twin lines of small white iron beds, nodded, and left.

  Each evening Rita led the children in their bedtime prayers, then switched off the ceiling light, so that the long room was lit by a single candle high on the wall before a statue of the Virgin. In the heavy dimness she patrolled the narrow aisle, walking slowly, carefully, until the children were asleep. In winter the room grew cold and the children shivered and whimpered. Then Rita bundled them together for warmth—tight packed head to toe, three or four to a single cot, shared blankets across them. And once each night, summer or winter, at eleven o’clock, Rita waked the entire dormitory and sent them to the potty-chairs that waited in the corner.

  The children fell back asleep quickly, slack mouthed, snoring lightly, mumbling in occasional dreams. (Like a chicken roost, Rita thought, all fluttering and shifting, but not waking nor leaving their perches.) Except for Mary Woods.

  She lay quietly, as if she were waiting for something, eyes wide. Sometimes she lay with arms outstretched, making shadow figures with the distant light of the dim candle.

  “I will tell you a story,” Rita whispered to her. “Would you like that?”

  She told stories from the Little Mirassou River country. Stories of oystermen who found great pearls in their catch, pearls so valuable that a single one bought a new boat. Of strange monsters caught in the nets of shrimp boats. Of beautiful naked women who appeared in the full moon and drove men mad with desire. Of obeah women who set spells like traps, for love or hate or good luck, for health and long life, for sickness and fevers. And many stories of lost princesses, like the princess Yolanda. She was stolen from her cradle by a witch and given to a cane farmer’s wife who raised her and took good care of her. One day, working in her foster mother’s garden, Yolanda saw a big black crow, ten times the size of other crows. Come now, the bird said to her, come now with me. She climbed on his broad feathered back and they flew off to her true and real father’s castle where the crow turned into a handsome prince and married her.

  When Mary Woods at last fell fast asleep, Rita sighed with weariness and went to bed herself.

  Mary Woods grew tall on pipe-stem arms and legs. She was no longer content with the swings at playtime. She became as obsessed with heights as she had once been with motion. She climbed every tree with a branch low enough for her to reach. She slipped into the locked cloister gallery of the chapel—she must have scrambled twenty feet up a supporting post and crept along a narrow ridge below the line of carved-wood screens. She waited patiently while Sister Agnes found the old key and turned back the rusting lock to release her. She loosened a wall grille and slipped into the heating vents. For hours she scrambled through the maze of metal tubes, sounding for all the world like a dozen rats. She even climbed the side of the building, wedging her feet between drainpipe and wall, to reach the cupola over the main door. Once there she seemed to forget the way back. Rita, skirts hitched into her belt, climbed a clanking extension ladder, hoisted the child to her back, and brought her down. Mary Woods came willingly enough. She might even have been afraid. It was hard to tell.

  Sometimes she disappeared from the line of sleeping girls in the dormitory. Then, yawning and barefoot, Rita climbed the stairs to the storage room at the back of the building, to the blackboard and the colored-chalk drawings. The night-light in the hall, dim bulb on a high ceiling, shone through the open door and made a kind of moonlight over the jumble of things inside. On the wall the chalk images glowed, three-dimensional and alive. Before them Mary Woods crouched on the floor, staring.

  When Rita Landry said, “I’ve come to fetch you now,” the child turned her head slowly. An emotion showed in her face: relief or recognition, or even affection, as near as Mary Woods ever came to that.

  She is glad to see me, Rita thought, because she wants to leave, and she can’t, not until someone takes her away.

  Afterwards Mary Woods fell into a heavy deep sleep, not even hearing the morning bell, until Rita, with an impatient sigh, shook her awake.

  On one of her nighttime explorations Mary Woods found five or six cans of paint, each with a thin film of liquid in the bottom—blue and gray and yello
w and white and tan. In the echoing silence of the sleeping orphanage Mary Woods began work again on her blackboard picture. She had no brushes; she used her fingers.

  Rita scrubbed her arms and hands clean with mineral spirits and laundry soap, but the paint rimmed her nails and the creases of her knuckles. And her hair was speckled and streaked, confetti-like.

  “She will just have to stay like that,” Sister Agnes said, “it will serve her right to look foolish.”

  But Mary Woods didn’t seem to mind. The very next night she sneaked back. When she found the door padlocked, she kicked and pounded it with her fists. Anyone might have thought she was angry, but her face didn’t change at all.

  “You are a sight,” Rita scolded her, “and you’ve got company coming too.”

  The priest had been meticulous in his duty. During the intervening four years, at precisely two-month intervals, he had sent someone to visit Mary Woods. Most often it was his sister, who wore print dresses and large-brimmed flat hats and always brought a half-dozen candy canes tied together like a bunch of flowers. Occasionally it was his secretary, an old man, body bent and humped by arthritis. And once it was a stocky blond man. One of the same men, Rita thought, who brought the child in the first place.

  This time it was the priest himself, who now wore the red of a monsignor. His heavy body shook with laughter when he saw the paint-speckled child.

  Sister Agnes folded her hands in patient exasperation. “We would appreciate your not encouraging her, Monsignor.”

  “Sister, you are absolutely right.” He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “But I was not expecting anything like this.”

  “Nor were we,” Sister Agnes said tartly.

  “I understand the difficulties.” He nodded sympathy and folded away his handkerchief.

  “We have tried to interest her in books and reading, but she does not respond. Rita tells me she speaks, but I have never heard her. She is in perfect health.”

  The priest took one of the child’s thin black hands, holding it gently. “Blue and yellow and brown,” he counted off the colors under the nails, “and gray too.” When he smiled, his teeth were darker than his skin. Hair thin and fine as cobwebs covered the sides of his head. “You, little one, are being a nuisance. The good sisters despair of you.” He turned to face Sister Agnes; his movements were quick and precise. “May we see this picture which is so important to the child?”

  Sister Agnes led the way, her stiff back showing how irritated she was by the request.

  “Well.” The priest’s eyebrows made wrinkles across his forehead. “That is quite a remarkable thing for a child her age to do.” To Rita he said, “Tell us about our little wild creature. You have cared for her. You know her better than anyone else.”

  Rita hesitated a moment, struggling to put her thoughts into words. “She has been very good and she has worked very hard. Harder than any of the children.”

  Sister Agnes cleared her throat in loud disagreement.

  “Things that are easy for the others are hard for her,” Rita insisted.

  “How old is she?”

  “Sister says she is about eight.”

  “Oh?” The priest looked to Sister Agnes.

  “Her teeth, Monsignor. The way you would tell the age of a puppy.”

  He nodded. And turned back to Rita. “What else?”

  “She has a hard time learning to read. But there is nothing wrong with her eyes, she can thread a needle faster than I can. She is good with numbers, I am teaching her from a fourth-grade arithmetic. What she likes most of all is painting and drawing.”

  “And speaking?”

  “She is shy, I think. She talks to some of the other children, her friends, I guess they are. And she talks to me. She tells me all sorts of things, whatever she can remember about the places she’s been, and the way she lived, and the people she lived with.”

  “And what was that?” the priest asked.

  Sister Agnes moved forward in her chair, listening.

  Rita felt her face grow hot. “She only told me because I promised I would never repeat a single thing.”

  Sister Agnes sucked in her breath, impatiently.

  “Then keep your promise and your silence.” He glanced at her intently for a moment. “Sister, your order will be well served by this young woman.”

  Sister Agnes inclined her head slightly. “We pray for her vocation, Monsignor.”

  “And in the meantime, Mary Woods.” He studied the child carefully, as if he expected to find something written on her skin, then nodded. “Little one, it is all settled. You will paint and draw and color to your heart’s content and show us this fantastic world of yours.”

  Sister Agnes folded her arms into the sleeves of her habit; the wooden rosary at her belt clacked softly. “Indeed, Monsignor. Perhaps one day she can even send a special painting to her kind patron.”

  “That is a thought.” The priest straightened up and smiled again, faintly.

  She is mocking him, Rita thought, and he has decided to ignore it because he doesn’t care at all what she thinks.…

  More time passed, all the duty-filled days, comfortable in their monotony. Rita Landry formally declared her intention to become a novice and, following the custom of the order, returned to her family for a month to consider her decision.

  Many things in the Little Mirassou River country had changed during the years she’d been gone. But not all. The cicadas still sang their quavery echoing songs in the evenings. The chinaberry trees, stunted by years of cutting for firewood, still bloomed their clusters of pale blue flowers. Roosters crowed at dawn; fat clumsy pigeons pumped on their heavy piston wings across the daylight sky; bats flew at dawn and dusk, chirping nervously to each other. There was still no word from her sister Ursula, who had gone to California. Her other sister Louise now had five children and lived in the same house in Menton with her husband, Al Abadie, who still worked at the rice mill there. And Rita’s baby sister was six years old, the very image of the old man her father.

  But many other things had changed. Father Gautreaux was gone, dead of a heart attack in the empty confessional box one Saturday afternoon. The church still stood by the shell mound on the river. It was even newly painted, but the rectory was empty, doors locked and windows boarded. No parish priest lived there, though descendants of the old cat still sheltered among its foundations. A priest from St. Stephen the Martyr parish came to say Mass on Sunday, returning only for special occasions, like weddings and funerals and baptisms.

  There seemed to be more trains on the L&N tracks. Four or five times a night she’d wake to passing whistles from the Belleterre crossing. There were more boats on the river too. Outboards sputtered back and forth all day long. And Rita counted half a dozen new names among the big fishing luggers. One of them was the Chère Amie, an old boat, but well kept. It belonged to Robert Fournet, from Texas. He had come up the Little Mirassou River two years past, to wait out a stretch of stormy weather. He met the Widow Landry at Vauchon’s grocery store and walked home with her. And stayed. Though he was thirty and she was nearly fifty, they seemed happy together. He’d be whistling and smiling when he came in for supper, and afterwards he never went out with the other men. He was content to sit on the dark porch and play his harmonica until he fell asleep, breathing softly in and out across the reeds. As if he’d always lived there.

  Rita slept in her old room behind the kitchen. It seemed small and crowded to her now, though it was no smaller than her cubicle at the convent. Her sister shared the bed—her small hot body burned against Rita’s skin—and she snored loudly.

  Each night Rita walked along the riverbank, ignoring the clouds of mosquitoes. Occasionally she’d hear distant voices, a laugh or a shout, and sometimes she met people hurrying home. They greeted her respectfully, as if she were already a nun. She answered them politely and kept walking. There was a great restlessness inside her, her legs could not keep still, her thoughts were scattered an
d half formed.

  And then she remembered Mary Woods.

  You will come walk with me, she told her memory child. We will keep each other company and get through the nights. We will talk together.

  The fragile image of Mary Woods settled into step beside her.

  “I have walked along here hundreds and thousands of times,” Rita said aloud, softly. “If you looked you’d probably find my footprints in the ground.”

  I never walked the same way twice, Mary Woods said silently. But I am happy to walk along with you. Because I like you. Maybe I love you. Maybe you even love me like your own child, the one you’ll never have.

  “Hush,” Rita said.

  Those who passed Rita Landry on the shell road by the river heard her soft muttering and paid no attention. They thought she must be praying.

  In time Rita Landry became Sister Celeste, and many other things happened, large and small. The chapel’s roof had to be repaired, shiny new copper gleamed against the sky. Bees got into the attic of the main building; their hollow buzzing echoed through the entire top floor. The bishop, on his yearly visit, stumbled over a broken step and pitched headfirst into the yard. In the space of a single week five newborn infants were left at the home. Sister Bernadette developed cancer, grew thinner and thinner until, nearly invisible already, she disappeared into death. Mary Woods painted a bright flower mural on the wooden fence of the play yard.

  And in the outside world, a war began. The priest, when he visited Mary Woods, wore the khaki of an army chaplain.

  The home’s custodian left for a job at a munitions plant. The maintenance man joined the merchant marine. The young gardener was drafted. The children mowed the grass and filled the flower beds with beans and corn and onions and cabbage.