Valley of Bones jp-2

by Michael Gruber

  It took me nearly two months to heal enough so I could move without pain. I was taken on increasingly longer walks, first around the infirmary, then to the refectory for meals, then around the grounds. The priory consisted of four three-story buildings made of gray local stone built around a quadrangle. In the center of the quad was a statue of a woman holding a wounded man, which they told me was of St. Marie-Ange de Berville, who had started the Blood Sisters long ago. Two wings of the building were dorms and one was offices and the chapel and the other was the services wing, which was where the refectory and the infirmary and the library were.

  The Society felt about poetry pretty much the way Orne did and mostly they had religious books and medical and nursing texts, but they did have a fiction section full of classics. I read all the novels. No one suggested I read the others. I was out of hospital gowns by then and wore what everyone else wore when they weren’t on nursing duty?what they calledbleu de travail, French mechanics’ one-piece jumpsuits, a souvenir of the Society’s origins in France. I was sitting in this outfit in the dayroom reading Daniel Deronda when Sr. Mercedes came in and said that the prioress wanted to see me. I said I’m busy, at which she took the book firmly from my hand and said the prioress wants to see younow. Well I had heard plenty about the prioress. They called her the Rottweiler and she ate human flesh when she was in a good mood. Mercedes said comb your hair it’s a mess, and I said fuck you and walked out.

  I had expected her to be a big square-jawed warhorse like Sr. Dr. McCallister, six foot tall and breathing smoke. What I found instead was Jette von Schwerigen, a small, spare elderly lady in the full habit of the Society sitting in an armchair, reading. When she saw me hesitating at the door of her office she gestured me closer with a finger and pointed to a chair opposite. She picked up a file and perused it. Her office was plain, whitewashed, a desk, low bookshelves, a large wooden table clock on a wooden file cabinet, some framed photos, the only wall decoration a large crucifix. She looked at me until I became uncomfortable. Sharp blue eyes behind gold-rimmed round glasses. Gave a little sigh, said Emily Louise Garigeau, what are we to do with you?

  A slight barely noticeable accent. I recall I wondered what a German woman was doing running an American operation. I said I wanted to split and she expressed concern for me, where could I go no clothes no money and I said I’ll manage because I was thinking about all those jars of gold coins, and I could call up the maps in my head pretty well. She told me the cops were after me, she knew about the dope business and said my picture was circulating, was on the TV, some federal agents had come nosing around the priory. I asked her why she didn’t turn me in and she said that wasn’t any of her business and then she said tell me about this woman you met, who cared for you when you were injured and led you here.

  So I described the mystery nurse, her face, her cowl or whatever, the prioress nodding, asking questions. Then she opened a book she had on a table next to her an art book red cover with a color picture of a man with arrows sticking out of him and I read the title upside down it was Medieval Italian Painting. She turned to a page and reversed the book and handed it to me. There was a picture of my nurse looking down, a close-up three-quarter view in color you could see the tiny cracks they have on old paintings.

  A chill raised the hair on my arms and I felt sick come up my throat a little. The picture had a caption, detail from St. Catherine by Andrea Vanni, San Domenico, Siena.

  The prioress said the artist who painted that was a friend of Catherine of Siena and he did that from life, that’s what she really looked like. And that’s what you saw, isn’t it? I take it that you have never seen that painting?

  I snapped the book shut. I said I don’t know what you’re talking about and she said young woman, you appear to be under the protection of a saint. I understand you don’t believe in God and all that nonsense, and I said yeah, right, and she smiled and shook her head. Do you know that there are perhaps thousands of people on their knees at this moment praying for some sign from God that will reward them for their faith and perhaps they will never receive one, and here are you, who does not believe at all and you have such visitations. What do you make of this, hmm?

  I shrugged. I said I must have seen the painting in a book somewhere and forgot, though the lie curdled in my mouth. It was a hallucination, I said, I was sick.

  The prioress did me the courtesy of ignoring this remark. She said I have always thought that the Holy Spirit had a sense of humor and this is one more evidence of it. So, we return to the question of what you will do. I assume you don’t wish to end in prison.

  No. Sullen now. My eyes were traveling around the room not wanting to look at her, but the place was so plain and bare that nothing held the eye except the crucifix which I was not going to look at it creeped me right out. There were books in a low glass-fronted case, no help there I couldn’t see the titles and one of the photos, the one in an oval silver frame, was a photograph of a man in uniform. I didn’t recognize the man but the uniform was a famous one.

  I asked her are you any relation to General Hanno von Schwerigen? Children who have been raped have a well-developed ability to change the subject.

  Her eyebrow tilted and she glanced at the photo and said it was her dad and asked me how I knew the name, and I said I have an interest in military history. He commanded the Twenty-second Panzer in Normandy. It was in that John Keegan book about the battle.

  But she was clearly as skilled as I in the opposite direction. She said, But you are the subject of our conversation here and not my father or long-ago battles. She told me that I was well enough to do work, and that I had the choice of leaving, and they’d give me clothes and a little cash, or they’d find me something to do. She said their rule is a modification of the Rule of Benedict, work and prayer.

  I said I was an atheist and she said fine, it’s an old and respectable faith. Some of my best friends are atheists. I’ve worked with atheists who are better Christians than I will ever be. Then she said, be that as it may, you shouldn’t try to ruin the faith of those who have faith because if it is truly of God then it is a waste of your time and in any case it’s impolite. She said manners are important in a community like this one, so if you stay, you can’t do it anymore.

  Now the interesting thing here was that the shiny man was in plain view out of the corner of my eye, just past my left shoulder where he usually hung out not saying anything but sending out his get-out-of-here vibe like he’d done after Momma got herself killed and with Hunter when he went all stupid, and I was about to say well I guess I’ll leave then, when I noticed that the prioress was staring over my left shoulder and I got it into my head she could see him too and this scared me worse than anything I’d been through up to now. I froze like a dead man and the minutes just ticked and I noticed the sound of the clock suddenly loud in the room and somehow time stretched then going from ticktockticktock to Tick. Tock. Tick.

  She broke the silence first. She said I don’t want to influence you unduly, but here is something to think about. It is clear that God is speaking to you through his saint?why we don’t know. He certainly never spoke to me that way and I have been a religious fifty-three years. And He has led you here, also we don’t know why. So let us say you have a certain talent for seeing things usually unseen. I suspect you have also heard from the other side, yes?

  I said I don’t believe in any of that shit! My voice was up and warbling nearly out of control. She said then you are insane. Do you feel insane?

  I had to think about that. I’d been around crazy people enough, my momma and the street people in Miami and I knew in my heart I wasn’t like them. Crazy people were kind of helpless when you got right down to it, and I wasn’t that. So I had to tell her no.

  This seemed to make her happy. She said something interesting has decided to happen to you, we won’t presume to say what it is, but this is probably where you are meant to be. St. Catherine brings you to a priory named for her?

 
; Coincidence, I said like a good little materialist. To my surprise, she laughed. For a little lady she had a deep laugh almost like a man’s. That’s when she told me the Eskimo story, which I will write down because it’s important for you.

  A pilot walks into a saloon in Alaska and the bartender says, oh Fred we have not seen you in church recently. Where have you been? The pilot says, I don’t go to church any longer. I have lost my faith. The bartender says, but why? The pilot says, last month I crashed my plane in the wilderness in the mountains and I was trapped in the wreckage. I prayed to God to get me out but nothing happened. Day after day I am praying, but nothing. I decide that there is no God and I am going to die and there is nothing after death. This is how I lost my faith. So the bartender says, but youdid escape from there. You are here and alive. And the pilot says, oh, that had nothing to do with God. Some damn Eskimo wandered by and pulled me out.

  That wasn’t why I stayed, that story. But after she told it she said, and another thing, my dear: there are no men here. Sometimes it is nice to take a vacation from men, yes?

  Yes, indeed.

  Thus I began my life in religion, God had found me and pinned me in this little corner, forcing holiness down my unwilling throat. In doing so I entered a strange place, strange even among religious foundations. The religious life is dying in the rich countries as everyone knows. The era of huge foundations is over, there are few vocations anymore among young girls, priories and convents are filled with the old and dying and their caretakers. St. Catherine’s was not like that, and this was because of the peculiar nature of the Bloods. This I learned from three books that I got from Sr. Marian Dolan, who was the subprioress and in charge of the lay sisters. The books were Faithful Unto Death, which was all about how the order got founded and how great Marie-Ange de Berville was, and then a book by her, The Formation of Nursing Sisters, and a little thin one, The Rule of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ, which she also wrote. The reason why they had young nuns and oblates is that they recruited from those they raised from childhood in foreign countries and also from some they rescued from the streets. Girls are still human garbage in much of the world and they grab a few from that great dump.

  Sr. Marian was a woman in her fifties with a rock jaw and thick round steel-rimmed glasses, who wore her coif low on her forehead, so she looked a little like a motorcycle rider in goggles. Sr. Marian seemed always to be leaning into the wind of her passage. She told me I would be considered a lay sister as long as I chose to stay. St. C.’s did not have guests, held no retreats. Everyone in the place was a member of the community and worked. She asked me what skills I had, and I said whoring, stealing, and helping run a dope business. Also I could shoot and ride a horse. I thought I would shock her, little did I know. She wrote something down and then said we usually start new people in maintenance. It’s simple, healthy work, and it will give you a good idea of how we live. Or there’s the kitchen, if you’d prefer that. I said how about nursing, I thought you were all nurses. She said nursing was for professed sisters, they wouldn’t put the others through the training, and she didn’t think I had a vocation for it, did I? Well, I sure didn’t, the whole bedpan and sticking needles business freaked me out and I didn’t want to work in the kitchen either, so I told her whatever, acting bored.

  There were about a dozen of us in the maintenance crew. Six were Filipinas, plus the Indian girl Margaret, and the rest were various types of lowlife who had wound up in the hands of a Blood, a couple of whores like me, a suicide attempt, some real young runaways. The head of us was Sr. Lorette, who looked about ninety but was spry. I recalled what the prioress had said about talking down the religion and I was pretty good about that, I mean who gave a rat’s ass about what any of them believed, as long as they didn’t try to foist it on me. Still it wasn’t that comfortable being around them all. The Filipinas were cheerful and devout and chattered among themselves in their bubbling language. They were all orphans who had been rescued from various horrible fates in their homeland. The others were converts and zealous in a particularly annoying way, talking about Jesus and the saints as if they could contact them whenever they wanted. None of them seemed to be contacted by saints against their will as I was, although I didn’t discuss that with anyone.

  The work wasn’t that hard, as work, but I grudged it, and that made it wearing. Despite my so-called eidetic memory I find it hard to recall what was going through my mind at the time. A lot of anger, mainly at myself for having screwed up my life, and at all the people who had let me down, my daddy by dying in that stupid way, my gran for not figuring me out in time, my momma for marrying a pedophiliac hypocrite, Ray Bob for being one, Foy for blowing himself up, and also at the people at the priory for being so bone-stupid they couldn’t even see how dumb and worthless I was, and all this shot out in all directions like sparkler sparks, but black, and especially at the people who were the sweetest to me, Margaret and Sr. Lorette mainly, but anyone who happened to come in range of my tongue. I wanted a fight, but no one would fight with me. One time I was up on a ladder in the infirmary changing a lightbulb, and as I took down the globe, I saw that it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base and I remembered my first night there and how I’d seen that floating up along the ceiling and I dropped the globe and didn’t tell anyone about it but it shook the shit out of me. I started volunteering for work outside after that, felling trees and clearing culverts.

  Occasionally I would see her, standing away at the edges of my vision, and once as I opened the door of my truck she was standing quite close, close enough to touch. She never said anything, although I shouted at her and used vile language and threw rocks, like a maniac, at Catherine of Siena. I feared I was going to be crazy like my mother, and I think that one of the big reasons I stayed at the priory was that if I was out in the world and people saw how I acted I would get arrested and they would check my fingerprints and that somehow (I wasn’t too clear on this but it was a terror nonetheless) I would end up back in Doc Herm’s rest home in Wayland and the Dideroffs could do what they liked with me.

  Aside from that and everyone hating me (as I believed) life at St. C.’s was pretty fine. The Bloods are not an ascetic order, about the furthest thing from as a matter of fact. They feed themselves well when they can get food. The Foundress has a whole section of her book on recipes, how to make daube for 250 and so on, navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, soupe r l’oignon. They baked their own bread too, and croissants. I never had food like that before or since. Bd. Marie-Ange thought that life was hard enough and they were all going to die fairly soon, and that God had given us all these good things like food and wine to enjoy and we should enjoy them. Over the entrance to the refectory there was carved a saying from St. Teresa d’Avila?”When it’s time to pray, pray; when it’s time for pheasant, eat pheasant.” We had wine with our meals too, except on Friday (when we ate only soup and bread) and during Lent. The order was liberal in some ways and conservative in others, like that, or maybe they were on the other side of that whole liberal-conservative thing, but I didn’t know anything about that then. I guess they liked their traditions was the main thing, like the habits and the French words they used for different things.Gouter for the snack they served in the refectory around three.En principe, when you were going to do something a little outside the rules: en principe, it’s not allowed, but. Anddebrouiller, of course, but I should say about that later because that was connected with Nora Mulvaney.

  Andrappel. Every Sunday we had rappel, which meant the entire population stood in lines marked on the pavement, the sisters dressed in their coifs and cavalry capes and us lays and postulants in our bleu de travail and berets and the little old prioress standing straight as a flagpole in front of the big bronze statue of the Foundress as the Angel of Gravelotte giving a drink to a wounded peasant lad, and then the subprioress, Sr. Marian, would say, in French, here are 120 (or whatever the number was) souls at your service and also
how many sick or absent there were and the prioress would say I thank you, sister, my service to God and His people, we are faithful unto death. May the Lord have mercy on us all. Come my children to the house of the good Lord. With which she would turn on her heel and march into the chapel, with the sisters following and after them us lays. They say that in the old days in Europe they used to have drums and bugles at rappel, but they don’t here. What they still do is the youngest member of the company stands at the church door facing out and ready to give the alarm in case any dangers appear, which happened in Algeria a long time ago, some bad guys snuck up on a bunch of Bloods and patients and killed them all. I didn’t understand this because what were they going to do except get killed whether there was warning or not, and I asked one of the professed about it and she looked at me funny and said, they could have escaped. She said, the point isn’t to die, the point is never to abandon. Oh my, she said, we run like rabbits all the time carrying our patients on our backs, and laughed.

  Actually it wasn’t just one of the professed it was Nora, and I see I am anxious to get to her part of the story so I will move on.

  Well, the thing was I refused to go to church and after a while the prioress sent for me. She didn’t beat around the bush any either. As soon as I walked into her office she said, Emily, listen to me. This is a religious community you are in. We all work together, we all eat together, and we all attend church together on Sunday. This is the rule and if you wish to remain here you must follow it. I don’t demand that you acknowledge the creed or participate in worship, but your presence in church is required. Perhaps you will tell me why you object so strongly to this. And I said in the nastiest way I could that I despised her religion I thought it was disgusting to worship death, a dead man, that you had to be crazy to think that the world was run by a God who was good, that Christianity stifled life and health it was fit only for terrified slaves, and that the idea that it was okay to be miserable now in hope of some fantasy of reward after death was the worst idea that anyone had ever come up with. I went on for some time.