Absence of Grace

by Ann Warner

  “Tomorrow’s your day off, right?”

  Everyone in Wrangell seemed to know she had Thursdays off.

  “It so happens, I’m free, too. We could make a day of it. Take the jet boat. Leave at ten, be back around four. Hit all the highlights. The Stikine, the hot springs, the garnet reef. How does that sound?”

  Like a date. No. She needed to say no. But she did want more sketches of him, and it would be nice to see the Stikine. When she and Paul were here before there had been no jet boat to make the trip possible. But there was also the unresolved issue of his and Hailey’s possible ‘coupleness.’

  “O…kay.” She was going to regret it. She was sure of it.

  “And bring a bathing suit. For the hot springs.”

  A bathing suit. Right. As if that was happening. Although, it might be kind of fun. She’d have to think about it. The suit had been lurking in the bottom of her one suitcase for more than a year. Maybe she would take it along and just see how things went.

  “See you tomorrow at ten.” He smiled, and when he did, his eyes almost disappeared into the fans of sun-touched lines at each corner. She wished she could draw fast enough to capture the way he looked in that moment.

  He left, and after working for a time on the sketch of Gerrum, she switched back to the one of the boat, remembering as she did so the visit with Hailey.

  How could she have forgotten how good it felt to receive praise for her work? Of course, it hadn’t happened in a very long time. Probably not since she graduated from college. Paul had always discouraged her sketching, and he particularly disliked her drawing him. Perhaps because he sensed it was her way of searching for the real man beneath the polished surface.

  She shrugged off the memory of Paul, but what was harder to dislodge were the memories of Thomasina set loose by seeing the portrait framed and hung in Hailey’s shop. That had brought a flood of remembrance both positive and painful.

  She missed Thomasina, although she was the one who failed to keep in touch. At graduation, Thomasina had held onto her hand and asked her to write. She’d said she would, but she hadn’t. And now, so many years had passed, it was too late to do anything about it.

  But there was one thing she could do. Retrieve the portrait.

  “Do you have radar or something?” Hailey asked when Clen walked into ZimoviArt.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I sold one of your pictures.” Hailey frowned.

  Clen thought that odd, since the news made her feel buoyant. “Which painting and who bought it?”

  “The portrait.” Hailey turned away to fiddle with something. “A pleasant, middle-aged man bought it.”

  Puzzlement at Hailey’s odd lack of enthusiasm was replaced by a sinking feeling in Clen’s gut. “You didn’t. Please...you didn’t. I...I came back to tell you I decided I didn’t want to sell it. Where did he go? What did he look like? Maybe I can catch him, get it back.”

  The deep bellow of the ferry’s departure horn interrupted them.

  “I’m so sorry, Clen.” Hailey looked as sick as Clen was feeling.

  Well, Clen had wanted to exorcise Thomasina from her life. Now, it seemed, she’d succeeded.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1964- 1965

  Marymead College - Mead, Kansas

  The autumn of her junior year, Clen struggled with bouts of nausea accompanied by tremors and a feeling of deep foreboding. When she was little, she’d been afraid of the dark, and these incidents reminded her of that, except the fear was stronger and lasted longer.

  Whenever she felt an attack coming on, she would look for somewhere to hide until it passed. As a result, she’d become familiar with the location of all the janitors’ closets, the least visited parts of the library, and a storage room in the basement. If anyone did see her and asked if she was having a problem, she said she had cramps. And that worked for a time, until the spells came more frequently and lasted longer.

  “Clen, nobody has cramps four times a month,” Maxine said. “You need to do something about it.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Maxine didn’t argue. She simply told Thomasina, who came to their room where Clen was shivering under the covers.

  Thomasina sat on the edge of the bed and laid a hand on Clen’s forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever.”

  “No. I’m c-cold.”

  “How often does this happen, Clen?”

  “It’s n-nothing. Just cramps.”

  “How often?”

  “M-maybe once, twice a week.”

  “And you’ve lost weight.”

  “I don’t feel like eating.”

  “I’m going to insist you see a doctor.”

  A spasm caused her to roll into a ball.

  “Clen, what is it?”

  “He died. Josh did. This summer.”

  “Oh, Clen, my dear. I am so, so sorry.” Thomasina smoothed her hair.

  “A priest came. He said Josh’s illness was God’s will. I wanted to scratch his eyes out.”

  “Of course you did. What a stupid, stupid man.”

  “You don’t think it was God’s will?”

  “In one sense I suppose we can say that everything that happens is God’s will. But do I believe God sits in heaven picking out who will get cancer or have an accident or die young? No. Of course, I don’t.”

  “What good is God then? If he doesn’t stop bad things from happening.”

  Thomasina was silent so long, Clen finally turned to look at her.

  “I’m sorry, Clen. I’m afraid I don’t have an answer for that.”

  “Maybe there is no God.”

  Thomasina straightened her veil and stood without answering.

  When Clen saw she was preparing to leave, she spoke quickly. “Please, don’t tell anybody. About Josh?”

  “If that’s your wish, of course I won’t. But you go see a doctor.”

  Clen did see a doctor, who asked a lot of questions about symptoms. She didn’t tell him about Josh, so he could be forgiven for thinking her problem was merely physical. He gave her a tonic to drink before meals.

  Gradually, the spells abated.

  Six weeks after Thomasina’s house call, Maxine came into their room and dumped her books on the bed. “Hey, did you hear the news about Thomasina?”

  “What news is that?”

  “She’s leaving.”

  “What? Why?”

  “All I know is the where. She’s going to spend time in an inner city parish in Chicago.”

  “When does she go?”

  “Actually, I misspoke. I think she’s already gone.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope.” Maxine already had her head stuck in her closet. It was Friday afternoon. That meant she’d be spending the next couple of hours trying on outfits and experimenting with makeup as she got ready for a date.

  “I’m going to spend some quality time in the library,” Clen said, trying to sound offhand.

  Maxine waved a hand. “Yeah. Sure. Study some for me.”

  Clen walked over to the Administration Building and sauntered by Thomasina’s office. The door, as usual, was open. She stuck her head in, and the secretary looked up. “Can I help you?”

  “I was hoping to speak to Sister Thomasina?”

  “Sister left for Chicago this morning.”

  “H-how long is she going to be gone?”

  “I believe she’s planning on at least six months, perhaps longer. We’ll be posting her address on the bulletin board if you’d like to write to her.”

  “Thanks.” Blindly, Clen stepped out of the office and walked down the hall and back outside. There she took the path leading to the picnic area by the river.

  How could Thomasina leave without one word? They were friends, weren’t they? Clen sat on one of the picnic tables and stared at the river. There had been rain over the last couple of days and the water was opaque and brown. She felt like smashing something or crying like a baby. Inste
ad, she sat for a long time, looking at that ugly water.

  Clen’s salvation after Thomasina’s departure was the drawing class she took second semester to fulfill part of the fine arts requirement. She signed up only after being assured by Mr. Howard, one of the few laymen teaching at Marymead, that he would be grading more on her dedication than on her talent. He also told her he could teach anyone to draw, a claim she expected him to have to withdraw after trying to teach her.

  The first time the class met, he handed out copies of a line drawing of a man sitting in a chair. He told them to turn the drawing upside down and copy it.

  Clen went to work, determined to earn a decent grade for effort if not for execution, but when she turned her paper around, she found herself staring with delight at a more than competent copy of the original drawing. Around the room, others were having a similar experience.

  “Usually,” Mr. Howard said, “your creative efforts are immediately critiqued by the left, analytical side of your brains. A real busybody, the left is. ‘That doesn’t look a bit like a hand,’ it will say. Or, ‘No, you’ve made it too big, too little, too dark, too light.’ That flow of commentary makes you uncertain about your ability to create, and that uncertainty restrains your natural talent.

  “But today, when you turned the picture upside down, nothing looked exactly the way the left brain expected it to. Eventually it became confused and fell silent, and that allowed your right, creative side to take over and guide your pencil. And now that you’ve exposed the left brain, your job is to get it to leave you alone to create. One way to do that is to promise it an opportunity to comment once you’ve finished.”

  The course hooked Clen on drawing—the only thing in her life no longer tinged with darkness.

  The notice on the bulletin board announced there would be a Civil Rights march Sunday afternoon in downtown Mead.

  Although there was only one television for the entire dormitory, located in the area where smokers congregated, Clen had a radio, and she’d regularly listened to reports about the Civil Rights Movement and in a literature class, they’d been assigned to read Black Like Me. The author of the book had dyed his skin and then spent time traveling around the South discovering how differently he was treated when he was no longer accepted as white.

  Personally, Clen had never had much contact with black people, and until she began listening to the news and reading the book, she had no idea how badly they were treated in the South.

  “Are you going?” asked the senior girl standing next to Clen, also reading the notice.

  “I doubt a march in Mead, Kansas, is going to have much impact on Alabama or Mississippi, do you?” Clen had an advanced calculus exam on Monday and she planned to spend the weekend studying for it.

  “Probably not, but it’s the right thing to do. Hope to see you there.”

  Clen decided the girl was right and joined the march. Roughly one hundred people, many of them Marymead students, walked from one end of Mead’s downtown to the park at the other end. In the park, a black pastor from a church in Alabama stepped onto the temporary platform and spoke about church members who had been killed in the struggle. He described the horrific deaths so graphically, Clen had difficulty joining in the singing of “We Shall Overcome” that followed. It was only the Methodist minister’s long, meandering closing prayer that gave her time to regain her composure.

  The march had been unsettling, but it had also been safe and peaceful with no worries about tear gas, fire hoses, or police dogs. Clen was glad she’d taken the time to stand up for something she believed in, but she very much doubted she would have had the courage to do it were she living in the South.

  Chapter Fifteen

  1985

  Wrangell, Alaska

  “In the Tlingit language, Stikine means great river,” Gerrum told Clen as they prepared to cast off. “And that’s the extent of my bilingualism, in case you’re wondering.”

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know how to say please, thank you, and where’s the restroom?”

  “I doubt the Tlingit have a word for restroom.” It pleased him Clen was willing to be playful. A good omen for the day.

  They left the harbor and he opened the throttle. Clen, who was sitting in the bow, faced forward to enjoy the ride. They crossed the shallow delta and entered the river, which was wide and deep, its swift currents gray with glacial runoff.

  Gerrum ran up the main channel at high speed for several miles before turning into a small tributary where he nosed into the bank and dropped anchor. Without the engine’s roar, the chuckle of the river and occasional birdsong were audible.

  The water here was clear and shallow, and together, yet apart, they watched it dapple over rocks and small fish.

  “Too bad you weren’t here to see the eagles gathering for the hooligan run,” he said.

  “Hooligan?”

  “You’d probably call them smelt. The champagne and caviar of the eagles’ diet.”

  “Do you ever get tired of all this?”

  He shook his head. “Each time is different. Different skies, different weather, a new group of people. A bear, snow geese heading north, eagles, a moose.”

  “What’s your favorite thing about it?”

  He paused for a moment then pointed to his ear. “The quiet.”

  Clen nodded toward the sky. “Except for that.” A plane, an ancient DC-3, was lumbering toward them from the east, flying low and following the course of the river.

  “That’s the second so far,” she said.

  “They’re gold planes. Flying out the ore. There’s a mine upriver.”

  She picked up her sketch pad and began to draw. While she sketched, he thought about what to show her next. Perhaps the waterfall he’d discovered this spring, up a shallow tributary most boats would be unable to navigate. He’d been saving it, for what he was not altogether certain.

  When Clen closed her sketch pad, he pulled in the short length of anchor chain, restarted the engine, and returned to the main channel. After several minutes at top speed, he slowed and turned into the creek.

  The engine note dropped to a low-pitched burble as he maneuvered through the narrow defile. Then they rounded a curve and the stream widened into a deep pool—a dead end of sorts, since the pool was fed by a waterfall cascading down thirty feet of rocky cliff.

  Clen’s mouth curved and her eyes softened. “Oh, how lovely.”

  No question, that was the reason he’d waited, in order to share it with someone who would savor its beauty and inaccessibility as much as he did. He shut down the engine and secured the boat. The water at the base of the cliff was churned into white foam, but where he anchored, the water was deep and dark.

  Once again Clen picked up her sketchbook and began to draw with quick, sure movements. Judging by the direction of her glance when she looked up, he thought she was focusing on a spruce bent over the falls.

  He looked away, giving his attention to their surroundings. A few minutes later, Clen turned the sketchbook around to show she’d captured him in profile looking up at an eagle, with the waterfall and tree behind him. Although his face tended to look round and soft in photographs, Clen had sketched hollows and angles in cheek and jaw that made him look more like himself. It pleased him.

  “Are you ready to move on?” he asked.

  Clen closed the sketchbook and lifted a hand to encompass the pool, trees, and waterfall. “You have my full confidence in deciding where we go next.”

  He counted her acquiescence a victory in what he viewed as a personal challenge to get this woman to smile more often and to bend those arms that kept everyone at a distance.

  Back in the main channel, the jet boat skimmed the opaque surface of the river, making short work of the rapid current. As he watched for debris, he thought about what to suggest if there were visitors at the hot springs. They’d become a popular destination since the forest service built a soaking tub, and often, particularly on weekends, the tub fil
led with guys who didn’t bring swimsuits but did bring an ample supply of six-packs. Whenever he found a boat tied to the small dock, he tended to give the place a pass, but today his luck held. No boats, no people.

  After a leisurely lunch, he suggested a soak in the hot water. Clen looked around at the arrangement of deck, tub, and changing cubicles before agreeing. That agreement was especially pleasing, since he’d fully expected her to say she’d forgotten her suit or didn’t have one. Another small victory in a day filled with them, if one were keeping score—which, it seemed, he was.