Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  Willow’s finger found a small hole in the seam of her skirt. She pushed at it. How could she walk down the aisle, her blue-felt scapular the size of a valentine hanging around her neck, but with a different name on it? “How come Willow isn’t a saint’s name?”

  “It isn’t. There’s nothing holy about it.”

  Willow pushed harder, heard one thread pop and then a second, her whole fingertip breaking through the seam. Standing still was too hard, and she rocked. “Papa named me for a tree.” It didn’t seem enough. “Mémé writes stories, so you can’t change my name.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.” She waited, letting her scolding hang in the air. “We all know your grandmother writes mysteries. That’s likely part of your problem. I’m told they are sacrilegious, full of pagan ideas.”

  Willow kept rocking. “When I grow up, I’m going to read all her books.”

  The nun’s hands came out of her sleeves and swung behind her back making a slapping sound. “You ought to read from the wealth of good Catholic literature.”

  Willow’s stomach squeezed. The week had been the worst ever. Mary turned away whenever Willow came close, and during every recess, Willow was made to stand beside Sister Dominic Agnes. At lunch, Mary sat at a different cafeteria table and made it the best table. For five lunches, Willow had crossed her ankles and swung her own feet and tried to pretend one foot was Mary’s.

  “I don’t see you and your father in church on Sundays.” The rosary, hanging from the thick belt around Sister Dominic Agnes’s waist, trembled. “Are you practicing Catholics?”

  Willow hadn’t known being a Catholic took practice. She couldn’t remember practicing, but she wasn’t going to admit to anything that would make things worse. Her Sunday mornings were usually spent in Mémé’s attic drawing pictures while Mémé typed. She studied the nun with a boy’s name and a girl’s name, the long white gown hanging round as a snowman, and the white wimple squeezing her teacher’s pale face. Even the nun’s lips looked gone, so pale they might have been erased. The only color on her face was the darkness in her eyes. “Do you practice?” she asked.

  The nun’s hand shot out, grabbed and pinched Willow’s ear so fast all Willow saw before she felt the sting was the jump of the two lowest mysteries on the long rosary. “You should be punished,” Sister Dominic Agnes scolded, “for asking such a thing.” She pinched harder, and Willow cried out. The first grade class forgot their game and turned to stare.

  Sister Dominic Agnes didn’t mind upsetting the class. All children needed to be reminded to respect authority, but poor little Mary looked shocked. It wouldn’t do to have her father back at the school, throwing about more accusations. She eased her thumbnail out of the flesh of Willow’s ear but kept hold. “I’ve had half a mind to punish you for a long time.”

  Slumped and rubbing her ear with her cuffed hand, Willow felt dazed. Sister Dominic Agnes had wanted to punish her for a long time, and Willow was not a holy name.

  “Stand up straight, and pull your hand out of your sleeve. You can’t hide God’s markings, and you can tell your father to start bringing you to Mass on Sundays. Maybe that will help you learn your place. Is he able to do that? Or does he spend his Sundays sleeping off his Saturdays? We don’t want him stumbling into church. I know about Frenchmen and their wine.”

  Willow didn’t know about Frenchmen, but they sounded bad. She wished for Doll or Papa and wondered why her teacher would think Papa stumbled. His back was straight. “Papa never falls down.”

  “Don’t correct me.”

  All through recess, stones had been dropping into Willow’s stomach, and their weight threatened to make her throw up. She wouldn’t, wouldn’t, do that in front of all her classmates. She had to make Sister Dominic Agnes like her. “Sometimes…Papa does fall down.” The first words were slow, but the next ones came in a rush. “He crashes down on his head, and the table falls over.”

  The nun nodded knowingly, her lips relaxing, and for a moment things seemed better. But Willow had told a lie about Papa, and she knew he would never tell a lie about her. Worse yet, what if he found out what she’d said?

  “What does your father say about the pictures you draw?”

  Stung by the lie she told, Willow felt mute. Using her index finger, she pushed, widening the hole in her skirt.

  The after-recess bell rang and the other first graders began forming a line behind Sister Dominic Agnes. Willow let them push her back, as one at a time, they stepped in front of her. Finally, with Mary Wolfe at the head, the long tails of her pink hair bow swinging and her hand in Sister Dominic Agnes’s, they started in. Willow took baby steps. What if Papa looked at her and saw the lie she told about him? Or what if he didn’t see the lie, but her mouth told him anyway?

  At her desk, her throat made little popping, sucking sounds she couldn’t stop. She could think of only one thing to keep herself from crying—drawing pictures. Since Mary’s return on Monday, Willow had drawn several pictures, and each made her feel better. She reached for her thick pencil and a piece of ruled school paper. Drawing made the world around her quiet, and she didn’t need to think about Sister Dominic Agnes or Papa.

  Minutes passed as she concentrated first on drawing the monster’s head, giving it one great big eye, one little tiny eye, a witch’s nose, and jagged teeth. When she finally looked up, she sat alone in an empty row. Sister Dominic Agnes had brought her chair from behind her desk, put it in the story-time place, and the rest of the first graders sat on the floor clustered around her ankles. Not even Mary saved Willow a place. Had Sister Dominic Agnes called Willow up front with the others, or did she want her to stay and keep drawing? Willow knew the nun loved her drawings, so much so that all week she’d let Willow draw and draw whenever she wanted and then collected the drawings for herself.

  The creature needed a body. Willow considered some of her favorite things to draw: birds, bugs, and zoo animals. Maybe she would draw clothes like Sister Dominic Agnes’s, which were almost like Doll’s. She went back to work and didn’t look up until the nun closed the last story book and started down the aisle, the folds of her long habit sweeping the sides of desks. Willow smiled, the finished drawing was one of her best, and looking at it made the lie she told about Papa feel far away. If the I Dream of Jeannie, Jeannie, were to come into the room and cross her arms and nod and make the monster alive, everyone would scream and run away.

  “Is this supposed to be me?”

  Willow looked again at the drawing and the monster’s habit, complete even to the rosary. The room began creeping slowly around her.

  “This time, you’ve gone too far.”

  It wasn’t hard for me to see the nun’s heartbreak. Here, she believed, was more of the mockery of everything she thought sacred. This time it wasn’t coming from the young nuns rejecting their habits for street clothes, convent life for apartments where they entertained, served unblessed wine, and lived without curfews, supervised morning prayers, and mandatory silences. Their very life-styles thumbed their noses at her life of service and tried to discredit every sacrifice she’d made for the order. As if all her renunciations, past and future, were without value, the disciplines sent down from Rome worthless, needless dark-age trappings practiced by the foolish, the thousands and thousands of women’s lives given over to convents, all for nothing! Now, there was a modern pope who would discard even Latin Mass, discard so many foundations of ritual, history, and the established institution. If all that could be so easily discarded, then couldn’t she also be?

  She lifted her gaze to the black paper chain. Wasn’t it proof enough of her spirituality, of how the church must hold fast? She would not take denunciation from a seven-year old who’d already caused her untold trouble with Mr. Wolfe and Father Steinhouse. She would not take it from this misshapen half-orphan whose father never brought her to church on Sundays. She narrowed her eyes on Willow. “I should have guessed. This picture proves your attitude toward me and Mo
ther Church.”

  Willow trembled as the classroom turned to winter. Even Sister’s rushing and flapping back up to the front of the room sounded like ice flaking and dropping from bare trees. First graders, some already in their seats, some still in the aisles, froze as the nun pulled open her top desk drawer and brought out her flat disciplinary paddle. She headed back for Willow.

  The wide, short-handled instrument rose in the air, and Sister Dominic Agnes grabbed hold of Willow’s right wrist, pulling back the sweater cuff in one motion and pinning the hand to the desk. The paddle whistled down, smacking, biting again, and then a third time.

  Willow screamed with each blow. She’d never been struck before, not so much as a swat on her backside, and she didn’t understand what was happening. As she screamed, she tried to twist and pull away, but the nun’s anger and strength funneled down through the heel of her large white hand, crushing Willow’s to the desk. The next series of strikes turned the skin on Willow’s hand red and purple.

  Then came the words that would for years shut Willow in: “You are disfigured to match your soul!”

  9

  Those words lifted the paper chain from the tops of the windows and threatened to send it slithering to the floor.

  Drums beat in Willow’s head, her hand burned, and still Sister Dominic Agnes pulled, jerking her out of her seat and dragging her up the aisle past girls who cried and Mary who only stared. Derrick Crat, the oldest boy in the class, stood beside his desk, his mouth contorted in mock sobs, his hands fisted, feigning the motion of rubbing his eyes. “Whaa, whaa.” When he had the attention of those nearest, he pulled his right hand up into the sleeve of his sweater and waved the empty cuff.

  “This is nothing compared to what you deserve,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, both hands on Willow’s shoulders, turning her into the tight corner. “Stand here until I say.”

  Willow’s head dropped into the vee of the abutted walls, and she cupped her hands to the sides of her face like blinders, or closing doors. Wall dust crawled up her nose, and the taste of wet salt rolled over her lips. Even if the class couldn’t see her face, she knew they saw her back: her worst thing. She fought against slumping or crumbling onto the floor. As minutes drug through one hour and then another, the eyes of her class stomping around and around the bulge on her shoulder, she imagined the bone growing until it became a whole head lifting out of her back to make ugly faces and say, “I hate you. I hate you.” Especially to Derrick. Sister Dominic Agnes had never made him stand in the corner, and he’d never been hit. Neither had Mary. Willow licked snot from her lips. Derrick and Mary hadn’t told lies about their dads.

  By the time the dismissal bell rang and doors all along the corridor outside the room opened and the hall filled with the sounds of happy kids, Willow’s eyes were dry. Doll would cry when she heard what happened, but Willow wouldn’t cry any more. She let the classroom empty, wanting everyone gone before she turned to show her face.

  “Is your father home?” the nun asked.

  Willow’s legs ached. She hadn’t been given permission to turn around.

  “Willow!”

  She jumped. She wasn’t sure if Papa was home. Sometimes he was, and sometimes a sitter was there. She shrugged into the wall.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you. I’m taking you home, and we’ll just see.”

  Willow never wanted Papa to hear the lie she told about him. She turned and ran to the back of the room, grabbed her Jeannie bag—the last backpack still hanging on the row of low hooks—and for a long second she held her bag up, picture facing out, Jeannie’s powers staring at Sister Dominic Agnes. If that bag, pushed defiantly in the air between them was held a moment longer than Willow intended, it was by my hand. She ran.

  “Stop!”

  Her life at school was over; she was never coming back. They’d called Jonah a bug and he never went back. She’d been called “disfigured to match her soul,” and she wasn’t ever coming back either.

  “Willow Starmore, get back here!”

  She kept running, down the hall, out the door, and into the schoolyard full of students waiting for rides or milling about in clusters of friends. Careful not to touch anyone, she wove her way through, and when she cleared the largest knots, she started running down the first of the two blocks home. By the end of it, her lungs ached, and her knees trembled, but she could see Julian getting out of his car in front of their house. “Papa!”

  He didn’t hear, and she ran harder, screaming his name until he stopped on the walk and looked up in her direction, his face filling with questions. She ran, out of breath now, Julian starting for her, not running, but coming with his long strides, the distance between them closing. She hit the wall of his body and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “Hey, hey.” He rubbed her back, and when she caught a semblance of breath, he held her back a step and lifted her skirt over one knee and then the other looking for a scrape. “What is it?”

  How could she explain without confessing her lie? She looked back to see Sister Dominic Agnes and a younger nun hurrying toward them. A ragged sob bleated from her throat.

  “It looks like I’m about to find out,” Julian said. “It can’t be this bad. Let’s go inside. Whatever’s happened, it’s not for the whole neighborhood.”

  He carried her, her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. The screen banged closed behind them, but the wooden door Willow wanted shut and locked, Julian left open. Crossing the first room into the kitchen, he tossed her backpack onto the table and set her down. “You want to tell me something before they get here?”

  She shook her head.

  “All right.” He looked around his own kitchen. “How about a glass of milk?”

  She could just manage to keep breathing; she didn’t want to try and drink milk. She ached to ask him about being “disfigured to match her soul.” Did that mean she couldn’t ever go to Heaven? Was disfigured the reason Mary Wolfe and Sister Dominic Agnes didn’t like her? She wouldn’t ask. She wouldn’t say the words because she never wanted Papa to know about them.

  Each time she looked through the screen door, her fear increased. Only the wire mesh stood between her and Papa learning what she said about him. Shadows climbed onto the porch and then toes of black shoes beneath glimpses of white-hosed ankles. Willow dropped her head onto her arms, and her heart banged as Papa took his time despite the knocking and opened the refrigerator, poured milk into a glass, and set it in front of her. He shook a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, still not hurrying when Sister Dominic Agnes knocked a second time, but lighting the cigarette and pressing it into a small groove on the side of the kitchen ashtray. How many times had Willow heard him and his partner, Red, chuckling about the length of some interrogations, how they counted the number of cigarettes that burned away—the slow crawl of the smoke unnerving to their suspects. A good confession didn’t cost them more than a couple of cigarettes.

  He took a step toward the door, but Willow let out such a sob, he stopped and turned back. “Hey now,” he winked at her. “We’ll get this figured out.”

  She kept her head down, wanting to beg him to slam the big door and take her to the back yard where they’d play catch with a football, his newest plan for strengthening her right arm. This was their house, only theirs, and she had a new rule: “No nuns allowed.”

  She heard the squeak of the screen and Papa say, “Good afternoon.”

  “I’m Sister Dominic Agnes. This is Sister Beatrice.”

  Willow snuck a glance. Her teacher was inside, looking around the room at Papa’s shiny floors, his desk with the top rolled down, and the clean kitchen counter tops. Only when her eyes landed on a stack of folded towels, did she seem to relax. Willow wanted to jump up and put them away, but she was too scared to move.

  “We’ve come to speak to you about Willow,” the nun said.

  Papa looked over at her. “Drink your milk.”

  Sister Dominic Agnes he
ld out the sheets of Big Chief paper she’d rolled into a scroll. “Look at these. Something must be done.”

  Surprised, Willow looked up to see Papa thumbing through the drawings. Had her teacher come to talk about the pictures? Not the lie?

  Julian’s brow lifted quizzically. “Gnomes, maybe trolls, what’s the problem?”

  An angry finger rapped the top picture, “It’s disrespectful,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, “mocking, even demonic.”

  “Demonic?” He needed a moment. “She’s got a wild imagination, but they aren’t evil. She spends a lot of time in her grandmother’s garden, imagines fairies, trolls, and she reads make-believe.” He looked through a few again. “They’re pretty good. She’s trying to copy Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, Dore, that kind of thing.”

  The nervousness in Willow’s stomach eased. Maybe, Papa could make things all right.

  “Her grandmother has quite a collection of the old books,” Julian continued, “I grew up with them. Some of those pictures are graphic but harmless.”

  “What you are holding,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, “is not what a normal Catholic child draws. I am responsible,” she expelled her breath and needed to draw another, “and no small responsibility it is, for the welfare of my first graders, at home and at school.”

  Willow crossed her arms over her stomach and held the hurt. Sister Beatrice was looking down at her shoes, and Papa considered her before looking back to Sister Dominic Agnes. “You’re responsible for your first graders? Even when they are at home?”

  “And for their pure minds,” the nun continued. “These kinds of things,” she motioned again to the drawings in Julian’s hand, “are sinful.”

  “Sinful?” His brows narrowed, and for a long moment, he said nothing. Then, “You’re experienced in this sort of thing.” He was nodding along with her. “You know enough to have brought all the pictures? I’m seeing all the evidence?”