The silence in the room deepened—so still I could feel my heart beating at my rib cage. Sister’s voice deepened, her words coming slower, heavier.
“The shrike, of course, though her song lifts the soul at work, will also mimic the calls of her cousin birds, luring them to her table, darting from her hidden perch when the songbirds begin to feast. She strikes with her fierce beak, carries her prey to a thorny bush, or in this case a barbed wire, and she impales the creature and eats its flesh. She saves the remains, safely snagged above the ground, for her mate. In this way, she survives the winter among us. Of the rufous towhee, the sprightly grub-eater, the industrious nest-builder, we may say that she was unsuspecting, that when she heard the shrike mimic the towhee song, she did not hear the arrival of her own death. So why did I weep for the towhee? Released of its flesh, the soul flies. Why weep for the towhee? Why did I not rejoice with the shrike?”
Sister J. bowed her head. Others bowed or stared into the middle distance, solemn. Tuck still had that trace of a smile on his lips, his eyes moist—was he crying? Carey glanced at me; he seemed unnerved. I could see the sweat on his brow. He shifted in his seat and met my eyes again, holding my gaze this time. He seemed uncomfortable, from the parable of the shrike, maybe, or the closeness of the bodies around us.
Sister continued in a brighter tone, and I looked away from Carey.
“Ignorance is God’s greatest gift to us,” she said. “Ah, you would say, but we have learned so much on this earth that is of use, that sustains us, that sustains those who come after us. And yes, I concur! It is the ignorance of what is beyond this moment that I’m thinking of. We know only what has come before and what is now, but not what is to come, and that, that ignorance, it is a gift. And then there is all that we think we know, but which is yet to be further illuminated. The mysteries of the stars, the cells, the cosmic dust we came from and into which we will dissolve. What we don’t know, what we are incapable of seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting—indeed what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste but cannot comprehend—this is the gift that allows us to sleep at night, to dream, to love each other, to sow and reap, and to build, to bear—”
She stopped short and held back. Elle inhaled sharply next to me.
“—to bear the burdens, the losses,” she continued. “We sleep at night because we don’t allow ourselves to believe that the murderer does not sleep, she stalks us every moment, behind every shadow, under our fingernails, from the forest canopy, in the depths of the sea, out of cracks in the earth, between colliding atoms. We dream because what we have seen, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted has filled us up with life and there is no room: our bodies, these organisms we inhabit, cell by cell, spend every second of every day trying to make sense of this, this—”
She slapped her heart, opening her arms to the room, hands cupped around some weighty, invisible substance.
“Look at what we have built! Could ignorance build this? Could ignorance take this burnt, poisoned crust of land and make it green again, and make it live again? We have witnessed a resurrection! We are living a resurrection!”
Her voice lowered to a whisper, but it carried down the table and up to the rafters in the still space.
“And yet. And yet. Death waits. Death watches. Death sings from the branches while we work, lifts our unknowing souls, calls us to fly.”
She bowed her head again, and the entire room seemed to exhale. Heads down or eyes closed, some tears, some blissful smiles. Sister lifted her head and signaled to Maggie and Katie, on either side of her. Everyone rose and joined hands around the tables. Maggie hummed the key and started to sing. Voices around the table joined in:
Come thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.
Streams of mercy, never ceasing, call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet, sung by flaming tongues above,
Praise the mount, I’m fixed upon it, mount of thy unchanging love.
The singing was energetic and robust; full-throated, simple harmonies that were nothing like the dispassionate singing of the Masses of my childhood. I sang along with the melody, not sure of my place in the song, pausing to breathe when I couldn’t remember the words, but compelled to sing by the tension rising in my chest that told me I would cry if I didn’t let something out of my throat. Katie sang next to me in her raspy alto, eyes closed, her hand delicate in my sweating grip. Carey stood with his eyes closed and head bowed, not singing, his body upright as ever, and still as a tree, with a softness to the bend in his neck, the slope of his shoulders.
Everyone seemed to have a part, every note memorized. Occasionally I could hear a particular voice, distinct from the rest, a higher harmony, a vibrato. At other times, certain phrases and notes—prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love—then every voice seemed combined into one. Once or twice I suppressed a shiver—all of our bodies connected, the rhythm flowing through us, rising and falling in waves. I felt something move in me. It felt like joy and also like surrender.
When the song ended, the reverberation through the room remained and no one moved until it had passed, until we could plainly hear the waves again, the wind picking up outside. We held hands a moment longer, then released and sat. That sound of the congregation sitting, the shushing of all the clothing folding into limbs, the shuffling of feet.
We passed tureens of the mushroom stew around the table, and chunks of the bread, still warm, soft goat cheese with herbs, a salad of berries and greens, the rabbit stew, and bottles of wine. There was little conversation at first, just here you go and thank you, but the faces and bodies around were warm and glad. After we had taken our first bites, our first tastes of the briny stew, the bitter greens, the quiet lifted and there was conversation, laughter. The lines around Carey’s eyes had not softened, but he held my gaze and smiled.
I listened to the wind, watched it blow clouds past the moon through a break in the trees. I tried to convince myself I didn’t have to pee, that I could wait until morning. I had to be up early again, to meet Coombs at the dock. I had drunk too much elderberry wine and my head was heavy. I threw the blankets off and grabbed my sweater and slipped on my sandals.
The moon was bright, but there were more shadows than I anticipated. Even with a flashlight, it was easy to become disoriented. I walked nervously down the path to the little vault toilet between my cabin and the next two. It was still warm in the loo, even with the breeze coming in an open window, flowered muslin curtain billowing. Frantic wind chimes. I heard voices, too, but coming from the woods behind me. As I walked back, ears tuned to the murmur of the voices, sometimes carried, sometimes obscured by the wind, I saw lights, deep in the trees. I turned off the flashlight and I crept back to the cottage door, watching them. Many lights, but not beams, more like the flames of candles. Oil lamps?
On the walk back from the supper, Katie had told me they had a ritual for the dying, that they gave them a tea of herbs and mushrooms to help them on their way.
“On their way?” I had asked.
“To the lights,” she had said.
“What does that mean?”
“Maybe you’ll see, someday,” she had said.
“Have you seen them?”
“We all have.”
“How?”
“We open our minds to them.” She had sighed, like she was tired of my questions.
I watched the lights move between the trees, listened to the occasional strand of voice. Were they performing a ritual out there? I didn’t want to let them out of my sight, but they flickered and vanished.
In the morning Katie woke me at dawn. She handed me a cup of tea and a cloth napkin with some bread and butter wrapped in it. She didn’t speak but indicated with a silly pantomime that I should eat before the boat so I wouldn’t get sick. The water was always worse on an empty stomach.
We made it to the dock as Coombs was pulling in, Carey already waiting. He was uns
haven, clothes more rumpled after his second night at Fort Union. Neither of us had showered in two days. I was looking forward to a hot shower and flushing toilet. Katie handed me a note on the dock and kissed my cheek. We pulled away and I watched her walk up the dock, getting smaller.
The note said, I’ll call you soon. xo, K.
Ten
The Palouse
SPOKANE, WASHINGTON
MAY 7, 2016
THE SISTERS KNOW I’m coming, but when I get to the Provincial House and tell them who I am, whom I have come to see, they tell me Janet needs to rest for the night. She’s been given a sedative. I turn to leave—to find a motel closer to town. Maybe a bar. And the sister puts a hand on my arm.
“You are welcome to stay here.” She’s already leading me through the entry—polished brick floors that I think must be very dangerous for elderly nuns with canes and walkers. “We know you’ve traveled a long way, and Sister will be so glad to see you in the morning,” she says, patting my arm, not letting go, so that I wonder who is supporting whom.
She’s afraid of these floors, too, I think.
Though she looks younger than some of the others. They walk alone through the halls. All gray and silver and white-headed. Some mostly bald. A couple wear short blue wimples with rough cotton smocks. Old school, pre–Vatican II attire. Maybe they just like not having to brush their hair or choose from their three dowdy flowered dresses or blouse/elasticized poly skirt outfits for the day. They shuffle along to the chapel from all directions for evening prayers. There’s a black box—like a giant mailbox—at the start of the drive to the Provincial House, where people can leave their sorrows, their problems, for the sisters to pray on their behalf. But this is where the retired Sisters of the Holy Family go, when they can’t physically be out living the Gospel in the world much anymore. Put out to pasture here, in this building on the Palouse above Spokane. Part convent, part senior center. Staffed entirely by other, slightly younger sisters.
I might get a little thrill out of those notes, if I were the sisters. Glimpses of life’s dramas outside these walls.
We turn down a hallway, through swinging wooden doors, the polished brick giving way to linoleum, also polished to a gleam. The lights are low here, like in some high-end grocery stores, and I wonder if this is another trap, like the shiny floors, intended to steal a few minutes here and there from life by slowing a body down.
“What’s your name?” I ask my guide.
“Oh, I’m Sister Rosemarie,” she says, and then, face turned up to my ear, as if it’s a secret, “But you can call me Sister Rosie.”
“Okay,” I say, and she nods and laughs like she knows something I don’t know.
She leads me out a door and across a walkway lined with roses and a courtyard with a tall marble statue of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by flowers—and I realize that they would have celebrated May Day recently, crowning the Mary with flowers. I crowned Mary in the May Day Procession in high school, no longer a virgin myself (not that anyone knew). Down the path we come to a ranch-style house, set back in the trees, and Sister Rose releases my arm. I follow her inside, and she leads me down some stairs into a carpeted lower level that smells exactly like a church basement: dustless, vacuous.
“You can sleep here,” Sister says, showing me a small furnished bedroom off a sitting room with windows that look out onto the forested hillside. There are crosses everywhere, made of straw and wood and brass and macramé. On every wall.
“Usually the visiting priests stay here,” she tells me, “but there aren’t any right now. Father Thomas comes up from the university for services these days.” I look at the twin bed, made up neatly in a patchwork denim quilt like a little boy’s room.
She shows me to a bathroom nearby, and there is a cross above the toilet. She opens a cabinet to show me a clutch of generic toothbrushes in cellophane wrappers and a tube of Aim.
“That’s very kind,” I say.
“Breakfast is at seven, after sunrise service. Please come. The sisters would love to meet a friend of Janet’s.”
“Has she had many visitors?” I ask.
Sister Rosie smiled and took my hand, squeezing it fiercely. “You’re the only one, dear. And we’re very glad you’ve come.”
I’m lying in the bed the priests sleep in, in my underwear and one of Carey’s undershirts. I took it out of the laundry bag before I left. He had worked all day in it, under his uniform—the unseasonably hot spring, early fire season on the way. He wore it at least two days ago. It’s slightly rank, but soft.
I smell him and count the lithium pulse of my watch till I sleep.
In the dining room I say hello to every sister. This is the journalist in me: talk to everyone, make eye contact. I can’t help it, anyway; they are either watching me as I go through the cafeteria line or they are blind. I am taller than the women in front of me, a head above their delicate, veiny skulls. Someday, I may be this old, my body shrunken, translucent.
There’s a toast station and I wait with one of the sisters, my bread in one side of the toaster and her bread in the other. She doesn’t know who I am or why I’m here. Her name is Sister Rosemary.
“Rosemary,” I say. “There are so many ‘roses’ here.”
“Yes, yes,” she says with a dismissive wave. She is at least ninety years old.
“What year were you born, Sister?” I ask. I want to know if I’m right.
She doesn’t blink an eye: “Nineteen twenty-two,” she says. “And I still do the New York Times crossword every day.”
She offers to butter my toast—I forgot to take a knife. I accept and watch as she slathers a tablespoon over four square inches of wheat bread.
I sit with Sister Rose and Sister Rosa, born in Mexico City, 1930. I want to keep them all straight, but I don’t know how I’ll do it, so I decide to call them all “Sister” no matter what. Like they did with Sister J. at the Colony, as if it were her given name. Soon we’re joined by Sister Michael, who tells me she’s a Kennedy.
“Really?” I say.
And she says: “It’s not as glamorous as everyone thinks it is.”
“Oh, no?” She tells me how many cousins there were, how many divorces, how many illegitimate children, how she was the last of four girls to wear the hand-me-down shoes. I nod and eat my eggs.
Sister Rosa asks me what I am doing with my life, like my own grandmother might, if I were sitting at her breakfast table on a bright spring morning. I tell her I’m living with a park ranger in the Oregon wilderness, writing about Sister J. and what she did on Marrow Island.
She burps behind a napkin and leans across the table. I prepare myself for a lecture on living in sin.
“We’re not supposed to call her ‘Sister’ anymore,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “Well, Janet, then.”
Then she shakes her head. “I don’t care what she did, she’ll always be a Sister to me.”
I think about telling her who I am. That Sister J. went to prison because of me. Or because of what I knew. Even now it feels tenuous—the case against her and all of them. But Sister Rose asks me, mouth full of oatmeal, what it’s like living with a park ranger and whether he wears a uniform. And I tell them about Carey. Of course they love a man in uniform as much as—if not more than—other women.
Sister Rosie finds me at breakfast and tells me that Janet is awake and asking for me. They’ve told her that I’m here. And she seems very alert, very lucid, Sister Rosie says. I say goodbye to the sisters and listen to them talk about me as I walk my tray to the dish bins. They’re hard of hearing, so they don’t bother to whisper. They believe I’ll marry the park ranger and have a baby. A little babe of the woods. It’s the sort of nativity they can believe in, even if I can’t.
Sister Rosie takes my arm, as before, and leads me across the polished entry again, through a different set of doors and into another wing. This one has a distinct nursing home smell, though it looks just like the other wings with i
ts linoleum and crosses and a sort of absent-minded silence, as if it didn’t occur to anyone to make a fuss, to make any noise at all.
“Janet wouldn’t come at first,” Sister Rosie tells me. “She wanted to stay in Walla Walla. The women there—in the prison—they liked Janet, you know. It’s not often they get somebody like Janet.”
“A nun?”
“Oh, no. We’re sisters, not nuns. Such a funny word. Nun. Like nothing at all. No, we’re sisters. Nuns are cloistered. We live with the rest of you, believers and unbelievers alike. We don’t just pray—we fight the good fight. We go to jail more than you’d think, and we die like soldiers, sometimes. Even so, Janet is an original. She was always . . . her own woman.”
“Did you know her before?”
“I ‘knew her when,’ as they say. She was always asking questions. Always wanting to change people’s ways. Even if it meant putting herself in the path of power . . .”
We stop at a door in the hallway, blinds down over a window to the side.
“Prepare yourself,” she says. “She’s very near the end.”
As prepared as I think I am to see this woman—I practiced by picturing the mummified remains, the ones in South America that have been taken over by fungus as the climate has changed—I am not prepared. She’s alive, but she doesn’t look human. She looks like an insect, folded into the bed, yellow and desiccated.
The eyes don’t shrink, but the flesh does, the body does what it can to keep the heart beating. It takes the meat first, the muscles and their coats of fat; collagen under the skin, in the lips, swallowed up by hungrier cells; the skin falls, shedding like generations of wallpaper. But the eyes—however well they actually see—are cartoonish orbs, accented by the bones of the brow that do not recede with the plump cheeks, but hang over the eyeballs like angry gargoyles, like architectural admonishments.
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