Valley of Bones (29 page)

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 à 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.
Goûter
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. And
débrouiller,
of course, but I should say about that later because that was connected with Nora Mulvaney.

And
rappel.
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.

She said I see you’ve studied Nietzsche, and I agreed that I had and she smiled and said, I too, he is lovely in the German, a great artist. Unfortunately he is what happens when a spirited little genius is raised by a bunch of pious church ladies. Nietzsche probably never met a real Christian in his whole life. They are extremely thin on the ground at the best of times. So forgive me if I say you don’t know what you are talking about. I said that I still thought it was stupid and that she was stupid to insist that I park my body in a certain place at a certain time even though nothing would be going on, and that I would hate and resent every second of it and she said, it’s important where the body is, and you can never tell
what will happen in a church. Besides, she said, it is the rule and you should try to follow a rule for once, as breaking them all has not appeared to have done you much good in life. Then I got really angry, like I hadn’t since that time with Ray Bob when he was going to arrest Hunter and I called her a lot of foul names at the top of my voice and went into a kind of state and before I knew it the whole story of the very Christian deacon baby-fucker Ray Bob leaped from my mouth in tongues of flame plus some extra stuff about pervert priests and nuns that I had gathered from the recent press and also from some pamphlets that Ray Bob had around the house about the Scarlet Woman of Rome.

She took it all in as if I was telling her about my summer vacation, nodding, and then she said, yes, this is what I imagined. Let me say two things. First, you have observed that the church is corrupt, and I don’t mean just the Catholic Church I mean the church entire, for it is all the same in every splinter, and I agree, because you know it’s partly a human institution and as such subject to the ruin of this world, and the more so as it has from time to time exercised power and power tends always to corrupt. So for nearly all its history the church has been run by gangsters, sometimes by literal gangsters, but almost always by egotistical power-hungry men without the slightest interest in following Christ. They may admire Christ and think he is very great, but that was not what Christ was after, you know, not at all. One of my countrymen once wrote that the church is the cross on which Christ is crucified every day, but then he said also that Christ cannot be separated from His cross, which means that in addition to being a seedy club of somewhat dull men wearing funny clothing the church is also the eternal, perfect, and mystical Body of Christ, which is why we women bother with it at all, and why we give our lives to it and count ourselves fortunate. You don’t understand this now, but perhaps later you will.

I said something or started to and she said be quiet for a moment please. And I did, and she said, next, as to you and this
story you have told me: you have been cruelly treated and betrayed, your childhood has been stolen. The world is oftentimes une pâtisse’ émerdée, a shit pie, but this is known, this is boring. The only interesting thing is how we use the suffering that is inevitable in life. Believe me, I understand what you have been through.

I said you have no fucking idea.

Do I not? she said. Then listen. In the winter of 1945 I was fifteen. My father had been arrested and executed in the July plot against Hitler, as perhaps you know, since you seem to be familiar with history. My two brothers had by this time been killed on the eastern front, and we were in a farm cart trying to get out of East Prussia before the Russians got us, my mother, my sister Liesel who was three years younger than I, and me. We failed in this and ended up among hundreds of refugees trapped in a ruined factory and when the Russians found us they raped every woman. Us three they tied to pipes naked and we were raped an uncountable number of times for two days and two nights. My sister was raped to death. I saw a couple of drunken Russians throw her out the window like a sack of garbage. In her whole life no one had ever said a harsh word to her, and so she died. My mother hanged herself the next day. I wandered for some weeks trading my body for food and cigarettes to whomever would buy. Then the Bloods found me, a group of German sisters, and naturally they had all been raped too. The interesting thing was that we never complained about what had happened to us because by then we knew very well that our people had done far far worse in Poland and Russia. So we suffered silently like dogs.

I remember that line very well although I’m not as sure of the rest. I am making it up the way we do in our minds, when we play back our memories. We’ve been taught by the voice-overs in movies. But I recall that about suffering silently like a dog, I recall it in my heart.

She went on and told me how she had walked with these
sisters to the west, then they were joined by others who had been released from concentration camps where the Nazis had put them. After the war was over a small group of them from all over Europe gathered in what had been a Blood priory in Rottweil in Germany. She said I saw all these women who in many cases had suffered worse than I had, lost everything, been tortured, ruined in their health, and all they could think of to do was to help others, and I was insane with rage I wanted to scream at them why why how can you believe in a God who allows such things, death, torture, rape, the slaughter of little children? And this woman, Sr. Magdalena, one day came up to me. She had been in the retreat too, they had nailed her naked to a farm cart so that any soldier who came by on the road could have her, like a public latrine. And one day she said to me you have to forgive them, they didn’t know what they were doing. And I lost my mind when I heard these words, I attacked her right there, I spat on her and scratched her face. But she threw her arms around me and soon we were wrestling on the floor, and she pinned me down and put her crucifix in front of my face, this crucifix in fact—and here the prioress held up the one she wore, held it in front of my own face—this very one. Then, she said, Sister Magdalena showed me the scars on her hands left by the Russian nails. Look look you stupid child she shouted at me what do you think this is, a joke, a fairy tale? I was crucified and I died and now I live in Christ, blessed be His name. And you! Don’t you see you are a corpse too after what was done to you and the true life is waiting for you to pick it up. But you will not, no you clutch the death to you like a child with her rag doll. Only forgive them now and you will be able to forgive yourself for not having died with your family and live again in God.