Paradise (28 page)

He was silent, of course. But it was not the silence of the Friday noon pickups. Then the unspeaking was lush with promise. Easy. Vocal. This silence was barren, a muteness lined with acid. And then she noticed the smell. Not unpleasant, not at all, but not his. Consolata froze; then, not daring to look at his face, she glanced sideways at his feet. He was wearing not the black high-tops but cowboy boots, convincing her that a stranger sat behind the steering wheel, inhabiting the body of him, but not him.

She thought to scream, to throw herself out onto the road. She would fight him if he touched her. She had no time to imagine other options, because they were approaching the dirt road that led to the Convent. She was just about to fling open the door, when the stranger braked and slowed to a standstill. He leaned over, brushing her breasts with his arm, and lifted the door handle. She stepped down quickly and turned to see.

He touched the brim of his Stetson, smiling. “Anytime,” he said. “Anytime at all.”

She backed away, staring at the exact face of him, repelled by but locked into his eyes, chaste and wide with hatred.

The incident does not halt the fig tree meetings. He comes the next Friday wearing the right shoes and exuding the right smell, and they argue a little.

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. He didn’t even ask me where I was going. Just drove me back.”

“Good thing he did.”

“Why?”

“Did us both a favor.”

“No, he didn’t. He was…”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’d he say to you?”

“He said, ‘Want a lift?’ and then he said, ‘Anytime.’ Like he’d do it again. I could tell he doesn’t like me.”

“Probably not. Why should he? You want him to? Like you?”

“No. Oh, no, but.”

“But what?”

Consolata sits up straight and looks steadily toward the back of the fire-ruined house. Something brown and furry scurries into what is left of a charred rain barrel.

“You talk to him about me?” she asks.

“Never told him a thing about you.”

“Then how did he know I was coming to find you?”

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just didn’t think you should be walking to town like that.”

“He didn’t turn the truck around. He was driving north. That’s why I thought it was you.”

“Look,” he says. He squats on his haunches, tossing pebbles. “We have to have a signal. I can’t always show up on Fridays. Let’s think of something, so you’ll know.”

They thought of nothing that would work. In the end she told him she would wait the Fridays, but only for an hour. He said, If I’m not on time, I’m not coming at all.

The regularity of their meetings, before his twin showed up, had smoothed her hunger to a blunt blade. Now irregularity knifed it. Even so, twice more he carried her off to the place where fig trees insisted on life. She did not know it then, but the second time was the last.

It is the end of October. He walls a portion of the fire-ruined house with a horse blanket, and they lie on an army-issue bedroll. The pale sky above them is ringed with a darkness coming, which they could not have seen had they looked. So the falling snow that lights her hair and cools his wet back surprises them. Later they speak of their situation. Blocked by weather and circumstance, they talk, mostly, about Where. He mentions a town ninety miles north but corrects himself quickly, because no motel or hotel would take them. She suggests the Convent because of the hiding places in it everywhere. He snorts his displeasure.

“Listen,” she whispers. “There is a small room in the cellar. No. Wait, just listen. I will fix it, make it beautiful. With candles. It’s cool and dark in the summer, warm as coffee in winter. We’ll have a lamp to see each other with, but nobody can see us. We can shout as loud as we want and nobody can hear. Pears are down there and walls of wine. The bottles sleep on their sides, and each one has a name, like Veuve Clicquot or Médoc, and a number: 1-9-1-5 or 1-9-2-6, like prisoners waiting to be freed. Do it,” she urges him. “Please do it. Come to my house.”

While he considers, her mind races ahead with plans. Plans to cram rosemary into the pillow slips; rinse linen sheets in hot water steeped in cinnamon. They will slake their thirst with the prisoner wine, she tells him. He laughs a low, satisfied laugh and she bites his lip which, in retrospect, was her big mistake.

Consolata did all of it and more. The cellar room sparkled in the light of an eight-holder candelabra from Holland and reeked of ancient herbs. Seckel pears crowded a white bowl. None of which pleased him for he never arrived. Never felt the slide of old linen on his skin, or picked flakes of stick cinnamon from her hair. The two wineglasses she rescued from straw-filled crates and polished to abnormal clarity collected dust particles, then, by November, just before Thanksgiving, an industrious spider moved in.

Penny and Clarissa had washed their hair and sat by the stove, finger-combing it dry. Every now and then one of them would lean and shake a shiny black panel of it closer to the heat. Softly singing forbidden Algonquian lullabies, they watched Consolata just as they always did: her days of excitement, of manic energy; her slow change to nail-biting distraction. They liked her because she was stolen, as they had been, and felt sorry for her too. They regarded her behavior as serious instruction about the limits and possibilities of love and imprisonment, and took the lesson with them for the balance of their lives. Now, however, their instant future claimed priority. Bags packed, plans set, they needed only money.

“Where do you keep the money, Consolata? Please, Consolata. Wednesday they take us to the Correctional. Just a little, Consolata. In the pantry, yes? Well, where? There was one dollar and twenty cents from Monday alone.”

Consolata ignored them. “Stop pestering me.”

“We helped you, Consolata. Now you must help us. It’s not stealing—we worked hard here. Please? Think how hard we worked.”

Their voices chanting, soothing, they swayed their hair and looked at her with the glorious eyes of maidens in peril.

The knock on the kitchen door was not loud, but its confidence was unmistakable. Three taps. No more. The girls stilled their hair in their hands. Consolata rose from her chair as if summoned by the sheriff or an angel. In a way it was both, in the shape of a young woman, exhausted, breathing hard but ramrod straight.

“That’s some walk,” she said. “Please. Let me sit.”

Penny and Clarissa disappeared like smoke.

The young woman took the chair Penny had vacated.

“Can I get you something?” asked Consolata.

“Water, would you?”

“Not tea? You look froze.”

“Yes. But water first. Then some tea.”

Consolata poured water from a pitcher and bent to check the stove fire.

“What’s that smell?” asked the visitor. “Sage?”

Consolata nodded. The woman covered her lips with her fingers.

“Does it bother you?”

“It’ll pass. Thank you.” She drank the water slowly until the glass was empty.

Consolata knew, or thought she did, but asked anyway. “What is it you want?”

“Your help.” Her voice was soft, noncommittal. No judgment, no pleading.

“I can’t help you.”

“You can if you want to.”

“What kind of help are you looking for?”

“I can’t have this child.”

Hot water splashed from the spout to the saucer. Consolata put down the kettle and sopped the water with a towel. She had never seen the woman—girl really, not out of her twenties—but there was no confusion from the moment she stepped inside about who she was. His scent was all over her, or hers was all over him. They had lived together close enough long enough to breathe phlox and Camay soap and tobacco and to exhale it in their wake. That and some other thing: the scent of small children, the lovely aroma of sweet oil, baby powder and a meatless diet. This was a mother here, saying a brute unmotherly thing that rushed at Consolata like a forked tongue. She dodged the tongue, but the toxin behind it shocked her with what she had known but never imagined: she was sharing him with his wife. Now she saw the pictures that represented exactly what that word—sharing—meant.

“I can’t help you with that! What’s wrong with you?”

“I’ve had two children in two years. If I have another…”

“Why come to me? Why you asking me?”

“Who else?” asked the woman, in her clear, matter-of-fact voice.

The poison spread. Consolata had lost him. Completely. Forever. His wife might not know it, but Consolata remembered his face. Not when she bit his lip, but when she had hummed over the blood she licked from it. He’d sucked air sharply. Said, “Don’t ever do that again.” But his eyes, first startled, then revolted, had said the rest of what she should have known right away. Clover, cinnamon, soft old linen—who would chance pears and a wall of prisoner wine with a woman bent on eating him like a meal?

“You get on out of here. You didn’t come here for that. You came to tell me, show me, what you’re like. And you think I’ll stop when I know what you’re willing to do. Well, I won’t.”

“No, but he will.”

“You wouldn’t have come here if you thought so. You want to see what I’m like; if I’m pregnant too.”

“Listen to me. He can’t fail at what he is doing. None of us can. We are making something.”

“What do I care about your raggedy little town? Get out. Go on. I have work to do.”

Did she walk all the way home? Or was that a lie too? Was her car parked somewhere near? Or if she did walk, did nobody pick her up? Is that why she lost the baby?

Her name was Soane, and when she and Consolata became fast friends, Soane told her she didn’t think so. It was the evil in her heart that caused it. Arrogance dripping with self-righteousness, she said. Pretending a sacrifice she had no intention of making taught her not to fool with God’s ways. The life she offered as a bargain fell between her legs in a swamp of red fluids and windblown sheets. Their friendship was some time coming. In the meanwhile, after the woman left, Consolata threw a cloth bag of coins at Penny and Clarissa, shouting, “Get out of my face!”

While the light changed and the meals did too, the next few days were one long siege of sorrow, during which Consolata picked through the scraps of her gobble-gobble love. Romance stretched to the breaking point broke, exposing a simple mindless transfer. From Christ, to whom one gave total surrender and then swallowed the idea of His flesh, to a living man. Shame. Shame without blame. Consolata virtually crawled back to the little chapel (wishing fervently that He could be there, glowing red in the dim light). Scuttled back, as women do, as into arms understanding where the body, like a muscle spasm, has no memory of its cringe. No beseeching prayer emerged. No Domine, non sum dignus. She simply bent the knees she had been so happy to open and said, “Dear Lord, I didn’t want to eat him. I just wanted to go home.”

Mary Magna came into the chapel and, kneeling with her, put an arm around Consolata’s shoulder, saying, “At last.”

“You don’t know,” said Consolata.

“I don’t need to, child.”

“But he, but he.” Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha, she wanted to say, meaning, he and I are the same.

“Sh sh sh. Sh sh sh,” said Mary Magna. “Never speak of him again.”

She might not have agreed so quickly, but as Mary Magna led her out of the chapel into the schoolroom, a sunshot seared her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision, and she began to see best in the dark. Consolata had been spoken to.

Mary Magna spent money she could not afford to take the household on a trip to Middleton, where each of them, but especially Consolata, confessed and attended mass. Clarissa and Penny, models of penitence, urged without success a visit to the Indian and Western Museum advertised on the road. Sister Mary Elizabeth said it was an unwise way to spend post-confessional time. The long ride back was silent except for the
shish
of missal pages turning and occasional humming from the last of the school’s clientele.

Soon only Mother and Sister Roberta were left. Sister Mary Elizabeth accepted a teaching post in Indiana. Penny and Clarissa had been taken east and, as was later learned, escaped from the bus one night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Except for a money order, made out to Consolata and signed with a storybook name, they were never heard from again.

The three women spent the winter waiting, then not waiting, for some alternative to retirement or a “home.” The independence the mission was designed for was beginning to feel like abandonment. Meanwhile they took steps to keep up the property and not incur debt the foundation could not meet. Sargeant Person agreed to lease land from them for rough corn and alfalfa. They made sauces and jellies and European bread. Sold eggs, peppers, hot relish and angry barbecue sauce, which they advertised on a square of cardboard covering the faded blue and white name of the school. Most of their customers in 1955 drove trucks between Arkansas and Texas. Ruby citizens seldom stopped to buy anything other than peppers, since they were supreme cooks themselves and made or grew what they wanted. Only in the sixties, when times were fat, did they join the truckers and look upon what they called Convent-bred chickens as superior enough to their own to be worth a journey. Then they would also try a little jalapeño jelly, or a corn relish. Pecan saplings planted in the forties were strong in 1960. The Convent sold the nuts, and when pies from the harvest were made, they went as soon as posted. They made rhubarb pie so delicious it made customers babble, and the barbecue sauce got a heavenly reputation based on the hellfire peppers.

It was an all-right life for Consolata. Better than all right, for Mary Magna had taught her patience as the first order of business. After arranging for her confirmation, she had taken the young Consolata aside and together they would watch coffee brew or sit in silence at the edge of the garden. God’s generosity, she said, is nowhere better seen than in the gift of patience. The lesson held Consolata in good stead, and she hardly noticed the things she was losing. The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally she lost the ability to bear light. By the time Mavis arrived, Sister Roberta had gone into a nursing home and Consolata had nothing on her mind but the care of Mary Magna.