The Saint's Mistress (33 page)

“Well…yes, I guess he did.” But, grateful as I was to be reunited with my friend, I was sure

that there was no comfort possible for me.

Miriam lasted four more months, through the cool, rainy winter, until almost the time when

we would harvest our first crop of winter wheat on Monnica’s land.

The day we buried her, the sun shone, lending shimmer to the ripening wheat. Sprouts of

spinach and lettuce and beans emerged from the vegetable garden beside the burial ground.

Lucy dug the hole herself, grunting through her tears.

Quintus prayed over the grave and returned to his house in town, and the other sisters went

back to their work after offering their own prayers and condolences. Once we were alone,

Lucy put her face in her hands and sank to her knees on the damp ground, sobbing.

I squatted beside her, placing my arms around her.
Help me,
I prayed,
I don’t know how to

comfort her.

For long minutes, I held Lucy, rocking her gently in my arms while she sobbed.

Finally she turned her wet face to me. “Why did God take away from me all of the people I

loved, aunty? My husband, my baby, my mother, all gone. How can God be good when he does

this?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“I try to pray. I try to be good. But, I don’t understand this one thing. I don’t understand it.”

“We’ll all be together again someday with Jesus,” I told her. “We’ll understand then. And, in

the meantime, I love you and you have friends here now. I’ll take care of you just as your mother

would have.” The words sounded hollow to me even as I said them. The same questions that

tortured Lucy were the same ones tearing at my own heart.

In my dream, the sky was the color of iron. I kept thinking that God was capricious and cruel,

and every time I thought it, lightning bolted from the sky and struck near me. Yet, I kept thinking

it as I walked towards a walled garden, lightning stabbing and burning the earth all around me.

I reached the garden and went through the gate. The sky was still dark, but the garden seemed

protected from the lightning. Aurelius sat in the garden, reading St. Paul’s letter to the Romans.

“Take and read,” he urged me, but when I tried to take the book that he offered, I found that my

arms were paralyzed.

I woke in a panic, thinking my arms still wouldn’t move, and for a moment, until the dream

faded into waking, they wouldn’t. Fully awake, I sat up and looked around the moonlit dormitory

at the sleeping women around me. Take and read, Aurelius had said. I rose quietly and padded to

the closet where we kept our small store of books, carefully rolled scrolls in round boxes and the

bound books in a small, plain trunk.

Aurelius had been reading a bound book in my dream, so I opened the trunk and selected the

volume that lay on top and opened it at random.

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It was a volume of Hebrew lamentations translated into Latin, and I could remember no

reason why it should have been on top of the pile in the trunk, but the words pierced me.

My soul is bereft of peace;

I have forgotten what happiness is;

So I say, “Gone is my glory,

And all that I had hoped for from the Lord.”

The thought of my affliction and my homelessness

Is wormwood and gall!

My soul continually thinks of it

And is bowed down within me.

My throat closed and tears gathered in my eyes as I read. Yes, I thought, and bowed my head

and let the sobs come for a moment.

I sniffed and wiped my eyes and read on.

But this I call to mind,

And therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,

His mercies never come to an end;

They are new every morning;

Great is your faithfulness.

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,

“therefore I will hope in him.”

My sobs stopped and I sat very still. How could both be true at the same time? How could

unendurable sorrow exist beside God’s steadfast love?

And the answer came to me: how could they
not
be true at the same time? At every point in

my life when darkness has threatened to overwhelm me, some gift of love and hope had been

given to me. I sinned with Aurelius and found myself pregnant while still a young girl, and I

despaired. But Adeo was a gift to me and to all who knew him in his short life. Adeo was lost to

me, but his last act was to leave me the means to help the humble people among whom I was

born and who were now so desperate in their poverty. My friend, so long lost, had been returned

to me, and when she, in turn, was taken, I had her daughter as a comfort.

I closed the book and laid it back in the trunk. Adeo’s death was still unendurable. That had

not changed and I knew that it would never change. I also knew now that I had been given what

was needed to bear the unbearable. I thought of the words again:
The steadfast love of the Lord

never ceases.
To prove it, he gives us each other to care for.

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Thagaste, Anno Domini 430

Rufus tightened the harness around the borrowed mule’s belly, then stood back and gave his

rump a slap. I held my breath and then let out a sigh as the mule jerked forward and we heard the

stones of our little mill scrape against each other. The milling of our winter wheat had officially

started.

“Mother, I hope you won’t tell the bishop on me: I buried a fish under the floor for good

luck,” Rufus whispered. “I know we should trust in the Lord, but the folks still like the old ways

a bit, too.”

“It’s God that brought us such a good harvest, and your hard work that repaired the mill,” I

scolded. “The buried fish is just one less fish on someone’s table. But, it can be our secret.”

I looked out the mill window, through a golden haze of wheat dust, at the surrounding fields,

where my young women moved as busy and purposeful as bees, some carrying a few last

sheaves, others pacing the fields with bags on their shoulders collecting the gleanings, and yet

others threshing the grain from the chaff by tossing it in the air on thin wool sheets. The

youngest, strongest girls then slung the grain-filled sheets over their shoulders and carried them

up to the third floor of the mill where Lucy directed the feeding of the harvested wheat into the

mill shaft. Everyone except the ill and the very old was busy from sunup until sundown during

harvest.

“You okay up there?” I called to Lucy.

“Just tell them to keep it coming,” she yelled back. “Thanks be to God that we got it going.

Lydia! Too fast! You’ll clog it! Slow down!” I smiled and shook my head at her shouting at the

young novice assisting her. At more than 50, my faithful, tireless Lucy was as straight-backed

and strong as ever, but her hearing was failing and she shouted at everyone.

“What would we do without you?” I said to Rufus.

“Mother, what would we do without the mill? If it couldn’t be repaired half the town would

starve this year. My Stephen is a big, strong boy and can do enough work on Licentius’ land for

two of us today. The repair wasn’t hard.”

“Nobody but you could do it,” I reminded him, and regretted again that most of Rufus’s time

was owed to the fields of his lord, Licentius, Urbanus’ son. Urbanus had died years ago, and

Licentius spent all his time in Rome and Carthage, but the factor who represented him never

failed to enforce the labor due him.

Rufus’ son Stephen, along with all other male peasants in the Thagaste countryside, were in

Licentius’ fields from dawn until after dusk these spring weeks, bringing in his harvest. I wished

Rufus could have been spared to work with us for more than just this day. His mechanical talents

were a gift from God. When still a young man, he had built our mill from a drawing in a book in

Quintus’s library, quadrupling the speed at which we could process our grain using hand mills.

“Let me help you down the stairs, Mother,” he said now, taking my arm.

I hadn’t kept track of my age, but knew that I must be over 70. My eyesight and hearing were

still sharp, but I tired easily, my bones often ached, and I knew that I wasn’t steady enough to

take stairs without help. It was a wonder to me that I still lived and worked, my hands still steady

for copying, and my mind still clear for the endless verbal duels with Quintus, who never ceased

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trying to gain control of the acres that Monnica had left and the mill that we had erected on the

land.

But, we had managed to hang on to our land and remain independent of the bishop for our

material needs. We paid the bishopric a tithe of one-fifth of our harvest each year, and the rest

was ours use or distribute as we saw fit. Our little community prospered. We raised wheat,

vegetables, sheep and goats, and were able to feed our own community of 100 women, plus

provide food in the lean months for the poorest people of Thagaste and its surrounding

countryside. I still had a few literate girls to help me copy scripture, Quintus’s sermons, and

other books that occasionally came our way. Many a Christian missionary had been sent to the

borderlands with a small, leather-bound Gospel copied by me or one of my young women.

As we made our way back to the kitchen complex, Rufus squinted down the road. “Mother, it

looks like travelers.” He pointed.

Already, the ground was dry, and the approaching travelers kicked up a big enough cloud of

dust that I could see that there were many of them.

“What should we do?” Rufus asked. He was right to be fearful. Legionnaires had not been

seen in North Africa outside the biggest cities in many years, and travel of any distance was

increasingly precarious, with bandits of all kinds roaming the roads. Most people stayed where

they were, eating what they could grow nearby and communicating little with the outside world.

And so it had become unusual to see a large party approaching.

But, our Lord commanded us to welcome the stranger, and when I looked around at the nearly

one hundred women busy at work, I knew that we could never get them all gathered inside

before the travelers reached us anyway. What’s more, Rufus was the only man in the vicinity

right now, and our buildings were designed for living, not defending. “There’s nothing to do

except wait for them and see what they want,” I said.

It seemed to take an eternity for the party to reach us. Rufus and I stood silently, but my heart

drummed rapidly against my ribs. For myself, I was old and ready to die, but I was responsible

for the welfare of the other women, most of them young with lives yet to be lived.

Finally, we could see that the travelers were not bandits, but an unarmed party of about 25

men, women and children, dusty and shambling. My heart slowed and I turned to Rufus. “They

look harmless. Come out with me to meet them.”

Rufus and I arrived in the small orchard outside the dormitory at the same time as the ragged

party of travelers. A hollow-eyed, slump-shouldered man led the party.

“We need food and rest,” he announced without preamble. “Please. Whatever you can offer.

We’ve been walking for three days from Liberium.”

“Of course,” I said. “Please come in.”

We sat the travelers in our kitchen and brought them a meal of bread, dried fruit, cheese and

olives, and had water brought from the well.

“You should abandon this place as soon as you can,” their leader, Julian, told me as soon as

he had washed his hands and wet his mouth. “The Vandals will surely reach here within days.”

Rumors had reached us for months of the army of Vandals that had already thundered across

central Europe to Spain and from there had crossed the Middle Sea to land on North Africa’s

northwestern shore.

“How far are they?”

He shrugged. “We didn’t wait to find out after Deborah barely escaped with her life.” He

nodded his head towards a woman sitting near him, a small child on her lap. “She came from a

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town just north of Liberium, on the coast, and she and her child were the only people to survive

the Vandals from their city. The city surrendered in hope of mercy and were slaughtered

anyway.”

Deborah’s eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and seemed to look inward rather than

outward as she told her story. Most of the men of her town had been put to the sword

immediately. Then the Vandal general, Genseric, had gathered the children and threatened to kill

them one by one if the women didn’t reveal where they might have hidden food or treasure. The

women produced what little thy had, but Genseric had two children put to the sword anyway to

prove that he was serious and gave them 24 hours to produce more. Finally, when he was sure

there was nothing more to take, Genseric’s men forced the remaining women and children into a