Valley of Bones (28 page)

I had to believe the nuns knew all about where all I’d come from but no one said a word nor did I see an official, which was fine with me. I did see a lot of Sr. Dr. McCallister, a dry old bird who was the surgeon who pulled the slug out of me and also head doctor at the priory. She informed me among other things that I had probably stumbled into the best place in eastern North America outside a big city ER to get a bad GSW treated. So I considered myself lucky, although as I now know luck had nothing to do with it. The doctor asked me though how I had happened to find the priory through the rain and dark and with such an awful wound and so I told her about the woman who had led me to their gates. I said that one of the sisters must have been out and found
me lying in the rain but she assured me there had been no such person. She asked me to describe the person and I did—the white cowl framing the face, the long thin nose and those eyes. She stared at me strangely, but said nothing.

I was a slow healer and required a good deal of painful therapy to regain movement in my arm and shoulder. Joining me in physical therapy was Margaret Chitoor, a postulant aged eighteen. She had been operated on for a club foot. From her I learned something of how the Society recruited its members. Chitoor was not her family name but the name of the place where she had been found by a missionary. She had been thrown on a trash heap to die as an infant, an unwanted girl, a useless cripple. She laughed when she told me this, as if a little joke had been played on baby her. She said many female babies were thus disposed of, in India and other places, and the Society was able to save a tiny fraction of them, to be raised in its priories around the world. Of these, a substantial number volunteered at age eighteen for service with the organization that had saved their lives.

I confess Margaret irritated me no end. I resented her cheerfulness under pain. I myself howled and cursed at our physical therapist, a stocky woman with a crew cut and a face like a bulldog. I was vile to her and would have begged her forgiveness later only she shipped out before I became sane. I was vile to Margaret too. She would pray at night and I would mock her prayers. I quoted from Nietzsche to destroy her faith, like any village atheist. The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; and at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation, and on and on, but oddly enough the words of a nineteenth-century brilliant middle-class syphilitic philosopher cut little ice with a girl who had been saved from a garbage pile. She looked at me like I was crazy, quite properly, and said oh Emmylou you mustn’t talk that way it makes me sad to hear you talk that way, and I heard her mention me in her prayers. I wanted to kill her. I would’ve too. I
would have killed them all for their goodness if I had the means.

Impotent, I fumed and was sarcastic, sarcasm being the last refuge of the impotent and I nursed my contempt for the sisters. They were most of them maimed in some way, except for Sr. Dr. McCallister, most of them rescued from third world hellholes and trained to be sent back to third world hellholes to die for Jesus. I thought it was the very essence of insanity and said so often and loud.

It took me nearly two months to heal enough so I could move without pain. I was taken on increasingly longer walks, first around the infirmary, then to the refectory for meals, then around the grounds. The priory consisted of four three-story buildings made of gray local stone built around a quadrangle. In the center of the quad was a statue of a woman holding a wounded man, which they told me was of St. Marie-Ange de Berville, who had started the Blood Sisters long ago. Two wings of the building were dorms and one was offices and the chapel and the other was the services wing, which was where the refectory and the infirmary and the library were.

The Society felt about poetry pretty much the way Orne did and mostly they had religious books and medical and nursing texts, but they did have a fiction section full of classics. I read all the novels. No one suggested I read the others. I was out of hospital gowns by then and wore what everyone else wore when they weren’t on nursing duty—what they called
bleu de travail,
French mechanics’ one-piece jumpsuits, a souvenir of the Society’s origins in France. I was sitting in this outfit in the dayroom reading Daniel Deronda when Sr. Mercedes came in and said that the prioress wanted to see me. I said I’m busy, at which she took the book firmly from my hand and said the prioress wants to see you
now.
Well I had heard plenty about the prioress. They called her the Rottweiler and she ate human flesh when she was in a good mood. Mercedes said comb your hair it’s a mess, and I said fuck you and walked out.

I had expected her to be a big square-jawed warhorse like Sr. Dr. McCallister, six foot tall and breathing smoke. What I found instead was Jette von Schwerigen, a small, spare elderly lady in the full habit of the Society sitting in an armchair, reading. When she saw me hesitating at the door of her office she gestured me closer with a finger and pointed to a chair opposite. She picked up a file and perused it. Her office was plain, whitewashed, a desk, low bookshelves, a large wooden table clock on a wooden file cabinet, some framed photos, the only wall decoration a large crucifix. She looked at me until I became uncomfortable. Sharp blue eyes behind gold-rimmed round glasses. Gave a little sigh, said Emily Louise Garigeau, what are we to do with you?

A slight barely noticeable accent. I recall I wondered what a German woman was doing running an American operation. I said I wanted to split and she expressed concern for me, where could I go no clothes no money and I said I’ll manage because I was thinking about all those jars of gold coins, and I could call up the maps in my head pretty well. She told me the cops were after me, she knew about the dope business and said my picture was circulating, was on the TV, some federal agents had come nosing around the priory. I asked her why she didn’t turn me in and she said that wasn’t any of her business and then she said tell me about this woman you met, who cared for you when you were injured and led you here.

So I described the mystery nurse, her face, her cowl or whatever, the prioress nodding, asking questions. Then she opened a book she had on a table next to her an art book red cover with a color picture of a man with arrows sticking out of him and I read the title upside down it was Medieval Italian Painting. She turned to a page and reversed the book and handed it to me. There was a picture of my nurse looking down, a close-up three-quarter view in color you could see the tiny cracks they have on old paintings.

A chill raised the hair on my arms and I felt sick come up my throat a little. The picture had a caption, detail from St. Catherine by Andrea Vanni, San Domenico, Siena.

The prioress said the artist who painted that was a friend of Catherine of Siena and he did that from life, that’s what she really looked like. And that’s what you saw, isn’t it? I take it that you have never seen that painting?

I snapped the book shut. I said I don’t know what you’re talking about and she said young woman, you appear to be under the protection of a saint. I understand you don’t believe in God and all that nonsense, and I said yeah, right, and she smiled and shook her head. Do you know that there are perhaps thousands of people on their knees at this moment praying for some sign from God that will reward them for their faith and perhaps they will never receive one, and here are you, who does not believe at all and you have such visitations. What do you make of this, hmm?

I shrugged. I said I must have seen the painting in a book somewhere and forgot, though the lie curdled in my mouth. It was a hallucination, I said, I was sick.

The prioress did me the courtesy of ignoring this remark. She said I have always thought that the Holy Spirit had a sense of humor and this is one more evidence of it. So, we return to the question of what you will do. I assume you don’t wish to end in prison.

No. Sullen now. My eyes were traveling around the room not wanting to look at her, but the place was so plain and bare that nothing held the eye except the crucifix which I was not going to look at it creeped me right out. There were books in a low glass-fronted case, no help there I couldn’t see the titles and one of the photos, the one in an oval silver frame, was a photograph of a man in uniform. I didn’t recognize the man but the uniform was a famous one.

I asked her are you any relation to General Hanno von
Schwerigen? Children who have been raped have a well-developed ability to change the subject.

Her eyebrow tilted and she glanced at the photo and said it was her dad and asked me how I knew the name, and I said I have an interest in military history. He commanded the Twenty-second Panzer in Normandy. It was in that John Keegan book about the battle.

But she was clearly as skilled as I in the opposite direction. She said, But you are the subject of our conversation here and not my father or long-ago battles. She told me that I was well enough to do work, and that I had the choice of leaving, and they’d give me clothes and a little cash, or they’d find me something to do. She said their rule is a modification of the Rule of Benedict, work and prayer.

I said I was an atheist and she said fine, it’s an old and respectable faith. Some of my best friends are atheists. I’ve worked with atheists who are better Christians than I will ever be. Then she said, be that as it may, you shouldn’t try to ruin the faith of those who have faith because if it is truly of God then it is a waste of your time and in any case it’s impolite. She said manners are important in a community like this one, so if you stay, you can’t do it anymore.

Now the interesting thing here was that the shiny man was in plain view out of the corner of my eye, just past my left shoulder where he usually hung out not saying anything but sending out his get-out-
of-here vibe like he’d done after Momma got herself killed and with Hunter when he went all stupid, and I was about to say well I guess I’ll leave then, when I noticed that the prioress was staring over my left shoulder and I got it into my head she could see him too and this scared me worse than anything I’d been through up to now. I froze like a dead man and the minutes just ticked and I noticed the sound of the clock suddenly loud in the room and somehow time stretched then going from ticktockticktock to Tick. Tock. Tick.

She broke the silence first. She said I don’t want to influence you unduly, but here is something to think about. It is clear that God is speaking to you through his saint—why we don’t know. He certainly never spoke to me that way and I have been a religious fifty-three years. And He has led you here, also we don’t know why. So let us say you have a certain talent for seeing things usually unseen. I suspect you have also heard from the other side, yes?

I said I don’t believe in any of that shit! My voice was up and warbling nearly out of control. She said then you are insane. Do you feel insane?

I had to think about that. I’d been around crazy people enough, my momma and the street people in Miami and I knew in my heart I wasn’t like them. Crazy people were kind of helpless when you got right down to it, and I wasn’t that. So I had to tell her no.

This seemed to make her happy. She said something interesting has decided to happen to you, we won’t presume to say what it is, but this is probably where you are meant to be. St. Catherine brings you to a priory named for her?

Coincidence, I said like a good little materialist. To my surprise, she laughed. For a little lady she had a deep laugh almost like a man’s. That’s when she told me the Eskimo story, which I will write down because it’s important for you.

A pilot walks into a saloon in Alaska and the bartender says, oh Fred we have not seen you in church recently. Where have you been? The pilot says, I don’t go to church any longer. I have lost my faith. The bartender says, but why? The pilot says, last month I crashed my plane in the wilderness in the mountains and I was trapped in the wreckage. I prayed to God to get me out but nothing happened. Day after day I am praying, but nothing. I decide that there is no God and I am going to die and there is nothing after death. This is how I lost my faith. So the bartender says, but you
did
escape from there. You are here and alive. And the pilot says, oh, that had nothing to do with God. Some damn Eskimo wandered by and pulled me out.

That wasn’t why I stayed, that story. But after she told it she said, and another thing, my dear: there are no men here. Sometimes it is nice to take a vacation from men, yes?

Yes, indeed.

Thus I began my life in religion, God had found me and pinned me in this little corner, forcing holiness down my unwilling throat. In doing so I entered a strange place, strange even among religious foundations. The religious life is dying in the rich countries as everyone knows. The era of huge foundations is over, there are few vocations anymore among young girls, priories and convents are filled with the old and dying and their caretakers. St. Catherine’s was not like that, and this was because of the peculiar nature of the Bloods. This I learned from three books that I got from Sr. Marian Dolan, who was the subprioress and in charge of the lay sisters. The books were Faithful Unto Death, which was all about how the order got founded and how great Marie-Ange de Berville was, and then a book by her, The Formation of Nursing Sisters, and a little thin one, The Rule of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ, which she also wrote. The reason why they had young nuns and oblates is that they recruited from those they raised from childhood in foreign countries and also from some they rescued from the streets. Girls are still human garbage in much of the world and they grab a few from that great dump.