The Patron Saint of Liars (29 page)

Sister Evangeline must have been around fifty then, but she was still pretty much the same. The little tuft of hair that stuck out from the front of her wimple was brown instead of white and maybe she wasn't as heavy, but she chattered a lot and filled up people's plates with food they weren't hungry for. She tried to ask me some questions over dinner, but it was all I could do to choke out the smallest yes or no. After a while she just gave up.

"Maybe Mr. Abbott will help with the dishes tonight and give you girls a rest," she said after we had eaten our tapioca pudding.

Sister Mary Joseph gathered the girls together and led them out into the lobby. Not one of them said a word. I helped Sister Evangeline pick up the plates and took them into the kitchen. It's almost impossible for me to think about that kitchen now without Rose being in it, but this was 1944 and Rose hadn't even been born yet.

"You don't need to do the dishes," Sister Evangeline said once the door swung shut behind us. "I just thought it might be better for us to talk alone."

"I'd like to do them," I said. It always made me feel better, doing something to earn my keep. I turned on the hot water and stacked them in the sink.

"What kind of work are you looking for?" she asked. She was wiping down the counters but not paying a lot of attention to what she was doing and she kept missing spots.

"I'll do whatever you've got, wiring, plumbing, painting. My father's a contractor. He taught me how to do a little bit of everything."

She nodded. "That's what we need around here, a little bit of everything. I could pay you out of petty cash for a while, then write the bishop and see if there's money for bigger jobs. We've needed help around here. It's been hard getting somebody from town."

"I don't need to stay on," I said. "I'm really just passing through." I ran a couple of plates under the water and stacked them in the dish rack.

"Headed where?"

"No place special," I said, and then I was worried 'cause I didn't want to sound like a vagrant. "I like traveling, is all."

"And you don't like the war?" she said, but in a nice way.

"I got shot in the knee," I said. "I'm not much good to them anymore."

She nodded. "I see," she said. "But you didn't get shot in the war."

I never said exactly. I always liked to tell it so people would think that's what I meant without my having to lie. "No," I said. "I was shot in basic training. It was an accident."

She smiled and patted my hand. "Don't mind me," she said. "I'm just interested. You, for example. You don't seem like someone who's been to war, which is why I asked you that. That's the kind of thing that's easy to tell about a person."

"You can tell things about everybody?"

"No, no." She waved me off, trying to pretend for a second like she was shy, but she couldn't make it work. "I know a lot about babies, they're my specialty. But sometimes I can tell things about grown people. There are things anyone can tell, if they pay attention. Like you're not a traveler. That's not your nature at all. Everything about you says that you're the kind of man to stay in one place. Now what about that?"

"Maybe," I said, not feeling too comfortable. "I used to be, but people change."

"Exactly," she said, very happy, like we were playing some sort of game where the point was for her to guess things about me. She picked up a plate and dried it a little and then set it back in the rack like maybe she'd decided she wasn't so interested in drying after all. "So what we know about you is that you used to be a person who stayed in one place, and that place was Tennessee because I can tell from your accent. I'd even go so far as to say middle Tennessee. Then you enlisted for the war because you wanted to defend your country. You seem like a good man, and that's what a good man would do, but there was an unfortunate accident and you were sent home for your knee to get better. And after that, something happened, that wasn't about the war or the knee and that was the thing that made you a traveler. The bad thing was something else entirely."

I stared at her. My hands were in the water but they weren't washing dishes, they were just in the water and all of the sudden the feeling was so familiar that I felt those same words come up in my mouth, Help me, somebody, but instead I said yes, it was something else.

Sister Evangeline looked at me straight in the eye and said, "And that something wasn't your fault." And then she put her hands down in the water and held my hands.

5

E
VER SINCE
I got married and Sissy was born,
I
never saw Miss June as much as I would have liked. Work kept me busy, same as ever, but now instead of spending my evenings wandering around, hoping to find somebody who was up and maybe willing to sit and talk for a while, I stayed at home. It was the only time I got to really see Sissy and Rose, when they weren't surrounded by a dozen different people pulling on them and wanting their attention. Course, I was going over there a lot, picking Sissy up or dropping her off. We went to June's for dinner every once in a while, and Rose got over to see her some. Sissy was ten then, and she and June got along real well, but I hardly ever got over there just to visit the way I used to and I felt bad about that. I looked after her though. I always cleaned her gutters in the spring and put her storms up for her in the fall. I kept up with her lawn just like the rest of the property. But still, I should have sat with her more. All the time she put in with me when I didn't know anyone in town. Until she died, I'd forgotten how much I'd relied on her.

It came quick, a stroke. "I don't mind a stroke," Miss June told me once, "so long as it takes me out clean. What I'm afraid of is one that will leave me crippled up, dependent on somebody." It came to her over lunch and she died in her kitchen. Sister Evangeline found her at two o'clock when she went over to watch their show together like they did every afternoon. She came into my workroom, not going fast or even out of breath.

"June's dead," she told me.

I looked up. The sun was square behind her and I couldn't see a thing. "Dead?"

"In her kitchen. You better come on."

I put down my screwdriver and balanced myself against the workbench. "You call an ambulance?"

"She's dead," Sister Evangeline said, "not sick."

I walked back through the pasture with Sister and she held onto my arm. No one could be sure how old Sister was, though by my calculations she must have been well past eighty by then. She didn't seem more than seventy most days. It was only when she was up and around for too long that I even thought about her age. "Why don't you wait back up at the hotel?" I asked Sister.

"No sense you going alone," she said. She puffed a little bit, so I slowed down. She took small, careful steps and what with her being five feet tall and me just at six seven, it was hard for us to get matched up.

We went in June's front door, which was open on account of the weather being so nice. Everything in her house was neat, put right in its place. The sun fell over the living room carpet and showed up how the cabbage roses had faded. "In here," Sister Evangeline said, and walked into the kitchen.

June was lying on the floor and her chair was turned over. The way her mouth was tensed made me think she'd felt some pain at the last. Sister Evangeline squatted down and closed June's eyes with two fingers. Then she picked up her hand and held it for a minute. "I wish it was me," she said kind of matter-of-factly.

"Don't say that."

She stayed down there awhile, just watching her. "Help me up, Son. I never should have gotten down like this." I leaned over and put my hands under her arms to straighten her up. She was a solid little thing, no doubt about that. "You take her in and put her on the couch so she looks comfortable and I'll call the funeral home." She sighed, looked at the table, and then smiled. "She was eating liverwurst," she said, pointing to the sandwich still sitting on the plate. "That's good."

I picked June up and carried her into the living room like Sister told me. She didn't weigh any more than Sissy. It was an awful thing to never really have the chance to hold somebody until she was dead. I put her on the couch. She did look better there.

"Hank's coming over," Sister Evangeline said, hanging up the phone. "He said we should wait here with her. It won't take him five minutes." I helped Sister down into the chair that had been June's and then sat down myself.

"This is awful," I said.

"People die," she said. But I knew it was even harder for her. June was old. Not quite as old as Sister, but old enough for her to talk about the way things had been in these parts when they were growing up. They were friends. Going to June's every day was what Sister looked forward to, and now that was gone. June was gone.

"She wanted to be a Catholic," Sister Evangeline said to me. I was surprised, I guess, seeing as how much trouble the Catholics had given the Clatterbucks over the years. "A hundred times she said that and I used to always say I'd give her instruction, but she just couldn't seem to get around to it. It was almost like she was scared. I should have pressed her, maybe."

"Naw," I said quietly, "can't press a person on something like that."

She nodded. "I guess that's right." Then she bent her head down toward her chest and she said, "Eternal rest, grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace. Amen." She kept on saying it, over and over again, until Hank came up from the funeral home.

By the time we got back to Saint Elizabeth's, Sister Evangeline was pretty worn out. "What's wrong?" Rose said, soon as she saw us. She was fixing dinner and pots were boiling all over the place. Her apron was covered in flour.

"June's dead," Sister said. "I'm going to lie down."

Rose moved toward her, but Sister put up her hand. "No, honey, I'm fine. I'm just tired is all. Let me go on. Son'll tell you what happened." She moved off down the hall with her little shuffling steps.

"June?" Rose said.

I nodded my head. "Just this afternoon."

Rose sat down and I took her hand. "Poor Sister," she said, and then added, "poor June."

They buried her with her family, just the way she wanted. All the girls came, even though most of them had never met her. They had all read the plaque in front of the hotel. Everybody felt they owed June the respect. It was always strange to see the girls outside of Saint Elizabeth's. When they were in the hotel or just walking around the grounds, I never noticed them being pregnant. After a while, you know, you just stop seeing some things. But whenever we went out it was like every girl was standing in a spotlight, and all together they made a wall of round bellies that was nearly impossible not to stare at. The dresses only really fit on one or two of them. The others were wearing things too big or too tight, like they had grown some on the bus coming over. They bowed their heads and said their prayers and tried to ignore the people who were staring at them. Habit and Saint Elizabeth's didn't have occasion to mix much, but June Clatterbuck's funeral was something that brought out everyone from both sides of town. Things had gotten better. People didn't mind the sight of pregnant girls the way they used to. The nuns still made them uncomfortable, their long white dresses and their habits flapping behind them like bed sheets on a line, but since there were television shows about nuns now, and a movie from time to time, people were a little more accustomed to the idea of women who were married to God.

I stood there with my hands folded. The town stood on one side of the open grave and we stood on the other: pregnant girls, nuns, and one man too tall to blend in anyplace. Miss June would have gotten a kick out- of it, her funeral making such strange bedfellows.

"Right beside her mother and father," Sister Evangeline said to me. "She never got over missing them, not till the day she died."

"Jesus owes us nothing," the preacher said, "and still He gives us all. He gave June Clatterbuck her life for more than seventy years. He gave us all June to know and love. We have witnessed His goodness through her." He looked at our side for a minute and then back to the ground. "Hell awaits the sinners," he said. "June walks with the Lord."

Sissy leaned over and scratched a mosquito bite on her ankle. She'd been crying off and on. I wanted to pick her up, but she only would've fussed at me. "I'm not a baby, Dad," she'd say every time I tried to pick her up now. It was true, she was getting so big you would have thought she was twelve, all legs and arms. She went to school in town and most of her friends and their parents were there. I could tell she was a little embarrassed standing with us. She would have liked to have been on the other side with the Baptists, even though she was taking being a Catholic very seriously because the nuns were always giving her rosary beads and holy cards and she liked those things a lot. She'd been good through the whole funeral, stood up straight and was quiet. She didn't complain about having to wear a dress or her stiff shoes like she did when she went to mass in the ballroom or up in Owensboro. June was the first one to see Sissy turn over and she heard her first words. Sister Evangeline fussed with Sissy's hair, picking at it like it was full of straw, and Sissy didn't even seem to mind that.

"Sad stuff," Sister said.

Sissy looked over at the place where the ground was dug up. "Why isn't he saying any of the prayers right?" she whispered to me, but I put my finger to my lips and she was quiet.

As soon as the service was over Mother Corinne clapped her hands twice to gather everyone together. "All right, girls," she said. "We need to start back." You could tell Mother Corinne didn't take to things not Catholic. It made her nervous, standing in the Baptist cemetery with a preacher.

We all climbed on board the Baptist Sunday school bus to go home. They'd sent it for us, which I thought was real decent of them. The last of the Clatterbucks was gone. The last real proof that there had ever been a spring that healed the sick. It would all be the church's now, just like the church had been saying it was all those years.