Valley of Bones (30 page)

So that was the prioress’s tale, or the important part of it anyway. Eventually God touched her heart and she stayed with the Bloods as they pulled themselves together after the war, and later she became a sister herself. She explained that the women who
were there then, the survivors of the catastrophe in Europe, were called Rottweilers and I said I thought it was because you were mean as a bad dog and she laughed and said there is yet another thing on which you were misinformed. When I left I heard the shiny man say well you really told her off. I am still using my childish name for him. I should say Lucifer now, but that sounds like something in a movie, with the special effects and the funny eyes.

You know that despite my tough front I really have a very weak mind, my brain is a vessel in which anything can be poured and I will tend to buy it. My poor parents left me so hollow. Unfortunately, there is no drain valve. So the prioress’s words stayed with me against my will and I pondered them in my heart, like Mary in the Gospel.

I agreed to go to church and I did. I stood I sat I knelt I crossed myself with the others I made the responses and I sang. They wanted an outward show, I said to myself, I would give them the outward show, but inside there would be no change. The priest was Father Munch, a small elderly man with shiny fake teeth. He arrived in procession, he proclaimed the Gospel, produced an anodyne homily, said his magic words over the bread and wine, and drifted away. I sensed he wasn’t all that comfortable at St. C.’s. I’ve heard that at regular convents priests are petted and doted over, but the Bloods I knew always treated them like union plumbers—they had the package and the ticket so they got to do the job, but that didn’t mean you had to like it. Poor man, and I can’t help believing he felt unappreciated, getting up before dawn and driving over slick winter roads up the mountain from Bradleyville to say mass for a bunch of hard-faced women who’d spent their lives dodging bombs and death squads and had no doubt they could carry off the whole thing a lot better themselves. And probably had too, as I found out later.

After some weeks I found it was hard to keep my mind off of God during mass. I had heard the Bible words before and they fell
like they say on deaf ears but my body was moving in the ritual ways and even though I mocked I was doing it and slowly it got to touch my pondering heart. Now in this ecumenical age we’re not supposed to speak against the charisms of all the different shards into which the church has shattered yet I can’t help feeling that no other church would have seized me as this one did. I am a fleshly creature and the Catholics work through the body in all things more than the others I think. The Bloods spend much of their lives amid really horrible ugliness and so when they have a chance as at St. C.’s they pour it on—processions, incense, banners, choirs, organ. I had never heard music like that, being a cracker barbarian, only the clunky hymns they sang in Wayland, so Palestrina and Mozart and Schubert hit me like a brick on the head, the opposite really, it knocked me
awake
in a way I hadn’t imagined before. Several times I cried despite myself.

As I say, I started to pay attention, and when poor Fr. Munch held up the bread in his shaky hand and said this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world the thought started in tickling my mind what if it’s
true.
And then the denial. Once I found myself shaking my head from side to side and people looked. Otherwise everyone left me alone, another Catholic habit. I’m sure if they came over to me with urgings and tracts like in Ray Bob’s church I would have bolted like a hornet-stung horse, but that was also God’s work I believe. It might not work for you, you might go for fire-breathing Baptists, or cool Congregational light, what do I know except what grabbed me?

I did a lot of reading that winter, in the bad weather, no longer the novels but works I could barely understand, the Gospels, Augustine, Origen, Aquinas, St. Teresa, Chesterton, Rahner, Küng. The Catholic Encyclopedia devoured in a week, what was I looking for, permission or ammunition I don’t know, but it helped in the pondering. I call myself a rebel, but really I can’t bear to be a dummy about anything, and so I am easily bidden to the lamp. The sense then of roads being closed off, a feeling of exhaustion.
The “Hound of Heaven” is not much of a poem but it was one of the 500 and lodged there in my brain and dripped down into my heart, I heard the steps beating behind me now, all things betray thee, who betrayest Me, but I was too cowardly I needed a friend of the heart like the prioress had Sister Magdalena to pull me the last gap over the titanic gloom of chasmed fears.

It was a Monday, I recall, March the seventh, when I first met her. On Mondays we all gathered at the toolshed, really a big garage where they kept the tractors and pickups and mowers and all the tools. It was a clear morning, not too cold, and I was carrying a large thermos and a box lunch from the kitchen because I figured I was going to be out in the woods. As I approached the doorway I heard laughter, the modest tittering of the Filipinas mixed with the American yawps of the other women and also one laugh I hadn’t heard before, loud free and rich. I walked in and there she was sitting on an oil drum, a woman maybe ten years older than I was, her legs crossed and only the left boot hanging down beneath her apron. She was telling a funny story in Tagalog and then translating it into English for the others, something about a man in a Mindanao village who fell in love with his buffalo and wanted to marry her and what the priest had done or not done. She had an Irish accent. Tagalog in an Irish accent is apparently extremely funny, the Filipinas were bent double.

I couldn’t follow the story because I was staring at her face. It wasn’t that she was beautiful in the usual supermodel way, I’m no oil painting was one of her sayings, but she
was
like an oil painting, a painting of a queen from olden times, except that her face was covered with freckles, which I think those old masters usually left off. She had red hair, the true metallic copper kind which grew in tight corkscrews on her scalp and heavy red gold eyebrows and deep-set green-hazel eyes. I guess I took in all this when I first saw her in the toolshed, but it wasn’t the physical that blew me over. It was like the first time I saw Orne Foy,
the sense that this was someone off the charts, the source of light in any room they might enter. I don’t know what it is. Total ease and confidence? The fancy word is charisma but what is that except a label? She had it and he had it and I don’t, but I vibrate to it like a string to the right note, and what I wanted more than anything since Orne died was that she look at me and like me.

But not until later. My first feeling was resentment: who does she think she is, casting all that light was my first thought for in my wickedness I saw women as adversaries and men as tools. I felt my jaw tighten as she looked at me still laughing and beckoned me in and held out her big freckled hand. It engulfed mine and she held it warm and said Nora Mulvaney. You must be Emily.

What it was, Sr. Lorette had to go into the hospital and Nora happened to be there to help plan some meeting of Blood big-shots they were holding at the priory in the spring and she agreed to run maintenance for a while, a typical Blood solution, even though she was on the staff of the Mother General she could still ply a rake so to speak although she couldn’t really with that leg gone. The next day she was there at dawn when I came to get the truck and said she wanted to ride over the land with me it had been years since she’d been here. We drove up the mountain she singing a song in Gaelic like we were going to pick flowers tra la la, and it took all my grit to keep from being charmed. She had a scent too, like fresh bread, it filled the cab. Then she said, So you’re the atheist dope lord, or dope lady I suppose. What’s that all about, mm? I didn’t answer. She said, Meself I haven’t ever had the pleasure of atheism, being a born Cat’lic and dope makes me sick up, give me a pint anytime. Me father now, he was the atheist, he thought the Church was the curse of Ireland, only exceeded in ignominy by the goddamned Brits. I was seven before I figured out that you could refer to the inhabitants of the UK without that particular prefixial adjective. It was me mother was
the religious one and I followed in her path. Maybe it was self-preservation, you know, because he was a consuming man, me father, he ate people up. Although a great man in his field, him being a consulting neurosurgeon in Dublin, don’t y’know. He’s married to a woman a year younger than me. Me mother died of acute pancreatitis brought on by drink and I suppose by the way he treated her, I would say like a dog, but we had a dog, Raffles, a big stupid setter, and I never heard him raise his voice to the creature. He waited a dacent six weeks before he married his girlfriend. In his worst nightmares he couldn’t imagine a more terrible fate for his bright little girl than becoming both a sister and a nurse, the lowest of the low. We don’t talk. I’ve got a brother too, Peter. You know what he does? I said a bishop and she let out that laugh. Almost as good, she said, he joined the British army and not even as an officer. Serving in the ranks, although he’s now a sergeant-major. We do talk, Peter and me, and don’t we work black conspiracies against Mister Himself?

I was out of the truck by now and filling my chain saw with gas. She was leaning against the tailgate. She went on, about how she went for a nurse in Ireland, and then joined the SBC and was taught the special skills that the SBC teaches right here at dear old St. C. and then went out to the Philippines where there was a terror war going on in the southern islands, and then she was replaced by Filipinas and they sent her to south Sudan, where she would be still if not for her leg. She said I trod on a wee land mine, chasing some little kid, and the funny thing was the kid ran through the mine field without a scratch and Nora that great clod of a woman gets herself blown up.

That was the first time I ever heard the words wee and trod used in speech. It was like being in a book, with her, a delight, but I didn’t let on.

I see you’re fascinated by me sad story, she said, but I just thought we’d start off a little more even, since I know all about you. I said you don’t know shit. And she said oh, dear, but I do, I
do. I know some things you probably don’t know yourself. For example, you’re a cradle Cat’lic too. I said bullshit! I am not! Oh, yes you are, she said, baptized in Holy Family Church in Gainesville, Florida, U. S. of A., age one month eight days, all done proper. Your father brought you. I stared at her. She went on, see here darlin’, you may think we’re a bunch of dotty women but the SBC has one of the finest intelligence services in the world. The Jesuits are older but we’ve got more money. Do you think we’d let a person in here unless we knew absolutely everything there was to know about them? It’s the money, you see, the Trust. You know about the Trust do you? I said I did but I thought it was all lost in the war. She laughed at the thought. Oh bless you it’d take more than a world war to break the Bloods there are deep deep vaults my darlin’. No, we kept most of it and it’s grown since, although we did have to bail out the Holy Father when he got in a bit of a jam over that Banco Ambrosiano thing back in the 1970s. The Holy See was bankrupt and we stepped in as good daughters of the church, us and the Opus Dei. If not, believe me, darlin’, we’d all be making tea for bishops. As it is, the money lets us do as we please, and we’re the pope’s favorite little nursie girls, that and the fact that we die so uncommon frequent. It makes it hard for them to crack down, d’you see, the church still having a soft spot for holy martyrs. Jim De Bree is sort of our unofficial motto. I said I didn’t understand and she said it was French je me débrouille, it means something like making things happen in ways that don’t bear strict scrutiny. Then she said, So when a little wench shows up on the run from the law and half-dead at our biggest priory spouting atheism and declaring visitations from St. Catherine of Siena, eyebrows go up, chins are stroked in Rome. Jette is no fool as you’ll have learned, and she thinks you’re something rare. Not a spy, nor a fraud at any rate. What do
you
say you are?

I said I didn’t know. I was confused and scared and starting to get weepy which I definitely did not want to do then, and she
took a step and put an arm around me and said then we’ll have to help you find out, mm?

The touch was what did it electricity of goodness or something stranger because without any warning I was hysterical. I literally collapsed in her arms, soaking her crisp white apron with snot and tears. I had no idea really what I was crying about maybe it was the nature of the touch, communicated on some level way down below. I never got touched like that, even when I was a little kid, my mother never did and neither did the men, and I never had a real friend, it was a touch erotic but not sexual a rare thing in this world saying we are all miserable wretches together here is some comfort. Darlin’ she said there there over and over, Daalin’ in her accent. She said, let’s go on back but you’ll have to drive on account of I’m a foot short. That got me turned from crying hysterically to laughing hysterically until my belly was tight as a washboard.

That was my conversion as it turned out. C. S. Lewis said he was converted on a motorcycle ride to Whipsnade, and St. Paul was knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus and as for me I rode down the mountain in a pickup truck, with Nora Mulvaney at my side she was humming “Stór Mo Chroí.” Simple as that, I got in the truck an unbeliever full of theology and when I got out in the garage I was Catholic.

I was at St. Catherine’s for seven months and three days after that. Joy is very simple and does not require much art in the telling I think pain and struggle are more literary. I became more or less her driver and confidante. Neither Lucifer nor any saints or angels made a further appearance in that time, having accomplished their mission or so Nora said and also she said the devil’s a good Cat’lic too when all’s said and done, he does the job required and he loves the church, by God,
you can’t get him out of it!
Oh, Christ, I loved her, and I had a time distinguishing between that and the love I owed to God, although maybe it comes to the same in the end.