($12,580) and opened an account at a Citibank nearby, after which I drove to a real estate office and rented a furnished apartment in a town house out on Bird on the far side of the expressway, giving as my name Emily Louise Garigeau, which was not the name on my driver’s license, but that was OK because I was a newlywed and the real estate lady cooed oh how lovely and said there were a lot of other couples just like us out in our development (Westfield Lakes), so we would be right at home. I got us a phone and turned the utilities on, although it used up a lot of our cash for the different deposits, because neither of us had any credit record or even a Social Security number. I got rid of all the paper with my old name on it and took out a driver’s license with the new one.
Well, there we were, a pair of high school dropouts from the boonies living among the striving squares, guys who ran Burger Kings, women who groomed poodles, mail carriers, airport workers, the people who assistant- managed the big stores, Home Depot, Staples, and it hit me (but probably not Hunter) that this was the life I was slotted for, this was what girls like me were supposed to aspire to if we kept our nose clean and finished high school, and I knew right then it was not for me. I was a criminal in my deepest soul, delighting in what was wrong. Getting money would not be a problem, with all that dope in the storage all just waiting for Orne Foy to tell us what to do with it, and had some other ideas which I did not share with Hunter like being a very very high-priced hooker if I could learn how.
You can take the boy out of the country, as the saying goes, and Hunter was a good example. He started slipping bricks of dope out of the stash and smoking it around the house, which was bad enough, but then he went and parked near Palmetto Springs high school and began moving product. When I tried to reason with him, he cursed me out and said if it wasn’t for me he never would’ve had to leave home, like he’d left some mansion on the hill and was living in a shithole instead of the other way around and when I pointed this out and told him I was going to tell Orne he was selling weed without his say-so, he punched me out, not that bad because I knew how to roll with it and he was pretty stoned, but that was it for me and Hunter. The next day I called Orne and left a message, but he didn’t get back to me until it was too late.
They don’t like you selling dope around high schools in Florida, at least not right out in the open. The cops don’t like it and neither do the other dope dealers. Someone must’ve dimed us because two nights after I called Orne our door crashed in and we were surrounded by cops with lights and guns yelling and screaming, me with my bare ass hanging out of a T-shirt on the couch in the living room, and we were busted with felony weight.
They seized all our money and cars and stuff because it was the produce of drug dealing and they discovered the key to our storage locker and thirty kilos of primo sensemilla dope. Naturally they wanted Hunter to tell who his dealer was, but he didn’t, because I will say one thing for the Foys, they stick together. This pissed them off no end, and even though they could clearly see he could hardly tie his shoes they treated him like a major trafficker, and I guess he was headed for a long visit with his daddy at the Union prison up in Raiford. I pretended to be a little slow, which I knew how to do pretty well from my days with the dumb kids, and gave my name as Emily Garigeau, so as to avoid any connection with Caluga County, and they figured Hunter was this big drug mastermind and all the stuff I had planned and accomplished in Miami was me being some kind of robot obeying his orders. Juveniles don’t get real trials, so I went in front of a lady judge and cried a lot and got confused, and said I was an orphan and when they asked me where I was from I said it was a blue trailer in Alabama I didn’t know the town, ma’am, it was near a tree hit by lightnin’? They sent me to Agape House, a residential facility in Dade County for girls needing drug treatment or if they had behavioral disorders. I guess they figured dumb was one of those, close enough anyway. It was a Jesus place and we had to sing hymns. I had a six-month sentence, but it was a minimum-security facility, and after three days I was over the fence and away in just the clothes I stood up in.
In another letter we find:
You will laugh, but in the dull warm afternoons I sit here in Gravelotte and imagine what sort of nun I shall be, if I ever get my courage up to tell my father of my intentions. As you know, I am far too stupid to be a scholarly Benedictine, and too nervous to make a good contemplative. The Carmelites would not have me with a queen’s dowry! I think that what I would really like is to help the sick, as our Lord did. I have read with interest the reports of Miss Florence Nightingale and think it a shame that the English should be so far in advance of us here in Catholic France, as it was we who invented the very idea of hospitals. I know that there are now some congregations of religious who do such work not in hospitals, but in the homes of the poor and helpless, and I think I would like that. I have a strong stomach and am not frightened of blood, or troubled by horrid smells. Would you be so kind as to look into the Institut de Bon Secours de Paris, and tell me what you think. Oh, and, although it is very wicked to ask this, would you please not tell Papa!!
It is not known whether Aurore Puyot ever told her brother-in-law about these notions, but in any case, events were to overtake them all, bring an end to Marie-Ange’s girlhood in Metz and set her feet on the course they were to follow for the remainder of her life. In August of 1870, while she sat penning this letter, perhaps in the gazebo at Bois Fleury that overlooked the small river Mance, war came to her nation, bringing its dread tide to her very doorstep.
From the start this war did not go well for France. The French Army of the Rhine fell back through Metz on its way to Verdun, with the Germans in pursuit. On the morning of the 16th of August, Marie-Ange was awakened by the sound of horsemen in the courtyard of the chateau. As she expected the arrival of her brother Jean-Pierre on convalescent leave, she ran down the stairs in just her robe and slippers, pausing at the door to throw on a blue uniform cloak of her brother’s that was hanging there. Yet when she burst through the door, she found to her dismay not her brother’s coach, but a troop of Prussian uhlans.
— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.
Nine
Lorna follows Darryla Chambers down the Pine Sol-perfumed corridors of Jackson Memorial Hospital toward the locked ward run by the Division of Forensic Services. Darryla is a large woman, so large that much of Lorna’s field of view is occupied by her blue scrubs, the broad back and shoulders, the spectacular rolling buttocks. Darryla the Gorilla to the wards, but this is because of her size and not, as far as Lorna knows, because of either her ferocity or the color of her skin. She is actually a gentle and caring person, who brooks, however, no shenanigans from her criminous lunatics. As she walks, Lorna continues her reflections on large women. Judge Packingham is large, larger than Darryla, really, a set of shoulders like a linebacker in pads, her face flat and pale beneath a ridiculous little gray perm, those black robes accentuating the hugeness. Packingcrate they call her around the courthouse, the usual cruelty. A few decades back she had worked for Janet Reno in the state’s attorney, and they used to say that she was the box Janet had come in.
At the hearing the judge did the right thing, really the only thing she could have done given the agreement among the headshrinkers and the acquiescence of the prosecutor. Emmylou was deemed incapable of assisting with her own defense and remanded to Jackson for thirty days’ observation. The defendant sat quietly during the twenty-minute hearing and answered in a clear voice when the judge explained to her what was about to happen. She seemed to Lorna at that moment the furthest thing from crazy.
That was the day before yesterday, and now Lorna is about to visit Emmylou for the first time. She catches up with Darryla and asks, “How is she settling in?”
“Dideroff? Shoot, give me a couple more like her I could get rid of half my staff.”
“What do you mean?”
Darryla pauses to open a locked door with one of the large ring of keys she carries at her waist. She motions Lorna through, then follows, locking the door behind her.
“Spends most of her time writing in a school notebook. Besides that…well, the population always responds to new people, usually by getting upset. There’s a new mix on the ward, in the dayroom, you know? But this time, it seems like she calms everyone down.”
“She calms them?”
There is a nurses’ station inside the door, and Lorna signs in on a clipboard.
“Yeah,” says Darryla, “she reads them stuff from the Bible. And explains it, like it was the newspaper, not preachy or anything.”
The dayroom smells of people and bleach, not unpleasant really, compared with some of the booby-hatch
