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 youdid 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.
Sr. Marian was a woman in her fifties with a rock jaw and thick round steel-rimmed glasses, who wore her coif low on her forehead, so she looked a little like a motorcycle rider in goggles. Sr. Marian seemed always to be leaning into the wind of her passage. She told me I would be considered a lay sister as long as I chose to stay. St. C.’s did not have guests, held no retreats. Everyone in the place was a member of the community and worked. She asked me what skills I had, and I said whoring, stealing, and helping run a dope business. Also I could shoot and ride a horse. I thought I would shock her, little did I know. She wrote something down and then said we usually start new people in maintenance. It’s simple, healthy work, and it will give you a good idea of how we live. Or there’s the kitchen, if you’d prefer that. I said how about nursing, I thought you were all nurses. She said nursing was for professed sisters, they wouldn’t put the others through the training, and she didn’t think I had a vocation for it, did I? Well, I sure didn’t, the whole bedpan and sticking needles business freaked me out and I didn’t want to work in the kitchen either, so I told her whatever, acting bored.
There were about a dozen of us in the maintenance crew. Six were Filipinas, plus the Indian girl Margaret, and the rest were various types of lowlife who had wound up in the hands of a Blood, a couple of whores like me, a suicide attempt, some real young runaways. The head of us was Sr. Lorette, who looked about ninety but was spry. I recalled what the prioress had said about talking down the religion and I was pretty good about that, I mean who gave a rat’s ass about what any of them believed, as long as they didn’t try to foist it on me. Still it wasn’t that comfortable being around them all. The Filipinas were cheerful and devout and chattered among themselves in their bubbling language. They were all orphans who had been rescued from various horrible fates in their homeland. The others were converts and zealous in a particularly annoying way, talking about Jesus and the saints as if they could contact them whenever they wanted. None of them seemed to be contacted by saints against their will as I was, although I didn’t discuss that with anyone.
The work wasn’t that hard, as work, but I grudged it, and that made it wearing. Despite my so-called eidetic memory I find it hard to recall what was going through my mind at the time. A lot of anger, mainly at myself for having screwed up my life, and at all the people who had let me down, my daddy by dying in that stupid way, my gran for not figuring me out in time, my momma for marrying a pedophiliac hypocrite, Ray Bob for being one, Foy for blowing himself up, and also at the people at the priory for being so bone-stupid they couldn’t even see how dumb and worthless I was, and all this shot out in all directions like sparkler sparks, but black, and especially at the people who were the sweetest to me, Margaret and Sr. Lorette mainly, but anyone who happened to come in range of my tongue. I wanted a fight, but no one would fight with me. One time I was up on a ladder in the infirmary changing a lightbulb, and as I took down the globe, I saw that it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base and I remembered my first night there and how I’d seen that floating up along the ceiling and I dropped the globe and didn’t tell anyone about it but it shook the shit out of me. I started volunteering for work outside after that, felling trees and clearing culverts.
Occasionally I would see her, standing away at the edges of my vision, and once as I opened the door of my truck she was standing quite close, close enough to touch. She never said anything, although I shouted at her and used vile language and threw rocks, like a maniac, at Catherine of Siena. I feared I was going to be crazy like my mother, and I think that one of the big reasons I stayed at the priory was that if I was out in the world and people saw how I acted I would get arrested and they would check my fingerprints and that somehow (I wasn’t too clear on this but it was a terror nonetheless) I would end up back in Doc Herm’s rest home in Wayland and the Dideroffs could do what they liked with me.
Aside from that and everyone hating me (as I believed) life at St. C.’s was pretty fine. The Bloods are not an ascetic order, about the furthest thing from as a matter of fact. They feed themselves well when they can get food. The Foundress has a whole section of her book on recipes, how to make daube for 250 and so on, navarin of lamb,
