Copyright © 2020, Marian O’Shea Wernicke
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Published 2020
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-759-3
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-760-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906873
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For Michael
Love always
D
ios
Siento a Dios que camina
tan en mí, con la tarde y con el mar.
Con él nos vamos juntos. Anochece.
Con él anochecemos. Orfandad.
I feel God who walks
so much in me, with the evening and the sea.
We go away together. Night falls.
We go into the night together, Orphanhood.
—César Vallejo
Achirana: a canal bringing fresh water from the highlands to the desert area around Ica in Peru. According to an ancient Inca legend, the Inca ruler Pachacutec became enamored of a beautiful young girl from the region of Ica. The maiden spurned his advances, but the ruler was so smitten he told her to ask any favor of him. She asked him to build a canal that would bring water to the parched lands around Ica. The word achirana means “that which flows cleanly toward that which is beautiful.”
C
hapter One
Thursday, June 25, 1964
At noon on a brilliant June day in the highlands of Peru, called the Altiplano, Sister Mary Katherine slips out the back door of the convent of Santa Catalina. She crosses the courtyard, gliding past fat little Tito playing in the shade of the eucalyptus tree near the convent wall. He looks up expectantly, but for once the tall nun does not return his grin. His mother Marta, the convent cook, comes to the door to check on her son, and, as she wipes her hands on her faded blue apron, watches in silence as Sister Mary Katherine pulls the large wooden gate open and disappears.
Sharp angles of sunlight fall on her black veil and white habit. She walks swiftly, inhaling the olive oil and garlic smells of noonday meals in the village, her footsteps echoing in the hushed streets. Not even a dog barks. She crosses the dirt road heading north of the parish, past the infirmary, shuttered now for the siesta, and enters the main street of Juliaca. The market stalls are still open, but only a handful of women and children squat in the shade, half-heartedly guarding their baskets of potatoes, onions, carrots, and mushrooms, their dogs huddling together for warmth in the early winter sun. A young girl in a green poncho greets her shyly, “Buenas tardes, madrecita.”
Soon Kate—for she has never stopped being Kate beneath the long white habit and black veil of the Dominicans—reaches the edge of town, where one rusting taxi is parked in the shade of the train station, the driver lounging in the shadows. She thinks briefly of buying a train ticket, but, smothering a laugh dangerously close to a sob, realizes that she has no money—and even worse, that she has no destination. You have to buy a ticket to somewhere, after all. All she knows is that she is running away.
The nun walks at a steady pace down the dusty road winding through sparse fields. By late afternoon she realizes she is headed toward Lake Titicaca. Solitude hangs over the land like mist.
Kate has heard the Aymaras’ stories of the great hungry god of the lake. Once she and the other sisters went out on a Sunday afternoon in a balsa boat with a local guide. Raul was paddling gently around when the sky darkened and the wind picked up. In a determined voice, he announced that they were heading back to shore. Kate remembers how she protested, but that Magdalena, their Peruvian novice, shook her head and put her finger to her mouth.
“Don’t insist,” she whispered in English. “Raul says that storms are very bad here on the lake. If we capsize no one will come to rescue us, for the native Andean prople believe that the god of the lake gets hungry—and we’d be his lunch!” Her eyes laughed. She was from Lima, and the ways of the highland people were as foreign to her as they were to the American nuns she had joined. But her face stayed serious as she nodded to Raul in assent. Despite the other sisters’ grumbling, Raul’s back remained straight beneath the wool of his poncho, and his slender hands gripped the oars firmly as he brought them safely to shore.
By now Kate’s feet hurt. Her sensible black oxfords were fine for everyday work in the parish, but they aren’t right for hiking; she wonders what she’ll do if she gets a blister. She finds a dry spot in the reeds encircling the lake and sits down to take off her shoes. She is thirsty and hungry, too. By now they would have missed her at the convent.
She gazes at the sun’s slanting red rays, glinting on the lake. Sister Josepha will be at Vespers now, trying to chant the psalms by herself. Kate murmurs the opening verse:
The morn had spread her crimson rays,
When rang the skies with shouts of praise,
Earth joined the joyful hymn to swell,
That brought despair to vanquished hell.
Despair. What’s happening to her?
