Kate gazes up at the altar, so distant in the settling gloom. A candle burns in the sanctuary lamp, signaling the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. She stares at the altar a long time. I’m not running from You. Only from myself. I just need to figure things out. She slumps against the pew, her face buried in her hands. What is happening to her? First she was a runaway, now a thief. Well, not really a thief, maybe. After all, the Englishman had offered her the jacket. Suddenly she wants to tell Tom about her night in the stranger’s house. They would laugh about it. Tom would tell her not to worry about the jacket; the British had been stealing from the Irish for centuries.
Only two weeks ago she and Tom had been riding together to Juli to look at a new well the people were putting in. Alejandro was driving, and the pastor, Father Jack, sat in front while she and Tom squeezed together in the back. The men joked and laughed as Alejandro taught them some of the more imaginative curses of the Aymara. Kate had looked out the window in a daze, conscious of nothing but Tom’s face so close to hers. Often he would turn and look into her eyes, and Kate had to turn away from what she saw in his. As they drove into town he passed a piece of paper to her, neatly folded into a small square.
Now, in the darkening church, Kate reaches into her pocket and pulls out the note she has read so many times. It is a poem, copied in block print.
BE STILL AS YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL
Be still as you are beautiful
Be silent as the rose;
Through miles of starlit countryside
Unspoken worship flows
To reach you in your loveless room
From lonely men whom daylight gave
The blessing of your passing face
Impenetrably grave.
A white owl in the lichened wood
Is circling silently,
More secret and more silent yet
Must be your love to me.
Thus, while about my dreaming head
Your soul in ceaseless vigil goes,
Be still as you are beautiful
Be silent as the rose.
Underneath he had scrawled:
You won’t have heard of this poem. It’s by Patrick Macdonogh, who died a few years ago. I heard him read it in my uncle’s bookstore in Galway. I hoped someday I would meet the woman I could give it to. Tom
That day had passed in a haze. She had trailed after the priests as they met with the village elders, trying to understand the brief exchanges in Aymara. Alejandro stood next to her for a while during the meeting, whispering to her in Spanish what the men were saying. Then the group walked through the dusty streets to the edge of town where the new well was being dug. Now the women and children joined them, and Kate was surrounded by small children tugging at her habit, vying for the chance to hold her hands.
She walked fast, and then would suddenly stop and send the two little ones clinging to her crashing harmlessly into each other. Squealing with excitement, they begged her to do it again. “Otra vez, madrecita, otra vez.” It was a trick her father used to do with her brother and her when they were little. Her heart ached, but she couldn’t tell if it was the altitude or not.
When they got to the newly dug well, Father Jack took out a small plastic bottle of holy water from the pocket of his windbreaker. He blessed the well, and all the people made the sign of the cross. Then he walked among the group, sprinkling them with holy water. The drops glistened in the sun like thousands of sequins.
Then Tom began to speak, slowly and deliberately, so that Alejandro could translate. Tom acknowledged their initiative in getting the prefect of Juliaca to come out and consider their need for a well. When they worked together they had power—power to change their lives, to make a better future for their children. The day of the passive campesino was past. It was time for them to reclaim the ways of their ancestors, a people who did not know hunger and want.
Kate had watched the impassive faces of the people as Tom’s voice rose. Their eyes were fixed on the young Irish priest with his hawk nose and cold blue eyes. When he finished, they clapped politely, and the men came up one by one to shake his hand. In Aymara, he joked and laughed with them, his smile dazzling in the noonday brightness.
Now in the empty chapel, Kate no longer hears the sounds of traffic outside. She spreads the jacket inside-out on the pew and lies down, burying her face in the fur. It smells of Peter’s cigarette smoke and eucalyptus of the Altiplano. But incense hangs in the air, too, and as she drifts off to sleep she is back in St. Roch’s, a little girl trying to stay awake during benediction as the choir sings the Pange Lingua.
C
hapter Nine
Kate knew she was supposed to be a nun since she was in eighth grade, but she hid this secret all throughout high school. To be a nun was the dream of many girls in St. Louis in the 1940s and ’50s, but it was not Kate’s dream. She dreamed of being a ballerina.
Once, she remembered, Bishop McCarthy visited their seventh grade classroom to examine them for the sacrament of Confirmation. His long black cassock bordered in scarlet braid, he was a small, almost bald man with wire-rimmed glasses that made his blue eyes look glassy and unnaturally large.
After a brief question and (carefully rehearsed) answer session, the bishop began to speak softly about vocations: “Now you see, boys and girls, the word vocation comes from the Latin word vocare, meaning to call. Some select
