In This Small Spot Page 3

  Sister Regina directed the juniors as they planted the vegetable seedlings she had tenderly nurtured in the abbey’s small greenhouse. Wearing work aprons and sleeves, they planted the young plants in the rows Sister Regina had prepared in the garden.

  This work, the first physical outdoor work Mickey had done in weeks, was like a tonic to her. Her cheeks were flushed and she felt like she had extra energy. By the time they got to the refectory for lunch after a couple of hours spent working in the garden, she was famished. Mickey hadn’t been sure what to expect from convent food – “funny how worried we all were about that,” she wrote to Jamie – but she was pleasantly surprised at the heartiness of the meals. She considered it fortunate that she preferred plain food, but she never left the table hungry. Second helpings weren’t frowned upon, but leaving food on the plate was. Sister Rosaria only needed to admonish them once about that. “Being hungry isn’t a sin; being wasteful is.”

  Tanya, Jessica and Abigail all seemed to be as hungry as Mickey was after their morning’s work in the garden, but Wendy took only a tiny helping of food. “She’s starting to look like Sister Renatta,” Tanya murmured. Looking at her more closely, Mickey realized Wendy had lost a good bit of weight. Sister Rosaria obviously noticed as well. “Believe me, abbey life will provide you with all the suffering you think you need,” Sister Rosaria reproved Wendy when she saw the meager portion she had taken. Mickey hid a smile. Sister Rosaria had been postulant mistress for a long time. “Picking you up after you faint is more suffering than I need. Eat,” she said sagely.

  Wendy’s exaggerated strictness had quickly become an irritant to Mickey, but “it’s none of your business,” she told herself repeatedly. Still, “I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy hearing her scolded for a change,” Mickey confided to Jessica who smiled in agreement.

  In June, when the first hay was ready for mowing, Sister Regina started up St. Jude, the abbey’s ancient tractor, named for the patron saint of lost causes. Each time she started the tractor, Sister Regina murmured a prayer asking St. Jude to intercede. It worked every time. Of course, it helped that Sister Regina kept the tractor immaculately clean, oiled and lubricated with generous amounts of grease. Then the two of them pulled the mower through the fields, leaving the hay to dry for a few days. Whether it was luck, or divine intervention, no one knew, but it never rained while the abbey’s hay was drying. All the other farmers in the region would mow also as word got around that “St. Jude is cutting.” When it was time to bale the hay, three farmers who had square balers would come over to the abbey’s field. The square bales were loaded onto a flat trailer pulled by St. Jude. This was where the postulants and novices helped, dividing themselves into ground crew and trailer crew, throwing the bales onto the trailer where they were stacked up. When the trailer was fully loaded, the bales were taken to the barn where they were hoisted into the loft with ropes. Generally, the abbey got three hay cuttings in over the course of the summer, which gave the cows plenty of feed to keep them producing milk all winter long.

  It took two days to get the first hay crop into the barn. Mickey was on the ground crew, and quickly learned to use momentum to swing the bales up onto the trailer. Even so, she and the others were so sore they could barely move the next morning. As they were working the second day, the trailer was only half full on its second load when the bell rang for Sext.

  “Why are we stopping?” Wendy asked as St. Jude halted. She wiped her sweaty face with her sleeve, then scowled as little bits of hay stuck to her face. “Let’s stay and get this over with.”

  Sister Regina’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Did you hear the bell?” Wendy nodded. “We’re here to pray, not to make hay or anything else,” a sentiment echoed by Sister Rosaria who reminded them often, “Praying is our work. All the rest is meaningless without that. When the bell rings to signal an hour, you must stop what you’re doing – no matter how frustrating that may be – and attend to our real work.”

  To Mickey’s surprise, prayer was work, but she came to realize that she had never prayed for any length of time before. Saying the rosary was probably the longest period she had ever spent praying – “those days when I was praying for a miracle,” she would have said – and even for that brief time, it was difficult not to let her mind wander. In the abbey, in between the set times for the Divine Office, there were periods of silent meditation, often spent praying for people or situations known to the nuns personally, or perhaps taken from the prayer board where prayer requests sent to the abbey were posted, sometimes lines snipped from a letter, or perhaps a worrisome headline clipped from one of the newspapers the abbey subscribed to.

  “People often think we withdraw from the world to isolate ourselves and forget about what goes on out there,” Sister Rosaria told them, “but it is our duty to keep abreast of the happenings of the world. How can you pray for it if you don’t know what is happening?”

  Prayer requests came from everywhere. “Please ask God to bring Tribble home to me,” wrote a little girl in Buffalo, including a photo of her lost kitten.

  Some of the requests were heartwrenching. There was a letter from a young father of three whose wife was dying from a brain tumor. His despair and fear were almost palpable. Most of the nuns prayed for the family; Mickey prayed for the doctors and nurses caring for the wife.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” had been the initial reaction of Mickey’s three male partners when she had told them of her plans. When they realized she was serious, the next question was, “Why are you going to waste your skills as a surgeon?” This had been the almost universal reaction as Mickey had gradually informed friends and co-workers of her decision. “At least go into a medical or missionary order,” they said, but “I’d be accomplishing no more than I do now. Maybe saving a life, maybe not. It’s not enough. I want to do more,” was all she could say to most. To only a few close friends, “I need to try and do something for their souls; that’s what really matters.” Prayer wasn’t dependent upon the skill of the person offering the prayer; it wasn’t limited geographically or physically; it wasn’t even limited by reality or any of the laws of science. To no one but herself, she had admitted, “I will never again have to tell someone there’s nothing I can do.”

  She had arranged a one-year sabbatical from teaching at Johns Hopkins, as well as a leave from the practice, with a buyout price negotiated in the event she didn’t return. When her partners disputed the dollar amount of her share of the practice, she had reminded them, “Religious life requires a vow of poverty, not of stupidity!”

  ╬ ╬ ╬

  “Michele,” Sister Rosaria gestured to Mickey as she got in line for lunch. “Could you take this tray to the chaplain’s residence, please?”

  She passed a heavily-laden tray with several stacked, covered dishes on it into Mickey’s hands.

  “Quickly, while it’s hot,” said the nun in the kitchen, leaning down to peer through the low pass-through.

  Mickey nodded and hurried through the refectory, out into the enclosure. A hot summer breeze was blowing and she had to hold tightly to the tray as she walked across the park to a wooden door set in the stone wall. Backing through it, she followed a flagstone walk to Father Andrew’s small house. The tray was too heavy to hold with one hand to knock, so she balanced on one foot and tapped the door with the other. It was opened in a moment by an old nun.

  “There you are,” she said brusquely. “Come in, come in,” she said, stepping back to let Mickey enter.

  Mickey carried the tray inside and set it on the dining table. The old nun hurried over and began laying out the covered dishes.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she ordered.

  Mickey quickly helped remove the covers, her stomach growling as aromatic steam rose from each dish. “This is a lot of food for one person,” she observed.

  “It’s not for one person,” the nun said, placing serving spoons in the dishes. “Father Andrew has a guest.” She placed the covers on
the tray and rearranged the dishes and bowls on the table until she was satisfied that everything was as it should be. “Take that to the kitchen,” she said, flapping a hand. Mickey carried the tray to the small kitchen while the nun called out that lunch was ready.

  Father Andrew entered the dining room with another elderly man in a secular black suit with a white collar.

  “Andrew,” said the other man, looking strangely out of place next to Father Andrew in his habit and the nun in hers, “they spoil you. I can see why you love it here.”

  Father Andrew smiled. “Thank you, Sister Linus. This looks wonderful.”

  She gave an arthritic bow. “You’re welcome, Father. I’ll be back to take care of the dishes.” She went to the kitchen and gestured to Mickey, taking her by the arm and walking her to the front door. “You can go now,” she said.

  Mickey turned to ask if she was needed to come back and collect the tray when Sister Linus shut the door in her face. “You’re welcome,” she muttered.

  She hurried back through the enclosure to get her own lunch.

  “Michele!”

  Gritting her teeth, Mickey turned to see Sister Lucille waving at her. “Could you please take this to the vestment room for me?” she huffed, holding a paper-wrapped package nearly as tall as she was. “They brought it to the front door by mistake.” Mickey opened her mouth to ask if this couldn’t be done later, but Sister Lucille was already walking back to her office.

  With an exasperated sigh, Mickey turned. “Where is the vestment room?” she asked aloud to no one as the community was all in the refectory. She knew a bit about it – “we have a waiting list of nearly two years,” Sister Rosaria had told them proudly. “Our orders come from all over the world – and not just Catholic churches and monasteries, but other denominations and even synagogues.” But none of the postulants had been there, as only the nuns specially trained for that work were assigned there.

  Frowning, Mickey remembered seeing a “Deliveries” sign on one of the outside walls of a wing of the monastery. She let herself back out into the enclosure, through the wooden door again, past Father Andrew’s house to the far end of the abbey’s main building where she saw a concrete parking pad and a door. Struggling to hold the roll as the stiff breeze tugged on it, she turned the knob on the door. The wind grabbed the door and flung it wide open.

  There was an angry exclamation as she stepped inside.

  “Close that door!”

  Mickey reached back and wrenched the door shut. Inside, all was chaos. Swathes of cloth had been blown off tables, and spindles of thread were rolling across the floor. Mickey could see the twinkling of sunlight off the motes of dust and dirt that had blown in with her.

  One nun was scrambling about picking up pieces of material.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she exclaimed.

  “I’m sorry,” Mickey gasped, dropping her wrapped roll and reaching for one of the large sheets of cloth lying crumpled on the floor.

  “Stop!”

  Mickey froze. The nun hurried over to her.

  “Look at your hands,” she commanded. Mickey looked down to see that her hands were smudged with dirt from the paper wrapping on the roll she had been carrying. “You cannot touch silk with hands like that.” She groaned as she laid out a length of embroidered scarlet cloth on one of the worktables. “It will take us days to get these clean.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mickey repeated.

  “Why did you come in that door?” the nun asked crossly.

  “Sister Lucille asked me to bring this,” Mickey said, pointing to the roll. “I didn’t know any other way here.”

  The nun took a deep breath, controlling her irritation with great effort. “I will take care of this mess. You may go.”

  Mickey nodded and reached for the door through which she had entered.

  “No!”

  Mickey turned.

  “That way.” The nun pointed to a wooden stair Mickey hadn’t noticed in the excitement.

  “Yes, Sister,” Mickey said. Behind her, she could hear the other nun grumbling. “You’re welcome, too,” Mickey said under her breath.

  She climbed the steep wooden stairs, glancing back at the nun who now had a small brush and was carefully whisking the scarlet cloth. Exiting the vestment room, Mickey found herself in an unfamiliar set of corridors. After a few minutes’ wandering, and a couple of wrong turns, she began to recognize where she was and hurried back toward the refectory which was now empty except for Jessica who was waiting with a plate.

  “Oh, thank you,” Mickey said gratefully as she bowed her head for a quick grace and sat to eat.

  “What happened?” Jessica asked. “Where have you been?”

  Quickly, in between bites, Mickey told her.

  “I wondered,” said Jessica.

  “What?”

  “About Father Andrew. Whether he ever had visitors,” Jessica said. “It must be so lonely for him. At least we have each other.”

  “Well, that old nun, Sister Linus, is certainly protective of him,” Mickey said. “But she’s nothing compared to the other one, the one in the vestment room.”

  “Sister Anselma,” Jessica said, nodding.

  “How do you know these things?” Mickey asked her.

  Jessica shrugged. “I just listen. The other sisters say she’s like some kind of genius in there, with the weaving and artwork, but… difficult,” she said tactfully.

  Mickey snorted. “That was very edifyingly said.”

  Chapter 5

  Mickey stirred in the early morning light. She rolled over in bed, and heard the shower in the bathroom next door. Closing her eyes, she drifted off to sleep again until, “Wake up, sleepy,” she heard in her ear.

  Smiling, she said, “Mmmm, you smell good.” She could feel Alice’s soft lips on her forehead, her cheeks, her mouth.

  “Come on,” Alice murmured. “Time to get up.”

  “Oh,” Mickey groaned. “Do I have to? I didn’t get home until two.”

  “I know,” Alice said sympathetically. “But Christopher is counting on us. We’re in charge of the cookies after Mass today.”

  “Oh,” Mickey groaned again. “I’m sorry. I was supposed to help you bake them.”

  Alice yanked the covers away. “Luckily, I figured you wouldn’t get home in time to help, so I baked six dozen.”

  “Ummm, not anymore,” Mickey said, sitting up on the edge of the bed, her hair sticking up in a bad case of bedhead. “I ate three oatmeal cookies when I got home last night.”

  “That was probably your dinner,” Alice said.

  “Yeah. It was. Thanks.”

  Thirty minutes later, Alice was loading Tupperware containers full of cookies into Mickey’s hands to carry out to the car. When they got to St. Matthew’s, the side door to the rectory was standing open.

  “Good morning,” beamed the large, burly man standing there.

  “Hey, Christopher,” Mickey returned. Without asking, she popped open the lid on the container holding the peanut butter cookies.

  Looking around guiltily, Christopher took two, popping one whole cookie into his mouth. “To keep my energy levels up, you know.”

  Mickey grinned. “I know and God knows, but you’d better wipe those crumbs out of your beard.”

  He quickly combed through the thick dark hair with his fingers. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he said.

  “Without Alice, you mean,” Mickey corrected.

  “No,” he said sincerely. “I meant both of you. Your donation to the PFLAG group was very generous.”

  “What’s generous is your letting them meet here,” Alice said, coming from around the car with another armful of cookie containers. “I’m guessing you didn’t ask the bishop.”

  Christopher shrugged and laughed. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

  “See?” Mickey said indignantly, turning to Alice with her arms outstretched. “How come that doesn’t work when I say it?
”

  Alice looked at her, one eyebrow raised slightly. “It’s his church. And he doesn’t have to live with you.”

  Chapter 6

  “Mother, I was angry at being asked to do an extra task in the kitchen. I broke two plates because I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Each week, the community held a Chapter of Faults before Mass. Mother Theodora would call the names of five nuns to come forward, one at a time, kneel before the community and confess any transgressions against abbey rules or other sisters.

  “Most convents have done away with the Chapter of Faults,” Sister Rosaria told the postulants when she had first explained the process, “but in a cloistered community where we can’t get away from each other, even little things can fester and grow with time. Better to clear the air while they are little.”

  Mother Theodora would assign each a penance in accordance with the severity of her infraction. To the nun who had confessed the breaking of the plates, “You will ask the forgiveness of the Sister you were angry with, and you will assist her with her work in addition to your own for one day.”

  Mickey had discovered that Mother Theodora’s brand of penance was powerful. Requiring personal forgiveness rather than simply assigning menial, unsavory tasks as penance had the effect of drawing the community closer together. “Sister Stephen is much less intimidating after she has had to ask your forgiveness for losing her temper with you three times last week,” Mickey had written to Jamie who thought this was a barbaric practice when he learned of it, but “no one can hold a grudge under those circumstances,” Mickey insisted and usually the penitent would only be permitted to perform a token task by the other sister.