In This Small Spot Read online

  She looked at Mickey shrewdly. “Your retreat, it looked like it was hard.”

  Mickey felt her cheeks grow hot. She just nodded.

  “Good,” Sister Linus said approvingly. “If they’re easy, there’s no point. God isn’t easy.”

  Neither was the Novitiate, as the new novices were finding out. While they continued studying Latin, they began studying the history of St. Bridget’s which had been founded in 1820 by a group of Scottish nuns trying to escape the persecution of Catholics by Protestants determined to make Great Britain entirely Protestant. “And to think, if we’d waited just nine wee years, we could have stayed in Scotland,” Sister Josephine joked in her Scottish burr which had softened after twenty years in the States, but was still present. If Sister Rosaria had been like an elderly maiden aunt, strict and stodgy, Sister Josephine was the younger, roguish aunt – one who had probably gotten into plenty of trouble herself, with laughing green eyes and a ready sense of humor. Mickey suspected there was red hair under that wimple.

  “Our vows are not just some promise we make to then lay them aside,” she told the five new novices and the two second-years. “They must become part of the fabric of who we are.”

  She invited debate and argument as they began reading and discussing books and papers on religious vows and monastic life in general.

  “None of us is a completely open book,” she told them, “but keeping secrets is a form of pride, a reliance on self instead of community, and it’s one of the most dangerous things to a cohesive community.” She scanned the group quizzically. “How do you deal with pride?”

  “I pray for humility,” said Sister Miranda, one of the second-years.

  “Ah, and how will you know if you get it?” Sister Josephine asked.

  Sister Miranda looked puzzled.

  “Praying for humility can be a bit tricky,” Sister Josephine warned them. “It tends to come to us through humiliation which is not usually what we have in mind when we ask for humility.”

  Mickey smiled, remembering several instances where she had learned that painful lesson.

  “The other thing about humility that makes it unique is that if you ever realize you’ve attained it, you just lost it.”

  “But then,” Tanya frowned, “how are we to become humble?”

  “Good question,” Sister Josephine replied, and dismissed them.

  Though the novices were not yet under vows, they were expected to begin living as if they were, and poverty was one of the first things Sister Josephine tackled as they were required to make their first inventory of their belongings, something they would henceforth do yearly. “It should be simple,” Mickey wrote to Jamie, “all we have to wear are two habits and two nightgowns and our underwear,” but “you will be surprised how difficult it is to give up other things,” Sister Josephine warned them. “Five books may not seem like many, until you realize you started with three and then it grows to eight and soon you will be hoarding. You may keep three books,” she said to Jessica, “and the others will be available from the library when you want to read them.” Mickey had laughed at the thought that any of them could be accused of hoarding until, “how many pens do you need, Sister Michele?” asked Sister Josephine as she looked Mickey’s list over. Beautiful pens had been the one thing that Mickey had collected. “I can’t help myself,” she said to Alice so many times when she came home from an antique shop with another fountain pen, but the four she hadn’t been able to part with had been gifts. The memories associated with each – one from Alice for the completion of her residency, one from Jamie, one had been her father’s, one from a patient – made them all precious to her, but “you may keep two,” Sister Josephine said gently, “so you have one as a back-up,” she added chidingly, and Mickey knew she was being eased into the mindset of true poverty. “The poor don’t have even one of these things,” they had heard over and over, “but somehow it doesn’t make it any easier to give things up,” Mickey wrote with her father’s pen.

  ╬ ╬ ╬

  Mickey lay in bed in her cell, listening to the wind whistling through her window. Come on, she thought as she tossed restlessly. You should be exhausted.

  The novices and this year’s three new postulants, who had entered after Easter, had spent the work periods over the past several days helping Sister Regina get the abbey’s large vegetable garden planted for the year. As she typically did, Sister Regina had started most of the plants weeks earlier in the greenhouse, as New York’s spring could be unpredictable. The weather had remained cool and blustery, and Sister Regina had watched the weather forecast fretfully, but “we can’t wait any longer to get these plants in the ground,” she said at last.

  Once furrows were dug and all was planted, everything had to be covered with firmly anchored netting to protect the tender young plants from the deer and rabbits who knew they had a safe haven on the abbey grounds.

  “They know we won’t shoot them,” Sister Regina grumbled, “but we can at least make them work for whatever they manage to steal.”

  Despite Sister Regina’s complaints, Mickey noticed that she kept salt blocks and piles of surplus corn near the edge of the wooded portion of the abbey’s land.

  Over the couple of weeks it took them to get everything dug and planted, Mickey noticed that Wendy and Abigail usually managed to be off by themselves in some corner of the garden far removed from the others. More than once, Tanya caught her eye with a questioning nod in their direction.

  Finally, as they finished planting in late May, the weather began to break with a strong, warm wind blowing from the south. Mickey stood in the garden facing into the wind, feeling something restless stirring within her.

  Mickey listened to the wind now, tossing in her bed until after midnight, trying to make herself go to sleep. Giving up, she dressed and exited the abbey as quietly as possible. Outside, in the enclosure, the wind whipped her veil. Overwhelmed by the need to stretch her body, she let herself through the enclosure gate, picked up her skirts and ran to a small hill in the orchard. She hadn’t been out this far since the day she got caught in the storm. Exhilarated by the exercise, she stood breathing in the wind, tasting it, letting it fill her. She wasn’t sure there was a specific rule against it, but she felt distinctly unmonastic as she unpinned her veil and removed her wimple. The wind felt wonderful as it blew through her hair, “or what’s left of it.” Carefully placing the veil and wimple in the crook of an old apple tree, she took off running again.

  A half-moon lit her way as she ran between the rows of trees. At last, winded and jubilant, she slowed to a walk and circled back toward the abbey. She became aware of a different moan from the wind. Puzzled, she stopped and listened. Someone was crying. She moved quietly toward the source. In the light from the moon, she saw a nun leaning against a tree, her hands covering her face. Remembering what Mother Theodora had told her about respecting each other’s privacy, Mickey had turned to leave when suddenly the other nun grabbed a broken tree branch lying on the ground and began hitting it against the trunk of the tree, over and over. Startled, Mickey just stood and watched.

  “Damn you!” It was Sister Anselma. As suddenly as she had started, she dropped the branch and fell to her knees. “Forgive me,” she sobbed, covering her face with her hands again.

  Mickey stood, torn. She didn’t want to intrude on a scene she was sure Sister Anselma hadn’t intended anyone to witness, but the anguish in her voice was so powerful….

  “Sister?” she said softly, walking nearer. Sister Anselma started and gasped.

  “I’m so sorry to intrude,” Mickey began, kneeling beside her. “I was out here, and heard you crying. I’ll leave if you wish, only… are you all right?” She laid a tentative hand on Sister Anselma’s shoulder.

  To her surprise, Sister Anselma sat in the grass and began to laugh. Not sure what to do, Mickey sat beside her and waited.

  “Michele,” she said at last, wiping tears from her face, “what are you doing out here
?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I needed to run and feel the wind –” she suddenly remembered and reached up to her hair. “Oh my gosh, I left my veil in a tree!”

  Sister Anselma started laughing again, and Mickey couldn’t help laughing along. If I’m going to make an idiot of myself, she thought, at least it’s with someone who already knows some of my most unflattering secrets.

  When the laughter faded, there was only the sound of the wind and the creaking of the tree branches. Mickey waited.

  “I got a letter today,” Sister Anselma said at last, looking up at the moon. “My mother died last week.”

  Mickey sat in disbelief. “Why didn’t someone let you know sooner?”

  “Probably because my mother told them not to. Everyone does as my mother says… said,” she corrected the tense.

  “I don’t understand,” Mickey prompted softly.

  “I come from a very dysfunctional family,” Sister Anselma explained. “Very wealthy and very troubled. My mother used her money to manipulate everyone: my father, my sister and brother. And me for a while.” She looked out at the apple trees around them. “Finally, when I was eighteen, I’d had enough. I left home and took whatever jobs I could find to put myself through college. She was furious that cutting me off didn’t bring me crawling back to her.”

  “I think it’s very admirable that you were strong enough to stand on your own two feet,” Mickey offered.

  Turning to Mickey, Sister Anselma said, “There was nothing admirable about the anger and spite that drove me then.” She hesitated, plucking a blade of grass and twisting it in her fingers. “While I was in college, I got pregnant. I didn’t want the baby, but I didn’t want my mother to get her hands on it, either. I knew no adoption would be safe from her attorneys and bribes. I had an abortion solely to keep my mother from getting my baby.” She bowed her head, pressing her fists against her forehead. “I’ll never be able to atone for that,” she finished softly.

  Mickey sat in stunned silence at this revelation.

  “No one but Mother Theodora knows about that,” Sister Anselma added after a long pause.

  “How long has it been since you last had any contact with your family?”

  “Since before I entered,” Sister Anselma answered in a low voice. “Mother encouraged me to write, and I did a few times, with no response.” She was quiet for a long time. “Fifteen years of religious life, and I still let her make me that angry.” She looked down at her hands. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Please don’t apologize to me,” Mickey insisted. “That’s a long time to live with so many unresolved issues, and now there can be no opportunity to get any resolution. I know I couldn’t pray hard enough to make that bearable.”

  Sister Anselma closed her eyes for a moment. “I thought I could.”

  Taking a deep breath, she got to her feet. “Come. We should get back. We’ve broken at least a dozen rules tonight. Go get your veil.”

  ╬ ╬ ╬

  Predictably, Sister Anselma’s name was called during the Chapter of Faults the week after the “orchard incident,” as Mickey had come to think of it, but “I would have had to confess even if my name weren’t called,” she knew Sister Anselma would have said.

  “Mother, I broke Silence, cursed and lost my temper.”

  “Was any of this directed toward another person?”

  “No, Mother. Toward a tree in the orchard.”

  Mother Theodora’s eyebrows went up. “I see. You will assist Sister Regina in pruning the orchard for one week.”

  “Does anyone else wish to speak?” Mother Theodora asked when the five had finished.

  Mickey had gone back and forth over whether she should speak up. Finally, she rose and knelt. “Mother, I broke Silence and ran.”

  Mother Theodora stared at her for a few seconds. “At the same time?”

  “No… I… felt restless one night, so I went outside and ran. Breaking Silence was separate.”

  Mother Theodora’s mouth twitched as she tried not to smile. “Well then, since you seem to need more physical activity, you will attend only Mass, Compline and Matins for the next week, and you will assist Mr. Henderson in replacing the abbey’s fences.”

  After the second day with Mr. Henderson, the abbey’s caretaker and maintenance man, Mickey was dead tired. This penance is working, she thought as she yawned over her dinner. Old fence posts had to be dug up so they could re-use the holes; new posts had to be sunk and tamped into place, and then new wire had to be stretched and fastened to the posts. Even with gloves, Mickey’s hands were cut and blistered from the work.

  On the evening of the fourth day at this, Mickey was in the library for the period between Compline and Matins. Several of her blisters had ripped open and bled that day. She’d had to go to Sister Mary David to have them dressed with antibiotic ointment and gauze. Sitting at the library table, she fell asleep on one of Thomas Merton’s books they were supposed to be reading for Sister Josephine. She started awake when she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Sister Anselma; the bell for Matins was ringing. Sister Anselma’s gaze flicked to the blood-tinged bandages on Mickey’s hands and back to her face. Mickey quickly closed her book and tucked her hands into the sleeves of her habit.

  “Thank you,” Mickey mouthed silently, grinning sheepishly.

  The next morning, Mother Theodora caught her as she was leaving the enclosure to join Mr. Henderson again. She took Mickey’s hands in hers, looking at the bandages. “You are done with this penance, Sister,” Mother said firmly. “I only wanted to tire you, not scar you for life.”

  Chapter 16

  Grunting under a heavy load of wet sheets, Mickey and Tanya transferred them to the large dryers in the abbey’s laundry room. Here in the laundry, personal items as well as linens had to be washed, dried, folded and placed in bins for pickup. Each member of the community was assigned a number, and small embroidered tags were sewn into each garment.

  Mickey had found it a little disconcerting at first to have strangers washing her underwear, but it really was a very efficient system, much more so than if each nun did her own washing. In fact, that model applied throughout the abbey. There were a few nuns whose special knowledge or skills were needed in a specific area – such as Sister Regina on the farm or Sister Mary David in the infirmary – but most of the others functioned “like a community of ants,” Mickey had described to Jamie when she first entered. “It never feels rushed, that would be unmonastic, but a tremendous amount of work gets done by sharing the labor.”

  Each member of the community was also given a kit containing needles, scissors, black thread and white thread. With these, they could make small repairs in their habits and undergarments, and keep their hair trimmed. Mickey had already had to make several small repairs of tears in her habit – “it’s a good thing I’m good with stitches,” she grumbled, but, “how do you manage to do so much damage?” Sister Josephine asked in frustration. “What are you doing? Crawling around on your hands and knees?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am,” but Mickey didn’t say it. Sister Linus, just the day before, had pulled Mickey into the chaplain’s house when she arrived with the breakfast tray.

  “Help me,” she said.

  In the sitting room, Father Andrew sat sprawled in a chair, his hair and clothing disheveled, reeking of alcohol.

  “He’s got to say Mass in an hour,” Sister Linus said, taking one of his arms. Mickey took the other, and together, they got him to his feet. Sister Linus steered them down the hall to the bathroom.

  “I am not undressing him,” Mickey said firmly as they pushed him into the shower.

  “Don’t worry,” said Sister Linus. “He’ll come to. He always does.” She turned on the cold water and stepped back as he yelled and flailed. “Go pour him some coffee.”

  Mickey returned in a moment to find him sitting in the bottom of the tub, soaking wet, looking up at her blearily. Sister Linus handed him the coffee
and said, “You drink this and get cleaned up, Father. Then come and eat some breakfast.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mickey said as she and Sister Linus went back out to the sitting room. “Where did he get alcohol?”

  “Those men,” Sister Linus said scathingly. “The ones who come to visit him. They bring bottles as thank-you gifts. Idiots. I try to get rid of them – the bottles, not the men – but sometimes he hides one from me.” She pointed to the sofa. “I think there’s a bottle under there.”

  Mickey got down on her hands and knees, groping under the couch until she could feel the cold smoothness of glass. As she pulled out an empty brandy bottle, the sleeve of her habit snagged on a nail under the sofa. Sister Linus took the bottle to the kitchen trash can and dropped the bag on the floor until the bottle broke. Then, she stomped on it, breaking the glass into smaller pieces.

  “This can’t go in recycling,” Sister Linus said, handing the bag to Mickey. “Take it straight to the trash.”

  “We do not throw away anything that can be recycled, reused or composted,” Sister Rosaria had told the postulants over and over whenever she saw them about to throw something in the trash that didn’t belong.

  “But Sister,” Mickey protested as Sister Linus shoved the trash bag into her hands. “He needs help. We can’t –”

  “In the trash,” Sister Linus insisted. “And you will not tell anyone about this. Do you understand?”

  “But –”

  “Please, Sister,” said Sister Linus more gently. “It would humiliate him no end if this got out.”

  Mickey sighed. “Yes, Sister.”

  Mickey carried the bag to the trash bin. As she walked back through the enclosure gate, fingering the tear in her sleeve, she became aware of agitated whispers. Abigail appeared without warning from behind a vine-covered trellis on the other side of the garden and entered the cloister without noticing Mickey. Mickey paused, knowing Wendy must still be there, staying out of sight. For a moment, she contemplated staying to see how long Wendy would hide, but “whatever,” she muttered with a shake of her head, following Abigail inside.