“I can’t help you with that! What’s wrong with you?”
“I’ve had two children in two years. If I have another…”
“Why come to me? Why you asking me?”
“Who else?” asked the woman, in her clear, matter-of-fact voice.
The poison spread. Consolata had lost him. Completely. Forever. His wife might not know it, but Consolata remembered his face. Not when she bit his lip, but when she had hummed over the blood she licked from it. He’d sucked air sharply. Said, “Don’t ever do that again.” But his eyes, first startled, then revolted, had said the rest of what she should have known right away. Clover, cinnamon, soft old linen—who would chance pears and a wall of prisoner wine with a woman bent on eating him like a meal?
“You get on out of here. You didn’t come here for that. You came to tell me, show me, what you’re like. And you think I’ll stop when I know what you’re willing to do. Well, I won’t.”
“No, but he will.”
“You wouldn’t have come here if you thought so. You want to see what I’m like; if I’m pregnant too.”
“Listen to me. He can’t fail at what he is doing. None of us can. We are making something.”
“What do I care about your raggedy little town? Get out. Go on. I have work to do.”
Did she walk all the way home? Or was that a lie too? Was her car parked somewhere near? Or if she did walk, did nobody pick her up? Is that why she lost the baby?
Her name was Soane, and when she and Consolata became fast friends, Soane told her she didn’t think so. It was the evil in her heart that caused it. Arrogance dripping with self-righteousness, she said. Pretending a sacrifice she had no intention of making taught her not to fool with God’s ways. The life she offered as a bargain fell between her legs in a swamp of red fluids and windblown sheets. Their friendship was some time coming. In the meanwhile, after the woman left, Consolata threw a cloth bag of coins at Penny and Clarissa, shouting, “Get out of my face!”
While the light changed and the meals did too, the next few days were one long siege of sorrow, during which Consolata picked through the scraps of her gobble-gobble love. Romance stretched to the breaking point broke, exposing a simple mindless transfer. From Christ, to whom one gave total surrender and then swallowed the idea of His flesh, to a living man. Shame. Shame without blame. Consolata virtually crawled back to the little chapel (wishing fervently that He could be there, glowing red in the dim light). Scuttled back, as women do, as into arms understanding where the body, like a muscle spasm, has no memory of its cringe. No beseeching prayer emerged. No Domine, non sum dignus. She simply bent the knees she had been so happy to open and said, “Dear Lord, I didn’t want to eat him. I just wanted to go home.”
Mary Magna came into the chapel and, kneeling with her, put an arm around Consolata’s shoulder, saying, “At last.”
“You don’t know,” said Consolata.
“I don’t need to, child.”
“But he, but he.” Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha, she wanted to say, meaning, he and I are the same.
“Sh sh sh. Sh sh sh,” said Mary Magna. “Never speak of him again.”
She might not have agreed so quickly, but as Mary Magna led her out of the chapel into the schoolroom, a sunshot seared her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision, and she began to see best in the dark. Consolata had been spoken to.
Mary Magna spent money she could not afford to take the household on a trip to Middleton, where each of them, but especially Consolata, confessed and attended mass. Clarissa and Penny, models of penitence, urged without success a visit to the Indian and Western Museum advertised on the road. Sister Mary Elizabeth said it was an unwise way to spend post-confessional time. The long ride back was silent except for the shish of missal pages turning and occasional humming from the last of the school’s clientele.
Soon only Mother and Sister Roberta were left. Sister Mary Elizabeth accepted a teaching post in Indiana. Penny and Clarissa had been taken east and, as was later learned, escaped from the bus one night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Except for a money order, made out to Consolata and signed with a storybook name, they were never heard from again.
The three women spent the winter waiting, then not waiting, for some alternative to retirement or a “home.” The independence the mission was designed for was beginning to feel like abandonment. Meanwhile they took steps to keep up the property and not incur debt the foundation could not meet. Sargeant Person agreed to lease land from them for rough corn and alfalfa. They made sauces and jellies and European bread. Sold eggs, peppers, hot relish and angry barbecue sauce, which they advertised on a square of cardboard covering the faded blue and white name of the school. Most of their customers in 1955 drove trucks between Arkansas and Texas. Ruby citizens seldom stopped to buy anything other than peppers, since they were supreme cooks themselves and made or grew what they wanted. Only in the sixties, when times were fat, did they join the truckers and look upon what they called Convent-bred chickens as superior enough to their own to be worth a journey. Then they would also try a little jalapeño jelly, or a corn relish. Pecan saplings planted in the forties were strong in 1960. The Convent sold the nuts, and when pies from the harvest were made, they went as soon as posted. They made rhubarb pie so delicious it made customers babble, and the barbecue sauce got a heavenly reputation based on the hellfire peppers.
It was an all-right life for Consolata. Better than all right, for Mary Magna had taught her patience as the first order of business. After arranging for her confirmation, she had taken the young Consolata aside and together they would watch coffee brew or sit in silence at the edge of the garden. God’s generosity, she said, is nowhere better seen than in the gift of patience. The lesson held Consolata in good stead, and she hardly noticed the things she was losing. The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally she lost the ability to bear light. By the time Mavis arrived, Sister Roberta had gone into a nursing home and Consolata had nothing on her mind but the care of Mary Magna.
But before that, before the disheveled woman in thong slippers hollered at the edge of the garden, before Mary Magna’s illness, still in a state of devotion and light-blindness, and ten years after that summer of hiding in a gully behind a house full of inhospitable ash people, Consolata was tricked into raising the dead.
They were subdued years. Penance attended to but not all-consuming. There was time and mind for everyday things. Consolata learned to manage any and every thing that did not require paper: she perfected the barbecue sauce that drove cattle-country people wild; quarreled with the chickens; gave hateful geese a wide berth; and tended the garden. She and Sister Roberta had agreed to try again for a cow and Consolata was standing in the garden, wondering where to pen it, when sweat began to pour from her neck, her hairline, like rain. So much it clouded the sunglasses she now wore. She removed the glasses to wipe the sweat from her eyes. Through that salty water she saw a shadow moving toward her. When it got close it turned into a small woman. Consolata, overcome with dizziness, tried to hold on to a bean pole, failed and sank to the ground. When she woke, she was sitting in the red chair, the small woman humming while mopping her forehead.
“Talk about luck,” she said, and smiled around a wad of chewing gum.
“What’s happening to me?” Consolata looked toward the house.
“Change, I expect. Here’s your glasses. Bent, though.”
Her name was Lone DuPres, she said, and if she had not come for a few peppers, she said, who knew how long Consolata would have lain in the snap beans.
Consolata found herself too weak to stand, so she let her head fall back on the chair’s crown and asked for water.
“Uh uh,” said Lone. “You already got too much of that. How old a
re you?”
“Forty-nine. Fifty soon.”
“Well, I’m over seventy and I know my stuff. You do as I say, your change will be easier and shorter.”
“You don’t know that’s what this is.”
“Bet on it. And it’s not just the sweat. You feel something more, don’t you?”
“Like what?”
“You’d know it if you had it.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“You tell me. Some women can’t stomach it. Others say it reminds them of, well, you know.”
“My throat is parched,” said Consolata.
Lone dug around in her bag. “I’ll brew you something to help.”
“No. The sisters. I mean, they won’t like. Won’t let you just walk on in and start messing on the stove.”
“Oh, they’ll be fine.”
And they were. Lone gave Consolata a hot drink that tasted of pure salt. When she described her spell and Lone’s remedy to Mary Magna she laughed, saying, “Well, the teacher I am thinks ‘baloney.’ The woman I am thinks anything that helps, helps. But be very careful.” Mary Magna lowered her voice. “I think she practices.”
Lone didn’t visit often, but when she did she gave Consolata information that made her uneasy. Consolata complained that she did not believe in magic; that the church and everything holy forbade its claims to knowingness and its practice. Lone wasn’t aggressive. She simply said, “Sometimes folks need more.”
“Never,” said Consolata. “In my faith, faith is all I need.”
“You need what we all need: earth, air, water. Don’t separate God from His elements. He created it all. You stuck on dividing Him from His works. Don’t unbalance His world.”
Consolata listened halfheartedly. Her curiosity was mild; her religious habits entrenched. Her safety did not lie in the fall of a broom or the droppings of a coyote. Her happiness was not increased or decreased by the sight of a malformed animal. She fancied no conversation with water. Nor did she believe that ordinary folk could or should interfere with natural consequences. The road from Demby, however, was straight as a saw, and a teenager driving it for the first time believed not only that he could drive it blindfolded but that he could drive it in his sleep, which is what Scout Morgan was doing, off and on, as he traveled early one evening the road that passed the Convent. He was fifteen years old, driving his best friend’s father’s truck (which was nothing compared to the Little Deere his uncle taught him to handle), while his brother, Easter, slept in the truck bed and the best friend slept at his side. They had sneaked off to Red Fork to see the Black Rodeo all their fathers forbade them to attend and had drunk themselves happy with Falstaff beer. During one of Scout’s involuntary naps at the wheel, the truck careened off the road and probably would have done no serious damage but for the roadside poles stacked and ready to go as soon as the power crew was empowered to install them. The truck hit the poles and flipped. July Person and Easter were thrown out. Scout was stuck inside, crooked red lines highlighting the black skin of his temple.
Lone, sitting at Consolata’s table, sensed rather than heard the accident: the shouts of July and Easter could not have traveled that far. She rose and grabbed Consolata’s arm.
“Come on!”
“Where to?”
“Close by, I think.”
When they arrived, Easter and July had pulled Scout from the cab and were howling over his dead body. Lone turned to Consolata, saying, “I’m too old now. Can’t do it anymore, but you can.”
“Lift him?”
“No. Go inside him. Wake him up.”
“Inside? How?”
“Step in. Just step on in. Help him, girl!”
Consolata looked at the body and without hesitation removed her glasses and focused on the trickles of red discoloring his hair. She stepped in. Saw the stretch of road he had dreamed through, felt the flip of the truck, the headache, the chest pressure, the unwillingness to breathe. As from a distance she heard Easter and July kicking the truck and moaning. Inside the boy she saw a pinpoint of light receding. Pulling up energy that felt like fear, she stared at it until it widened. Then more, more, so air could come seeping, at first, then rushing rushing in. Although it hurt like the devil to look at it, she concentrated as though the lungs in need were her own.
Scout opened his eyes, groaned and sat up. The women told the unhurt boys to carry him back to the Convent. They hesitated, exchanging looks. Lone shouted, “What the hell is the matter with you all?”
Both were profoundly relieved by Scout’s recovery, but, No, m’am, Miss DuPres, they said, we got to get on home. “Let’s see if it still runs,” said Easter. They righted the truck and found it sound enough to drive. Lone went with them, leaving Consolata half exhilarated by and half ashamed of what she had done. Practiced.
Weeks passed before Lone returned to put her mind at ease about the boy’s recovery.
“You gifted. I knew it from the start.”
Consolata turned her lips down and crossed herself, whispering, “Ave Maria, gratia plena.” The exhilaration was gone now, and the thing seemed nasty to her. Like devilment. Like evil craft. Something it would mortify her to tell Mary Magna, Jesus or the Virgin. She hadn’t known what she was doing; she was under a spell. Lone’s spell. And told her so.
“Don’t be a fool. God don’t make mistakes. Despising His gift, now, that is a mistake. You calling Him a fool, like you?”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” Consolata told her.
“Yes you do. Let your mind grow long and use what God gives you.”
“I think He wants me to ignore you.”
“Hardhead,” said Lone. She hoisted her bag and walked down the driveway to wait in the sun for her ride.
Then Soane came, saying, “Lone DuPres told me what you did. I came to thank you with all my heart.”
She looked much the same to Consolata, except that the long hair of 1954, sticky with distress, was cut now. She carried a basket and placed it on the table. “You will be in my prayers forever.”
Consolata lifted the napkin. Round sugar cookies were layered between waxed paper. “Mother will like these with her tea,” she said. Then, looking at Soane, “Go nice with coffee too.”
“I’d love a cup. More than anything.”
Consolata placed the sugar cookies on a platter. “Lone thinks—”
“I don’t care about that. You gave him back to me.”
A gander screamed in the yard, scattering the geese before him.
“I didn’t know he belonged to you.”
“I know you didn’t.”
“And it was something I couldn’t help doing. I mean it was out of my hands, so to speak.”
“I know that too.”
“What does he think?”
“He thinks he saved himself.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“Maybe he is.”
“What do you think?”
“That he was lucky to have us both.”
Consolata shook crumbs from the basket and folded the napkin neatly inside. They traded that basket back and forth for years.
Other than with Mary Magna, “stepping in” was of no use. There was no call for it. The light Consolata could not bear to approach her own eyes, she endured for the Reverend Mother when she became ill. At first she tried it out of the weakness of devotion turned to panic—nothing seemed to relieve the sick woman—then, angered by helplessness, she assumed an attitude of command. Stepping in to find the pinpoint of light. Manipulating it, widening it, strengthening it. Reviving, even raising, her from time to time. And so intense were the steppings in, Mary Magna glowed like a lamp till her very last breath in Consolata’s arms. So she had practiced, and although it was for the benefit of the woman she loved, she knew it was anathema, that Mary Magna would have recoiled in disgust and fury knowing her life was prolonged by evil. That the bliss of that final entrance was being deliberately delayed by one who ought to
know better. So Consolata never told her. Yet, however repugnant, the gift did not evaporate. Troubling as it was, yoking the sin of pride to witchcraft, she came to terms with it in a way she persuaded herself would not offend Him or place her soul in peril. It was a question of language. Lone called it “stepping in.” Consolata said it was “seeing in.” Thus the gift was “in sight.” Something God made free to anyone who wanted to develop it. It was devious but it settled the argument between herself and Lone and made it possible for her to accept Lone’s remedies for all sorts of ills and to experiment with others while the “in sight” blazed away. The dimmer the visible world, the more dazzling her “in sight” became.
When Mary Magna died, Consolata, fifty-four years old, was orphaned in a way she was not as a street baby and was never as a servant. There was reason the Church cautioned against excessive human love and when Mary Magna left her, Consolata accepted the sympathy of her two friends, the help and murmurs of support from Mavis, the efforts to cheer her from Grace, but her rope to the world had slid from her fingers. She had no identification, no insurance, no family, no work. Facing extinction, waiting to be evicted, wary of God, she felt like a curl of paper—nothing written on it—lying in the corner of an empty closet. They had promised to take care of her always but did not tell her that always was not all ways nor forever. Prisoner wine helped until it didn’t and she found herself, full of a drinker’s malice, wishing she had the strength to beat the life out of the women free-loading in the house. “God don’t make mistakes,” Lone had shouted at her. Perhaps not, but He was sometimes overgenerous. Like giving satanic gifts to a drunken, ignorant, penniless woman living in darkness unable to rise from a cot to do something useful or die on it and rid the world of her stench. Gray-haired, her eyes drained of what eyes were made for, she imagined how she must appear. Her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others. Exactly the opposite of that blind season when she rutted in dirt with the living man and thought she was seeing for the first time because she was looking so hard. But she had been spoken to, half cursed, half blessed. He had burned the green away and replaced it with pure sight that damned her if she used it.