Farthest House (6 page)

She lifted her gaze to the black paper chain. Wasn’t it proof enough of her spirituality, of how the church must hold fast? She would not take denunciation from a seven-year old who’d already caused her untold trouble with Mr. Wolfe and Father Steinhouse. She would not take it from this misshapen half-orphan whose father never brought her to church on Sundays. She narrowed her eyes on Willow. “I should have guessed. This picture proves your attitude toward me and Mother Church.”

Willow trembled as the classroom turned to winter. Even Sister’s rushing and flapping back up to the front of the room sounded like ice flaking and dropping from bare trees. First graders, some already in their seats, some still in the aisles, froze as the nun pulled open her top desk drawer and brought out her flat disciplinary paddle. She headed back for Willow.

The wide, short-handled instrument rose in the air, and Sister Dominic Agnes grabbed hold of Willow’s right wrist, pulling back the sweater cuff in one motion and pinning the hand to the desk. The paddle whistled down, smacking, biting again, and then a third time.

Willow screamed with each blow. She’d never been struck before, not so much as a swat on her backside, and she didn’t understand what was happening. As she screamed, she tried to twist and pull away, but the nun’s anger and strength funneled down through the heel of her large white hand, crushing Willow’s to the desk. The next series of strikes turned the skin on Willow’s hand red and purple.

Then came the words that would for years shut Willow in: “You are disfigured to match your soul!”

9

Those words lifted the paper chain from the tops of the windows and threatened to send it slithering to the floor.

Drums beat in Willow’s head, her hand burned, and still Sister Dominic Agnes pulled, jerking her out of her seat and dragging her up the aisle past girls who cried and Mary who only stared. Derrick Crat, the oldest boy in the class, stood beside his desk, his mouth contorted in mock sobs, his hands fisted, feigning the motion of rubbing his eyes. “Whaa, whaa.” When he had the attention of those nearest, he pulled his right hand up into the sleeve of his sweater and waved the empty cuff.

“This is nothing compared to what you deserve,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, both hands on Willow’s shoulders, turning her into the tight corner. “Stand here until I say.”

Willow’s head dropped into the vee of the abutted walls, and she cupped her hands to the sides of her face like blinders, or closing doors. Wall dust crawled up her nose, and the taste of wet salt rolled over her lips. Even if the class couldn’t see her face, she knew they saw her back: her worst thing. She fought against slumping or crumbling onto the floor. As minutes drug through one hour and then another, the eyes of her class stomping around and around the bulge on her shoulder, she imagined the bone growing until it became a whole head lifting out of her back to make ugly faces and say, “I hate you. I hate you.” Especially to Derrick. Sister Dominic Agnes had never made him stand in the corner, and he’d never been hit. Neither had Mary. Willow licked snot from her lips. Derrick and Mary hadn’t told lies about their dads.

By the time the dismissal bell rang and doors all along the corridor outside the room opened and the hall filled with the sounds of happy kids, Willow’s eyes were dry. Doll would cry when she heard what happened, but Willow wouldn’t cry any more. She let the classroom empty, wanting everyone gone before she turned to show her face.

“Is your father home?” the nun asked.

Willow’s legs ached. She hadn’t been given permission to turn around.

“Willow!”

She jumped. She wasn’t sure if Papa was home. Sometimes he was, and sometimes a sitter was there. She shrugged into the wall.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you. I’m taking you home, and we’ll just see.”

Willow never wanted Papa to hear the lie she told about him. She turned and ran to the back of the room, grabbed her
Jeannie
bag—the last backpack still hanging on the row of low hooks—and for a long second she held her bag up, picture facing out, Jeannie’s powers staring at Sister Dominic Agnes. If that bag, pushed defiantly in the air between them was held a moment longer than Willow intended, it was by my hand. She ran.

“Stop!”

Her life at school was over; she was never coming back. They’d called Jonah a bug and he never went back. She’d been called “disfigured to match her soul,” and she wasn’t ever coming back either.

“Willow Starmore, get back here!”

She kept running, down the hall, out the door, and into the schoolyard full of students waiting for rides or milling about in clusters of friends. Careful not to touch anyone, she wove her way through, and when she cleared the largest knots, she started running down the first of the two blocks home. By the end of it, her lungs ached, and her knees trembled, but she could see Julian getting out of his car in front of their house. “Papa!”

He didn’t hear, and she ran harder, screaming his name until he stopped on the walk and looked up in her direction, his face filling with questions. She ran, out of breath now, Julian starting for her, not running, but coming with his long strides, the distance between them closing. She hit the wall of his body and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“Hey, hey.” He rubbed her back, and when she caught a semblance of breath, he held her back a step and lifted her skirt over one knee and then the other looking for a scrape. “What is it?”

How could she explain without confessing her lie? She looked back to see Sister Dominic Agnes and a younger nun hurrying toward them. A ragged sob bleated from her throat.

“It looks like I’m about to find out,” Julian said. “It can’t be this bad. Let’s go inside. Whatever’s happened, it’s not for the whole neighborhood.”

He carried her, her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. The screen banged closed behind them, but the wooden door Willow wanted shut and locked, Julian left open. Crossing the first room into the kitchen, he tossed her backpack onto the table and set her down. “You want to tell me something before they get here?”

She shook her head.

“All right.” He looked around his own kitchen. “How about a glass of milk?”

She could just manage to keep breathing; she didn’t want to try and drink milk. She ached to ask him about being “disfigured to match her soul.” Did that mean she couldn’t ever go to Heaven? Was
disfigured
the reason Mary Wolfe and Sister Dominic Agnes didn’t like her? She wouldn’t ask. She wouldn’t say the words because she never wanted Papa to know about them.

Each time she looked through the screen door, her fear increased. Only the wire mesh stood between her and Papa learning what she said about him. Shadows climbed onto the porch and then toes of black shoes beneath glimpses of white-hosed ankles. Willow dropped her head onto her arms, and her heart banged as Papa took his time despite the knocking and opened the refrigerator, poured milk into a glass, and set it in front of her. He shook a cigarette from the pack in his pocket, still not hurrying when Sister Dominic Agnes knocked a second time, but lighting the cigarette and pressing it into a small groove on the side of the kitchen ashtray. How many times had Willow heard him and his partner, Red, chuckling about the length of some interrogations, how they counted the number of cigarettes that burned away—the slow crawl of the smoke unnerving to their suspects. A good confession didn’t cost them more than a couple of cigarettes.

He took a step toward the door, but Willow let out such a sob, he stopped and turned back. “Hey now,” he winked at her. “We’ll get this figured out.”

She kept her head down, wanting to beg him to slam the big door and take her to the back yard where they’d play catch with a football, his newest plan for strengthening her right arm. This was their house, only theirs, and she had a new rule: “No nuns allowed.”

She heard the squeak of the screen and Papa say, “Good afternoon.”

“I’m Sister Dominic Agnes. This is Sister Beatrice.”

Willow snuck a glance. Her teacher was inside, looking around the room at Papa’s shiny floors, his desk with the top rolled down, and the clean kitchen counter tops. Only when her eyes landed on a stack of folded towels, did she seem to relax. Willow wanted to jump up and put them away, but she was too scared to move.

“We’ve come to speak to you about Willow,” the nun said.

Papa looked over at her. “Drink your milk.”

Sister Dominic Agnes held out the sheets of Big Chief paper she’d rolled into a scroll. “Look at these. Something must be done.”

Surprised, Willow looked up to see Papa thumbing through the drawings. Had her teacher come to talk about the pictures? Not the lie?

Julian’s brow lifted quizzically. “Gnomes, maybe trolls, what’s the problem?”

An angry finger rapped the top picture, “It’s disrespectful,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, “mocking, even demonic.”

“Demonic?” He needed a moment. “She’s got a wild imagination, but they aren’t evil. She spends a lot of time in her grandmother’s garden, imagines fairies, trolls, and she reads make-believe.” He looked through a few again. “They’re pretty good. She’s trying to copy Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane, Dore, that kind of thing.”

The nervousness in Willow’s stomach eased. Maybe, Papa could make things all right.

“Her grandmother has quite a collection of the old books,” Julian continued, “I grew up with them. Some of those pictures are graphic but harmless.”

“What you are holding,” Sister Dominic Agnes said, “is not what a normal Catholic child draws. I am responsible,” she expelled her breath and needed to draw another, “and no small responsibility it is, for the welfare of my first graders, at home and at school.”

Willow crossed her arms over her stomach and held the hurt. Sister Beatrice was looking down at her shoes, and Papa considered her before looking back to Sister Dominic Agnes. “You’re responsible for your first graders? Even when they are at home?”

“And for their pure minds,” the nun continued. “These kinds of things,” she motioned again to the drawings in Julian’s hand, “are sinful.”

“Sinful?” His brows narrowed, and for a long moment, he said nothing. Then, “You’re experienced in this sort of thing.” He was nodding along with her. “You know enough to have brought all the pictures? I’m seeing
all
the evidence?”

“Of course. I wanted you to see everything. If she doesn’t stop this, I’ll take her to see Father Steinhouse. He’ll likely want to meet with you, and he may well decide she’s not suited for Our Lady of Supplication. As it is, I’m taking her out of the May procession.”

Willow slid off her chair and ran to stand beside Julian. “Mémé bought me a dress, and you’re coming to the procession too, aren’t you Papa? You’re coming to church.”

“Adults are talking,” Sister Dominic Agnes said.

Willow’s eyes met Sister Beatrice’s eyes, which looked kind and sorry. Sister Beatrice couldn’t help though, and Willow turned for her room and Doll. Julian caught her arm, pulling her up short. As she tugged, stretching for her room, though he didn’t seem to notice her struggle, he raised the pictures. “You’re taking her out of the procession because of these?”

“She draws when she shouldn’t. She did all those this week. I cannot tolerate such misbehavior. We take time for coloring the last hour on Fridays, and it’s not the devil we color at Our Lady of Supplication.”

The pictures hung at Papa’s side, the corners fluttering as he tapped them against his leg, his thoughts loud in Willow’s head.
She can’t be getting in trouble over her drawings again, can’t be drawing when the rest are getting ahead. Jeannie attended that school; she wanted her kids to go there. I don’t want Willow in rough public schools…not where they’ll pick on her.

She stopped fighting his grip. Why had his mind said
getting in trouble again?
She’d never been in trouble for drawing.

He let her go and re-rolled the pictures into a tight scroll. “I’ll see this stops.”

“Very well,” Sister Dominic Agnes sighed with satisfaction. “However, as punishment, I’m still removing her from the procession.”

A squeak from Sister Beatrice. “Perhaps, if she—”

“I must maintain discipline,” Sister Dominic Agnes cut in, “or risk having none at all.” She motioned to the pictures in Julian’s hand, “I’ll take those back with me.”

To both nuns, he gave a slow, gracious smile. “Why don’t I keep them? We’d hate to see them land in a file somewhere. Especially if someone might think they’re inappropriate.”

Willow saw red wash up from Sister Dominic Agnes’s neck and onto her cheeks. “They are school property. They were drawn at school and, therefore, belong in her school records. Father Steinhouse may wish to see them.”

“Well, then, I’m sincerely indebted to you for bringing them
all
to me. That was a real act of kindness.” He stepped around the women and held open the screen door with an outstretched arm. “I’ll talk to Willow. She won’t give you any more trouble.”

Sister Beatrice leaned down, and her kind eyes met Willow’s again. “Angels are coming tonight.”

The elder nun gasped, “Sister! Wait outside.” She glared at the pictures and then again at Julian. “I
insist
you return those to me.”

He feigned a smile, “I’ll keep them.”

The nun reached, and Willow’s mouth opened when she saw Papa swing the pictures behind his back. Sister Dominic Agnes would have to touch his arm to reach again. Wasn’t Papa committing a mortal sin?

He stood still, waiting until Sister Dominic Agnes stepped out onto the porch beside Sister Beatrice. He stood still until they descended the steps and reached the sidewalk. He crossed the room, picked up his cigarette, inhaled smoke, and blew it toward the ceiling.

“Only half a cigarette, Papa. You did good.”