In This Small Spot (12 page)

“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.