The Far Reaches (12 page)

“Kill Japs, boys!” the gunny cheerfully sang. “Now, ain't the Marine Corps good to you, gives you a simple job like that? Don't have to think, just aim and pull the trigger. Get it done and then we'll all go to the isles of easy nooky, your Hawaiian Islands, which are just like heaven.”

“It would have to be heaven before any easy nooky came your way, Gunny,” Sampson jibed, and everybody laughed except Ready, who was thinking about the nun, and the gunny, who was thinking about living and dying and weighing the odds for each during the remainder of the day. He concluded the odds were better for dying, and it made him a bit melancholy.
I ain't getting out of this one alive,
he said to himself, although he kept walking forward, leading his men toward a hard fight, which is what marine gunnies are paid to do.

Sister Mary Kathleen walked across the atoll of Betio, and past all the dead men. Her chin was up, her shoulders back, and her expression serene, just as she'd been taught as a postulant. “Observe the sisters, notice the manner in which they walk, talk, and even eat,” Sister Theresa, the mistress of postulants, told her covey of recent novices on their first day in the convent. “Ye will see an expression of humility and serene detachment in their posture as they move, sit, or even lie in their beds. Note as well the quiet but steady manner in which they address one another and others, and how they eat, never quickly, but slowly, without any apparent enjoyment, food but a means to live.”

She picked her way over a line of bodies, careful not to tread on them with her soiled white slippers. They were a mixed lot of Japanese and Americans, the dead uncaring of their neighbors. She made the sign of the cross over them and then tucked her hands inside her sleeves, for such a gesture might be interpreted as self-important.

Self-importance and a lack of humility were two evils she struggled against. She had not been a postulant for more than a few days before she was called into the august presence of Sister Theresa for those very offenses. It had been reported that she had a tendency to walk faster than the others, and once she was observed looking at herself, presumably in an admiring manner, in the shiny curved surface of a teapot. For those transgressions, she was made to lie prostrate behind the Mother Superior's chair during chapel and afterward remain in that humiliating position until all the nuns and postulants had filed past while looking down at her.

The next morning, she was again called to the mistress's office, where
she was bade to sit and then sternly corrected when she put her hands on her knees rather than folding them on her lap. For two hours or more—she had no way of determining the time—she sat with her spine straight as an arrow, never daring to touch the back of the chair, while the mistress recorded entries in her ledger. During the torturous silence, she had tried to show no interest in what Sister Theresa might be writing, nor curiosity about anything else. This was not entirely difficult since the mistress's office was barren except for her desk and a crucifix displayed on the wall beside a painting of the Blessed Virgin.

Finally, the mistress put down her pen, clasped her hands together, and looked at her. Sister Theresa had a round, ruddy face that was composed into the serenity of the perfect nun. “Kathleen,” she said, “the path to humility is hard and not for the weak or the silly. Ye must work every day, every hour, every moment to humble yerself before all men, even the lowest and vilest of men, and women, too. Even children requiring discipline must sense yer willingness to sacrifice yerself for them. Learn to be truly humble, Kathleen, or else leave us.”

“But what did I do, Mistress?” she asked, sincerely confused.

“Ye were observed again admiring yerself in the teapot.”

“I was not admiring meself,” she replied honestly. “I was just curious how I look in me new garb.”

“Such curiosity reflects a lack of humility in yer person. It is the reason why there are no mirrors in the convent.”

“Yes, Mistress,” she replied and humbly hung her head, though she still did not understand.

Sister Theresa sighed. “We have much work to do with you, Kathleen. But together, we will get there, by and by.”

Her fella boys stopped, staring at a Japanese corpse. She recognized him as Captain Sakuri, struck down by the big man carried now on the litter, but clearly not killed by that blow in the sand fortress. Instead, the captain had apparently fought on until he could sit atop a small sand dune and commit ritual suicide. His intestines, turned gray by the blistering sun and alive with flies, lay in a curved pile between his legs. “Oh, Captain,” she said. “Such a waste!” Sakuri stared back at her, if such could be said of dead, dry eyes, and Sister Mary Kathleen knelt briefly beside him, then closed his eyelids. “Ye were not evil,” she told him. “I know evil, ye see. It has a home in me heart.” She rose, thinking once more of her progress toward sisterhood over the years and miles.

In the days that followed her initial counseling by Sister Theresa, she had done her best to learn humility and discipline. Looking back, it should not have been difficult, especially with the constant example of the other nuns. She had marveled at their orderly, motionless rows in the chapel, their heads bowed in faultless angularity. No matter their age or infirmity, she never saw one of them show any evidence of pain, nor heard even the smallest complaint. There was an interior silence to each of them, their personalities diminished to only their facial characteristics. She considered all of them beautiful, though some had soft, round, country faces and others more aristocratic features, which gave them, no matter how placid their expression, an intelligent aspect. She had secretly hoped she would also appear intelligent and be admired for that, if nothing else. Even though she said nothing of this wish, it was as if Sister Theresa could read her mind.

Once more she found herself sitting on the hard little chair before the mistress's desk and forced to meditate. Finally, a short lecture came, this one on false pride. Sister Theresa cocked her head and allowed a thin-lipped smile that diminished as she talked. “ ‘Tis the curse of the Irish, Kathleen, this desire to feel important and inflate one's opinion of oneself. But such has no place in our order, no more than envy or greed. Ye must clear yer mind of any sense of yerself as a person. If ye join us, ye will be but one of many, the same as all, no sister different from the next. Now, can ye do it or not, child?”

She had said yes, she could do it. She also said she would do it better than any of the other postulates. This had made Sister Theresa sigh and shake her head. “ ‘Tis not a contest, Kathleen. ‘Tis a journey. Ye must allow God to enter yer very core, to seep inside ye and strip ye of anything other than His will. If ye are not willing, or able, t'would be better if ye left us. Now, what say ye?”

She had dutifully answered. “Please, Mistress. Give me another chance.” Sister Theresa nodded, then waved her away, though she stopped her at the door. “Perhaps ye could find a special saint to intercede for ye.”

Sister Mary Kathleen confessed something then, something she had not even allowed herself to believe. “I have had dreams of a girl. She is dressed in gold. I believe she is a saint, but I know not who she might be.”

The mistress's eyes turned bright with interest. “What does she do?”

“She smiles at me and captures me in her eyes.”

“How old is she?”

“I believe she is around six years old.”

Sister Theresa stood, and a rapturous expression formed on her round face.
“It is Saint Monessa. Do ye know her story? She was the child of an ancient Irish chieftain. Upon her baptism when she was but six, she died. Pray to that child, Kathleen. For no saint is so humble as she.”

Sister Mary Kathleen recalled now how startled she was at this history. “Why did she die, Mistress?” she asked.

Sister Theresa shrugged. “No one knows, but ever since, a few especially blessed sisters have claimed to have been visited by her in their dreams. Ye are therefore blessed, Kathleen, more than you—and I—may know. Hence-forth, I beseech ye, let Saint Monessa be yer guide.”

Afterward, she began to pray almost exclusively to the little child-saint, and to her surprise, wisdom soon came. She began to understand she could not simply force change onto herself. She had to trade pride for humility through prayer and to exchange her Irish temper for detachment by believing that she had no right to anger, that only God could judge. She was all the more surprised when, just as she felt she was making progress, she came under even heavier criticism from Sister Theresa. “Ye seem humble,” the mistress told her, taking her aside after chapel.

“Yes, Mistress,” she answered with a secret, triumphant smile.

“But if ye believe ye are humble, then ye are not.”

Stricken, she nearly cried out in despair. “I am sorry nothing I do pleases ye!”

Sister Theresa took her hands. “Please me, child? It does not matter if ye please me. Ye must please God by your total subjugation to His will! Will ye never understand?”

“But I am here, Sister,” she argued. “Is that not enough? I have turned away from life outside. His will be done, I said!”

The mistress sadly shook her head. “I know why ye came, Kathleen. What? Such an expression on yer face! Did ye think it was a secret? Ye came because of yer father, he who murdered a priest and other men and never asked for forgiveness even while a rope was around his neck. A priest damned him as he died. Now ye hope to save his soul through yer own sacrifice. But a sister in this order is not allowed to be here other than for God's own purposes.”

“God brought me here,” she answered stubbornly. “This much I know.” This earned another smile from Sister Theresa. “Ah, Kathleen. Perhaps he has, indeed. Or perhaps not. Ye must meditate to discover God's truth. And keep praying to Saint Monessa. ‘Tis her glow about ye I feel.”

So she had meditated all the more and prayed until she thought that she
could pray no more and that surely Saint Monessa was tired of hearing her pleas. Then, when she had all but lost hope, she made a surge of progress toward being a true and perfect nun. When she was dispatched to scrub the floor of the cell occupied by an ancient nun riddled with cancer and filled with constant pain, the nun had complained loudly from her bed that it was not being done properly. Though the floor was clean enough to eat off of, Kathleen silently bowed her head and did it all over again. And when Sister Claire, the choirmaster, told her that her voice was not good enough—never mind that everyone had always told her she sang like an angel—she did not argue but went to sit with the others who had also been rejected, her hands folded placidly on her lap, her eyes cast downward, her expression unconcerned, even though she felt as if her stomach had tied itself into a knot.

Then, one night, when she recited at the culpa a list of her most recent faults—walking too fast to chapel, reaching across the table for a biscuit without permission, paying more attention to a particularly colorful flower in the courtyard than her prayers during meditation—she lifted her head and for just a moment, a split second, no more, saw something in Sister Theresa's eyes that told her she had been accepted. Soon after, she took her final vows.

And now, even after she had been dispatched to a place beyond her imagination, to a group of islands on the other side of the world, she had continued to reach for the three unwritten goals of every sister in her order: subservient humility, a sense of detachment from the world, and a willingness, nay, eagerness, to bend to the will of God, even when such was harsh and unfair. And, after all that had happened, her terrible sins in the Far Reaches yet unforgiven, she still kept on with her unceasing quest to become a proper nun.
Even now,
she thought, forcing down the bitterness.
Saint Monessa,
she prayed,
ye know I am weak, so very weak, and afraid. I beg ye, give me strength and speed my presence before a priest.

She listened for an answer, which she knew was also a reflection of her awful pride. For why would a saint in heaven, even one so ignored by the Church as this little girl, give her any thought at all? Instead, she heard in her head only her pap recounting some foolish joke. “I love ye, ye old poot,” she said beneath her breath and felt so very lost at that moment with her vision of him dancing in the air on the gallows and her ma and her brothers and sisters so far away, so impossibly far away. Ah well, distance, both in miles and time, she supposed, was necessary and good. She prayed often in the darkness of the night when she couldn't sleep that all the folks of Ballysaggart of the
County Tyrone would believe she was dead.
I am, ye know,
she said to herself, for she had come to learn there were many ways to die.

So she walked on, following her fella boys and the stretcher that held Josh Thurlow, who, she sensed, held her salvation locked away in his shattered body and perhaps shriveled soul.

Led by the bandy-legged little gunny, the rump squad of four marines plus Ready O'Neal reluctantly slogged past shell craters and foxholes filled with dead Japanese. Ready kept averting his eyes, but the marines managed to make a joke out of each corpse according to the expression on its face or its death pose. There was also a great deal of griping about how hot it was and everything else in general. Sampson especially griped about his left foot. “I stepped on something. I don't know what,” he told Ready. “It went right through the sole of my boot.”

Sampson stopped and turned up his boot for Ready to examine what proved to be a small hole in the tread. “Looks like you stepped on a nail,” Ready said.

“It hurts like hell,” Sampson said, limping on. “Hey, gunny! I need to see a corpsman!”

“You're walking beside one,” the gunny replied tiredly.