The work wasn’t that hard, as work, but I grudged it, and that made it wearing. Despite my so-called eidetic memory I find it hard to recall what was going through my mind at the time. A lot of anger, mainly at myself for having screwed up my life, and at all the people who had let me down, my daddy by dying in that stupid way, my gran for not figuring me out in time, my momma for marrying a pedophiliac hypocrite, Ray Bob for being one, Foy for blowing himself up, and also at the people at the priory for being so bone-stupid they couldn’t even see how dumb and worthless I was, and all this shot out in all directions like sparkler sparks, but black, and especially at the people who were the sweetest to me, Margaret and Sr. Lorette mainly, but anyone who happened to come in range of my tongue. I wanted a fight, but no one would fight with me. One time I was up on a ladder in the infirmary changing a lightbulb, and as I took down the globe, I saw that it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base and I remembered my first night there and how I’d seen that floating up along the ceiling and I dropped the globe and didn’t tell anyone about it but it shook the shit out of me. I started volunteering for work outside after that, felling trees and clearing culverts.
Occasionally I would see her, standing away at the edges of my vision, and once as I opened the door of my truck she was standing quite close, close enough to touch. She never said anything, although I shouted at her and used vile language and threw rocks, like a maniac, at Catherine of Siena. I feared I was going to be crazy like my mother, and I think that one of the big reasons I stayed at the priory was that if I was out in the world and people saw how I acted I would get arrested and they would check my fingerprints and that somehow (I wasn’t too clear on this but it was a terror nonetheless) I would end up back in Doc Herm’s rest home in Wayland and the Dideroffs could do what they liked with me.
Aside from that and everyone hating me (as I believed) life at St. C.’s was pretty fine. The Bloods are not an ascetic order, about the furthest thing from as a matter of fact. They feed themselves well when they can get food. The Foundress has a whole section of her book on recipes, how to make daube for 250 and so on, navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, soupe r l’oignon. They baked their own bread too, and croissants. I never had food like that before or since. Bd. Marie-Ange thought that life was hard enough and they were all going to die fairly soon, and that God had given us all these good things like food and wine to enjoy and we should enjoy them. Over the entrance to the refectory there was carved a saying from St. Teresa d’Avila?”When it’s time to pray, pray; when it’s time for pheasant, eat pheasant.” We had wine with our meals too, except on Friday (when we ate only soup and bread) and during Lent. The order was liberal in some ways and conservative in others, like that, or maybe they were on the other side of that whole liberal-conservative thing, but I didn’t know anything about that then. I guess they liked their traditions was the main thing, like the habits and the French words they used for different things.Gouter for the snack they served in the refectory around three.En principe, when you were going to do something a little outside the rules: en principe, it’s not allowed, but. Anddebrouiller, of course, but I should say about that later because that was connected with Nora Mulvaney.
Andrappel. Every Sunday we had rappel, which meant the entire population stood in lines marked on the pavement, the sisters dressed in their coifs and cavalry capes and us lays and postulants in our bleu de travail and berets and the little old prioress standing straight as a flagpole in front of the big bronze statue of the Foundress as the Angel of Gravelotte giving a drink to a wounded peasant lad, and then the subprioress, Sr. Marian, would say, in French, here are 120 (or whatever the number was) souls at your service and also how many sick or absent there were and the prioress would say I thank you, sister, my service to God and His people, we are faithful unto death. May the Lord have mercy on us all. Come my children to the house of the good Lord. With which she would turn on her heel and march into the chapel, with the sisters following and after them us lays. They say that in the old days in Europe they used to have drums and bugles at rappel, but they don’t here. What they still do is the youngest member of the company stands at the church door facing out and ready to give the alarm in case any dangers appear, which happened in Algeria a long time ago, some bad guys snuck up on a bunch of Bloods and patients and killed them all. I didn’t understand this because what were they going to do except get killed whether there was warning or not, and I asked one of the professed about it and she looked at me funny and said, they could have escaped. She said, the point isn’t to die, the point is never to abandon. Oh my, she said, we run like rabbits all the time carrying our patients on our backs, and laughed.
Actually it wasn’t just one of the professed it was Nora, and I see I am anxious to get to her part of the story so I will move on.
Well, the thing was I refused to go to church and after a while the prioress sent for me. She didn’t beat around the bush any either. As soon as I walked into her office she said, Emily, listen to me. This is a religious community you are in. We all work together, we all eat together, and we all attend church together on Sunday. This is the rule and if you wish to remain here you must follow it. I don’t demand that you acknowledge the creed or participate in worship, but your presence in church is required. Perhaps you will tell me why you object so strongly to this. And I said in the nastiest way I could that I despised her religion I thought it was disgusting to worship death, a dead man, that you had to be crazy to think that the world was run by a God who was good, that Christianity stifled life and health it was fit only for terrified slaves, and that the idea that it was okay to be miserable now in hope of some fantasy of reward after death was the worst idea that anyone had ever come up with. I went on for some time.
She said I see you’ve studied Nietzsche, and I agreed that I had and she smiled and said, I too, he is lovely in the German, a great artist. Unfortunately he is what happens when a spirited little genius is raised by a bunch of pious church ladies. Nietzsche probably never met a real Christian in his whole life. They are extremely thin on the ground at the best of times. So forgive me if I say you don’t know what you are talking about. I said that I still thought it was stupid and that she was stupid to insist that I park my body in a certain place at a certain time even though nothing would be going on, and that I would hate and resent every second of it and she said, it’s important where the body is, and you can never tell what will happen in a church. Besides, she said, it is the rule and you should try to follow a rule for once, as breaking them all has not appeared to have done you much good in life. Then I got really angry, like I hadn’t since that time with Ray Bob when he was going to arrest Hunter and I called her a lot of foul names at the top of my voice and went into a kind of state and before I knew it the whole story of the very Christian deacon baby-fucker Ray Bob leaped from my mouth in tongues of flame plus some extra stuff about pervert priests and nuns that I had gathered from the recent press and also from some pamphlets that Ray Bob had around the house about the Scarlet Woman of Rome.