Baptism

For once they left God’s house in silence. No one made a sound. Servers in white robes were moving around lighting candles, and people were kneeling before the altar, taking out rosaries, murmuring quiet prayers to the Son of God on the night when he had given himself to the world. Jinny was kneeling beside Isaac before she knew it. She looked at Isaac for a second. His lips were moving quickly and she wondered what he was saying.

They were coming down the steps, making the descent to the parking lot. The sky was stained a wet grey that promised rain tonight. Some young men were standing together, talking in young man Christian earnestness, and one with particularly bad skin looked up suddenly and with friendly surprise in his eyes said, “Jinny!”

Her eyes widened. She looked at him. It seemed the decline from the church to the parking lot dropped quicker. She felt as if she was a yolk and someone had cracked her egg, and there she was, shapeless and spilling.

But all she could do was catch her breath, ignore the hot itching prickle of her skin and say, “Joe!”

To Virginia O’Muil the entire encounter with Joe was as if someone had told it to her, as if it were a story for which she had not been present.

Joe, still scarred by bad skin. Jinny, making the observation that he still had beautiful eyes, and if he would clean up his skin—but it was probably too late—he might be handsome. Joe talking on and on about how he was about to enter the seminary as if he had not fucked her twice, as if that whole affair had not nearly ruined her relationship with Isaac, and her belief in everything.

But no, Joe had not done that. She had done that. Jinny O’Muil had ruined it single handedly. She hadn’t been forced into it. Jinny, the whole time standing on the lip of the world, feeling the eyes of Efrem and Cecile and Anne, and Isaac on her back.

When they were all in the O’Muils kitchen, Isaac turned to her and said, “That was himwasn’t it?”

Jinny nodded and Isaac said, “Janna Peterson.”

“Hum?” Jinny said, not getting it, then she said, “Oh, my God, you and Janna!”

Aaron wasn’t in the kitchen, thankfully.

Isaac said, “Yes, cause your Joe is such a prize.”

Then they looked at each other expressionless, and then Jinny, and next Isaac started laughing.

“Well, well,” Isaac commented exploding the bag of Doritos and passing them around, “the last of the red hot skeletons in the closet.”

Jinny was laughing, but she felt drained. Her cousin Jayson came into the house, and waving at them, shouted up the stairs for her sister, “Anne! Anne O’Muil!”

Anne came down with her bag over her shoulder and then looked up at her. Cecile saw madness in her face.

“What’s up?” said Cecile.

“Anne, take me with you.”

“Hunh?” said Anne.

“I’m going with you,” Jinny said. “Will they be upset?”

“You’re going to the convent?” Isaac said.

“Just make sure you come back,” Efrem murmured, crunching on a chip.

“Get yourself some clothes,” Anne told her sister, offhandedly. “Just write Mom a note and say you’re coming too.”

“And hurry,” Jayson grumbled as Jinny ran upstairs.

Efrem shook his head, “Things are getting weirder and weirder around here.”

His sister ate a chip.

“Yeah,” Cecile agreed. “But I like it.”

In the night they took Route 106 through Rhodes, out through Dennis, on into Sandusky and all off the coast of Lake Erie until they headed south a little for Toledo and Lassador, and south of Lassador hit the state road that took them through Regalville and Glencastle and then for a long time there was nearly nothing, and Jayson began yawning and Anne said, “Do you want me to take the wheel?”

“Not on your life,” Jayson said.

“Then let me,” Jinny said from the backseat. They pulled the car to the side of the road and Jayson went in the back to nap while Jinny strapped herself in the front.

“Mind if I smoke?” she said.

“I don’t,” Anne said, turning over and cracking a window. The breeze felt good. They’d had the heat on.

Jayson said nothing, which Jinny took as assent. The burning smell of the cigarette was good to her, and she watched a wisp of smoke curl out of the ashtray before she took to the road again.

Here the road had been cut between hills, and the shadows of trees rose up. The sky was purple grey, and then rain fell for a bit, slashing against the windows. Driving like this always made Jinny nervous, but it would have made her more nervous if Jayson had been doing it. Beside her Anne was snoring. After an hour the hills and rain cleared away and in the dark night, far off to either side of the highway, Jinny could see the orange and white lights of factories, taillights passing with and against her, and she wondered where those travelers were going? Were they going to convents? Or some place weirder?

It’s not the convent that’s weird. It is me going along with my baby sister that is weird. Our going is weird.

They passed the turn off toward Fort Wayne that would have taken them to Jamnia. They were still very much in the north of the state, and had been driving for over three hours. Ohio was the sort of state nice enough to be both long and wide, and Rhodes was at the extreme northeast, closer to Pennsylvania than to Columbus.

From Columbus they began the more definite southern turn and missed Dayton and headed for the hills of Cincinnati. Jinny was useless for driving after Columbus, and Jayson was asleep, so Anne took over. Outside of Cincinnati she announced she had to pee and was hungry. They pulled over at a rest stop. The wind was stiff and cold, and Jayson mumbled and pulled the hood of his windbreaker over his head. Their legs were stiff as in the wind they trotted across the wet asphalt and concrete into the rest stop.

“I had to pee like no other,” Jayson declared when they were back in the car, eating McDonald’s.

Anne observed, “I don’t think this burger is fresh.”

“I guarantee you it isn’t,” Jinny said, mouth full of food.

“How old you think it is?”

“More eating,” Jinny charged. “Less thinking.”

“I’m so glad we got the hell out of that balagahoochie place,” Anne said. “I know we’re white, but the whole time I felt Black as hell, like they were gonna hang us or something.”

“It was a little Deliverance-esque out there,” Jayson said, finishing his burger and pushing his blond hair out of his face. “I would appreciate driving my car now, if you don’t mind.”

They switched seats, and as they fumbled around for lost things, rearranged things in the way, and passed back cigarettes and up Cokes, Jinny said, “You ever notice how there’s Black unity—well, sort of? How Efrem and Cecile always talk to other random Black people wherever they go, how there’s just this code that they all have to acknowledge each other. Even if for the worst. But there’s no white unity. Like, I didn’t want to walk up to any of those hillbillies and say, ‘What’s up my brother?’”

Anne started to howl with laughter at the idea of her sister walking up to anyone and saying what’s up my brother and Jasyon, sticking his key in the ignition and starting the car commented dryly, “But there is white unity. It’s called Aryan Nation. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Our Lady of the Snows lay indirectly across the Ohio River. Indirectly because ever since Cincinnati, nothing was direct. Everything was a plunge between hills and the folds and cracks of land. Everything was burrowing through winding roads and tall pines and tree covered hills, and reaching Our Lady of the Snows was no different.

Past Ramseyville, an almost city that they got lost in, they shot out west and arrived in a town that they nearly missed because Anne had blinked. The town was a conglomeration of trailer homes and bars and past the last bar, called The Honkey Tonk— “You’ve got to be kidding,” Jinny muttered—was a sign that read plainly, NUNS and a road that shot unwaveringly for about a mile with nothing but black hills in the dark night rolling on either side, and it took them up to the open gates of Our Lady of the Snows.

“Are we supposed to knock or something?” Jayson said. “It’s like two in the morning.”

They parked in a small lot. Before them, wrapped in a white brick wall light in the night and overhung with trees was the convent, rising three stories in the night. They walked to the right of the convent, and there was a small pathway that shot up to the doors of a church, and on the other side of the walk was another, more modern three story building.

“Looks like a Motel Six.”

“It’s the guesthouse,” Anne said, sounding professional. “We’ll just find a way in. They don’t believe in locking doors, and we’ll all crash in a room until morning.”

The guesthouse door was locked.

They went up the steps and through the modern glass doors of the church. There was a door to the left and one to the right. The right said, Monastic Enclosure, Do Not Enter. The left said: Guesthouse, and so they entered what indeed looked like a very clean hotel. The first floor was empty and low lit and showed a kitchen, and a lobby. Anne led them upstairs where most of the rooms were and soon they realized that the doors left open were the rooms with no guests. So they piled into room 205, throwing their bags on the floor. Jinny looked at little sign on the night table.

Bells had started ringing. They must have been electric. They began with a whir that worked its way up to a steady bong. Three times.

“Vigils:” Jinny read with raised brow, “Three-fifteen a.m. Lauds, 5:45. Mass, 6:15. Breakfast—after Mass. Ends at 7:30. All meals are to be had in silence. Terce, 7:30. Jesus fuckin’ Christ!”

“I don’t think that’s the response they were looking for,” Anne commented, “I almost want to go to Vigils and see it. I think I’ll peak in a second.”

Jinny said she’d follow, just for a second.

“I’m tired as hell,” she declared.

“You ladies have fun,” Jayson said, stripping out of his jeans and taking a blanket off the bed. He rolled himself like a pig-in-a-blanket on the floor. Then his hand shot out and flicked off the lamp. “I need my beauty sleep.”

“You certainly do,” Anne commented, and was the first out the door to Vigils.