Baptism

A LETTER TO WOULD BE AUTHORS: Unless someone is paying your bills and paying them well, your first duty is to your vision and to you people, that is, your characters. I have had many stories, most high rated, some where three paragraphs are low rated and then the next incredibly high, and in this case the anonymous crowd is loud in saying they don't care for this one. They could... imagine this... simply not read or seeing my name and knowing I am not not to their tastes, leave the goddamn stories alone altogether, but you must understand, would be writer, we live in a time when there is an anonymous and unhappy crowd that neither keeps a roof over your head nor pays a dime for what you do, and even though they do not have the power to help you or the ability to create anything on their own, they do have the ability to click a button to indicate they do not love what you are doing. But here you are ,and here I am, creating again and again, and there they are doing.... whatever the fuck people who have no ability to bring forth do.

And so we continue our tale...

At a little past three in the morning we walk from our room on the second floor to a door that says BALCONY. Directly on the other side of it we are in he church, looking down into it from what would be a choir loft in most places. Directly across from us is another door, and I bet that leads to the convent. Up here it is almost completely dark, but we are not the only ones. It is hard to believe there is a world awake at three. The balcony is not filled to capacity. There is still space to feel private. I’m a little nervous about being seen, though I can’t say why. Anne is never nervous about anything. She moves to the balcony rail where there is a kneeler and she kneels there and looks over the edge. For once I am the little sister and I follow her.

Below us is the stone floored chapel filled with a light which I think is much too cruel for this time of not-morning, and nuns in white in their stalls, two rows of stalls on either side of the church are chanting to each other, one side to the other.

“The Book of Psalms,” Anne tells me, reading my mind.

Their habits are white. The walls are white and very high. Brick. They soar so high the church looks narrow, and there are plain wooden beams crossing over us. It looks like a peaceful life. I try to picture Anne in it, but I can’t do so successfully. And not cause she’s not holy enough. Just because… she’s Anne.

Anne does things her own way, not the way that forty other people do it, and my sister would never wear the same identical habit and do the same identical chants as a whole group of women.

In Catholic school there was a point in time before we realized that nuns were not male priests, when all the girls would wear the cardigans over their heads and pretend to be sisters. Anne never pretended to be a nun or even the Virgin Mary. When she was seven I came into the house and found her stretched across a wall looking frightening.

“What areyou?” I demanded.

“I’m Jesus!” she told me.

And I think that’s the key to understanding my sister, who is kneeling beside me, quiet, transfixed you might say if you used words like that. The only role she had ever been content to play is that of Christ. She loves God naturally and without production the way most people would like to and pretend to. The way I wish that I could.

2.

“Go down there on your own peril,” Jinny said, opening the door as she came into the room they had shared the night before.

Anne was just waking up, and Jayson, rolled up in his blankets murmured, “Whaaa?”

“They are not nice at all,” Jinny elaborated. “I tried smiling at them, but they just looked at me like I was nuts. Or they looked scared.”

“The nuns?” said Anne.

“Oh, no. I didn’t see a single nun,” Jinny said. “The guestss downstairs.”

“Oh, hell we’re missing breakfast,” Anne swore.

“Not really,” Jinny disagreed. “It’s some bad oatmeal and fruit, cereal boxes. They leave the kitchen open all day.”

Anne nodded.

Jayson stood up and stretched.

“It’s one hell of a morning.”

They all looked out the window. The hills of Kentucky, covered in rust oranges, and reds, smoky browns, was spread out before them, and the sky was grey blue after rain, a few clouds stretched out and nearly transparent in the sky.

Above them the bells began again.

“It’s only seven,” Jayson said, yawning. “Now explain to me why I volunteered to drive you all here and then head out and come back and get you tomorrow.”

“Because originally you thought it would be a quick trip and you’d be back in Rhodes last night,” Anne said. “We all did. Plus, you wanted to drive Aunt Catherine’s car.”

“And I didn’t know Jinny would be coming,” Jayson said.

“Well, you’re here now,” Jinny said. “You might as well stay, then we can all go back home tomorrow.”

“Can I really stay?” Jayson said, looking pleased. “You think they’d let me?”

“I wonder if we should even ask,” Anne said. “Do you know how many guests there are here? Do you really think the nuns spend their time wondering who checked in or not, who’s staying in what room?”

“Don’t you think we should ask, anyway?” Jinny said, afraid of lying to a nun. These weren’t the Catholic school sisters in their short skirts who taught math. These were realnuns like Saint Teresa, in big bulky habits who prayed to Jesus all day and lived behind walls. They could probably smell a lie.

Anne did not agree.

“The best way not to be refused is not to ask permission. Now I think me and Jayson should grab some grub. You had coffee yet?”

Jinny shook her head.

“Come and get a cup with us,” she said. The bells were ringing again.

Jayson picked up the card at the end table.

“Terce is about to start.”

“I’m afraid we’ll have to miss it,” Anne said, “I’m hungry as hell.”

For the second time since they’d set out, Jinny felt like the younger sister.

The only person in the silent dining room who looked directly at everyone and smiled or broke the silence was, of course, a nun. She was black, or at least half black and reminded Jinny of Cecile. She was young and pretty, caramel skinned, and her eyes were dark and liquid, almond shaped. Black hair peaked out of her white wimple.

“Are you all together?” she demanded.

“This is my sister,” Jinny said, “and this is my cousin Jayson. I’m Virginia.”

“A holy family,” the young nun commented.

“If you only knew,” Anne murmured, shaking her head.

The nun threw back her head and laughed loudly. No one in that hall dared to frown at her

“I am Sister Catherine. And I know all about holy families. My mother went for a series of bad men and the last one was my father. My brother took after him, and I have to take time out from here to visit him in prison.”

She looked at the sisters.

“I haves sisters too. Not in habits. One of them has two kids. My stepsister? She’s a different matter.”

“What does she do?” Jinny said.

“She’s a whore.”

“Oh, no!” Jinny heard herself say.

“Oh, yes, she’s the best hooker in Michigan, God bless her. Or God damn her. Or God do something with her,” Catherine shook her head, half in pity, half fondly.

“Virginia? Anne? Jayson?” she said each of their names with a lift, like a question. “The best way to enjoy this place is to enjoy it alone. Consider me your retreat master. You,” she told Anne, “go to Saint Anne’s Rest. Follow the signs. You,” she said to Jayson, “Go out toward St. Joseph’s Hill. Big hill with the statue on top, overlooks the highway. Go out there and go walking around there and don’t you dare come back until Sext. That’s at 12:15. And you,” she said looking at Jinny. She chuckled, “Virginia, you need the Stations of the Cross. I can tell you need ‘em real bad. And on Good Friday too! Go, go out the patio door upstairs. Just head down the walkway and there’s the first one, and follow it to the end, and then keep on walking anyway. Beautiful, Beautiful place if you’re not used to it. Beautiful if you don’t let yourself get too used to it. Never get used to life.”

The first thing Jinny was aware of was that she had never walked the Stations of the Cross, not in the twenty-three, almost twenty-four years of her life. These were cut into the wall that ran about the guesthouse and the monastery. Cut in stone and sanded down, but still very fine, she could see the face of Jesus. She had never had to look at the face of Jesus. No one had ever commanded Virginia O'Muil to do this until Sister Catherine. Now Jinny thought this was exactly what she had been asked to do, inadvertently. After all, why else walk the Stations?

"Why am I here?" Jinny said, and then, as if someone had spoken to her, she repeated. "No, but really? Why am I here?"

And what did that mean? It could mean that big old esoteric question, why were any of us here? Which is not the way she had meant it. It could also mean what had driven her here, to Kentucky, in a heartbeat? And the quickest answer was seeing Joe's face popping up after all these years. But really she meant why had this nun told her to walk the Stations of the Cross, and why was Sister Catherine so sure that she needed to?

"What is all this?"

She moved beyond the first station, Jesus being handed the Cross to the station of Jesus falling. Did he fall three times or two? Suddenly, without knowing the answer she knew she was terribly stupid for a Catholic who had been schooled by the Church from the age of five until just a few short months ago. She was sorely lacking, and she knew why she had come. She had said it before. She needed baptizing. She needed to start all over again. But wasn't this what baptism was?

She moved to the next station and then to the fourth where Mary met Jesus. She was getting nothing from looking at these pictures. Anything that she may have been getting or not getting was coming from her wondering why she was here, doing this right now. What was all this about?

"Following Jesus I guess," she answered herself. If Anne was here she could explain it. If Anne was walking with her along these stations, she was sure that Anne could tell her.

"And that's just the problem," Jinny told herself. "That is exactly the problem."

“What is the problem?” Sister Catherine asked.

By then Jinny was walking around murmuring things to herself, and she nearly bumped into the nun in her white robe, her golden face veiled and wimpled in white.

“You are becoming my angel,” Jinny said.

“Maybe I’m just stalking you,” Catherine said, deadpan.

Then she shook her head.

“No one’s stalking you. It’s almost time for Sext and your cousin Jayson wanted me to find you.

“It’ll be good to get home.”

They went walking over the new grass, under the vaulted sky.

“This isn’t your home?”

“No,” Catherine said. “This is my order, but my home convent is in Indiana.”

“Do you know?” Jinny said.

The nun looked to her.

“Is there more to that question?” Sister Catherine asked.

“Since I was five I have been told what to believe in and why to believe it. But there were no answers. Usually I think my sister has the answers.”

There were people like Joe who wanted to make you think they knew the answers, who believed they knew the answers. You saw the happiness on their faces caused by the joy of knowing.

The bells were ringing beyond the guesthouse from the steeple on the convent chapel. The sound of bells was filling the blue air of Kentucky, touching the rust stained trees.

“Then when you say, do I know, you mean do I know about… everything?” Catherine said.

“The important things.”

Then Jinny said, “I bet you’re surrounded by people who see your habit and ask you for the answers to life? Who think you have it all figured out.”

Catherine laughed and said, “But, you’re right.”

As they walked back, silent, Catherine said, “The important things boil down to one thing.”

“Belief?”

“Love.”

“Love is hard,” Jinny said.

Catherine said, “Love is a crown of thorns.”

“I am getting married.”

Catherine did not say congratulations. She did not say anything.

“I know I love him. He’s one of the two men I’ve been with. I don’t feel like I’m shocking you by saying things like that. I don’t think much shocks you.”

“Not really.”

“I love him like I’ve loved him since we were teenagers, and I know he loves me.”

“But,” Catherine guessed, “you are not teenagers anymore.”

“Yes,” Jinny said. “And I don’t know if I love him enough in the grown up way.”

And then she said, “And I feel like as much as he loves me… He loves someone else.”

“Can you share him?”

“What?” Jinny blinked, surprised that a nun, that anyone really, would ask this.

Sister Catherine took her hand.

“Love is a matter of sharing, or letting go. Sometimes of holding on, but often of knowing you may not be able to hold on forever. Whatever you do, just remember that.”