jwaneeta

Hm. Well, when Kly suggested changing the POV I'm thinking she didn't mean this, exactly. I don't know if it works. But I can write this without wanting to gouge out my eyeballs and eat them. Which is something. I guess.

A bit of the Nun book follows.



He came in flood and he left in fire, and the hills burned after him, I mused, congratulating myself on the poetic turn of phrase. Father Bumgartner was passing like his predecessors into memory, having fled that morning under the full wrath of Mother Paulina. He'd summoned surprising pluck at the end, had Father Baumgartner, delivering a surly homily at his last Mass about St. Steven, who died beneath a hail of stones from the people he had come to serve. But having shot his bolt he left, and we were light one chaplain, yet again.

Father Bumgartner had served us as a stoutly rightwing priest who feared freethinkers, the vanished threat of Communism, social tolerance and the internet, and had distinguished himself on earth by a melting devotion to St. Therese the Little Flower, about whom he published reams of lilting rhapsody. This had been enough to make Mother attach him but not enough to ensure his tenure -- he had sealed his fate by offending her regarding the order of the Mass.

Our chapel had a public side where the locals came to recieve the sacrament, and one grim day Father Bumgartner discovered traces of lipstick on the chalice. He immediately stopped offering the consecrated wine even to the nuns, and that was the end of his career at the Monastery of the Holy Angels. One terse, monastically polite, exceedingly sanguinary conference in Mother's grated parlor settled the matter, and ten minutes later Father Baumgartner was in the drive outside the chaplain's residence loading his books into a station wagon.

Mother gaves us the news at recreation, before dismissing us to play softball or loaf about meditating.

"Thank you, Mother," said Sister Tobias, an older sister with vows and nothing to lose, who nevertheless fawned like gangbusters at every opportunity.

Mother gave her a hard look. Outre, very, to suggest that it had been Mother and not the direct agency of God that sent a priest of Jesus packing.

"Father is gone?" exclaimed Sister Elizabeth, a novice unprotected by vows who dug her vocation's grave a bit deeper every time she opened her mouth. "When? What happened?"

"Please try to use your head, Sister," advised Mother coldly.

"Who's up for a game?" interjected the sub-prioress, as she rose and pinned up her scapular. "Let's get out in the sun!"

***

Our habits were brown, with wide skirts gathered at the waist by leather belts made for us by a cobbler of riding tack. Our veils were black for the professed and white for the novices, and their length was contained and controlled by a black scapular, which went over the head and reached nearly to the ground. When our community clustered, you could see subtle variations in the brown from habit to habit, like the color range of the animated deer in a Disney cartoon. I stood aside and watched the softballers troop out to the grounds toting straw hats, plastic bats and baseball caps, and waved them on merrily. I had foresworn softball for the duration. It was a pastime fraught with peril, in my opinion -- too much danger of losing one's head and uttering the incautious cussword over a dropped fly.

I wandered the cloister instead, rejoicing in the rare taste of idleness. The halls of the novitiate were soaked in sunlight from the floor-length windows, which afforded a fine view of smoke rolling over the densely forested hills below. PBUs trawled in and out of the billowing plumes, dumping cascades of retardant before droning away to refuel. A spring tradition, fires, and aside from dragging out old paschal candles and lighting them as a bar to the conflagration reaching our mountain and crisping us within our holy walls, it was nothing the community noticed much or remarked upon.

"It's the big memsahib!" I warbled, as the sub-prioress and my novice mistress swept around the corner at the hall's turning. "And the junior memsahib. Praised be Jesus Christ, and good morning to all."

It was a feast day and talk -- even the lackwitted chatter to which I was prone when the muzzle was off -- was permitted.

"Now and forever," replied my novice mistress, crooking a finger. "I have a commission for you from Mother Paulina, Sister Juan."

I quailed. My master plan for surviving the novitiate and making final vows turned chiefly on avoiding the notice of our fearsome and unpredictable prioress, a woman who bent steel rebar with her teeth.

"Really?"

"Yes. She's decided that she wants you to paint the cupola after all."

"She has?" gurgled I.

Sister De Chantal was a jewel among novice mistresses, a phenom, a prodigy. She saw everything, penetrated all secrets, plumbed all mysteries. The souls of her charges lay open to her. She certainly knew that my enthusiasm for scrabbling up a scaffold and trying to paint saints while lying on my back 40 feet above the ground was minimal, to say the least. But the sticky part of signing on with the Nuns of the Cenacle (of the Strict Observance) was that you left
personal inclination, rational choice and even what benighted seculars called common sense at the door, and she knew that, too.

"Come along and I'll set you up," said Sister De Chantal serenely.

I followed with docility in her train. We left the cloister and entered the chapel through the sacristy, and I did some more quailing.

"That's one tall scaffold. Wow. Looms, kinda. Doesn't it strike you as pretty tall, Dear Mistress?"

Sister De Chantal picked up a roomy sack with arms sewn onto it and shook out the folds. "Here, put this apron on over your habit."

"I don't know if I can manage brushes, you know, upside down."

Sister De Chantal tied the collar strings for me and tugged a ancient wimple over my veil. "You'll need to pin your skirts back, too, in case of dripping."

"I've been rethinking that sketch of mine. Poorly imagined! Absolute junk. I need to start over," I bleated.

"Hold out your arms, Sister." Sister De Chantal pulled protective cuffs over the apron sleeves and checked the elastic bands. "There. Very good."

It didn't feel very good. It felt like a Santa suit. With six yards of stiff denim layered over eight pounds of wool habit, underskirt, shift and scapular, it seemed doubtful that I could manage to sit down, much less leap like a hart on the high places. "God reward you," I groaned, resigning myself.

Sister De Chantal reached into her pocket and frowned. "Oh, dear. Wait. Where is it?" More searching and fumbling, followed by a sigh. "Sister Juan, I beg your pardon. Mother gave me a conte crayon for your use, for the plaster drawing, and I've misplaced it."

"You have?" I cried, hardly daring to hope.

"This is very bad of me, dear Sister. I have failed in the practice of poverty, and set you a disedifying example."

"No, no, not at all."

"I humbly ask you to forgive me."

"Dear Mistress," I said, "with all my heart."

"It may be a week before Mother goes into town again," said Sister De Chantal, and my heart sank. Mother went to town any time the fit took her, sometimes twice a day.

"If you feel your concept needs work," said Sister De Chantal, with quiet emphasis, "perhaps you can employ the time to advantage."

And there it was. A fair shot at escape, delivered in the gentle, obscure language of the cloister, a dialect as full of implied meaning and inflection as speech at Kyoto's imperial court. At least a day to get a headcold, or sprain an ankle, or turn in a revised concept for the mural so modernist and revolting Mother would lose interest in the project entirely.

"Thank you, dear Mistress," I said, with deep feeling.

****

I couldn't resist. I was a poor excuse for a student of self-mastery and contemplation. I waddled into the refectory on the way back to my cell and accosted my fellow novice Sister Gabriel as she fretted over her pots and cleavers. It was a Feast Day and speech was permitted, after all.

"Hey, get me. I've joined the Sister Servants of the Hazardous Waste Disposal."

Sister Gabriel chuckled grimly. "You look like a religious Far Side cartoon."

There was something in her voice, a shadow in her usually merry eye. I let slip the dogs of intuition in the service of charity. Obliquely, of course.

"Smells great! What's for dinner?"

"Lobster," hissed Sister Gabriel, hacking at a carrot.

I knew what ailed her, poor creature. It was an open secret. Sister Gabriel had a besetting canker gnawing at her deeps. At the end of the day she was a Franciscan by nature -- she loved poverty and deprivation and thin blankets and the cold earth as her pillow. But for some reason that community tact didn't seek to discover, the Franciscans hadn't taken her, and she'd found her vocation with the Nuns of the Cenacle (of the Strict Observance). On paper this would have been no tragedy: the NCSO enjoyed a reputation as the most austere of orders, and God knew we slept little, toiled much, and chanted in choir until we swayed like birches.

But despite this general emphasis on hardihood, we ate like sultanas. Mother Regina attracted patronage and hard coin in freakish excess and she knew how to spend, according to her own Talmudic interpretation of the vegetarian diet imposed by our Rule. Hamburger was forbidden, but shrimp creole and swordfish were daily fare. Cooks without talent didn't last a day -- one indifferent attempt at stuffed mushrooms was enough to earn permanent exile from the kitchen range. But poor Sister Gabriel had the foul luck to have been trained as a chef, back in the crass world, and had been set over the refectory on her Clothing Day.

It was a hairshirt for Sr. Gabriel, a studded chain. During Holidays she laid out the obscene bounty with white lips and hooded eyes. The only time she seemed to relax and enjoy life was during the Black Fast -- the Lenten stretch during which we ate our breakfast crusts standing and eschewed even dairy. Sister Gabriel bounced through Lent on springs, elated by a diet of coffee, bare salad and black bread, and one had to feel a certain selfless pleasure on her behalf in those sere days. But Lent was a long way off. It was only Easter, and beyond it stretched the wide country of Ordinary Time, full of feasts and picnics and God knew what horrors. And clearly-readable moods were tremendously risky in all weathers. Sister Gabriel, I felt, needed to take the wide view.

"Still, it's all alms, isn't it?" I poked at some organic no-doubt-hideously-expensive kale. "We can't help what people give us. It would be impious to refuse, and, uh, deprive the giver of merit."

Sister Gabriel sighed.

"Ours is not to reason why, eh?" I persisted. "Obedience a mort, eh?"

"Right. Obedience. Right." Sr. Gabriel didn't exactly burst into song, as when all the clouds pass away and the light of harmony shines into a soul untainted by rebellion, but her stern nod showed that she had gained the upper hand and passed the worst shoal of the day. "Thank God for obedience."

"Now and forever," I chirped, waddling out.

"Or else I'd go nuts," I heard Sister Gabriel mutter, before I passed the door.


***


My cell charmed me. A low bed, tiles, bare walls, and another of the floor-length windows Mother did so well. Technically, it was our cell, because you never used the possessive in the cloister, unless you were talking about a gut ache. If a postulant went to Sr. De Chantal, as all inevitably did, and asked to lie down because our period was killing her, she learned immediately what was ours and what was the individual's personal cross. Faults were personal possessions, and so was pain. Everything else was held in common.

I got rid of my cupola-painting MOP gear and sat at my desk. Set into the plaster wall above it was a small alcove that served as a bookshelf, and from that I retrieved my sketchbook. Most sisters were permitted to keep a bible, the autobigraphy of our foundress, and one other improving book in the cell; I was allowed to keep a sketchbook as well, because of the art thing. Mother suggested it and dispensed me personally. Mother had a big pash for art and artists.

I flipped to one of the few remaining blank pages and thought hard. What did Mother Paulina hate most, in the current visual lexicon of the post Vatican II church? The faux-primitive style, surely, the bland and cynical minimalism that purported to channel the spirit of the early Christians. Stuff that tried to look like it was done by blockprint, or rubbed from a catacomb wall. Grapes, wheat, fish. Human figures that would have been considered crude in the time of Constantine. Oh, and abstraction -- Mother hated abstraction not merely as a matter of taste, but as a challenge to the order of creation flung directly in the face of God. Vital, therefore, to toss in a bit of old soul-numbing abstraction.

Within half an hour I had produced a rough so repellently modern it hurt to gaze upon it. Gone was my foolhardy Tiepolo-swipe of the Blessed Virgin's Assumption. In its place remained a cuckoo's egg of potential cupola concept: a semicircle of androgynous worshippers bearing wheat, arranged behind a pair of cavorting liturgical dancers under a seagull-infested sky.

"Nauseating," I breathed, profoundly satisfied. No scaffolds por moi.


****

The bell rang for Vespers. The soft slap of sandals converged from all corners of the monastery, heading for the choir. The postulants wore polyester skirts and capes and didn't need to prepare, so they went ahead. The rest of us peeled off and entered the chapter room, where we donned our choir mantles and veils as befitted a feast day. Eighteen amply-clad nuns topping their habits with vast mantles and veils made for a certain amount of hushed fumbling in the small space: it was a bit like an NFL locker room, except for the lack of nudity, of course, and the absence of all speech.

In spring enough light lingered at Vespers to leave the lamps off. The shadows were blue in the dim choir, and the long tapers of the Solemn Salve gleamed like ivory. The youngest postulants moved up the rows, lighting them in turn. When each sister held a burning candle in honor of the Blessed Virgin, Protectress and Queen, Mother rapped her choir stall once. We bowed profoundly, our veils whispering and floating, and began to sing.

****






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