EIGHT
When Harris Squires told Tula, “Your friend, Carlson, must be in a lot of pain because he wants you to come to the hospital,” she knew he was lying, but the voice in her head told her to get into Squires’s big, rumbling truck anyway and go with him.
This was early the next morning, several hours after the EMTs had refused to let Tula ride in the ambulance, and after many more hours that she had spent in hiding.
The girl knew it was unwise to linger near the lake, inviting questions from the police. So she had wandered off to her tree to speak with the owls, but the owls were not calling, possibly because of all the noise and flashing lights.
Even so, she waited, sitting alone in the high limbs of the banyan, where she could observe the actions of her second patron, Tomlinson, and his friend, the large man with eyeglasses, who was speaking with police.
Tula focused on Tomlinson, who was talking to Squires. She sensed her patron ’s good heart and godliness, and also that he was angry about something. He was angry at the landlord, perhaps, who had used God’s name to blaspheme them even though they had saved his life.
Yes… the man was angry at Squires. Tula had watched Tomlinson walk toward the huge landlord, and, for a moment, she thought he might strike him. Instead, the two men exchanged loud words that weren’t always loud enough for her to hear, but she heard enough. Tula knew they were talking about her and she listened carefully.
Soon, she felt ashamed because she realized that the landlord was telling the patron about seeing her naked in the bathtub. The girl felt her face become hot, and she felt like sobbing.
No man had ever seen Tula naked before, and very few women. Sitting in the tree, she had vowed to herself that it would never happen again. Ever. Not as long as she lived-unless, of course, the voice in her head, the Maiden’s voice, told her that she should marry. But that seemed unlikely, and, even then, Tula would not want it to happen.
The Maiden had gone to her death a virgin. Tula knew this was true, just as she knew every detail of the saint’s life because, at the convent, Sister Lionza had given her books about Joan of Arc. Tula had read those books so many times that she knew them by heart.
Her favorite book was a simple volume that included only words that the Maiden had written in her own warrior’s hand or had spoken before witnesses. Tula loved the book so much that it was one of the few things she had brought with her from the mountains of Guatemala. Its entries spanned the saint’s childhood, included her lionhearted testimony at her trial and, finally, her last words as flames consumed her body:
Jesus! Jesus!
There was no intrusive scholarship in the book. No third-party guessing about what the Maiden had thought or felt.
That small book was pure, like the Maiden herself. Tula carried it everywhere and had read it so often that her own patterns of speech now naturally imitated the passionate rhythms of the girl who had been chosen by God.
Tula knew that imitating the Maiden’s style of speaking caused some people to look at her strangely, but she took it as an affirmation of her devotion. The book had been a great comfort to Tula on the journey from the mountains to this modern land of cars and asphalt by the sea.
Tula had memorized several favorite passages. There were many that applied to her own life:
When I was thirteen, a voice from God came to help me govern myself. The first time I heard it, I was terrified. The voice came to me about noon; it was summer, and I was in my father’s garden. I had not fasted the day before. I heard the voice on my right. There was a great light all about.
Soon afterward, I vowed to keep my virginity for as long as it should please God…
Tula had not been in her father’s garden, of course, when the Maiden’s voice first came. Her father had been murdered by the revolucionarios as Tula, age eight, watched from the bushes. The memory of what she had seen, heard and smelled was so shocking-her father’s screams, the odor of petrol and flesh-that her brain had walled the memory away in a dark place.
Little more than a year later, when Tula began to feel at home at the convent, the dark space in her soul had opened slowly to embrace the Maiden’s light.
Another favorite line from the book was: I would rather die than to do what I know to be a sin.
When Tula whispered those words, she could feel the meaning burn in her heart. She had whispered the phrase aloud many times, always sincerely, as an oath to God. The words were clean and unwavering, like the Maiden’s spirit. Tula could speak the phrase silently in the time it took her to inhale, then exhale, one long breath.
I would rather die than to do…
… what I know to be a sin.
Tula longed for the same life of purity, for it was the Maiden’s writing that had first sent her into the trees to seek her own visions. The Maiden, Tula had read, had often sought God’s voice in a place called the Polled Wood, in France, where she had sat in the branches of a tree known as the Fairy Tree.
Tula doubted if she would ever see France, but Florida had to be more like Orleans than the jungles of Quintana Roo.
It was strange, now, to sit in a Florida banyan tree so far from home, watching the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles. The Maiden’s visions, Tula remembered, were always accompanied by bright light, which caused the girl to concentrate even harder on what she was seeing.
The lights pulsed blue and red, exploding off the clouds, then sparking downward, rainlike, through the leaves. The lights were brighter than any Tula had ever seen, lights so piercing, so rhythmic, that they invited the girl to stare until she felt her body loosen as her thoughts purified and became tunneled.
Soon, Tula slipped into a world that was silent, all but for the Maiden’s voice-Jehanne, her childhood friends had called the young saint. Jehanne’s voice was so sure and clear, it was as if her moist lips touched Tula’s ear as she delivered a message.
It was a message Tula had heard several times in the last week.
You are sent by God to rally your people. The clothing of a boy is your armor. The amulets you wear are your shields…
Fear not. I speak as a girl who knew nothing of riding and warfare until God took my hand. We drove the foreigners away because it was His will. He provided the way.
You, too, are God’s instrument. You will gather your family in this foreign land, and free them from their greed. You will lead them home again, where they can live as a people, not slaves, because it is His will.
Trust Him always. He will provide the way for you.
Tula loved the solitude of trees. She loved the intimacy of this muscled branch that was contoured like a saddle between her legs. Once, as the saint’s voice paused in reflection, Tula found the nerve to whisper a question with a familiarity that she had never risked before.
“Jehanne? Holy Maiden? I think of you as my loving sister. Is this wrong? I have to ask.”
I am the God-light that lives within you, the Maiden’s voice replied. We are one. Like twins with a one soul.
Sisters? Tula hazarded, thinking the word but not speaking it.
Forever sisters, the Maiden replied. Even when you leave this life for the next.
For more than two hours, Tula had sat motionless in the tree as the Maiden spoke to her, providing comfort and the governing voice of God. She was only vaguely aware when her patron, Tomlinson, walked beneath the tree, calling her name, followed by the large man with eyeglasses. Whose name, she had learned, was Dr. Ford.
There was something unusual about her patron ’s friend, she realized vaguely, as the two hurried past. Something solid and safe about Dr. Ford… But the man was cold, too. His spirit filled Tula with an unsettling sensation, like an unfamiliar darkness that was beyond her experience.