Perhaps her smoky, sundown skin? She took her along as a ward to the post to which the difficult nun was now assigned-an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls in some desolate part of the North American West.
In white letters on a field of blue, a sign near the access road read christ the king school for native girls. Maybe that was what everybody meant to call it, but in Consolata's living memory only the nuns used its proper name-mostly in prayer. Against all reason, the students, the state officials and those they encountered in town called it the Convent.
For thirty years Consolata worked hard to become and remain Mary Magna's pride, one of her singular accomplishments in a lifetime of teaching, nurturing and tending in places with names the nun's own parents had never heard of and could not repeat until their daughter pronounced them. Consolata worshipped her. When she was stolen and taken to the hospital, they stuck needles in her arms to protect her, they said, from diseases. The violent illness that followed she remembered as pleasant, because while she lay in the children's ward a beautiful framed face watched her. It had lake-blue eyes, steady, clear but with a hint of panic behind them, a worry that Consolata had never seen. It was worth getting sick, dying, even, to see that kind of concern in an adult's eyes. Every now and then the woman with the framed face would reach over and touch Consolata's forehead with the backs of her knuckles or smooth her wet, tangled hair. The glass beads hanging from her waist or from her fingers winked. Consolata loved those hands: the flat fingernails, the smooth tough skin of the palm. And she loved the unsmiling mouth, which never needed to show its teeth to radiate happiness or welcome. Consolata could see a cool blue light beaming softly under the habit. It came, she thought, from the heart of her.
Straight from the hospital, Consolata, in a clean brown dress that reached her ankles, accompanied the nuns to a ship called Atenas. After the Panama call they disembarked in New Orleans and from there traveled in an automobile, a train, a bus, another automobile.
And the magic that started with the hospital needles piled up and up: toilets that swirled water clear enough to drink; soft white bread already sliced in its wrapper; milk in glass bottles; and all through the day every day the gorgeous language made especially for talking to heaven. Ora pro nobis gratia plena sanctificetur nomen tuum fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo, et in terra sed libera nos a malo a malo a malo. Only when they arrived at the school did the magic slow. Although the land had nothing to recommend it, the house was like a castle, full of a beauty Mary Magna said had to be eliminated at once. Consolata's first tasks were to smash offending marble figures and tend bonfires of books, crossing herself when naked lovers blew out of the fire and had to be chased back to the flame. Consolata slept in the pantry, scrubbed tile, fed chickens, prayed, peeled, gardened, canned and laundered. It was she, not any of the others, who discovered the wild bush heavy with stinging-hot peppers and who cultivated them. She learned rudimentary cooking skills from Sister Roberta and got good enough to take over the kitchen as well as the garden. She attended classes with the Indian girls but formed no attachments to them.
For thirty years she offered her body and her soul to God's Son and His Mother as completely as if she had taken the veil herself. To her of the bleeding heart and bottomless love. To her quae sine tactu pudoris. To the beata viscera Mariae Virginis. To her whose way was narrow but scented with the sweetness of thyme. To Him whose love was so perfectly available it dumbfounded wise men and the damned. He who had become human so we could know Him touch Him see Him in the littlest ways. Become human so His suffering would mirror ours, that His death throes, His doubt, despair, His failure, would speak for and absorb throughout earthtime what we were vulnerable to. And those thirty years of surrender to the living God cracked like a pullet's egg when she met the living man.
It was 1954. People were building houses, fencing and plowing land, some seventeen miles south of Christ the King. They had begun to build a feed store, a grocery store and, to Mary Magna's delight, a pharmacy closer than ninety miles. There she could purchase the bolts of antiseptic cotton for the girls' menstrual periods, the fine needles, the sixty-weight thread that kept them busy mending, mending, the Lydia Pinkham, the StanBack powder, and the aluminum chloride with which she made deodorant.
On one of these trips, when Consolata accompanied Mary Magna in the school's Mercury station wagon, even before they reached the newly cut road it was clear something was happening. Something unbridled was going on under the scalding sun. They could hear loud cheering, and instead of thirty or so energetic people going quietly about the business of making a town, they saw horses galloping off into yards, down the road, and people screaming with laughter. Small girls with red and purple flowers in their hair were jumping up and down. A boy holding for dear life onto a horse's neck was lifted off and declared winner. Young men and boys swung their hats, chased horses and wiped their brimming eyes. As Consolata watched that reckless joy, she heard a faint but insistent Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Then a memory of just such skin and just such men, dancing with women in the streets to music beating like an infuriated heart, torsos still, hips making small circles above legs moving so rapidly it was fruitless to decipher how such ease was possible. These men here were not dancing, however; they were laughing, running, calling to each other and to women doubled over in glee. And although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them.
It was some time before Mary Magna could get the pharmacist's attention. Finally he left the crowd and walked them back to his house, where a closed-off part of the front porch served as a shop. He opened the screen door and, politely inclining his head, ushered Mary Magna in. It was while Consolata waited on the steps that she saw him for the first time. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. A lean young man astride one horse, leading another. His khaki shirt was soaked with sweat, and at some point he removed his wide flat hat to wipe perspiration from his forehead. His hips were rocking in the saddle, back and forth, back and forth. Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha. Consolata saw his profile, and the wing of a feathered thing, undead, fluttered in her stomach. He rode on past and disappeared into the feedlot. Mary Magna emerged with her purchases, complaining a little about something or other-the price, the quality-and hurried to the station wagon, Consolata, behind her, carrying blue-tissued rolls of surgical cotton. Just as she opened the passenger door he passed again. On foot, running lightly, eager to return to the festive knot of people farther down the road.
Casually, perfunctorily, he looked her way. Consolata looked back and thought she saw hesitation in his eyes if not in his stride. Quickly she ducked into the sun-baked Mercury, where the heat seemed to explain her difficult breathing. She did not see him again for two months of time made unstable by a feathered thing fighting for wingspread. Months of fervent prayer and extra care taken with chores. Months of tension also, because the school had been enjoined to close. Although the endowment of the wealthy woman who founded and funded the order had survived the thirties, it was depleted by the fifties. The good, sweet Indian girls were long gone-snatched away by their mothers and brothers or graduated into a pious life. For three years now the school had been soliciting wards of the state: impudent girls who clearly thought the sisters were hilarious most of the time, sinister the rest of the time. Two had already run away; only four remained. Unless the sisters could persuade the state to send them (and pay for) more wicked, wayward Indian girls, the orders were to prepare for closure and reassignment. The state had wayward girls, all right, since wayward could mean anything from bedwetting to truancy to stuttering in class, but preferred to place them in Protestant schools, where they could understand the clothes if not the religious behavior of the teachers. Catholic churches and schools in Oklahoma were as rare as fish pockets. Which was why the benefactress had bought the mansion in the first place. It was an opportunity to intervene at the heart of the problem: to bring God and language to natives who were assumed to have neither; to alter their diets, their clothes, their minds; to help them despise everything that had once made their lives worthwhile and to offer them instead the privilege of knowing the one and only God and a chance, thereby, for redemption. Mary Magna wrote letter after letter, traveled to Oklahoma City and beyond, hoping to save the school. In that distracted atmosphere, Consolata's fumbling, dropping some things, scorching others, making rushed, unscheduled visits to the chapel, were nuisances to the sisters but not signs of alarm distinguishable from their own. When asked what the matter was or reprimanded for some intolerable lapse, she invented excuses or sulked.