"Your help." Her voice was soft, noncommittal. No judgment, no pleading.
"I can't help you."
"You can if you want to."
"What kind of help are you looking for?"
"I can't have this child."
Hot water splashed from the spout to the saucer. Consolata put down the kettle and sopped the water with a towel. She had never seen the woman-girl really, not out of her twenties-but there was no confusion from the moment she stepped inside about who she was. His scent was all over her, or hers was all over him. They had lived together close enough long enough to breathe phlox and Camay soap and tobacco and to exhale it in their wake. That and some other thing: the scent of small children, the lovely aroma of sweet oil, baby powder and a meatless diet. This was a mother here, saying a brute unmotherly thing that rushed at Consolata like a forked tongue. She dodged the tongue, but the toxin behind it shocked her with what she had known but never imagined: she was sharing him with his wife. Now she saw the pictures that represented exactly what that word-sharing-meant.
"I can't help you with that! What's wrong with you?"
"I've had two children in two years. If I have another…"
"Why come to me? Why you asking me?"
"Who else?" asked the woman, in her clear, matter-of-fact voice.
The poison spread. Consolata had lost him. Completely. Forever. His wife might not know it, but Consolata remembered his face. Not when she bit his lip, but when she had hummed over the blood she licked from it. He'd sucked air sharply. Said, "Don't ever do that again." But his eyes, first startled, then revolted, had said the rest of what she should have known right away. Clover, cinnamon, soft old linen-who would chance pears and a wall of prisoner wine with a woman bent on eating him like a meal?
"You get on out of here. You didn't come here for that. You came to tell me, show me, what you're like. And you think I'll stop when I know what you're willing to do. Well, I won't."
"No, but he will."
"You wouldn't have come here if you thought so. You want to see what I'm like; if I'm pregnant too."
"Listen to me. He can't fail at what he is doing. None of us can.
We are making something."
"What do I care about your raggedy little town? Get out. Go on.
I have work to do."
Did she walk all the way home? Or was that a lie too? Was her car parked somewhere near? Or if she did walk, did nobody pick her up? Is that why she lost the baby?
Her name was Soane, and when she and Consolata became fast friends, Soane told her she didn't think so. It was the evil in her heart that caused it. Arrogance dripping with self-righteousness, she said. Pretending a sacrifice she had no intention of making taught her not to fool with God's ways. The life she offered as a bargain fell between her legs in a swamp of red fluids and windblown sheets. Their friendship was some time coming. In the meanwhile, after the woman left, Consolata threw a cloth bag of coins at Penny and Clarissa, shouting, "Get out of my face!"
While the light changed and the meals did too, the next few days were one long siege of sorrow, during which Consolata picked through the scraps of her gobble-gobble love. Romance stretched to the breaking point broke, exposing a simple mindless transfer. From Christ, to whom one gave total surrender and then swallowed the idea of His flesh, to a living man. Shame. Shame without blame. Consolata virtually crawled back to the little chapel (wishing fervently that He could be there, glowing red in the dim light). Scuttled back, as women do, as into arms understanding where the body, like a muscle spasm, has no memory of its cringe. No beseeching prayer emerged. No Domine, non sum dignus. She simply bent the knees she had been so happy to open and said, "Dear Lord, I didn't want to eat him. I just wanted to go home."
Mary Magna came into the chapel and, kneeling with her, put an arm around Consolata's shoulder, saying, "At last."
"You don't know," said Consolata.
"I don't need to, child."
"But he, but he." Sha sha sha. Sha sha sha, she wanted to say, meaning, he and I are the same.
"Sh sh sh. Sh sh sh," said Mary Magna. "Never speak of him again."
She might not have agreed so quickly, but as Mary Magna led her out of the chapel into the schoolroom, a sunshot seared her right eye, announcing the beginning of her bat vision, and she began to see best in the dark. Consolata had been spoken to.
Mary Magna spent money she could not afford to take the household on a trip to Middleton, where each of them, but especially Consolata, confessed and attended mass. Clarissa and Penny, models of penitence, urged without success a visit to the Indian and Western Museum advertised on the road. Sister Mary Elizabeth said it was an unwise way to spend post-confessional time. The long ride back was silent except for the shish of missal pages turning and occasional humming from the last of the school's clientele.
Soon only Mother and Sister Roberta were left. Sister Mary Elizabeth accepted a teaching post in Indiana. Penny and Clarissa had been taken east and, as was later learned, escaped from the bus one night in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Except for a money order, made out to Consolata and signed with a storybook name, they were never heard from again.
The three women spent the winter waiting, then not waiting, for some alternative to retirement or a "home." The independence the mission was designed for was beginning to feel like abandonment.
Meanwhile they took steps to keep up the property and not incur debt the foundation could not meet. Sargeant Person agreed to lease land from them for rough corn and alfalfa. They made sauces and jellies and European bread. Sold eggs, peppers, hot relish and angry barbecue sauce, which they advertised on a square of cardboard covering the faded blue and white name of the school. Most of their customers in 1955 drove trucks between Arkansas and Texas. Ruby citizens seldom stopped to buy anything other than peppers, since they were supreme cooks themselves and made or grew what they wanted. Only in the sixties, when times were fat, did they join the truckers and look upon what they called Convent-bred chickens as superior enough to their own to be worth a journey. Then they would also try a little jalape+-o jelly, or a corn relish. Pecan saplings planted in the forties were strong in 1960. The Convent sold the nuts, and when pies from the harvest were made, they went as soon as posted. They made rhubarb pie so delicious it made customers babble, and the barbecue sauce got a heavenly reputation based on the hellfire peppers. It was an all-right life for Consolata. Better than all right, for Mary Magna had taught her patience as the first order of business. After arranging for her confirmation, she had taken the young Consolata aside and together they would watch coffee brew or sit in silence at the edge of the garden. God's generosity, she said, is nowhere better seen than in the gift of patience. The lesson held Consolata in good stead, and she hardly noticed the things she was losing. The first to go were the rudiments of her first language. Every now and then she found herself speaking and thinking in that in-between place, the valley between the regulations of the first language and the vocabulary of the second. The next thing to disappear was embarrassment. Finally she lost the ability to bear light. By the time Mavis arrived, Sister Roberta had gone into a nursing home and Consolata had nothing on her mind but the care of Mary Magna.
But before that, before the disheveled woman in thong slippers hollered at the edge of the garden, before Mary Magna's illness, still in a state of devotion and light-blindness, and ten years after that summer of hiding in a gully behind a house full of inhospitable ash people, Consolata was tricked into raising the dead.
They were subdued years. Penance attended to but not allconsuming. There was time and mind for everyday things. Consolata learned to manage any and every thing that did not require paper: she perfected the barbecue sauce that drove cattle-country people wild; quarreled with the chickens; gave hateful geese a wide berth; and tended the garden. She and Sister Roberta had agreed to try again for a cow and Consolata was standing in the garden, wondering where to pen it, when sweat began to pour from her neck, her hairline, like rain.