I turned the page to August 16 and found something else. Sr. A, letter. Questioned Sr. R & Sr. O. Sister A must be Sister Anne, whom the letter-writer had chastised for lewdly baring her nakedness. Sister O-well, I knew who that was. Sister R? She was new to my cast of alphabet characters. I ran my finger down the roster and counted eight Rs: Ramona, Rachel, Rowena, Ruth, Rosabel, Rose,
Rosaline, Regina. Nine, including Sister John Roberta. I sighed. It was too bad that R names were so popular in this order. It was really too bad that Mother Hilaria had been so cryptic. If she had only used names instead of initials, I'd know which of the nine Rs she had questioned. But that was information I could get from Sister O, who would surely remember the August sixteenth conversation.
I turned the pages and found more brief notations. Phoned Rev Moth G, re: problems, but on retreat at Moth Hs. Which of her problems had Mother Hilaria wanted to discuss? The trust accounts? Dwight? The letters? But Rev Moth G (Reverend Mother General, I assumed) had apparently remained incommunicado at the Moth Hs (the Mother House?) for quite some time. The diary didn't indicate that Mother Hilaria had succeeded in talking to her.
There was nothing more of interest until August 22, the day Sister Anne's swimsuit was found draped on the cross. Sr. A's suit!!, the outraged entry read. Questioned Sr. 0 & Sr. R again. The remaining entries in August were focused on financial affairs-Bank re: statements, Tom Sr re: funds, bank re: note. September 1 was blank. September 2's entry consisted of just one word, underlined.
I stared at the single word. Somebody else had gotten a letter, but who? Mother Hilaria? If so, what had happened to it? Had she destroyed it, or was it still among her possessions?
That was the last entry. On September 3, Mother Hilaria had died. Sometime after that, Dwight had stolen her journal.
Chapter Seven
Several years ago, a newspaper reporter interviewed me for an herb article. After the interview, the reporter arranged to trade some herb plants with me. He wanted to show me some comfrey, which he had tried in salads and found extremely bitter tasting. The next day I went to his office and there, sitting on a file cabinet, was a box of first-year foxglove plants! To the novice, comfrey and foxglove have a similar appearance. Earlier that same year (1979), an elderly couple had eaten what they thought were comfrey leaves. It was foxglove, and both died within twenty-four hours.
Steven Foster Herbal Renaissance
Sister Gabriella's garlic operation wasn't exactly what you'd expect in a monastery. Neither was she, come to that. She was tall and strong, and she swung her arms energetically as she talked, her gestures punctuating her rich Southern speech.
"When we first came out here, there were only ten of us, and we had just an acre of plants," she said as we walked through the big, airy barn. "When harvest time came, we dug the garlic with forks and shovels."
"Wasn't that hard on everybody's back?" I asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to spade up an entire acre of garlic. And even after it was dug, the job wouldn't have
been done. The sisters had to remove the dirt, dry the plants, separate the bulbs from the tops… People who buy garlic in little cellophane packages have no idea what they're missing.
She chuckled. "You bet. But we were new in the business and everybody was willing. A couple of years later, though, we doubled the acreage, and I started to hear grumbling. Mother Hilaria tried to convince the sisters that they'd get a couple of extra days in paradise for every garlic bulb they dug, but they didn't buy it. So when we doubled the acreage again, I went looking for an old-fashioned chisel plow, like the one my grandfather used to have back in Kentucky." She gestured at a piece of equipment in the corner. "Found it in a junkyard over in Johnson City. All that was wrong with it was a quarter-inch of rust and a broken strap. Now, I just set the tractor tires into the irrigation furrows and drop that plow-point between the rows. The plants still have to be pulled, but at least they're loose. No more spadework."
I grinned at the picture of tall, strong Sister Gabriella poking around a Johnson City junkyard looking for a secondhand chisel plow. "What happens after the garlic's pulled?"
"We used to cart it up here in wheelbarrows and dunk it in a tub to wash off the dirt. Then we'd lay it out on that cement over there to dry." She shook her head pityingly. "Lord sakes, that was work. Happy garlic grows three feet high, and we harvest the whole thing, not just the bulb. That's a lot of leaf to be totin' around."
I shook my head, imagining the size of the job. "It was a good thing you had conscripts," I said. "You probably couldn't have found enough people willing to work that hard for what you could pay."
Gabriella grinned. ' 'We had a good crop of novices those years. And Sadie, bless her heart, donated a beat-up old Ford pickup, which we traded for a front-end loader for our tractor." She gestured in the direction of a dusty, antique-
looking dinosaur of a tractor. ' 'Then we built some garlic flats-chicken wire on board frames, six feet long by three feet wide by two feet deep-that we lay on the loader. Now, after the field's plowed, we pull the garlic and lay it in a rack. When one rack's filled, we stack on another. When they're all filled, I haul the load up here. We restack the garlic into those thirty-foot-long storage racks in that cement block building over there."
"It looks like a great system," I said.
She nodded. "There's still plenty of toting and hauling. From planting to market we handle the garlic eight times. If we braid it, we handle it twice more. In a good year, we'll move over two tons of the stuff."
I whistled. Two tons of St. T's famous rocambole. "It's all gone by spring, I suppose."
' "The biggest cloves are back in the ground by October. The market-grade stuff we sell as bulbs, retail and wholesale. The plants with the best tops we braid into ristras and wreaths and swags, along with chilies and dried flowers. Buckwheat, statice, strawflowers, cockscomb-the usual stuff. Sister Cecilia is in charge of that part of it. She also grows a few specialities. Chiles, gourds, strawberry popcorn. With the garlic, they make nice wreaths."
I looked around. "You've got lots of storage, plenty of labor, decent equipment. You've got water for irrigation and room for more fields. How big could the operation get?"
She grew thoughtful. ' "That depends. We could plant another acre or two of garlic and sell it easily. With an expanded marketing effort, we might sell fifty or a hundred percent more. We could grow more flowers and market fhem with the garlic, and just about double our revenue." She lifted her broad, capable shoulders, let them fall. ' 'We could get big, sure. We could make a lot more money. But why?"
I cocked my head at her. ' 'Why?''
"Well, sure. Work is good for the soul, and we can al-
ways use a little more money. But we need time for prayer and study more than we need money." A half-grin cracked her weathered face. "Woman does not live by work alone, you know."
I thought of the shop back home and the hours I'd poured into it last fall. Had I been brought all the way to St. Theresa's just to hear this bit of advice?
She grew sober. "Anyway, you know what's happening here. The garlic operation isn't likely to expand. In fact, the crop in the ground may just turn out to be our last."