She watched Wendy take in the soft armchair, the bright pillows, and the throw rug she’d transported from the living room. “It looks good in here,” Wendy said. “Grunkie’s going to like it.”
The nickname came from a time when Wendy, at the age of three or four, had been struggling to fit her mouth around “Great-uncle Brendan” and had come up with those two childish syllables instead. When she said them now, she sounded eight rather than eighteen, but there was nothing childish in the way her smile disappeared when she saw the cross-stitched motto on the wall. “Do you want that in here?” she said. “Really?”
Wiloma nodded. “Really,” she said.
The scorn in Wendy’s voice annoyed her — surely anyone could see how the Church might heal Brendan, after all it had done for her. It was different, entirely different, from the other disciplines she’d sampled between Waldo’s departure and Courteney’s birth. She’d experimented with Zen, hours of sitting on a round black cushion and listening to the great drum and the ping of ceramic bells. In a Gurdjieff group she’d learned some of the movements; in the latihans of Subud, she had growled and cried and sung. Then one day she’d driven past a convent, which was hidden behind a wall and a row of trees, and she’d remembered how, when she was just a girl, she’d asked Brendan what he’d felt like when he’d first entered his abbey. Peaceful, he’d said. Clean. Whole. Happy. Feelings that, in those first few months after Waldo’s departure, she couldn’t imagine ever having again. She’d never been inside a Catholic church. Her parents had died before they’d settled the issue of which faith, Presbyterian or Catholic, would claim their children, and her grandparents had given up on church completely. But she remembered the light in Brendan’s face when he talked about his youth, and she wrote the Sisters and asked if she could visit them.
The Sisters mailed her a blue pamphlet with a text handprinted on coarse paper. Inside were prayers and a daily schedule and a number of photographs: women in calf-length white dresses and black tunics and short white veils, women in work clothes and boots and glasses and scarves that hid their hair. Women milking cows, fixing tractors, cutting melons into quarters; praying, eating, baking, doing useful work. The pictures were hugely appealing and the note clipped inside the brochure said that Wiloma was welcome anytime for a weekend retreat.
She hadn’t gone; she’d shown the brochure and the note to Brendan, sure that he’d approve, and he’d suggested, gently, that perhaps she work up to a retreat in steps. Find a church you like, he’d said. A priest you trust. Join a prayer group and see about some religious training. He had asked her what she knew about the Catholic Church these days and she’d had to admit she knew almost nothing. “It’s a big commitment,” he’d said. “Starting from scratch at your age.”
She had gone twice to St. Mary’s, a mile from her house, but the services had made no more of a dent in her distress than had her other experiments. The convent was worlds away, she’d seen. Even a visit was years in the distance. And then her Manual had arrived in the mail, in response to a coupon she’d forgotten she’d filled out, and its quiet voice had begun to speak to her.
Spirit is real; matter is unreal. Truth is real; error is unreal. Light is real; darkness is unreal. The voice was simple, the voice was clear. It spoke the words she’d been yearning for. She had fallen into the Church’s warm embrace and had never turned back — not when Brendan had expressed his dismay, not when her own family mocked her.
Now she watched her daughter frown and change the subject. “Soft,” Wendy said, as she sat down on the edge of the bed and tested the egg-crate mattress. “Sort of strange.”
“How was your visit?” Wiloma asked.
“Also strange,” Wendy said. Stranger than usual. Sarah made cassoulet — she said it had taken her two days and she was upset when Win didn’t like it. But it tasted a lot like baked beans to us. Win gave Courteney some of his, and Courteney threw it in the fireplace. Dad and Sarah got into an argument over some bills. Then after supper Dad took us into that den of his and started showing us maps of this place in Massachusetts. Some of them were topographic maps, those green ones with the lines. Then he had these old ones, not really old but copies of old ones, that he said he’d ordered from the Geological Survey people in Washington. He kept us in there looking at them for an hour.”
Wiloma looked at her sharply. “What was that all about?”
“Grunkie. I think. Dad showed us, on the old maps, this place where Grunkie used to live. And then he showed us the new ones, and how that place had been covered by a reservoir. He said there was a big hill or something at the edge of it that Grunkie still owns, and that you and Uncle Henry had been born there.”
Wiloma stared at the armchair and tried to sort out what Waldo might be up to. She had mentioned the land to him casually, when he’d stopped by to drop off some papers just after her visit to her uncle. It had seemed like an interesting fact, a drop of oil to smooth their awkward conversation, but she’d known as soon as she mentioned it that she should have kept quiet. “Don’t you dare go giving that to the Church,” he’d said, as if he had any right to tell her what to do. “Don’t do anything with it until I have a chance to get it appraised.”
She had shrugged off his comments, thinking them just another example of his reflexive attempts to meddle in her financial affairs. But she couldn’t imagine why he’d gathered those maps, or why he’d shown them to the children.
“It was interesting,” Wendy said. “How come you never told us about that? This huge area, all these villages being drowned — isn’t that amazing? I mean it’s awful, in a way, but still …”
“I never saw those places,” Wiloma said. Her stomach was beginning to ache. “The reservoir was filled before I was bom.”
“Dad says Grunkie lived there, and that your grandparents had a farm there before they had the place in Coreopsis. It’s so amazing — do you think Grunkie remembers it?”
“Of course he does,” Wiloma said. “He just doesn’t like to talk about it.” She didn’t either; she had heard the story so often during her childhood that she couldn’t stand to repeat it.
“They stole it from us,” Da used to say. He’d held her and Henry captive for hours at the table in Coreopsis, telling and retelling his tales of the Paradise Valley as if he could bring his dead son back with his words or recover his lost life. She’d known, even then, that those tales were what kept him from functioning as any kind of surrogate father. “Those men in suits, those Boston men — it was Curley and his gang, all that Boston gang, they stole the ground out from under our feet.”
On and on he’d gone, about the engineers and the politicians and the cover-ups and the lies; about the woods chopped down and the buildings razed and the bodies exhumed from the cemeteries. And then about what had happened to the twenty-five hundred people who’d been displaced at the height of the Depression — how some, such as Wiloma’s father, had migrated to the nearby towns on the boundary of the watershed, while others, such as he and his wife, had left Massachusetts altogether and wandered through western New York until they found someplace where they felt safe.
“Someplace cheap enough,” Da had said. “Not just safe enough, cheap enough — those bastards hardly gave us any thing. Farms that had been in our families for generations, and what did they give us? Jack shit.”