Valley of Bones

Fourteen

What passes for goodness among us fallen humans is generally not much more than a mutual picking of lice from our fur, and a suspension of our desire to eat each other up, it is only social goodness, like the nanny telling the docile child what agood little boy. We must be good in that way, not killing stealing lying, so as to help us accumulate more of the world’s riches. Only God is really good, and only those who allow God’s reflected glory to shine out of them can be accounted good on earth. I didn’t know that then and so I was confused by my encounter with the nurse Sister Trinidad Salcedo. In a strange way (can you say this?) I was innocent of good. I was like a sexually pure girl from way back, a Victorian, say, who understands that there is something being hidden from her, because she is not totally isolated from society and she sees the signs all around her, the giggling factory girls, the innuendos, the looks of men in the street, and observes the behavior of her peers. She is curious, let us say, she feels cheated and incomplete, perhaps?what is this horrible thing I’m supposed to avoid that the world takes for granted, that the world thinks is the most important thing? So with me good was my forbidden fruit. I was attracted to it, and repelled at the same time. For if good was a fraud, like Ray Bob’s churchgoing, then I was just fine, a beast like the other beasts I now hung out with in the Market squat. But if not, if the worldwasn’t just Grab and Fuck, then

Then the world could not be borne. I say this now, knowing what I know now, but then it was not even a thought, just a psychic itch, a feeling of vague discontent, expressed as annoyance and short temper. I was reading stuff too, stuff I couldn’t understand too well because I didn’t get it and it pissed me off, how could glorious brilliant me not get everything on the page? I recall that when I read my Russians I had to put down Crime and Punishment because I couldn’t understand why the asshole turned himself in, what was thatstuff going on in his head, what confession and repentance meant. I mean I knew the words and their formal meanings, but the underlying thought had no grip on my savage mind.

Nevertheless, I read all the time. I had my whore-address library card and I was a frequent visitor to the Coconut Grove library in Peacock Park. Books was my street name by then. Hey, Books, whatcha reading? I would read to them sometimes, mainly books that had been made into movies, they ripped these off from stores or found them on trash piles, the kids especially, barely literate but they knew about Star Trek and Star Wars and Harry Potter. They couldn’t afford the movies but they wanted so much to be included in the great American media dream.

The life of the homeless: not much to say here, unromantic, dirty, violent in spurts, softened by drugs, sex, and booze. I could handle it pretty well, but what I really wanted was to get together with Orne Foy, and I didn’t know how to do that. I had his number and I called him from time to time, but he had nowhere to return the call. I tried giving him a phone booth number, but that got too frustrating, waiting there all day and going crazy when someone would come in and use it.

I also tried to attract the interest of Sister Trinidad, but no luck there either, I had imagined nuns were always trying to make you holy and get you to go to church like the church ladies in the Amity Street church back in Wayland, but apparently not, she seemed not to care much about that, only healing the bodies of the homeless, and that in a distracted manner, like her eyes were focused on another place entirely. She didn’t chat, she was close with information, she wouldn’t tell me what the brass angel meant and I didn’t like the way she looked at me like I was nothing in her eyes or like I had made a mess like a little kid and she was waiting for me to get hip to it so I could clean it up. I sensed that I bored her, which was insufferable. We can forgive bores, but never those who are bored by us as La Rochefoucauld says in my Quotation Book.

So one day when she hadn’t given me the treatment I thought I deserved as queen of the universe I went back to the Market in a bad mood. I decided to do some coke to cheer me up, I still had most of the bag I took from Jerrell’s place. It was daytime and the main squat was pretty cleared out except for the people sleeping off a drunk and the regular junkies and who should I meet there but Tommy and we did a number of lines together and then it seemed like a fine idea to go to one of the offices upstairs and have a fuck the poor dumb shit. I put it in his mind, an act of pure evil.

After that he was crazy for me, strange because Carmen loved him and would do anything for him, but men are like that I have found. He would send her off on errands for him, get him some food he had to have or cigarettes or out to panhandle and as soon as she was gone up to the offices, filthy places full of junk and broken glass and plaster dust and stinking of piss and cats, another romantic affair for Emmylou.

It was the plaster dust that gave us away, she spotted it on my back and she must have been smarter than I gave her credit for or maybe she was just smart about this one thing, because she came in on us while we were doing it and threw a screaming fit, and I cleared out for the rest of the day. To say the devil made me do it is now a joke, but I recall wondering all that day why I did such a foolish and uncalculating thing to a girl who had never done me anything but good, who had probably saved my life, with a man I didn’t particularly care for. But you know what I’m talking about now, Detective, you don’t think it’s such a joke.

It was getting dark by the time I got back to the Market and there were TV lights and flashing cop lights and bright beams from firetrucks pointed up at the tower above the Market where I could see Carmen up there, and a fireman on a ladder it looked like he was trying to talk her down. And the whole neighborhood was out, the usual idiots yelling jump jump, with the TV cameras pointed at us all to show the people at home how depraved we were on the street. A woman I knew told me Carmen’d been crying all day and getting any drugs she could into her, smack, crank, PCP, acid, whatever was around and I said if she jumps off she’ll probably fly but no she stepped into the sky just as the fireman was reaching out to her from his ladder and fell in the usual way and the woman gave me a look like she just stepped in dog shit.

Trini Salcedo was there too, in her van, and I went over and started talking to her, and before I knew it I was telling her the whole story about me and Tommy and Carmen. She listened and after I was finished asked me why I was telling her this and I realized that I didn’t know why and she said well you might want to think about that and she turned away and went back into her van and I recall it pissed me off considerably, me confessing and all and she just turned her back instead of I don’t know what all I expected, butsomething. If I had a weapon I swear I would have just murdered her then.

I headed back to the Grove. I recall being angry, fuming, cursing on the street like a crazy person, but I can’t recall what my anger was about and maybe I didn’t know even at the time. What had I expected the nun to do? Forgive me? I wasn’t really conscious that there was such a thing or that I needed it. Another feather touch from Him, a baby’s tug.

Because I was angry I did something dumb. Homeless was getting old I decided a bunch of sick losers and why was I hanging out with them anyway? Tommy acted like it was all my fault and bad-mouthed me around the Market as much as he could, like he was a baby in the big city I had seduced. I thought it was ridiculous, like high school, but I also noticed people avoiding me. Meanwhile, I still had maybe eight ounces of really pure coke left, which was running then at about two hundred a gram. Cut that in half for wholesale, and I figured I could score a little over twenty grand, enough for me to start a serious new life and so I put the word out on the street that I had half a pound of blow to sell and a couple of nights later I woke up to a kick in the ribs and a couple of guys standing over me, where’s the product, bitch. I guess I had counted on the people who lived there to give me some kind of warning, which we usually did for one another, but at that point I realized that the community such as it was had booted me out on account of what I’d done with Tommy, high school or not. Maybe they still believed in true love, I don’t know, or maybe it was Tommy who had set me up, revenge on the temptress.

I made a racket anyway, because there were often cops and social work types hanging out there and I saw flashlights go on and candles. The men cursed and beat at me and finally one of them slugged me on the head with something hard and I went limp. I wasn’t entirely unconscious, so I knew when they carried me out and tossed me in the back of a SUV. It was new, I could smell the new car smell and the cologne and sweat of the men. The problem with SUVs becoming fashionable among gangsters is that they don’t have trunks for jobs like this, but gangsters usually don’t think in such practical terms. They had me squashed down in the footwell of the rear seat. One of the men had his big Nike on my neck and the other two were in front. They were arguing in Spanish, with the man in the back putting a word in from time to time, and after we’d been driving for a while the driver yelled mierda and I heard the screech of brakes and a heavy pressure jamming me forward then a crash a tinkle of glass and two explosions as the airbags in front deployed. Maniacal cursing from the driver. The foot was off my neck. I could see it twitching above me along with its mate because the guy in back had flown over the front seats and crashed into the windshield and I wriggled upright and reached for the handle of the rear door. I heard the sound of the front doors opening and then a string of little pops like firecrackers going off that I knew weren’t firecrackers. One of the men groaned. The back door swung open and there was Orne Foy with a smoking machine pistol in his right hand. He reached out his other hand and pulled me out of the car. My head hurt real bad and when I touched where the pain was I felt a hot tender lump bigger than my thumb where they’d whapped me. I could hardly stand up so he threw his arm around my waist.

He said I been looking for you and I asked him how he’d found me and he said you were on television and I’ve been hanging around that squat for days now, nobody told you? No nobody did. He said he’d decided to search the place at night and had come by just as they were taking me out God had sent him as I now know but luck is what I thought then. I looked around. The SUV was jammed up against a power pole with its front stove in and two men were lying all splayed out dead with lots of blood flowing in black runnels under the anticrime lights and the front windshield was all blown to pieces with bullet holes so I guessed the third guy had never got out of the car. We were on Douglas between Grand and U.S. 1 and not a car in sight. A red Ford 150 Supercab pickup with oversize tires and a large dent in the quarter panel was standing there and we got in and drove away. It was pretty clear what had happened, he’d chased down the kidnappers and forced them into the power pole. Orne never talked about it after and I didn’t ask him, some kind of instinct that he didn’t like to talk much about operational details. At that point I was flying from the adrenaline and the relief and contented to go anywhere in the world in this pickup truck with Orne Foy the first man who ever killed anyone for me but not the last by far, oh no, may Christ have mercy on me.

I passed out as soon as the truck took off, lying on the bench seat in the back of the Ford cab, and when I woke up just after we crossed the Georgia line on 95 I was lying in the backseat of a Chevy Suburban. I checked to see if it was still him driving and it was so I drifted back into sleep. I didn’t ask any questions. I was so tired of knowing stuff and having to figure out what to do next.

It was a fourteen-hour drive all told. When he stopped for gas and food in Valdosta I took a handful of aspirins with my Coke. I wasn’t hungry, nauseous in fact, and returned to the backseat and heavy sleep. When I awoke it was late afternoon and we were off the interstate on a two-lane blacktop in mountains heavy with summer growth. I had never been in mountains before. I was hungry now and said so and he said we’ll be home soon. At this word I was filled with a feeling of happiness such as I hadn’t known for a long time, not since my daddy held me before I could read. The devil can gin up all the sweetest things to turn us from God. But it is true sweetness, not false, because itis of God, although we don’t know it. Satan himself got nothing in his pockets God didn’t put there.

We left the blacktop after a while and began to climb a steep gravel road, switching back and forth past ravines full of honeysuckle and deadfalls choked with kudzu and on the ridges tulip trees, mountain ash, dogwood, pin oaks, hickory not that I knew all the names then it was all a blank to me before I studied the land. We went through a swing pole stretched across the road with a sign on it: KEEP OUT PRIVATE. He asked me to get out and close it behind us and when I did I heard him talking into a portable radio. Then up an even steeper road with the big V-8 straining in four-wheel and when we rounded this one big slatey boulder Orne stopped us and shouted and in a couple of seconds a man in camo gear holding an assault rifle appeared like magic out of the brush. Orne introduced me, Wavell this’s Emmylou she’ll be staying with us. He nodded and disappeared back where he came from. We crossed a wooden bridge over a little bubbly branch and then we were in the place. Orne said this is Bailey’s Knob, the last piece of free America. It was like a little town, old houses and a couple of small trailers, smell of wood smoke and a deeper animal smell, which I recognized too well. Pigs I said sniffing and he said no just pig shit. I got out of the truck and suddenly the pain came back in full force the light was too bright and then it shuttered out to black like an old-time movie fade-out.

When I woke up I was in a small room, in a big old-fashioned high wooden sleigh bed, the dark lit by a yellow glow from a bug light outside the window. My head hurt so much it was making me nauseous and showing sharp colored lights every time I moved it. When my eyes adjusted I saw there was a woman in the room with me, small, slight with some kind of white headdress on that covered all her hair. I thought of the sisters in Miami and I said are you a nurse? But she didn’t answer and I asked where’s Orne? But she didn’t answer that either she just looked at me and smiled in a funny way. She had a long nose and strange long eyes like willow leaves. I asked her if I could have an aspirin or codeine and some water, but she just sat down on the bed and took my hand or that’s what I recall happening but then I must have blacked out again and then I woke up again and the woman was gone and so was my pain.

I felt well enough now to rise from the bed and leave the room. There was a narrow hallway outside and I stood still for a moment and tried to get the feel of the place. It reminded me of Gran’s house, that smell of dust and old paint and cooking you get in a wood house that’s been around for a while silent now except for the usual creaks and the wind outside and crickets. I could almost have been in Wayland except for the cool of the night and a kind of sulfur smell and a distant rumble of some engine. I found a bathroom and used it, washed my face and tried to straighten out my tangled hair, what a mess, bruises and smudgy rings under my eyes. Then I followed the light out to the front room.

Orne was lying on a cracked brown leather couch reading. I could just see the top of his yellow-haired head and the book’s pages and his feet in gray socks up on the other armrest and I just felt so good watching him that I didn’t say a word just looked around. There was a square enamel stove over in one corner of the room and a big scarred table and some chairs and a rag rug on the floor, a fireplace and a mantelpiece, an old rocker with a quilt on it, and the rest of the room was all books, thousands it seemed like, on shelves covering every wall from floor to ceiling except for where the windows poked through. And everything was neat as a pin, no clutter, the floors swept and mopped, and no books jammed anyhow into odd spaces in the shelves like they were at Gran’s, more like at the library.

I took a step and a plank creaked and up Orne shot like a snake, on his feet and the book gone flying a.380 tight in his hand. Shit he said and took a couple of deep breaths and put the little pistol in his pocket and he said I’m not used to other people in the house at night and I felt glad because it meant he didn’t have a girlfriend. He asked me how I felt and I said fine and asked him who the woman was who tended me. He looked at me funny then and said there was no woman it was I tending to you and no one else. And we agreed it must’ve been in a dream. He said I had been out more than twenty-four hours and he had been worried and if I hadn’t got up pretty soon he was going to take me down to the community hospital in Bradleyville.

My stomach growled just then astonishingly embarrassingly loud in the quiet room and we both laughed and he said come on we’ll get you fed. He had a big pot of stew, venison, we ate a lot of venison on Bailey’s Knob, the deer were swarming in the state forest and God knew we had plenty of guns and no respect for the hunting laws, although I didn’t learn that until later. He warmed some up and watched me eat like a hog, tipped back in his chair drinking a glass of murky beer. I had some too, malty and bread-tasting, homemade like most of the stuff we fed on. I asked him what the throbbing noise was and he said the generator, we’re off the grid here.

The question foremost in my mind then?actually the next foremost, since the first was when I was going to get into bed with him?was why he had come looking for me but I didn’t know how to say it, but then he seemed to read my mind and said the question and answered it. He’d been looking for a woman, young, trainable?he didn’t actually say that but that’s what he meant?bright, capable, and he thought I was the one. It was time for him to start a family, past time really but he had been so busy with his Work. Capital letters here because that’s what it always sounded like when he said it. I had heard some of this when he came and talked to me at Hunter’s place but now it all came out in a spate, me listening while I ate and nodding agreement. The great collapse was not far off, they were running out of time to prepare, the Bastards had ruined the world with their money and manipulations and thought control and there would be a blowup pretty soon, engineered plagues and nuclear war and anarchy, just like in those African countries, all the assholes thought we were immune but no and we had to prepare. Billions would die as the control systems collapsed and all those people who only knew how to manipulate symbols, who thought that symbols were real and thought the food came from a supermarket and energy came from the walls and water came from a tap and wastes just vanished by magic, they’d be helpless. The only people who’d survive would be the ones who understood the Real Stuff, who weren’t moral cowards whining to a dead god, no, after all the loser and dirt people were swept away we would found a new race and its foundation stone would be the people that the Bastards had disdained as white trash. Why? Because they were the best stock in the world, the descendants of Vikings and warrior Celts and Teutonic tribes, they’d come here with nothing and built here in these mountains the only decent civilization that had ever existed in America yeoman farmers proud and independent, free of social garbage from Europe and Africa and Asiatic hordes, until the Bastards had come to the Appalachians and destroyed everything decent with their commodity capitalism and their man-eating coal mines and now they were eating the land itself ripping mountains apart in their greed turning everything on the planet into money well let the Bastards try to eat their money and their fucking data when the day of doom arrived!

He wanted me to appreciate the funny part of it?the triumph of the trash paid for by dope that the Bastards needed because their miserable money-grubbing lives and their dead god couldn’t give them anything to live for, no decent food, no decent air or water, their heads full of TV crap concocted by Jews, no decent sex, their manhood dried up by the gray lives they had to lead to make the money they thought they need to buy the garbage the Jews and the faggots told them they had to have to be men…and on and on like this it must have been hours, and it made perfect sense to me as an explanation of the shittiness of the world although to be frank I had kind of lost focus when he mentioned decent sex. Although you might have thought that given my experiences in that line I would’ve been off the whole thing but you would’ve been dead wrong there because you know while all of that was going on from age nine I had only one thought in my head that I was holding on for someone who would make it all turn out right who would redeem my fouled body with blazing passion and wipe the stains away, redemption through sex a common American trope and I did not need any Jews or faggots to put it there either it is in the air of my native land.

I finished eating and he was still talking away, few are made for independence it is the privilege of the strong, Nietzsche, oh, my, could he wail on Nietzsche, pages of it in his head, his gospel, him and the two Toms, Jefferson and Paine, and he was still talking as I took my bowl and cup to the sink and washed and still talking when I turned around and he only ran down a little when I ripped my T-shirt off and yanked down my pants so I was jaybird naked and jumped up on him wrapping my legs around him and grabbing his still talking mouth with my mouth, but he shut up for a while after that and I made him fuck me on the cold enamel of the kitchen table.

As I reflect now I have to say that in all the time I was with him he never said he loved me nor did we exchange many words of tenderness. We lived with each other like fierce beasts an occasional snarl a cuff of the paw and then all submerged and forgotten in blazing sex. I believe many people live in this way and some of them write songs about how great it is and I thought it was great too I thought that was what lovewas. I love him still. If he walked through the door right now I might give it all up and follow him, I can’t be sure, my faith is so weak really it needs a bodyguard of saints. God will judge not me.

The next morning I got the tour. Bailey’s Knob was not a commune or even much of a community. It was a company town, Orne being a CEO straight out of Ayn Rand and the business was the growing of high-grade marijuana. I guess that the people who lived there more or less believed what Orne believed about the government, they were all some kind of survivalist type of person, but I never saw much organization aside from the guard roster, which everyone accepted as a business necessity. It wasn’t a Christian Identity center or any other kind of center and I doubt whether any of the people I met knew who Nietzsche was or cared. They were all lanky, pale people with light hair and tin-pail eyes, the children and grandchildren of miners tossed off their land by the strip mines or unemployed by the deep mines closing down. They had a grudge sure enough and guns and they weren’t going to send their kids to the town schools where they’d learn to despise who they were, like I had. They had no use for the kind of America they saw on TV, they didn’t understand it and didn’t want to. Not big fans of diversity but not exactly fascists either because while they respected Orne there was no cult of personality going on that I could see. They mainly wanted to be let alone, and if Orne gave them the opportunity to support themselves and their families they’d give him a wary loyalty and most of them believed that the world was really going to crash just like Orne said, or maybe they were just hoping it would and didn’t want to be left behind. The Foys, it turned out, were originally mountain people from around here. Most of them had lit out for north Florida and become the depraved tribe I had grown up with but some of them stuck, and Orne had come back and with money that came from no one knew where, had bought a whole mountain’s worth of busted coal mines and ruined streams and piles of spoil and started his business.

The heart of the operation was Caledonia Number Three, which was the name of his coal mine, in a gallery two hundred feet down inside the mountain. We took a cage elevator down, and it was not dark as a dungeon at all but full of blazing light from Gro-Lux lamps in long rows shining down on tables covered with long rubber tubs in which grew dense green marijuana plants over eight thousand of them at various stages from seedlings to harvest-ready. A team of women was moving up and down the line, tending plants, fertilizing from shoulder tanks, pinching buds into plastic pails, snipping and trimming. Orne said they regularly tested different plants for yield, part of the breeding program. Then we went to the processing center in a side adit where some other people men and women and young girls were stripping the buds from harvested plants and tossing the leaves and stems into a hopper, for later chopping and processing into low-grade weed and some were compressing buds into bricks with a hydraulic rammer. They wore masks so they could remember what they were there for and not work the whole day stoned from the fine intoxicating dust that hung yellow-green in the air and coated every surface. I got a buzz from five minutes in the place.

They had a shipping area too where they packed the bricks in shrink-wrap and loaded them into cartons. Orne moved bulk around the country in regular trucks and private planes just like UPS. He had a computerized billing system and inventory control. As a cover operation he bought crafts?dolls and quilts and rag rugs?from local women and shipped those out to mail-order. It explained the boxes going out air freight and washed the dope money.

He was moving tons of the stuff right out in the open like that and never a sniff from the cops, because according to him the cops and the DEA were set up to catch dummies really, not smart people like Orne or Kaczynski the Unabomber, a local hero, unless they’re betrayed by someone close to them. In another gallery of the mine he had the armory and we took a look at that too. He had every kind of weapon, pistols, rifles, machine guns, mines, rocket launchers, boxes of shells and ammunition, plus other military hardware like radios and generators and in another room stores of food and water for when the nuclear destruction came and they had to all sit it out down in the deeper tunnels where the radiation couldn’t follow. The electricity to run the place they generated from methane that came from a digester fed on hog manure from North Carolina and he also had a little steam generator that ran off of coal, but that wasn’t hooked up yet. We cooked with the methane too.

So I began my life on Bailey’s Knob. Everyone was friendly to me in that reserved, formal mountain way, except for a couple of the younger women who had their eyes cocked on Orne and were mad that I had got him instead, but nothing too bad. The whole place ran on kin spirit, they were all Randalls, Warrens, Wendells, Coles, more or less related to one another and to the Foys, because you couldn’t run an operation like that with just hired help. Any one of them could’ve blown us but none of them ever did and I will not blow any of them now by supplying names. The other thing about the Knob was no TV. There was no reception of course because of the mountains and no one wanted a satellite dish. They listened to the radio and made music themselves, like in the olden days, or watched movies on VCR. I thought it was real restful, not to have people blaring at you from commercials every night and besides it left more time to read. And no phones, no ringing to distract you, to bring news from the outside no electrical bane or boon interrupting life. No phones no taps, was Orne’s rule and he wouldn’t have one on the place. The pay phone outside the grocery in Tiptree was our only contact with the outside, and Orne paid the salary of a girl there all she did was answer the phone and take messages for him. Once or twice a day she’d ride up the mountain and deliver the messages and every couple of days or once a week Orne would go down there and make calls.

I was there two years and four months and in that time I guess I read every book in Orne’s library. There was all of Nietzsche, naturally, and near everything that anyone had ever written about him biographies and such, and some other philosophy and political science and economics, as long as it didn’t say anything good about religion or welfare or socialism. Besides that, most of the shelves were taken up with history and military history and how-to books, and reference works, so that when the world collapsed we could construct civilization again, but leave out the parts Orne didn’t like. There were no novels. Orne thought that fiction was a waste of time, and no poetry either except one book called the 500 Top Poems, some guy collecting the most anthologized poems, and Orne thought that was good enough, plus the complete works of Shakespeare. He also had a nearly complete collection of field manuals for the U.S. Army and a complete Loompanics catalog, all kinds of books on how to be a terrorist at home or change your identity and all.

Right off he taught me the business. The trade in domestic marijuana is much larger than most people think. In California it’s second only to grapes as a cash crop. I don’t know about Virginia, but I guess we were right up there with apples. Slade County hadn’t produced so much income since the Caledonia shut down. The prime sensemilla we grew went for over $200 an ounce on the street and paid us around forty dollars or $1,280 a kilogram and we shipped between 400 and 500 kilos a month so an income of half a million per. Figure 70 percent for salaries and overhead that’s still a lot of money and all of it went into gold, because Orne didn’t want to have his money in data when all the computers went to slag. Once a month he’d go to Roanoke and hire a private jet and fly around his distribution area, collecting his take and converting it into one-ounce ingots, maple leafs, Kruger-rands and when he had enough he would bury them around the property in gallon jars. He used a mil-spec GPS receiver and took a digital photo of the burial site and then he stored the photo in encrypted form along with the GPS coordinates on his little solar-power Argonaut ruggedized laptop. I learned how to do that too.

Besides this work, my time was my own. When I got sick of reading, I walked the land with map and guidebook, learning the trees and plants, sometimes with Orne, who knew it like his own face, and sometimes alone. They had built a watchtower on the rocky crest of the Knob and we would sometimes go up there and view our eight hundred acres. From there you could see the growing blanket of the state forests and watch it turn from green to golden and red and also the blighted areas where the coal companies were carving the tops off mountains and also St. Catherine’s Priory, lodged against its own hill, Sumpter Ridge across Crickenden Hollow from Bailey’s Knob, a set of blue-gray boxes among the trees. Orne pointed it out to me and said maybe they would sack it like the Vikings did when the end came. It was in my first autumn there that I saw snow for the first time, and was also for the first time cold in a cold wind and felt what it felt like to be hugged warm by someone else.

I’m sorry, you’re not interested in my delights, although it’s the case that the devil has a whole bag of them. Not like in the horror movies where the devil’s always obviously nasty, yellow eyes shooting flames from fingers making people fly into the walls, oh no he is as nice as pie and truly solicitous of your comfort. It is God who makes you cringe and hide your face and suffer pangs of torment, and flings you against the wall, not that I knew that then, and not that you know that now, but I pray you will learn.

What else? We played a lot of paintball, all joining in after work and on weekends, war with two teams or sometimes escape and evasion with three or four trying to get through and the others trying to keep us out. We took turns being commander. Most of the guys and some of the women had been in the service, so it was a pretty tough league and at the beginning I was usually killed fairly soon. I never got particularly good at being the commander, which is kind of strange, considering what happened later on. We did a good deal of shooting too, pistols rifles of all kinds machine guns rocket launchers. We had a 60 mm mortar and I got to shoot that and we also practiced making booby traps and blowing things up. Orne had the whole place packed with explosive devices and in case of a raid he intended to seal the mines under tons of rock, hopefully with all the narcs inside it. We tested these demo charges in unused tunnels. There is so much blasting in those hills from the mining that no one ever noticed our noise. I liked blowing things up, there is a luxurious thrill that goes through my body when I release a shot. Orne said I was a dab hand at it.

I didn’t meet Skeeter Sonnenborg until I was there for well over a year, in fact on October 10, 1989, because he had been away in some far corner of the globe, although I had heard a good deal about him from Orne and everyone else. Ol’ Skeeter. Remember that time when ol’ Skeeter run his motorcycle through that wedding in Boonetown? Or started the goat racing? Or got drunk and brought a girl back to his place having forgot he already had a girl there he just asked to marry him? Skeeter was the best buddy. On that morning I was lying in bed with Orne and about to either get up or do it again, when we heard a crackling of gravel and then the potato-potato-potato sound of a Harley-Davidson exhaust and Orne lit up a big grin and said damn it’s Skeeter back again. We got out of bed then and I was just looking around for something to put on when the door kicked open and there was Skeeter in his riding leather and his Nazi helmet. He ran his eyes over me and said nice tits honey and then jumped on Orne and they wrestled and whooped and punched each other down on the floor until Orne got him pinned in a hold and he hollered enough.

Well there is often a problem with the girlfriend and the best buddy. With Skeeter around Orne seemed to lose about twenty points of IQ, not that Skeeter was dumb far from it. He had gone to a fancy prep school name of Andover or Hand Over Your Money Daddy as he always called it and spent some time at the University of Pennsylvania before he dropped out in ‘73 and joined the marines, which is where he met up with Orne. They didn’t want to miss out on the war. He was obscure about where all he came from, allowing only that his daddy was a plutocrat and he didn’t have much to do with his people. That was strange to me, since among Orne’s kind you just didn’t leave your kin no matter what kind of low dogs they were but there were a lot of rules that didn’t seem to apply to Skeeter, including him making fun of Orne’s philosophical ideas. Skeeter didn’t believe in getting ready for the End of the World, nor strictly speaking did he believe in getting ready for the day after tomorrow. Or that’s how it seemed, although in fact he was a perfectly competent businessman. What he did was sell weapons. He lived in Kelso, Virginia, which was about fourteen miles away on the other side of Sumpter Ridge, where he ran an outfit called The Gun Nut. This was not just selling Remingtons and Colts to the locals. He was an arms dealer on a fair scale, and he traveled all over the world buying and selling lethal hardware. He was the first person who ever talked to me about Africa, but I have run out of pages so here ends the third book.

Shortly before the surrender of Metz to the Prussians, a frantic Georges de Berville shipped his daughter eastward to what he imagined would be the safety of Paris. Marie-Ange arrived in the capital on the second day of September, but within three weeks the city was besieged by the enemy. She lodged with her Aunt Aurore at first but soon gained admission to the Institute of Bon Secours as a postulant. Calledgardes malades, these women were devoted to the care of the sick, both rich and poor, in their own homes. All through the terrible winter of 1870 Marie-Ange worked ceaselessly in the poorer quarters of the Left Bank, bringing food, coal, and medicine when she could, bought from her own pocket at siege prices, and toward the end, when there was nothing to be had at any price, she brought a cheerful face and a comforting word.

Paris capitulated in January, but the agonies of the city were far from over. In March, the people of Paris revolted, and the revolutionary movement known as the Commune took over the city. During this time, Marie-Ange was working in Neuilly, which had been heavily bombarded by government forces. When the Commune began to arrest priests and religious, she merely changed her clothes, dropping the habit of Bon Secours and resuming the costume that had served her well in the Battle of Gravelotte.

That spring, the government forces advanced irresistibly, and the Communards were pushed back to a few heavily defended bastions. In the last week in May, Marie-Ange found herself in a wine cellar in Monmartre, where she had established a dressing station with no medicines but wine and no bandages but old sacking and the torn-up garments of the dead, washed in vinegar. By May 23, surrounded on all sides, subject to a ferocious cannonade, the Communards in the strongpoints of Monmartre lost heart and began to drift away. Her companions urged Marie-Ange to flee as well, for she could do nothing for the dying men and women in her charge, besides which, the attacking troops were shooting every rebel they encountered. She had almost been convinced of the futility of her plight when, as she later wrote, “all at once I became aware of a Figure at my side, the Blessed Virgin, who said to me, ‘As I did not desert my Son at the foot of the cross, remain faithful to your charges, for these too are beloved of Christ.’ So I composed myself for death with a good heart, although I was saddened that I would never more see my dear papa or my brothers short of our glorious reunion in paradise.”

Then she heard a final fusilade and the door crashed down. The soldiers made to bayonet the helpless wounded, but Marie-Ange threw her frail body in their way, and cried, “Soldiers of France! Are you not Christian men? In the name of Christ and his Blessed Mother, have mercy!” Despite this plea, it is likely that Marie-Ange de Berville would have been killed in that vile cellar, had not the Providence of God brought Lieutenant Auguste Letoque to the spot at that very moment. This young officer was a close friend of Jean-Pierre de Berville and had often been entertained at Bois Fleury. Striking the rifles away with his saber, he shouted, “Fools! Would you slay an angel!”

— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.