Valley of Bones

Seventeen

It seems like all we did that winter was talk, the three of us in Orne’s living room around the hot cube of the stove occasionally tossing in a chunk of oak and pulling out of our mouths some idea, cut to size, quartered, aged, and dry like the wood. It was mostly me and Skeeter who talked, which I found strange because Orne had always been the biggest talker I knew, but he seemed content to sit sipping home-brewed beer or corn liquor and listen to us chop logic.

Topping was what our conversation was mainly about, I have to say that even though Skeeter was supposed to be Orne’s best pal he was mean to him in a sly way that for some reason Orne didn’t seem to resent, always putting him down about things of the mind. He was hard as blazes on old Nietzsche because he knew Orne had sort of built the whole structure of his life on that philosophy, and Skeeter had got pretty good at tearing it down. Nee Chee, he would say, how can you take him seriously? He never made any money and he never got laid. What the fuck good is his philosophy if he never made any money and never got laid, when the point of his philosophy was you ditch God and then you’re the superman and you can do what you want, and here’s superman Nee Chee wandering around Europe jerking off in low-end hotels collecting cheap soup in that stupid mustache. And more like that.

So I am drifting again. This is not the important material. The important thing was that Orne was fading away from me that winter. I thought it was because I couldn’t get pregnant and Orne was a planning man and a planning man don’t like it when his plans go awry even in a small detail like that. I said I could go to a fertility clinic I looked up in Roanoke, but he said no because he didn’t trust doctors. He had a couple of theories about them too. It never did occur to me that every time I wasn’t there Skeeter was tearing me down to his best buddy, but I didn’t find that out until it was much later and didn’t matter anymore.

So one day he was off on one of his trips without even a farewell fuck like we used to and near as soon as his dust had settled on the road the best buddy was trying to get into my pants. And I wouldn’t let him and it really peed him off, because we were not what you would call a moral bunch, a point he made a good deal of. I mean why not? What’s a fuck between friends after all, why is it different from borrowing a truck or a tool, he would say, Orne won’t mind, you want me to ask him? In fact, I can see he’s trying to get rid of you already, and listen, darlin’, I wish I had a dollar for every time Orne and me switched off girlfriends, I mean whatis your problem?

On the other hand…I guess that besides being tedious and all it was also interesting to be courted that hard, something you kind of miss in the whore business, and Skeeter was an interesting man aside from him being a bandy rooster type with the shaved head and the tats, although built up from lifting weights. He really had been to all those places, buying and selling weapons, and occasionally he would seem to forget about his seduction routine and just go on about Abidjan and Mombasa and Nairobi and the mountains of the moon and the Andes and slipping planes into secret airports at night and the sweating faces of desperate men shining in the light of flares.

So one day, Orne still gone who knew where, Skeeter said to me I have to go see a Depot of the Damned and would I like to come and I said what’s that and he explained about how army units accumulated stuff that they weren’t supposed to have and the officers and NCOs lied about it and hid it during inspections in some truck or other and that after a while the stuff got too conspicuous and they had to get rid of it, no questions asked, and Skeeter supplied the disappearing service. He was a pilot, did I mention that? We flew down to Georgia in a Cessna and he wore me down so I let him fuck me in the back of the plane just to get past it and to get back at Orne too and it turned out to be my very last voluntary fuck as I shall tell.

It is real hard to practice evil unless you are a hypocrite, and lie to yourself about what you’re really doing. I have seen a lot of evil men in my time and Skeeter Sonnenborg was one of the few I met who didn’t lie in that way?he was bad and gloried in it?and another good part about him I have to say is he didn’t hold a grudge, he was not that flavor of evil. He bought me a big box of fudge at the airport and stuck his business card from the Gun Nut onto it with a note that said anytime, babe, and boy was it stupid I meanfudge but it touched me because I had not experienced much in the way of gifts without some immediate payoff expected.

Orne got back the next day and he was colder than he had been before he left. The problem with living like fierce beasts is that not much talking goes on and if your credo is an individualism so extreme that intimacy feels like oppression then there’s not much you can say anyway. Do you want me to leave? Do whatever you want. So I moved my quilt and pillow into an empty room and cried my little eyes out for a couple of nights, hoping he would hear and come in or relent or something, but no. After about a week of this, I came out to the kitchen one morning to make some coffee and there was a girl there younger than me fussing with the coffeemaker, Sharon her name was, and we sat down and had a civilized conversation over coffee and sweet rolls and she told me that she was carrying his child and I could stay as long as I wanted she didn’t want to kick me out or anything.

I thought about killing the two of them Sharon and Orne and then myself, really thought hard about it for days, the devil in me painting a pretty picture of how it would feel the look on his face and such, but in the end I just didn’t, God was directing me to a different fate. I did want to killsomething though, and so one dawn I dressed up in a heavy winter camo jacket and overalls and my good boots. I took Orne’s Jarrett 280 with the Swarovski PH scope, which nobody but him was ever supposed to touch, and my Buck knife and a pack frame and rope, and headed out to get a deer. As I walked out of the place someone was playing a banjo and singing

Up in the Blue Ridge mountains

It’s there I’ll take my stand.

A rifle at my shoulder

A six-gun in my hand.

Our theme song you might say.

The place we usually hunted from was a little knob overlooking a meadow that ran down to the banks of Crittenden Run, the little stream of the holler that our mountain overlooked. There was good cover on the knob, and the deer would come down to water, and in the spring the bucks would use the meadow for their joustings. I got comfortable in a little scoop of ground full of the season’s leaves that we’d covered with a camo tarp and from where I could look out from under a laurel bush at a view of most of the meadow and the stream. Through the scope I could see deer tracks in the sandy shore on my side of the stream. I loaded up and waited and before long a buck and a pair of does came down to the stream to drink. I put the crosshairs on the buck and as always when I hunted thought of Ray Bob, how he had taught me not to try to keep the cross rock steady on the target but to control its waver, moving it in tiny circles and slowly squeezing your trigger at the same time in coordination so that when the round went off the sight picture would be just right. Where I come from we are not sentimental about edible animals. The buck raised his lovely head from the water and stiffened, only his ears twitching, and I dropped him with one right behind the eye.

An hour later I had him gutted and skinned out and a haunch bagged and tied on to my pack frame, when I heard the first shots, which I didn’t pay any mind to, and then a whole lot more, automatic fire in volume and then the whole face of the mountain shook and there was a whomp of noise and I started to run up the trail. I thought it had to be an accident one of the demo charges must have gone off and I thought of all the workers in there crushed and dead. I honestly never thought that he had set them off on purpose that the Knob was under attack by the law until I came off the trail onto the gravel road and I saw it was full of SUVs with government markings. Men were crouched down behind cars, and some of them were shot and bleeding and there were bullets cracking overhead and they were returning fire. Two of them spun around and looked at me, they were like space aliens in gas masks and helmets. I guess they thought I was one of the defenders. I had a rifle in my hand, and it didn’t occur to me to throw it down. Instead I turned and ran and one of them shot me in the back and I fell off the road and down the side of the mountain rolling and rolling until I crashed and disappeared into a big patch of laurel.

It was dark under the leaves and stank of rot and that peculiar laurel smell. I had wound up facedown, with the heavy pack frame pressing me into the cold earth and the little hard laurel stems. I didn’t move for the longest time. Gradually the firing died down. There were other explosions, but not as loud. I could hear sirens too and truck engines and the sound of people talking urgently on radios. The pain from my back wasn’t so bad, more of a pressure hard to tell from the weight of the deer meat where it bore on the frame and pressed it into my own flesh, worse were the little laurel spikes, there was one that felt like it was going right through my breastbone to my heart. I thought I would die there in the laurel but I didn’t yell or anything, I just tried to think if Nietzsche had said anything about death and came up pretty blank except it was ignoble to worry much about it.

I drifted off, or maybe I fainted, and when I woke up it was dark and quiet with the patter of freezing rain on the leaves above my head. And cold. Which seemed to wake me up. The shiny man was there I could see him in the glint of the raindrops and he was telling me all about how I would get eaten by animals and beetles and turn into a skeleton and wasn’t it sad, poor Emmylou, and this made me so angry I shucked out of the backpack and struggled upright and then the pain really hit me.

I crashed along downhill for a while stumbling and falling the rain heavier now the Run where I crossed it up to my thighs and of course I slipped and fell and rose coughing soaked to the skin and thought if I could just lie down a second and rest I would feel better but the nurse said not here not here child go ahead go just a little farther. The nurse from before when I was alone that first night in Orne’s house, with the willow-leaf eyes. I didn’t give a thought to how she had got there it seemed so natural that she was there I could see her white headcloth shining although the clouds were low and heavy and there was no moon showing. But it glowed.

The nurse was speaking now but in a language I couldn’t understand, I mean I couldn’t understand the words but I could extract their meaning she said God has brought you this far child now you must go the rest of the way yourself and I said I don’t believe in God and that’s when I knew I was dying and that this was a dream.

Then I was warm again and floating up around the ceiling of a long white room and thinking oh this is what dead is. I could see close to my head the rough texture of the plaster and the light fixture and the white paint flaking around where the chrome of the fixture was attached it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base plate and looking down I saw a row of hospital-type beds empty except me and bango it was morning and I was on my back in the bed not dead but feeling like it and a brown woman in a white headcloth and apron was taking my blood pressure. Our eyes met and for a moment I thought it was Sister Trinidad Salcedo in Miami and maybe all that happened since I last saw her had been a dream, but no, no such luck, she said well you’re back with us, how are you feeling, and I said the traditional where am I and she said this is the infirmary at St. Catherine’s Priory and I’m Sister Mercedes Panoy. Who are you she asked and I said I was Emily Louise Garigeau. I said, you’re a Blood Sister aren’t you? She gave me a funny look and asked if I were comfortable, which is what nurses say when they want to know if something hurts like hell and when she said it I realized that my whole back was in agony shooting pains radiating all across it from my left shoulder blade. I said no my back hurts and she went away and came back with a couple of red-and-white capsules and a paper cup of water.

I spent the next week in an oxycodone haze. I learned I had been shot through the shoulder blade but that my meat-filled pack had reduced the force of the bullet, which probably saved my life. When found, I was suffering from hypothermia and a raging infection, as well as from an immune reaction owing to the deer meat that had been forced into my wound. No one asked me how I had been shot and I didn’t volunteer. I was in a facility of the Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ as I had surmised, actually their central training facility in North America.

When I was well enough to walk around, after about ten days, I took myself to the little dayroom they had there and read the Roanoke Times. The story was still getting play, a massive raid on a marijuana-growing empire international criminal white supremacists, six officers and an unknown number of criminals had been killed in the shoot-out and explosion, including Percival O. Foy, the mastermind. There were protests from the usual idiots, the Feds had blown up the innocent victims and oh how awful armed militia in our state Virginia is for lovers ban the guns.

So that was the end of Orne Foy, blood and fire, the death of a Nietzschean hero, as he wanted. I discovered I had no tears for him then although he was the first being I loved, loved in the sense that I wanted his good more than my own. He of course did not believe in that kind of love at all and looking back I see that God gave him to me to make the first crack in the armor of my self and only a tool as hard and as merciless as Orne could have held the edge that did it. I believed in him too, in his nonsense, his apocalypse, and also I see that now as my introduction to theact of belief, and also practice in loving the fairly unlovable, my darling racist killer. “I have done that says my memory; I cannot have done that says my pride and remains adamant. At last, memory yields.”?Nietzsche. But not for me, I am denied even that.

I had to believe the nuns knew all about where all I’d come from but no one said a word nor did I see an official, which was fine with me. I did see a lot of Sr. Dr. McCallister, a dry old bird who was the surgeon who pulled the slug out of me and also head doctor at the priory. She informed me among other things that I had probably stumbled into the best place in eastern North America outside a big city ER to get a bad GSW treated. So I considered myself lucky, although as I now know luck had nothing to do with it. The doctor asked me though how I had happened to find the priory through the rain and dark and with such an awful wound and so I told her about the woman who had led me to their gates. I said that one of the sisters must have been out and found me lying in the rain but she assured me there had been no such person. She asked me to describe the person and I did?the white cowl framing the face, the long thin nose and those eyes. She stared at me strangely, but said nothing.

I was a slow healer and required a good deal of painful therapy to regain movement in my arm and shoulder. Joining me in physical therapy was Margaret Chitoor, a postulant aged eighteen. She had been operated on for a club foot. From her I learned something of how the Society recruited its members. Chitoor was not her family name but the name of the place where she had been found by a missionary. She had been thrown on a trash heap to die as an infant, an unwanted girl, a useless cripple. She laughed when she told me this, as if a little joke had been played on baby her. She said many female babies were thus disposed of, in India and other places, and the Society was able to save a tiny fraction of them, to be raised in its priories around the world. Of these, a substantial number volunteered at age eighteen for service with the organization that had saved their lives.

I confess Margaret irritated me no end. I resented her cheerfulness under pain. I myself howled and cursed at our physical therapist, a stocky woman with a crew cut and a face like a bulldog. I was vile to her and would have begged her forgiveness later only she shipped out before I became sane. I was vile to Margaret too. She would pray at night and I would mock her prayers. I quoted from Nietzsche to destroy her faith, like any village atheist. The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; and at the same time enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation, and on and on, but oddly enough the words of a nineteenth-century brilliant middle-class syphilitic philosopher cut little ice with a girl who had been saved from a garbage pile. She looked at me like I was crazy, quite properly, and said oh Emmylou you mustn’t talk that way it makes me sad to hear you talk that way, and I heard her mention me in her prayers. I wanted to kill her. I would’ve too. I would have killed them all for their goodness if I had the means.

Impotent, I fumed and was sarcastic, sarcasm being the last refuge of the impotent and I nursed my contempt for the sisters. They were most of them maimed in some way, except for Sr. Dr. McCallister, most of them rescued from third world hellholes and trained to be sent back to third world hellholes to die for Jesus. I thought it was the very essence of insanity and said so often and loud.

It took me nearly two months to heal enough so I could move without pain. I was taken on increasingly longer walks, first around the infirmary, then to the refectory for meals, then around the grounds. The priory consisted of four three-story buildings made of gray local stone built around a quadrangle. In the center of the quad was a statue of a woman holding a wounded man, which they told me was of St. Marie-Ange de Berville, who had started the Blood Sisters long ago. Two wings of the building were dorms and one was offices and the chapel and the other was the services wing, which was where the refectory and the infirmary and the library were.

The Society felt about poetry pretty much the way Orne did and mostly they had religious books and medical and nursing texts, but they did have a fiction section full of classics. I read all the novels. No one suggested I read the others. I was out of hospital gowns by then and wore what everyone else wore when they weren’t on nursing duty?what they calledbleu de travail, French mechanics’ one-piece jumpsuits, a souvenir of the Society’s origins in France. I was sitting in this outfit in the dayroom reading Daniel Deronda when Sr. Mercedes came in and said that the prioress wanted to see me. I said I’m busy, at which she took the book firmly from my hand and said the prioress wants to see younow. Well I had heard plenty about the prioress. They called her the Rottweiler and she ate human flesh when she was in a good mood. Mercedes said comb your hair it’s a mess, and I said fuck you and walked out.

I had expected her to be a big square-jawed warhorse like Sr. Dr. McCallister, six foot tall and breathing smoke. What I found instead was Jette von Schwerigen, a small, spare elderly lady in the full habit of the Society sitting in an armchair, reading. When she saw me hesitating at the door of her office she gestured me closer with a finger and pointed to a chair opposite. She picked up a file and perused it. Her office was plain, whitewashed, a desk, low bookshelves, a large wooden table clock on a wooden file cabinet, some framed photos, the only wall decoration a large crucifix. She looked at me until I became uncomfortable. Sharp blue eyes behind gold-rimmed round glasses. Gave a little sigh, said Emily Louise Garigeau, what are we to do with you?

A slight barely noticeable accent. I recall I wondered what a German woman was doing running an American operation. I said I wanted to split and she expressed concern for me, where could I go no clothes no money and I said I’ll manage because I was thinking about all those jars of gold coins, and I could call up the maps in my head pretty well. She told me the cops were after me, she knew about the dope business and said my picture was circulating, was on the TV, some federal agents had come nosing around the priory. I asked her why she didn’t turn me in and she said that wasn’t any of her business and then she said tell me about this woman you met, who cared for you when you were injured and led you here.

So I described the mystery nurse, her face, her cowl or whatever, the prioress nodding, asking questions. Then she opened a book she had on a table next to her an art book red cover with a color picture of a man with arrows sticking out of him and I read the title upside down it was Medieval Italian Painting. She turned to a page and reversed the book and handed it to me. There was a picture of my nurse looking down, a close-up three-quarter view in color you could see the tiny cracks they have on old paintings.

A chill raised the hair on my arms and I felt sick come up my throat a little. The picture had a caption, detail from St. Catherine by Andrea Vanni, San Domenico, Siena.

The prioress said the artist who painted that was a friend of Catherine of Siena and he did that from life, that’s what she really looked like. And that’s what you saw, isn’t it? I take it that you have never seen that painting?

I snapped the book shut. I said I don’t know what you’re talking about and she said young woman, you appear to be under the protection of a saint. I understand you don’t believe in God and all that nonsense, and I said yeah, right, and she smiled and shook her head. Do you know that there are perhaps thousands of people on their knees at this moment praying for some sign from God that will reward them for their faith and perhaps they will never receive one, and here are you, who does not believe at all and you have such visitations. What do you make of this, hmm?

I shrugged. I said I must have seen the painting in a book somewhere and forgot, though the lie curdled in my mouth. It was a hallucination, I said, I was sick.

The prioress did me the courtesy of ignoring this remark. She said I have always thought that the Holy Spirit had a sense of humor and this is one more evidence of it. So, we return to the question of what you will do. I assume you don’t wish to end in prison.

No. Sullen now. My eyes were traveling around the room not wanting to look at her, but the place was so plain and bare that nothing held the eye except the crucifix which I was not going to look at it creeped me right out. There were books in a low glass-fronted case, no help there I couldn’t see the titles and one of the photos, the one in an oval silver frame, was a photograph of a man in uniform. I didn’t recognize the man but the uniform was a famous one.

I asked her are you any relation to General Hanno von Schwerigen? Children who have been raped have a well-developed ability to change the subject.

Her eyebrow tilted and she glanced at the photo and said it was her dad and asked me how I knew the name, and I said I have an interest in military history. He commanded the Twenty-second Panzer in Normandy. It was in that John Keegan book about the battle.

But she was clearly as skilled as I in the opposite direction. She said, But you are the subject of our conversation here and not my father or long-ago battles. She told me that I was well enough to do work, and that I had the choice of leaving, and they’d give me clothes and a little cash, or they’d find me something to do. She said their rule is a modification of the Rule of Benedict, work and prayer.

I said I was an atheist and she said fine, it’s an old and respectable faith. Some of my best friends are atheists. I’ve worked with atheists who are better Christians than I will ever be. Then she said, be that as it may, you shouldn’t try to ruin the faith of those who have faith because if it is truly of God then it is a waste of your time and in any case it’s impolite. She said manners are important in a community like this one, so if you stay, you can’t do it anymore.

Now the interesting thing here was that the shiny man was in plain view out of the corner of my eye, just past my left shoulder where he usually hung out not saying anything but sending out his get-out-of-here vibe like he’d done after Momma got herself killed and with Hunter when he went all stupid, and I was about to say well I guess I’ll leave then, when I noticed that the prioress was staring over my left shoulder and I got it into my head she could see him too and this scared me worse than anything I’d been through up to now. I froze like a dead man and the minutes just ticked and I noticed the sound of the clock suddenly loud in the room and somehow time stretched then going from ticktockticktock to Tick. Tock. Tick.

She broke the silence first. She said I don’t want to influence you unduly, but here is something to think about. It is clear that God is speaking to you through his saint?why we don’t know. He certainly never spoke to me that way and I have been a religious fifty-three years. And He has led you here, also we don’t know why. So let us say you have a certain talent for seeing things usually unseen. I suspect you have also heard from the other side, yes?

I said I don’t believe in any of that shit! My voice was up and warbling nearly out of control. She said then you are insane. Do you feel insane?

I had to think about that. I’d been around crazy people enough, my momma and the street people in Miami and I knew in my heart I wasn’t like them. Crazy people were kind of helpless when you got right down to it, and I wasn’t that. So I had to tell her no.

This seemed to make her happy. She said something interesting has decided to happen to you, we won’t presume to say what it is, but this is probably where you are meant to be. St. Catherine brings you to a priory named for her?

Coincidence, I said like a good little materialist. To my surprise, she laughed. For a little lady she had a deep laugh almost like a man’s. That’s when she told me the Eskimo story, which I will write down because it’s important for you.

A pilot walks into a saloon in Alaska and the bartender says, oh Fred we have not seen you in church recently. Where have you been? The pilot says, I don’t go to church any longer. I have lost my faith. The bartender says, but why? The pilot says, last month I crashed my plane in the wilderness in the mountains and I was trapped in the wreckage. I prayed to God to get me out but nothing happened. Day after day I am praying, but nothing. I decide that there is no God and I am going to die and there is nothing after death. This is how I lost my faith. So the bartender says, but youdid escape from there. You are here and alive. And the pilot says, oh, that had nothing to do with God. Some damn Eskimo wandered by and pulled me out.

That wasn’t why I stayed, that story. But after she told it she said, and another thing, my dear: there are no men here. Sometimes it is nice to take a vacation from men, yes?

Yes, indeed.

Thus I began my life in religion, God had found me and pinned me in this little corner, forcing holiness down my unwilling throat. In doing so I entered a strange place, strange even among religious foundations. The religious life is dying in the rich countries as everyone knows. The era of huge foundations is over, there are few vocations anymore among young girls, priories and convents are filled with the old and dying and their caretakers. St. Catherine’s was not like that, and this was because of the peculiar nature of the Bloods. This I learned from three books that I got from Sr. Marian Dolan, who was the subprioress and in charge of the lay sisters. The books were Faithful Unto Death, which was all about how the order got founded and how great Marie-Ange de Berville was, and then a book by her, The Formation of Nursing Sisters, and a little thin one, The Rule of the Society of Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ, which she also wrote. The reason why they had young nuns and oblates is that they recruited from those they raised from childhood in foreign countries and also from some they rescued from the streets. Girls are still human garbage in much of the world and they grab a few from that great dump.

Sr. Marian was a woman in her fifties with a rock jaw and thick round steel-rimmed glasses, who wore her coif low on her forehead, so she looked a little like a motorcycle rider in goggles. Sr. Marian seemed always to be leaning into the wind of her passage. She told me I would be considered a lay sister as long as I chose to stay. St. C.’s did not have guests, held no retreats. Everyone in the place was a member of the community and worked. She asked me what skills I had, and I said whoring, stealing, and helping run a dope business. Also I could shoot and ride a horse. I thought I would shock her, little did I know. She wrote something down and then said we usually start new people in maintenance. It’s simple, healthy work, and it will give you a good idea of how we live. Or there’s the kitchen, if you’d prefer that. I said how about nursing, I thought you were all nurses. She said nursing was for professed sisters, they wouldn’t put the others through the training, and she didn’t think I had a vocation for it, did I? Well, I sure didn’t, the whole bedpan and sticking needles business freaked me out and I didn’t want to work in the kitchen either, so I told her whatever, acting bored.

There were about a dozen of us in the maintenance crew. Six were Filipinas, plus the Indian girl Margaret, and the rest were various types of lowlife who had wound up in the hands of a Blood, a couple of whores like me, a suicide attempt, some real young runaways. The head of us was Sr. Lorette, who looked about ninety but was spry. I recalled what the prioress had said about talking down the religion and I was pretty good about that, I mean who gave a rat’s ass about what any of them believed, as long as they didn’t try to foist it on me. Still it wasn’t that comfortable being around them all. The Filipinas were cheerful and devout and chattered among themselves in their bubbling language. They were all orphans who had been rescued from various horrible fates in their homeland. The others were converts and zealous in a particularly annoying way, talking about Jesus and the saints as if they could contact them whenever they wanted. None of them seemed to be contacted by saints against their will as I was, although I didn’t discuss that with anyone.

The work wasn’t that hard, as work, but I grudged it, and that made it wearing. Despite my so-called eidetic memory I find it hard to recall what was going through my mind at the time. A lot of anger, mainly at myself for having screwed up my life, and at all the people who had let me down, my daddy by dying in that stupid way, my gran for not figuring me out in time, my momma for marrying a pedophiliac hypocrite, Ray Bob for being one, Foy for blowing himself up, and also at the people at the priory for being so bone-stupid they couldn’t even see how dumb and worthless I was, and all this shot out in all directions like sparkler sparks, but black, and especially at the people who were the sweetest to me, Margaret and Sr. Lorette mainly, but anyone who happened to come in range of my tongue. I wanted a fight, but no one would fight with me. One time I was up on a ladder in the infirmary changing a lightbulb, and as I took down the globe, I saw that it said KayBee Electric Inc. Decatur GA on the base and I remembered my first night there and how I’d seen that floating up along the ceiling and I dropped the globe and didn’t tell anyone about it but it shook the shit out of me. I started volunteering for work outside after that, felling trees and clearing culverts.

Occasionally I would see her, standing away at the edges of my vision, and once as I opened the door of my truck she was standing quite close, close enough to touch. She never said anything, although I shouted at her and used vile language and threw rocks, like a maniac, at Catherine of Siena. I feared I was going to be crazy like my mother, and I think that one of the big reasons I stayed at the priory was that if I was out in the world and people saw how I acted I would get arrested and they would check my fingerprints and that somehow (I wasn’t too clear on this but it was a terror nonetheless) I would end up back in Doc Herm’s rest home in Wayland and the Dideroffs could do what they liked with me.

Aside from that and everyone hating me (as I believed) life at St. C.’s was pretty fine. The Bloods are not an ascetic order, about the furthest thing from as a matter of fact. They feed themselves well when they can get food. The Foundress has a whole section of her book on recipes, how to make daube for 250 and so on, navarin of lamb, blanquette de veau, coq au vin, soupe r l’oignon. They baked their own bread too, and croissants. I never had food like that before or since. Bd. Marie-Ange thought that life was hard enough and they were all going to die fairly soon, and that God had given us all these good things like food and wine to enjoy and we should enjoy them. Over the entrance to the refectory there was carved a saying from St. Teresa d’Avila?”When it’s time to pray, pray; when it’s time for pheasant, eat pheasant.” We had wine with our meals too, except on Friday (when we ate only soup and bread) and during Lent. The order was liberal in some ways and conservative in others, like that, or maybe they were on the other side of that whole liberal-conservative thing, but I didn’t know anything about that then. I guess they liked their traditions was the main thing, like the habits and the French words they used for different things.Gouter for the snack they served in the refectory around three.En principe, when you were going to do something a little outside the rules: en principe, it’s not allowed, but. Anddebrouiller, of course, but I should say about that later because that was connected with Nora Mulvaney.

Andrappel. Every Sunday we had rappel, which meant the entire population stood in lines marked on the pavement, the sisters dressed in their coifs and cavalry capes and us lays and postulants in our bleu de travail and berets and the little old prioress standing straight as a flagpole in front of the big bronze statue of the Foundress as the Angel of Gravelotte giving a drink to a wounded peasant lad, and then the subprioress, Sr. Marian, would say, in French, here are 120 (or whatever the number was) souls at your service and also how many sick or absent there were and the prioress would say I thank you, sister, my service to God and His people, we are faithful unto death. May the Lord have mercy on us all. Come my children to the house of the good Lord. With which she would turn on her heel and march into the chapel, with the sisters following and after them us lays. They say that in the old days in Europe they used to have drums and bugles at rappel, but they don’t here. What they still do is the youngest member of the company stands at the church door facing out and ready to give the alarm in case any dangers appear, which happened in Algeria a long time ago, some bad guys snuck up on a bunch of Bloods and patients and killed them all. I didn’t understand this because what were they going to do except get killed whether there was warning or not, and I asked one of the professed about it and she looked at me funny and said, they could have escaped. She said, the point isn’t to die, the point is never to abandon. Oh my, she said, we run like rabbits all the time carrying our patients on our backs, and laughed.

Actually it wasn’t just one of the professed it was Nora, and I see I am anxious to get to her part of the story so I will move on.

Well, the thing was I refused to go to church and after a while the prioress sent for me. She didn’t beat around the bush any either. As soon as I walked into her office she said, Emily, listen to me. This is a religious community you are in. We all work together, we all eat together, and we all attend church together on Sunday. This is the rule and if you wish to remain here you must follow it. I don’t demand that you acknowledge the creed or participate in worship, but your presence in church is required. Perhaps you will tell me why you object so strongly to this. And I said in the nastiest way I could that I despised her religion I thought it was disgusting to worship death, a dead man, that you had to be crazy to think that the world was run by a God who was good, that Christianity stifled life and health it was fit only for terrified slaves, and that the idea that it was okay to be miserable now in hope of some fantasy of reward after death was the worst idea that anyone had ever come up with. I went on for some time.

She said I see you’ve studied Nietzsche, and I agreed that I had and she smiled and said, I too, he is lovely in the German, a great artist. Unfortunately he is what happens when a spirited little genius is raised by a bunch of pious church ladies. Nietzsche probably never met a real Christian in his whole life. They are extremely thin on the ground at the best of times. So forgive me if I say you don’t know what you are talking about. I said that I still thought it was stupid and that she was stupid to insist that I park my body in a certain place at a certain time even though nothing would be going on, and that I would hate and resent every second of it and she said, it’s important where the body is, and you can never tell what will happen in a church. Besides, she said, it is the rule and you should try to follow a rule for once, as breaking them all has not appeared to have done you much good in life. Then I got really angry, like I hadn’t since that time with Ray Bob when he was going to arrest Hunter and I called her a lot of foul names at the top of my voice and went into a kind of state and before I knew it the whole story of the very Christian deacon baby-fucker Ray Bob leaped from my mouth in tongues of flame plus some extra stuff about pervert priests and nuns that I had gathered from the recent press and also from some pamphlets that Ray Bob had around the house about the Scarlet Woman of Rome.

She took it all in as if I was telling her about my summer vacation, nodding, and then she said, yes, this is what I imagined. Let me say two things. First, you have observed that the church is corrupt, and I don’t mean just the Catholic Church I mean the church entire, for it is all the same in every splinter, and I agree, because you know it’s partly a human institution and as such subject to the ruin of this world, and the more so as it has from time to time exercised power and power tends always to corrupt. So for nearly all its history the church has been run by gangsters, sometimes by literal gangsters, but almost always by egotistical power-hungry men without the slightest interest in following Christ. They may admire Christ and think he is very great, but that was not what Christ was after, you know, not at all. One of my countrymen once wrote that the church is the cross on which Christ is crucified every day, but then he said also that Christ cannot be separated from His cross, which means that in addition to being a seedy club of somewhat dull men wearing funny clothing the church is also the eternal, perfect, and mystical Body of Christ, which is why we women bother with it at all, and why we give our lives to it and count ourselves fortunate. You don’t understand this now, but perhaps later you will.

I said something or started to and she said be quiet for a moment please. And I did, and she said, next, as to you and this story you have told me: you have been cruelly treated and betrayed, your childhood has been stolen. The world is oftentimes une patisse’ emerdee, a shit pie, but this is known, this is boring. The only interesting thing is how we use the suffering that is inevitable in life. Believe me, I understand what you have been through.

I said you have no fucking idea.

Do I not? she said. Then listen. In the winter of 1945 I was fifteen. My father had been arrested and executed in the July plot against Hitler, as perhaps you know, since you seem to be familiar with history. My two brothers had by this time been killed on the eastern front, and we were in a farm cart trying to get out of East Prussia before the Russians got us, my mother, my sister Liesel who was three years younger than I, and me. We failed in this and ended up among hundreds of refugees trapped in a ruined factory and when the Russians found us they raped every woman. Us three they tied to pipes naked and we were raped an uncountable number of times for two days and two nights. My sister was raped to death. I saw a couple of drunken Russians throw her out the window like a sack of garbage. In her whole life no one had ever said a harsh word to her, and so she died. My mother hanged herself the next day. I wandered for some weeks trading my body for food and cigarettes to whomever would buy. Then the Bloods found me, a group of German sisters, and naturally they had all been raped too. The interesting thing was that we never complained about what had happened to us because by then we knew very well that our people had done far far worse in Poland and Russia. So we suffered silently like dogs.

I remember that line very well although I’m not as sure of the rest. I am making it up the way we do in our minds, when we play back our memories. We’ve been taught by the voice-overs in movies. But I recall that about suffering silently like a dog, I recall it in my heart.

She went on and told me how she had walked with these sisters to the west, then they were joined by others who had been released from concentration camps where the Nazis had put them. After the war was over a small group of them from all over Europe gathered in what had been a Blood priory in Rottweil in Germany. She said I saw all these women who in many cases had suffered worse than I had, lost everything, been tortured, ruined in their health, and all they could think of to do was to help others, and I was insane with rage I wanted to scream at them why why how can you believe in a God who allows such things, death, torture, rape, the slaughter of little children? And this woman, Sr. Magdalena, one day came up to me. She had been in the retreat too, they had nailed her naked to a farm cart so that any soldier who came by on the road could have her, like a public latrine. And one day she said to me you have to forgive them, they didn’t know what they were doing. And I lost my mind when I heard these words, I attacked her right there, I spat on her and scratched her face. But she threw her arms around me and soon we were wrestling on the floor, and she pinned me down and put her crucifix in front of my face, this crucifix in fact?and here the prioress held up the one she wore, held it in front of my own face?this very one. Then, she said, Sister Magdalena showed me the scars on her hands left by the Russian nails. Look look you stupid child she shouted at me what do you think this is, a joke, a fairy tale? I was crucified and I died and now I live in Christ, blessed be His name. And you! Don’t you see you are a corpse too after what was done to you and the true life is waiting for you to pick it up. But you will not, no you clutch the death to you like a child with her rag doll. Only forgive them now and you will be able to forgive yourself for not having died with your family and live again in God.

So that was the prioress’s tale, or the important part of it anyway. Eventually God touched her heart and she stayed with the Bloods as they pulled themselves together after the war, and later she became a sister herself. She explained that the women who were there then, the survivors of the catastrophe in Europe, were called Rottweilers and I said I thought it was because you were mean as a bad dog and she laughed and said there is yet another thing on which you were misinformed. When I left I heard the shiny man say well you really told her off. I am still using my childish name for him. I should say Lucifer now, but that sounds like something in a movie, with the special effects and the funny eyes.

You know that despite my tough front I really have a very weak mind, my brain is a vessel in which anything can be poured and I will tend to buy it. My poor parents left me so hollow. Unfortunately, there is no drain valve. So the prioress’s words stayed with me against my will and I pondered them in my heart, like Mary in the Gospel.

I agreed to go to church and I did. I stood I sat I knelt I crossed myself with the others I made the responses and I sang. They wanted an outward show, I said to myself, I would give them the outward show, but inside there would be no change. The priest was Father Munch, a small elderly man with shiny fake teeth. He arrived in procession, he proclaimed the Gospel, produced an anodyne homily, said his magic words over the bread and wine, and drifted away. I sensed he wasn’t all that comfortable at St. C.’s. I’ve heard that at regular convents priests are petted and doted over, but the Bloods I knew always treated them like union plumbers?they had the package and the ticket so they got to do the job, but that didn’t mean you had to like it. Poor man, and I can’t help believing he felt unappreciated, getting up before dawn and driving over slick winter roads up the mountain from Bradleyville to say mass for a bunch of hard-faced women who’d spent their lives dodging bombs and death squads and had no doubt they could carry off the whole thing a lot better themselves. And probably had too, as I found out later.

After some weeks I found it was hard to keep my mind off of God during mass. I had heard the Bible words before and they fell like they say on deaf ears but my body was moving in the ritual ways and even though I mocked I was doing it and slowly it got to touch my pondering heart. Now in this ecumenical age we’re not supposed to speak against the charisms of all the different shards into which the church has shattered yet I can’t help feeling that no other church would have seized me as this one did. I am a fleshly creature and the Catholics work through the body in all things more than the others I think. The Bloods spend much of their lives amid really horrible ugliness and so when they have a chance as at St. C.’s they pour it on?processions, incense, banners, choirs, organ. I had never heard music like that, being a cracker barbarian, only the clunky hymns they sang in Wayland, so Palestrina and Mozart and Schubert hit me like a brick on the head, the opposite really, it knocked meawake in a way I hadn’t imagined before. Several times I cried despite myself.

As I say, I started to pay attention, and when poor Fr. Munch held up the bread in his shaky hand and said this is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world the thought started in tickling my mind what if it’strue. And then the denial. Once I found myself shaking my head from side to side and people looked. Otherwise everyone left me alone, another Catholic habit. I’m sure if they came over to me with urgings and tracts like in Ray Bob’s church I would have bolted like a hornet-stung horse, but that was also God’s work I believe. It might not work for you, you might go for fire-breathing Baptists, or cool Congregational light, what do I know except what grabbed me?

I did a lot of reading that winter, in the bad weather, no longer the novels but works I could barely understand, the Gospels, Augustine, Origen, Aquinas, St. Teresa, Chesterton, Rahner, Kung. The Catholic Encyclopedia devoured in a week, what was I looking for, permission or ammunition I don’t know, but it helped in the pondering. I call myself a rebel, but really I can’t bear to be a dummy about anything, and so I am easily bidden to the lamp. The sense then of roads being closed off, a feeling of exhaustion. The “Hound of Heaven” is not much of a poem but it was one of the 500 and lodged there in my brain and dripped down into my heart, I heard the steps beating behind me now, all things betray thee, who betrayest Me, but I was too cowardly I needed a friend of the heart like the prioress had Sister Magdalena to pull me the last gap over the titanic gloom of chasmed fears.

It was a Monday, I recall, March the seventh, when I first met her. On Mondays we all gathered at the toolshed, really a big garage where they kept the tractors and pickups and mowers and all the tools. It was a clear morning, not too cold, and I was carrying a large thermos and a box lunch from the kitchen because I figured I was going to be out in the woods. As I approached the doorway I heard laughter, the modest tittering of the Filipinas mixed with the American yawps of the other women and also one laugh I hadn’t heard before, loud free and rich. I walked in and there she was sitting on an oil drum, a woman maybe ten years older than I was, her legs crossed and only the left boot hanging down beneath her apron. She was telling a funny story in Tagalog and then translating it into English for the others, something about a man in a Mindanao village who fell in love with his buffalo and wanted to marry her and what the priest had done or not done. She had an Irish accent. Tagalog in an Irish accent is apparently extremely funny, the Filipinas were bent double.

I couldn’t follow the story because I was staring at her face. It wasn’t that she was beautiful in the usual supermodel way, I’m no oil painting was one of her sayings, but shewas like an oil painting, a painting of a queen from olden times, except that her face was covered with freckles, which I think those old masters usually left off. She had red hair, the true metallic copper kind which grew in tight corkscrews on her scalp and heavy red gold eyebrows and deep-set green-hazel eyes. I guess I took in all this when I first saw her in the toolshed, but it wasn’t the physical that blew me over. It was like the first time I saw Orne Foy, the sense that this was someone off the charts, the source of light in any room they might enter. I don’t know what it is. Total ease and confidence? The fancy word is charisma but what is that except a label? She had it and he had it and I don’t, but I vibrate to it like a string to the right note, and what I wanted more than anything since Orne died was that she look at me and like me.

But not until later. My first feeling was resentment: who does she think she is, casting all that light was my first thought for in my wickedness I saw women as adversaries and men as tools. I felt my jaw tighten as she looked at me still laughing and beckoned me in and held out her big freckled hand. It engulfed mine and she held it warm and said Nora Mulvaney. You must be Emily.

What it was, Sr. Lorette had to go into the hospital and Nora happened to be there to help plan some meeting of Blood big-shots they were holding at the priory in the spring and she agreed to run maintenance for a while, a typical Blood solution, even though she was on the staff of the Mother General she could still ply a rake so to speak although she couldn’t really with that leg gone. The next day she was there at dawn when I came to get the truck and said she wanted to ride over the land with me it had been years since she’d been here. We drove up the mountain she singing a song in Gaelic like we were going to pick flowers tra la la, and it took all my grit to keep from being charmed. She had a scent too, like fresh bread, it filled the cab. Then she said, So you’re the atheist dope lord, or dope lady I suppose. What’s that all about, mm? I didn’t answer. She said, Meself I haven’t ever had the pleasure of atheism, being a born Cat’lic and dope makes me sick up, give me a pint anytime. Me father now, he was the atheist, he thought the Church was the curse of Ireland, only exceeded in ignominy by the goddamned Brits. I was seven before I figured out that you could refer to the inhabitants of the UK without that particular prefixial adjective. It was me mother was the religious one and I followed in her path. Maybe it was self-preservation, you know, because he was a consuming man, me father, he ate people up. Although a great man in his field, him being a consulting neurosurgeon in Dublin, don’t y’know. He’s married to a woman a year younger than me. Me mother died of acute pancreatitis brought on by drink and I suppose by the way he treated her, I would say like a dog, but we had a dog, Raffles, a big stupid setter, and I never heard him raise his voice to the creature. He waited a dacent six weeks before he married his girlfriend. In his worst nightmares he couldn’t imagine a more terrible fate for his bright little girl than becoming both a sister and a nurse, the lowest of the low. We don’t talk. I’ve got a brother too, Peter. You know what he does? I said a bishop and she let out that laugh. Almost as good, she said, he joined the British army and not even as an officer. Serving in the ranks, although he’s now a sergeant-major. We do talk, Peter and me, and don’t we work black conspiracies against Mister Himself?

I was out of the truck by now and filling my chain saw with gas. She was leaning against the tailgate. She went on, about how she went for a nurse in Ireland, and then joined the SBC and was taught the special skills that the SBC teaches right here at dear old St. C. and then went out to the Philippines where there was a terror war going on in the southern islands, and then she was replaced by Filipinas and they sent her to south Sudan, where she would be still if not for her leg. She said I trod on a wee land mine, chasing some little kid, and the funny thing was the kid ran through the mine field without a scratch and Nora that great clod of a woman gets herself blown up.

That was the first time I ever heard the words wee and trod used in speech. It was like being in a book, with her, a delight, but I didn’t let on.

I see you’re fascinated by me sad story, she said, but I just thought we’d start off a little more even, since I know all about you. I said you don’t know shit. And she said oh, dear, but I do, I do. I know some things you probably don’t know yourself. For example, you’re a cradle Cat’lic too. I said bullshit! I am not! Oh, yes you are, she said, baptized in Holy Family Church in Gainesville, Florida, U. S. of A., age one month eight days, all done proper. Your father brought you. I stared at her. She went on, see here darlin’, you may think we’re a bunch of dotty women but the SBC has one of the finest intelligence services in the world. The Jesuits are older but we’ve got more money. Do you think we’d let a person in here unless we knew absolutely everything there was to know about them? It’s the money, you see, the Trust. You know about the Trust do you? I said I did but I thought it was all lost in the war. She laughed at the thought. Oh bless you it’d take more than a world war to break the Bloods there are deep deep vaults my darlin’. No, we kept most of it and it’s grown since, although we did have to bail out the Holy Father when he got in a bit of a jam over that Banco Ambrosiano thing back in the 1970s. The Holy See was bankrupt and we stepped in as good daughters of the church, us and the Opus Dei. If not, believe me, darlin’, we’d all be making tea for bishops. As it is, the money lets us do as we please, and we’re the pope’s favorite little nursie girls, that and the fact that we die so uncommon frequent. It makes it hard for them to crack down, d’you see, the church still having a soft spot for holy martyrs. Jim De Bree is sort of our unofficial motto. I said I didn’t understand and she said it was French je me debrouille, it means something like making things happen in ways that don’t bear strict scrutiny. Then she said, So when a little wench shows up on the run from the law and half-dead at our biggest priory spouting atheism and declaring visitations from St. Catherine of Siena, eyebrows go up, chins are stroked in Rome. Jette is no fool as you’ll have learned, and she thinks you’re something rare. Not a spy, nor a fraud at any rate. What doyou say you are?

I said I didn’t know. I was confused and scared and starting to get weepy which I definitely did not want to do then, and she took a step and put an arm around me and said then we’ll have to help you find out, mm?

The touch was what did it electricity of goodness or something stranger because without any warning I was hysterical. I literally collapsed in her arms, soaking her crisp white apron with snot and tears. I had no idea really what I was crying about maybe it was the nature of the touch, communicated on some level way down below. I never got touched like that, even when I was a little kid, my mother never did and neither did the men, and I never had a real friend, it was a touch erotic but not sexual a rare thing in this world saying we are all miserable wretches together here is some comfort. Darlin’ she said there there over and over, Daalin’ in her accent. She said, let’s go on back but you’ll have to drive on account of I’m a foot short. That got me turned from crying hysterically to laughing hysterically until my belly was tight as a washboard.

That was my conversion as it turned out. C. S. Lewis said he was converted on a motorcycle ride to Whipsnade, and St. Paul was knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus and as for me I rode down the mountain in a pickup truck, with Nora Mulvaney at my side she was humming “Stor Mo Chroi.” Simple as that, I got in the truck an unbeliever full of theology and when I got out in the garage I was Catholic.

I was at St. Catherine’s for seven months and three days after that. Joy is very simple and does not require much art in the telling I think pain and struggle are more literary. I became more or less her driver and confidante. Neither Lucifer nor any saints or angels made a further appearance in that time, having accomplished their mission or so Nora said and also she said the devil’s a good Cat’lic too when all’s said and done, he does the job required and he loves the church, by God,you can’t get him out of it! Oh, Christ, I loved her, and I had a time distinguishing between that and the love I owed to God, although maybe it comes to the same in the end.

That Easter we drove into Roanoke and a moon-faced eunuch for the kingdom of heaven oiled a cross on my brow and I was confirmed and took communion for the first time. I wish I could say that it was transcendent, but it was not. Nora was my sponsor of course, and she gave me a rosary, which I still have but have rarely used. I am not the devotional sort?I think you have to be born into all that, or at least I would have had to be. But it made her happy. While we were in Roanoke I saw Skeeter Sonnenborg on his Harley, like a noisy ghost from my past life. He drove by us with his straight pipes ripping the air apart. It gave me a start because I thought he was dead with most of the others. I didn’t say anything to Nora about it or to anyone else, but then I got real paranoid and bugged her to hurry back to St. C., but we had to drop some packages off at the post office, and there was my face on the wall with the other wanted criminals. Like an idiot I stood staring at it with my mouth open and when I turned away there was a middle-aged woman looking at me and I saw her gaze flick back at the picture on the wall of the notorious cop-killer and drug kingpin Emily Garigeau. I got out of there fast and back to Nora, who said not to worry darlin’, we’ll arrange something, je me debrouillerai, and with that she found a phone and made half a dozen calls and we drove not back to the priory but to eastern Virginia near Arlington and put up in a house there with some other sisters. That night Nora helped me dress in the full habit of the Bloods, which I wasn’t even entitled to wear, and someone delivered a passport with my picture in it, but in the name of a sister killed in Colombia. Nora said, we keep the passports of our dead and keep their deaths quiet for just this purpose. We often have to get people across borders and we debrouillons when necessary, you understand? Yes, I did indeed.

The airport was no trouble on either end. This was before our current terror times, and in any case no one ever looks at a nun. Two days later we were in Rome.

By early 1914 the Sisters had established priories and other facilities in nearly every western European country and had also established themselves in the United States (Baltimore, 1908) as well as in the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, and Chile. The training facility in Nemours was flourishing, as was the language institute directed by Claire de Roighy-Brassat in Rome. These were expensive undertakings, but the flow of money into the Trust was unceasing, tied as it was to the burgeoning value of petroleum in the new century. The general war everyone had dreaded began in August of that year. Marie-Ange startled her companions by declaring that “now it is my turn,” and resigned her post as Mother General, in favor of Otilie Roland.

She appointed herself in charge of operations in western Europe. She chose Lille as her headquarters, a city she knew well, and by late August refugees were already streaming in from the border areas affected by the German invasion and from as far away as the Belgian front. She established her chief hospital in a school near the cathedral, and went about organizing medical relief for the refugees. Those who observed her in these days said that she seemed to have recaptured her youth, exhibiting an energy that belied her fifty-eight years.

By the first week in October, they could hear the guns of the approaching Germans. Marie-Ange seemed to be everywhere at once, offering encouragement, even lending a hand with the terrified patients. Among them was Msgr. Matteo Ratti, an Italian scholar who had been wounded in Louvain on August 26, when the Germans destroyed the university and the lovely old city. Now they seemed to be doing the same to Lille. From October 11, the artillery fire was almost continuous. When shells began crashing into the cathedral itself, Marie-Ange ordered the patients moved to the school basement. According to Msgr. Ratti, the Foundress was helping a novice transfer him to a stretcher. He recalled saying to the terrified girl, “Don’t worry, God will protect you,” and her superior saying, “Whether God protects her or not, she must do her duty. Kindly lift his feet.”

Those were her last recorded words. At that moment a large shell exploded in the room, and the ceiling came down. Hours later, Ratti was rescued from the rubble, unhurt. As her final conscious act, Marie-Ange had thrown her body protectively over her patient. Lying thus she had received a splinter of steel through her valiant heart.

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