SEVEN
FLESH AND BONE
Anigel Reyes realized that for most of her life she had known nothing like solitude. She loved Chayne’s house, and there she knew peace, a rare enough experience, but not until now had she known what it was like to have space for her mind and body to wander.
She would have said she had never been alone, except in some way or another she knew all about that, had felt alone often. Anigel knew all about feeling she wasn’t really here, or the reverse feeling that she was here, but no one else was, something was a fantasy, and she wasn’t sure if it was her, or the people around her.
Her whole growing up in Geschichte Falls had been like that from her childhood in Westhaven until she had escaped home to live with her sister across the river in Little Poland. Most of her memories felt like they belonged to a ridiculous movie she’d watched from the dark theatre seats. Anigel wished she’d been normal or brought up by normal people who said “Go to college, far away from here,” but she was the daughter of Grace and Roberto Reyes, and so she went to community college in East Sequoya and left after one semester.
But this, right here was real. Everything around her was the realest thing she’d ever known. And maybe in order to be real all that was needed was that something be looked at. The steam curling, almost transparent from this cup of coffee was real, as was the blackness of the drink before the sugar and the whiteness of the milk. The starkness of this room where she had slept three days was real as was the view outside, black trees like fanning arteries of the earth, leafless against the thick white sky and the hill below her on which this little house was built. Tramping up the hill, all in black like a priest, black pants, black coat, black blue boots, was someone real too. He leaned on his staff cut from a tree as if he were an old man or, realistically, as if he were someone walking up a dark hill powdered with snow. His round, bespectacled face looked up, seeming to look at her as he approached: her old friend and sometimes her only friend, Ross Allan.
He had barely given the merely perfunctory knock and entered the small house when Anigel lamented, “Must we leave, or can’t we come back?”
The Hermitage consisted of four large rooms, two of them making a little apartment, separated by a foyer and joined, at the end, by a shared bathroom and kitchen and an icy back porch with a refrigerator.
“You’ve come to love it?” Ross said, “Being alone?”
“I think I always loved it,” Anigel said. “I think I was meant for it.”
She sat down in the little wooden chair and reached for her cigarettes, but did not take one.
“It’s funny. Other girls always wanted a boyfriend or a something, and I’ve always looked for a vocation, a life I should have, but this is the first thing I’ve ever wanted, and all it is…. Is being in this silence.”
Ross nodded. He always listened to what she said, and now he said, “We can always return. For now, though, we’ve got to head back. We said we’d be home for Christmas and tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. What’s more, it looks like we’re going to have snow, and I don’t relish driving in it.”
“Well, don’t worry about that. I can drive.”
“I relish that less.”
Anigel did not even exert the energy to curse him, and Ross said, “Before we leave, I’m going to Mass. It only seems right, and I want to thank everyone for letting us stay.”
“Oh,” Anigel pushed herself out of her seat, “I think I’ll go with you.”
“Really?” Ross said in a voice barely betraying surprise.
“Yes,” Anigel said, “really.”
Everything here was a series of white boxes. The little hermitage on the hill and below it, between the square monks’ house and the square nuns’ house was the square little church. As Anigel and Ross entered, they were already singing:
“O gates, lift high your heads; grow higher,
ancient doors.
Let him enter, the king of glory!”
The chapel was not huge, but it was bigger than Anigel assumed from her view in the high up Hermitage, and there was no organ music accompanying the thin and earthy singing that hummed off the crossed beam rafters. All was plain in here, spare, and Anigel and Ross took their place along with the townspeople. There weren’t many of them. In a regular church there were pews and then the altar, but here, between the pews and altar were choir stalls facing one another, and monks were gathered in one and the nuns in the other. A middle aged woman in glasses with a white bandanna about her hair that must have served as a veil, went to the pulpit to read:
“After he was weaned, she took the boy with her, young as he was, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour and a skin of wine, and brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh. When the bull had been sacrificed, they brought the boy to Eli, and she said to him, ‘Pardon me, my lord. As surely as you live, I am the woman who stood here beside you praying to the Lord. I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.’ And he worshiped the Lord there.
The word of the Lord.”
Along with Ross and everyone else, Anigel heard herself saying, for the first time in years, “Thanks be to God.”
The nuns were not all the same, not that she had noticed them until now. She had not wanted to look at them, and then she had been attracted not by the idea of nuns, but by the idea of absolute quiet. They were mostly all white, with white veils though one or two were in black with white habits. But when she looked closely, the habits were different from one another. There were the jumpers she remembered from Catholic school, but there were also full robes, and then simple dresses, and two older women were in white pants and shirts. Again, there was the neat veil from school, or the full veil from long ago, or like the woman who had just read, the bandanna or scarf tied neatly about the head with the hair poking out. But now the brothers were singing:
“My heart exults in the LORD,
my horn is exalted by my God.”
And the nuns sang, their voices quavering as they touched the rafters:
“I have swallowed up my enemies;
I rejoice in your victory.”
Back and forth they sang:
“There is no Holy One like the LORD;
there is no Rock like our God.”
“Speak boastfully no longer,
Do not let arrogance issue from your mouths.”
Saint Celestine’s was the opposite of a box of a church. It was the first place she’d been in awe of God, and the place where she’d come to love him. High roofed, it was shaped like a long cross, and it’s transepts were painted with murals of saints and angels amidst the clouds. In the great mural over the altar, all of these surrounded Jesus, wounded hands open, face serene as a Buddha, and Anigel remembered the great white marble statue of Christ to the left of the altar. You passed him after receiving communion, and on the way back to your pew were the scenes of his last day, Christ Falls for the Third Time, Simon Picks Up His Cross, Veronica Eipes the Face of Jesus.
But after high school she had walked out of that church and never returned until last fall, when she had found Niall Dwyer weeping. What had happened that for years she had gone into that church every Friday as a girl at Saint Celestine’s school, and then every Sunday until she was seventeen, and one day seen nothing, but sentiment for things that weren’t true?
“The bows of the mighty are broken,
while the tottering gird on strength.”
“The well-fed hire themselves out for bread,
while the hungry no longer have to toil.
The barren wife bears seven sons,
while the mother of many languishes.”
But it was here, amidst this starkness, with the absolute lack of art or even beauty, that she had felt the same way she felt as a child, as they stood up and she shook out her legs, as the Gospel acclamation begun, Anigel realized that in this cold and white country she felt what, as a little girl she had felt in the warmth and ornate beauty of Saint Celestine’s, awe, love. No…. no…. She felt… in love.
They have packed up. When they leave, the nuns and the monks stand in a line to shake hands and embrace and Anigel says, feeling foolish, “I feel like I didn’t get to know anyone.”
“You weren’t really here to know anyone,” says Sister Jeanne. “Unless maybe you were here to know God. Or yourself.”
“Oh, yes,” said a plump little nun in a grey coat, a muffler wrapped around her face, “And knowing people… oh, that’s greatly overrated.”
“Well, now, I don’t know that this is true,” Anigel said as Ross pulls off onto the road and they begin the long trip home. “I don’t know if knowing people is overrated. Maybe knowing people is how we know God.”
“That’s very philosophical of you.”
“You don’t think so?”
“That’s not what I said,” Ross Allen said.
Anigel wanted to hear good music. She wanted to hear something quiet and classical to go with the snow falling very gently around them. But every station was full of noisy music, and when there wasn’t the noise of music there was static and so she turned off the radio and sat in silence.
“It gives the lie to things,” Ross said. “We sit here and everything is silcnce, and then you turn on the radio and the world is full of noise, all these noisy radio waves are just bouncing around us all the time.”
They drove in silence for a long time, because why not? Silence felt good, and Anigel didn’t think she was fully awake anyway. She felt a yawn come up, and lay against the window, watching white flakes drift over the country where she could just see the black outlines of trees and fences
“Ross, what do you think God is?”
“This is what I mean,” he said, quietly, “by you being philosophical. A month ago I thought you didn’t believe in God, and now you ask me what he is.”
“I felt that everything we were ever shown was hollow,” Anigel said. “And then I stopped believing. And things changed.”
Anticipating what Ross might sah, she said, “Even before the whole Virgin Mary incident. In fact, I think that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t changing already. It was like when somebody shows you something, say, a stuffed lion, and says, ‘This is a lion’. And then one day you say, no that’s not even real. And then you sense that there are real lions. And then…. Maybe you feel its breath. Know the lion is there but can’t see it. Ah, I don’t know. That sounds a little too Narnia, and I hate Narnia, but does that make even a little sense?”
“It makes more than a little sense,” Ross patted her hand and kept his eyes on the road.
At last Ross said, “Silence.”
“Hum.”
“When I wonder what God is I think, I don’t know, I cannot really conceive of that, certainly nothing I’ve ever seen, something sort of hinted at in what you see in churches, hear about in books. But… I don’t know. And then when I do know, my answer is a great Silence.”
“Do you think it,” Anigel said, sitting up, “or do you know it?”
Ross looked at her as if he were waiting for his friend to say something else.
“Or feel it?” she said.
“God is not notional to me,” he said. “He is somewhere between knowing and feeling. I’m not a theologian. Thoughts about God aren’t really my department, or at least not many thoughts. Not many words That could be dangerous. You could think your words are the Word, and then take yourself seriously and worship the bullshit you’ve made.”
“Even if it’s beautiful bullshit.”
“Especially if it’s beautiful bullshit. That’s why I like where we went. There was so little of the bullshit we make and all the starkness of God.”
“Can we go there again?” Anigel wondered.
“We can go many places,” Ross said.
Right now, where they were going was Geschichte Falls, and he was fine with that. They were going to celebrate Christmas, and he was alright with that. Ross Allan didn’t love it. It always disappointed, and then the year that his mother had died nine days before it, Christmas could not be more disappointing, and so, for the most part he had tried to get through it rather than celebrate.
Religion was a help, not a hindrance. If his mother had died at a less religious time, when it was all about family and togetherness, Ross Allen is not sure what he would have done, but she died in a time when you could immerse yourself in religion, so now he went to monasteries and convents. He went to Mass and kept silent. He had learned that in those convents and monasteries, beneath the robes and rosaries, was an equal loneliness, a similar revulsion for the frivolity so many people associated with the holiday.
