In This Small Spot (4 page)

Wendy’s exaggerated strictness had quickly
become an irritant to Mickey, but “it’s none of your business,” she
told herself repeatedly. Still, “I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy
hearing her scolded for a change,” Mickey confided to Jessica who
smiled in agreement.

In June, when the first hay was ready for
mowing, Sister Regina started up St. Jude, the abbey’s ancient
tractor, named for the patron saint of lost causes. Each time she
started the tractor, Sister Regina murmured a prayer asking St.
Jude to intercede. It worked every time. Of course, it helped that
Sister Regina kept the tractor immaculately clean, oiled and
lubricated with generous amounts of grease. Then the two of them
pulled the mower through the fields, leaving the hay to dry for a
few days. Whether it was luck, or divine intervention, no one knew,
but it never rained while the abbey’s hay was drying. All the other
farmers in the region would mow also as word got around that “St.
Jude is cutting.” When it was time to bale the hay, three farmers
who had square balers would come over to the abbey’s field. The
square bales were loaded onto a flat trailer pulled by St. Jude.
This was where the postulants and novices helped, dividing
themselves into ground crew and trailer crew, throwing the bales
onto the trailer where they were stacked up. When the trailer was
fully loaded, the bales were taken to the barn where they were
hoisted into the loft with ropes. Generally, the abbey got three
hay cuttings in over the course of the summer, which gave the cows
plenty of feed to keep them producing milk all winter long.

It took two days to get the first hay crop
into the barn. Mickey was on the ground crew, and quickly learned
to use momentum to swing the bales up onto the trailer. Even so,
she and the others were so sore they could barely move the next
morning. As they were working the second day, the trailer was only
half full on its second load when the bell rang for Sext.

“Why are we stopping?” Wendy asked as St.
Jude halted. She wiped her sweaty face with her sleeve, then
scowled as little bits of hay stuck to her face. “Let’s stay and
get this over with.”

Sister Regina’s eyebrows raised slightly.
“Did you hear the bell?” Wendy nodded. “We’re here to pray, not to
make hay or anything else,” a sentiment echoed by Sister Rosaria
who reminded them often, “Praying is our work. All the rest is
meaningless without that. When the bell rings to signal an hour,
you must stop what you’re doing – no matter how frustrating that
may be – and attend to our real work.”

To Mickey’s surprise, prayer was work, but
she came to realize that she had never prayed for any length of
time before. Saying the rosary was probably the longest period she
had ever spent praying – “those days when I was praying for a
miracle,” she would have said – and even for that brief time, it
was difficult not to let her mind wander. In the abbey, in between
the set times for the Divine Office, there were periods of silent
meditation, often spent praying for people or situations known to
the nuns personally, or perhaps taken from the prayer board where
prayer requests sent to the abbey were posted, sometimes lines
snipped from a letter, or perhaps a worrisome headline clipped from
one of the newspapers the abbey subscribed to.

“People often think we withdraw from the
world to isolate ourselves and forget about what goes on out
there,” Sister Rosaria told them, “but it is our duty to keep
abreast of the happenings of the world. How can you pray for it if
you don’t know what is happening?”

Prayer requests came from everywhere.
“Please ask God to bring Tribble home to me,” wrote a little girl
in Buffalo, including a photo of her lost kitten.

Some of the requests were heartwrenching.
There was a letter from a young father of three whose wife was
dying from a brain tumor. His despair and fear were almost
palpable. Most of the nuns prayed for the family; Mickey prayed for
the doctors and nurses caring for the wife.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” had been the
initial reaction of Mickey’s three male partners when she had told
them of her plans. When they realized she was serious, the next
question was, “Why are you going to waste your skills as a
surgeon?” This had been the almost universal reaction as Mickey had
gradually informed friends and co-workers of her decision. “At
least go into a medical or missionary order,” they said, but “I’d
be accomplishing no more than I do now. Maybe saving a life, maybe
not. It’s not enough. I want to do more,” was all she could say to
most. To only a few close friends, “I need to try and do something
for their souls; that’s what really matters.” Prayer wasn’t
dependent upon the skill of the person offering the prayer; it
wasn’t limited geographically or physically; it wasn’t even limited
by reality or any of the laws of science. To no one but herself,
she had admitted, “I will never again have to tell someone there’s
nothing I can do.”

She had arranged a one-year sabbatical from
teaching at Johns Hopkins, as well as a leave from the practice,
with a buyout price negotiated in the event she didn’t return. When
her partners disputed the dollar amount of her share of the
practice, she had reminded them, “Religious life requires a vow of
poverty, not of stupidity!”

╬ ╬ ╬

“Michele,” Sister Rosaria gestured to Mickey
as she got in line for lunch. “Could you take this tray to the
chaplain’s residence, please?”

She passed a heavily-laden tray with several
stacked, covered dishes on it into Mickey’s hands.

“Quickly, while it’s hot,” said the nun in
the kitchen, leaning down to peer through the low pass-through.

Mickey nodded and hurried through the
refectory, out into the enclosure. A hot summer breeze was blowing
and she had to hold tightly to the tray as she walked across the
park to a wooden door set in the stone wall. Backing through it,
she followed a flagstone walk to Father Andrew’s small house. The
tray was too heavy to hold with one hand to knock, so she balanced
on one foot and tapped the door with the other. It was opened in a
moment by an old nun.

“There you are,” she said brusquely. “Come
in, come in,” she said, stepping back to let Mickey enter.

Mickey carried the tray inside and set it on
the dining table. The old nun hurried over and began laying out the
covered dishes.

“Don’t just stand there,” she ordered.

Mickey quickly helped remove the covers, her
stomach growling as aromatic steam rose from each dish. “This is a
lot of food for one person,” she observed.

“It’s not for one person,” the nun said,
placing serving spoons in the dishes. “Father Andrew has a guest.”
She placed the covers on the tray and rearranged the dishes and
bowls on the table until she was satisfied that everything was as
it should be. “Take that to the kitchen,” she said, flapping a
hand. Mickey carried the tray to the small kitchen while the nun
called out that lunch was ready.

Father Andrew entered the dining room with
another elderly man in a secular black suit with a white
collar.

“Andrew,” said the other man, looking
strangely out of place next to Father Andrew in his habit and the
nun in hers, “they spoil you. I can see why you love it here.”

Father Andrew smiled. “Thank you, Sister
Linus. This looks wonderful.”

She gave an arthritic bow. “You’re welcome,
Father. I’ll be back to take care of the dishes.” She went to the
kitchen and gestured to Mickey, taking her by the arm and walking
her to the front door. “You can go now,” she said.

Mickey turned to ask if she was needed to
come back and collect the tray when Sister Linus shut the door in
her face. “You’re welcome,” she muttered.

She hurried back through the enclosure to
get her own lunch.

“Michele!”

Gritting her teeth, Mickey turned to see
Sister Lucille waving at her. “Could you please take this to the
vestment room for me?” she huffed, holding a paper-wrapped package
nearly as tall as she was. “They brought it to the front door by
mistake.” Mickey opened her mouth to ask if this couldn’t be done
later, but Sister Lucille was already walking back to her
office.

With an exasperated sigh, Mickey turned.
“Where is the vestment room?” she asked aloud to no one as the
community was all in the refectory. She knew a bit about it – “we
have a waiting list of nearly two years,” Sister Rosaria had told
them proudly. “Our orders come from all over the world – and not
just Catholic churches and monasteries, but other denominations and
even synagogues.” But none of the postulants had been there, as
only the nuns specially trained for that work were assigned
there.

Frowning, Mickey remembered seeing a
“Deliveries” sign on one of the outside walls of a wing of the
monastery. She let herself back out into the enclosure, through the
wooden door again, past Father Andrew’s house to the far end of the
abbey’s main building where she saw a concrete parking pad and a
door. Struggling to hold the roll as the stiff breeze tugged on it,
she turned the knob on the door. The wind grabbed the door and
flung it wide open.

There was an angry exclamation as she
stepped inside.

“Close that door!”

Mickey reached back and wrenched the door
shut. Inside, all was chaos. Swathes of cloth had been blown off
tables, and spindles of thread were rolling across the floor.
Mickey could see the twinkling of sunlight off the motes of dust
and dirt that had blown in with her.

One nun was scrambling about picking up
pieces of material.

“Look what you’ve done!” she exclaimed.

“I’m sorry,” Mickey gasped, dropping her
wrapped roll and reaching for one of the large sheets of cloth
lying crumpled on the floor.

“Stop!”

Mickey froze. The nun hurried over to
her.

“Look at your hands,” she commanded. Mickey
looked down to see that her hands were smudged with dirt from the
paper wrapping on the roll she had been carrying. “You cannot touch
silk with hands like that.” She groaned as she laid out a length of
embroidered scarlet cloth on one of the worktables. “It will take
us days to get these clean.”

“I’m sorry,” Mickey repeated.

“Why did you come in that door?” the nun
asked crossly.

“Sister Lucille asked me to bring this,”
Mickey said, pointing to the roll. “I didn’t know any other way
here.”

The nun took a deep breath, controlling her
irritation with great effort. “I will take care of this mess. You
may go.”

Mickey nodded and reached for the door
through which she had entered.

“No!”

Mickey turned.

“That way.” The nun pointed to a wooden
stair Mickey hadn’t noticed in the excitement.

“Yes, Sister,” Mickey said. Behind her, she
could hear the other nun grumbling. “You’re welcome, too,” Mickey
said under her breath.

She climbed the steep wooden stairs,
glancing back at the nun who now had a small brush and was
carefully whisking the scarlet cloth. Exiting the vestment room,
Mickey found herself in an unfamiliar set of corridors. After a few
minutes’ wandering, and a couple of wrong turns, she began to
recognize where she was and hurried back toward the refectory which
was now empty except for Jessica who was waiting with a plate.

“Oh, thank you,” Mickey said gratefully as
she bowed her head for a quick grace and sat to eat.

“What happened?” Jessica asked. “Where have
you been?”

Quickly, in between bites, Mickey told
her.

“I wondered,” said Jessica.

“What?”

“About Father Andrew. Whether he ever had
visitors,” Jessica said. “It must be so lonely for him. At least we
have each other.”

“Well, that old nun, Sister Linus, is
certainly protective of him,” Mickey said. “But she’s nothing
compared to the other one, the one in the vestment room.”

“Sister Anselma,” Jessica said, nodding.

“How do you know these things?” Mickey asked
her.

Jessica shrugged. “I just listen. The other
sisters say she’s like some kind of genius in there, with the
weaving and artwork, but… difficult,” she said tactfully.

Mickey snorted. “That was very edifyingly
said.”

Chapter 5

Mickey stirred in the early morning light.
She rolled over in bed, and heard the shower in the bathroom next
door. Closing her eyes, she drifted off to sleep again until, “Wake
up, sleepy,” she heard in her ear.

Smiling, she said, “Mmmm, you smell good.”
She could feel Alice’s soft lips on her forehead, her cheeks, her
mouth.

“Come on,” Alice murmured. “Time to get
up.”

“Oh,” Mickey groaned. “Do I have to? I
didn’t get home until two.”

“I know,” Alice said sympathetically. “But
Christopher is counting on us. We’re in charge of the cookies after
Mass today.”

“Oh,” Mickey groaned again. “I’m sorry. I
was supposed to help you bake them.”

Alice yanked the covers away. “Luckily, I
figured you wouldn’t get home in time to help, so I baked six
dozen.”

“Ummm, not anymore,” Mickey said, sitting up
on the edge of the bed, her hair sticking up in a bad case of
bedhead. “I ate three oatmeal cookies when I got home last
night.”

“That was probably your dinner,” Alice
said.

“Yeah. It was. Thanks.”

Thirty minutes later, Alice was loading
Tupperware containers full of cookies into Mickey’s hands to carry
out to the car. When they got to St. Matthew’s, the side door to
the rectory was standing open.

“Good morning,” beamed the large, burly man
standing there.

“Hey, Christopher,” Mickey returned. Without
asking, she popped open the lid on the container holding the peanut
butter cookies.

Looking around guiltily, Christopher took
two, popping one whole cookie into his mouth. “To keep my energy
levels up, you know.”