Read Online Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen - Free Book Online Page B

surprised, therefore, when she pricks the heel of her hand with a thorn and irritatedly presses up a bead of blood, and Mother Saint-Raphaël interestedly kneels opposite her and holds Mariette’s hand in both her own. “Oh my dear,” she says. “Are you badly hurt?”
    “Oh no; just a thorn.”
    “Shall I get something for it?”
    “I’ll be fine, truly.”
    Mother Saint-Raphaël puts spit onto her forefinger and softly caresses the blood from the wound, and there’s such an odd confusion of feelings in the grandmotherly face that Mariette hesitantly wrests her hand away.
    Everything changes in Mother Saint-Raphaël then, as if a great door has slammed shut inside her. “Don’t misinterpret simple tenderness,” she says.
    Mariette travels between worry and sympathy before she replies in humility, “I have, Mother. I see that now.”
    Mother Saint-Raphaël gets up with effort and goes back to work and hoes with a kind of urgency. And when, just before meditation, she walks with Mariette to the tool room, she says, “There’s a great deal about you that troubles me.”
     
    Mass of the Dedication of the Basilica
of Saint Michael the Archangel.
     
    Walking into the oratory for Prime, Sister Léocadie holds her stomach and whispers to Sister Pauline, “I have cramps.” And at the pause before the reading she faints, wrenching and hurting the pew in her slow heavy fall. Every nun stays as she was until Mariette anxiously lays down her Psalter and gets up from her stall.
    Sister Léocadie is paper-white and woozily slumped against the pew, but she pulls away in horror when the postulant tries to help her, hissing, “Don’t, Sister! The mistress!”
    Mother Saint-Raphaël takes four steps out onto the oratory floor and scowls at Mariette and then Sister Léocadie until the ill novice kneels upright again. Mother Saint-Raphaël then pettishly withdraws to her place in the choir.
    Sister Léocadie is punished at Mixt by being ordered to prostrate herself on the floor as if she’s been nailed facedown on a crucifix. The sisters hesitate only to inchingly lift up their skirts before stepping over her. When it is Mariette’s turn, however, Sister Léocadie senses her halting and slowly descending to the floor and joining her on the cross beside her. And Mariette stays like that, simply praying, until Mixt has ended.
     
    —Was anything said, Sister Léocadie?
    —Yes; I told Mariette she’d go hungry now. She just answered that she’d had Christ’s body at Mass and that was food enough.
    —Was she trying to impress you with her piety?
    —I don’t think she thinks about it.
     
    October 2nd. Mass of the Holy Guardian Angels.
     
    Horses shamble lazily up a knoll and browse the grass near their hooves.
     
    The skies are gray as habits and all the greens are darkening with a faint and chilling mist.
    Twenty-six nuns are hunching along the grapevines in their sabots and jean aprons and dusters, snapping grape bunches from their stems and skidding wide French baskets along or teaming on the handles to tiltingly carry them to the pig wagons on the roadway.
     
    The psalms of Terce and Sext are recited in the vineyard and the sisters pray the Angelus while slouching tiredly in to dinner. Work replaces Méridienne and classes, Nones are read privately by the water tank, and the grapes are crushed just before Vespers, Sisters Aimée, Virginie, Marthe, Félicité, and Mariette tying their habits as high as their thighs and getting up into the great oaken vats to walk and trounce and slop in the oozing grape juice and skins. And then the prioress humbly walks out to them with plush white towels and a copper verrière, and she kneels before the sisters who have trodden the grapes as she gently washes their feet.
     
    Mass of Saint Francis of Assisi, Confessor.
     
    Class. Waving her hand eraser over the blackboard like a fat farmboy in wild hurrah, Sister Saint-Denis gets rid of her drawing of the Great Chain of Being