Read Online The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd - Free Book Online

imagined themselves marinating in holiness through their ceaseless rounds of chanting and prayer—was all this hidden mud and cow shit. It was hard to overestimate how much this pleased him. Brother Thomas had dreamed once about Christ’s feet—not his crucifixion or his resurrection or his sacred heart but his feet.
    The scent emanating from the church floor, even God’s feet in his dream, made him think more highly of religion somehow. The other monks, Sebastian for instance, would have impugned the buildup in the floor crevices as profane, but Thomas lay there knowing suddenly that what he smelled was a fine patina of the most inviolate beauty, and shockingly holy. He was smelling the earth.
    He’d been at St. Senara abbey on the small South Carolina island for nearly five years, each one of those years a bone of darkness that he’d gnawed. And still no marrow of light, he thought, though now and then he felt an occasional beam of it dart out of nowhere and hit him. Just as it had a moment ago when he’d caught that scent.
    After his other life had ended, the one with his wife and his unborn child, he’d been incurably driven. Sometimes his quest seemed impossible, like an eye trying to look back and see its own self. All he’d discerned so far was that God seemed surreptitiously about and wrenchingly ordinary. That was all.
    His real name was Whit O’Conner. Before, in that other life, he’d been an attorney in Raleigh thwarting developers and industrial polluters on behalf of various conservation and environmental groups. There had been a brick house with a landscaped yard, and his wife, Linda, seven and a half months pregnant. She’d worked as an office manager in an orthodontist’s practice, but she’d wanted to stay home and raise their child, even though that wasn’t fashionable. He’d liked that about her—that she wasn’t fashionable. They’d met at Duke, gotten married the Sunday afternoon following her graduation in her family’s tiny Methodist church near Flat Rock, North Carolina, and they’d never been apart until the tire came off the truck in front of her car on I-77. The medic who’d responded to the accident told him over and over that she had gone quickly, as if her leaving sooner would console him.
    His sense of abandonment had been bottomless—not just by Linda and the promise of family but by God, whom he’d actually believed in. The kind of believing one does before immense suffering.
    Linda had called him from work the day she died to tell him she was sure they were having a girl. Up until then she’d had no feeling either way, though he personally had believed all along it was a boy. The impression had come over her while standing in the shower that morning. She’d touched her abdomen and simply known. He smiled now, remembering this, and his lips brushed against the floor. After the funeral he’d learned from the coroner that she’d been right.
    He couldn’t remember precisely when it had first occurred to him to come here, but it had been around a year after her death. He’d sent his baptism and confirmation records, recommendations from two priests, and a long, carefully constructed letter. And still everyone, including the abbot, had said he was running away from his grief. They’d had no idea what they were talking about. He’d cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he’d refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.
    Sometimes he couldn’t fathom why he’d thrown in his lot with these aging men. Some were grumpy to the point he went out of his way to avoid them, and at least four inched about with walkers and lived permanently in the infirmary. There was one monk, Brother Fabian, who was always writing letters of complaint to the pope about things the rest of them did, and posting copies in the corridors.