Evergreen (15 page)

“If only you’d let God into your heart,” she said today as she guided a spoonful of cornmeal toward Naamah’s mouth. Her heavy silver cross swung across her habit like a pendulum. “I can see it, Naamah. It’s still flecked with black.”

Sister Cordelia had a way of sounding sincere sometimes, like she really did want to help Naamah but Naamah was the one making that impossible. When Naamah was a little girl, she believed what Sister Cordelia told her: that the cross gave her the power to see into Naamah’s soul as if through a window. Naamah would put all of her effort into trying to change the view. She’d pray until her knees went numb. She’d scrub the floors until she saw her reflection in them. She’d memorize Sister Cordelia’s favorite passages in the Bible. Still, her devotion was flawed. She’d confuse the order of someone begetting someone else or the floor would shine in a less-than-holy
light. Naamah didn’t think Sister Cordelia could see into her soul anymore, but part of her still clung to the belief that if she could just scrub a little longer or pray a little harder she’d become lovable.

Naamah lay all day watching the sunlight move across the walls. When night came she watched the moonlight move across them. She soothed herself by thinking of her favorite of the songs Sister Lydie used to sing to her.
Go to sleep my darling, close your weary eyes. The lady moon is watching from out the starry skies. The little stars are peeping, to see if you are sleeping. Go to sleep, my darling, go to sleep, good night
. Naamah thought about her mother and why she left her at the orphanage with only a blanket to know her by. That small white square of cotton with rows of yellow ducks on it was the only thing Naamah owned that her mother had once touched. When no one was looking, Naamah would press her lips to each of the ducks, as if her mother were in there somewhere and only needed to be coaxed out.

It’s all right that you left me. It’s all right if you come back
.

Sister Cordelia allowed her to keep the blanket as a reminder of the low place she came from. She told Naamah her mother was a prostitute at a logging camp up north, which Naamah thought meant her mother was a cook or a nurse or a special kind of woodcutter who climbed high up into the branches of trees until Sister Cordelia described the crimes of the flesh her mother committed daily,
nightly
, for money. Every night since then, Naamah would trace the letters stitched into the corner of the blanket—
HUX
—wondering what they meant, pretending it was a secret message. Maybe it was Morse code like they’d used in the war. Maybe it meant
I’m sorry, my little duck. I love you
.

Of everything she was deprived of in the broom closet,
Naamah missed her blanket, which she kept hidden behind a towel in her locker during the day, the most. She missed the thinning fabric, the fading ducks, her only true friends at Hopewell. She didn’t care what Sister Cordelia said about her mother and the men who paid her money to take off her clothes. She didn’t care how many sins of the flesh her mother had committed. She didn’t even care that one of those men was probably her father. One day she was going to find her mother and push all those men down into the sawdust where they belonged, and she was going to hold her mother tight until her mother held her and everything was all right for the first time in their lives. That’s what kept her going.

That night, Naamah dreamed of her mother’s face, her skin, the shape of her heart. In her dream, she and her mother were meandering through a garden like the one at Hopewell. Her mother was humming a tune about everything blue in the world.
Blue skies, bluebirds, blueberries
. When they passed a vine full of jam grapes so ripe some had already burst and fallen to the ground, her mother reached for a small cluster of them.

You can’t
, Naamah warned her.
You’ll get in trouble
.

But her mother picked the grapes anyway and put several of them in her pretty pink mouth. As she chewed, she let the sugary juice run down her chin. She picked another grape from the vine; this one she handed to Naamah.

Try one
, she said.
They taste like love
.

Just as Naamah was lifting the grape to her mouth, anticipating its sweetness, she woke with a start and found herself on the floor of the broom closet. She didn’t know how she’d arrived there or what kind of noise she’d made on her journey down from her cot, but she braced herself for a late-night visit from Sister Cordelia. Sister Cordelia knew everything that
happened at Hopewell. Her moles were detectives. The hairs that grew out of them were antennae. She knew things about Naamah that Naamah didn’t even know.

Naamah listened for Sister Cordelia’s footsteps on the stairs. She listened for the swishing sound of her heavy black habit against the tile floor. She listened for how quickly Sister Cordelia was breathing, how much trouble she was going to be in. She listened until the pool of silvery moonlight flooding over the windowsill slipped from one wall to another.

Still, Sister Cordelia didn’t come. Maybe she didn’t know everything.

Naamah waited until the moonlight gave way to daylight before she climbed back into her cot as noiselessly as she could. She drew her knees to her chest and closed her eyes, trying to call forth an image of her mother.
Blue skies
, she whispered.
Bluebirds. Blueberries
. Only when Naamah finally stopped listening for Sister Cordelia and the hem of her habit brushing against the floor in the hallway could she hear her mother singing in the garden once more. Only then could she see the grape juice dripping from her mother’s chin.

14

Although Sister Cordelia had bent herself to the task of saving Naamah’s soul, she had to delay her plans because the town of Green River had invited all twenty-six of the orphans at Hopewell to its harvest festival on the following Saturday. In the letter, which was hand delivered by an assistant clerk from the town hall and which Mary Elizabeth had brought up to the broom closet straightaway, the board of trustees wanted the Hopewell girls to sing one of the Lord’s songs on a stage in front of the whole town. They wanted the girls to feel like they had a real place in the community instead of simply sharing an address with them. Afterward, cups of warm apple cider and plates of sausages would be served, and the girls could mingle with the townspeople.

“Whores mingle,” Sister Cordelia hissed as she read. Surely Sister Cordelia wouldn’t be opposed to the request, the letter said, since she could select any of the Lord’s songs she saw fit. The town’s board of trustees said they were looking forward to hearing the girls sing because they were certain
their voices would sound more poignant than the voices of girls who were blessed with (yet spoiled by) mothers and fathers. They were looking forward to enjoying a bright future with Hopewell.

“Fools,” Sister Cordelia said.

Sister Cordelia was feeding Naamah spoonfuls of cornmeal, reading the letter, and reacting to it all at once. She wasn’t aware she’d been reading out loud until Naamah started choking because Sister Cordelia had pushed the spoon too far into her mouth.

“Singing is for heathens,” Sister Cordelia said, retracting the spoon.

While Naamah lay on the cot with bits of cornmeal strewn across her face, Sister Cordelia looked over the letter very carefully, as if she might have missed something in the blocky print (
print!
) and Naamah was waiting for it to be her fault.

Warm apple cider and sausages? The sounds of the words, the fragrant steam rising off of each letter, made Naamah’s mouth water. She licked the stale cornmeal from the outer edges of her lips, pretending it was anything other than what it was, even the slender piece of chalk Sister Cordelia had made her suck on so she never forgot Pythagoras’ theorem again, the geometry of fear. Naamah hated cornmeal.

“There’s no community out there,” Sister Cordelia said. She held the letter away from her cross. “People lie to each other. People cheat. Out there people have babies and leave them on my doorstep like dogs.”

“Maybe they don’t mean to,” Naamah said because she thought Sister Cordelia was talking to her and therefore awaiting a response.

Sister Cordelia tucked the letter into her habit. She told Naamah she could get up from her cot now and return to the
dormitory with the other girls, but she kept hovering over Naamah as if she had something else to say. A fat blackfly was darting around the broom closet, buzzing across the length of the floor, the ceiling, the cot. When it landed on one of Naamah’s toes, Sister Cordelia’s hand came crashing down on her foot.

“There’s good and there’s evil,” Sister Cordelia said. “There’s in here and out there. You’re foolish if you believe anything worthwhile exists on the other side of our wall.”

Sister Cordelia always said there were two worlds—the one at Hopewell and the other one—and that the other one had different rules. Out there, plenty of good Christians got punished for following God’s laws, and plenty of bad ones lived like kings for breaking them.

“Think about that when you see people stuffing themselves with sausages.”

“I get to go, too?” Naamah said, trying to picture the fountain, the colorful cars, the market with an entire aisle devoted to salty canned foods.

“I can’t very well leave you alone, can I?” Sister Cordelia said. “But you certainly haven’t earned a trip to town. A trip anywhere other than the broom closet.” Sister Cordelia put her hand on Naamah’s cheek. “What happened here? You have dust on your face.”

Naamah thought about the time she spent on the floor of the broom closet last night. She thought about her mother’s pink lips, the sweetness of her voice. Naamah didn’t want to lose her garden dream by giving it to Sister Cordelia.

“I do?” she said, waiting for Sister Cordelia to see the truth in her soul and punish her for lying. For dreaming of her mother. For dreaming at all.

But Sister Cordelia didn’t say anything. She simply went to
the bathroom and returned with a washrag and a basin of tepid water. She wiped down Naamah’s face the same meticulous way she would a corner of the floor to prove her loyalty to God and whatever humble work he required of her. Though Sister Cordelia had seen every one of Naamah’s angles from her head to her toes, Naamah had never even seen Sister Cordelia without her habit on. She didn’t even know what color her hair was or if she had hair at all.

“Sometimes I wonder if you’re ever going to follow the path to God,” Sister Cordelia said, wringing out the washrag. “Don’t you see it, Naamah? It’s right in front of you. All you have to do is open your eyes. I can’t keep prying them open for you.”

From the window in the broom closet, Naamah saw a group of girls huddling together in the garden to try to keep warm in their threadbare uniforms, pleated gray skirts and white blouses pintucked at the sleeves, while they harvested the last of the season’s tomatoes and corn and the first of the squashes and root vegetables, which they carried to the screened door at the back of the kitchen, where the oldest girls worked very hard to make whatever meals Sister Cordelia requested.

From where she stood now, Naamah could also see above the high stone wall. She could see beyond the iron gates. To the south was Green River. To the north, the woods. Tall evergreens. Green as far as she could see.

“Do you have any idea what God thinks of you?” Sister Cordelia said. “What he tells me while you’re sleeping? He thinks you don’t have a chance at redemption. Maybe I should stop fighting for you like he tells me. Maybe I should move on to another girl.”

“I’ll be good,” Naamah said, thinking,
Maybe you should
.

For the first time in her life, fear wasn’t the only thing steering
her into good behavior. Fear wasn’t the only thing flooding her heart. Naamah imagined herself standing on the stage at the harvest festival with the other girls. She imagined a whole town of people clapping for them after they finished singing, a whole town of people rushing onto the stage to shake their hands and hand them plates of sausages and glasses of cider, to welcome them to the community. She imagined slipping away from the stage in all that commotion and running toward her mother, the forest ever green.

This was Naamah’s chance to change her life. Maybe her only one until she turned eighteen and could walk out of Hopewell immediately thereafter. By then where would her mother be? How many more grapes would she offer Naamah before she gave up on her altogether? Wasn’t that what her mother was trying to say in her dream?

Be brave, Naamah. Fight for me. Fight for you
.

Sister Cordelia put the washrag in the basin. “I’m all you have,” she said, as if she’d heard Naamah’s thoughts. “I’m all any of you have. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t,” Naamah said, but there was no heart in it.

That was on Sunday.

On Monday, after a night of sleeping in the dormitory again, Naamah awoke to three girls standing over her, sneering as if she’d done something terrible to them while she was in the broom closet. They followed her to her locker with the same angry expressions until she took off her nightgown to change into her uniform, and they saw the sores on her back from lying on it too long. One of them asked her if they hurt. Another said of course they did. The last one, Mary Margaret, said Naamah still looked pretty; she always looked pretty.