The Best American Short Stories 2015 (12 page)

Wilda is about to scrawl these questions in the margins when she feels a tug on her sleeve. She turns, regards the blunt, sallow face of Sister Elgaruth, which nips all speculation in the bud.

“Sister,” croaks Elgaruth, “you stray from God's task.”

Wilda turns back to her copying, shaping letters with her crimped right hand.

At lunch in the dining hall, the Abbess sits in her bejeweled chair, rubies representing Christ's blood gleaming in the dark mahogany. Though the Abbess is stringy and yellow as a dried parsnip, everybody knows she has a sweet tooth, that she dotes on white flour, pheasants roasted in honey, wine from the Canary Islands. Her Holiness wears ermine collars and anoints her withered neck with myrrh. Two prioresses, Sister Ethelburh and Sister Willa, hunch on each side of her, slurping up cabbage soup with pious frowns. They cast cold glances at the table of new girls.

The new girls have no Latin. They bark the English language, lacing familiar words with the darkness of their mother tongue. One of them, Aoife, works in the kitchen with Wilda on Saturdays and Sundays. Aoife works hard, chopping a hundred onions, tears streaming down her cheeks. She sleeps in a cell six doors down from Wilda's. Sometimes, when Wilda roams the night hall to calm her soul after matins, she sees Aoife blustering through, red hair streaming. And Wilda feels the tug of curiosity. She wants to follow the girl into her room, hear her speak the language of wolves and foxes.

Now, as Wilda's tablemates spout platitudes about the heavy snows God keeps dumping upon the convent in March, the new girls erupt into rich laughter. They bray and howl, snigger and snort. Dark vapors hover over them. A turbulence. A hullabaloo. The Abbess slams her goblet down on the table. And the wild girls stifle their mirth. But Wilda can see that Aoife's strange amber eyes are still laughing, even though her mouth is pinched into a frown.

At vespers, the gouty Abbot is drunk again. His enormous head gleams like a broiled ham. He says that the world, drenched in sin, is freezing into a solid block of ice. He says that women are ripe for the Devil's attentions. He says their tainted flesh lures the Devil like a spicy, rancid bait. The Abbot describes the Evil One scrambling through a woman's window in the darkness of night. Knuckles upon pulpit, he mimics the sound of Satan's dung-caked hooves clomping over cobblestones. He asks the nuns to picture the naked beast: face of a handsome man of thirty, swarthy skinned, raven haired, goat horns poking from his brow, the muscular chest of a lusty layman, but below the waist he's all goat.

It has been snowing since November and the nuns are pale, anemic, scrawny. They are afflicted with scurvy, night blindness, nervous spasms, and melancholy. Unlike the monks across the meadow, they don't tend a vineyard at their convent. And when the Abbot describes the powerful thighs of Satan, the stinking flurry of hair and goat flesh, a young nun screams. A small mousy thing who never says a word. She opens her mouth and yowls like a cat. And then she blinks. She stands. She scurries from the chapel.

After the Abbot's sermon, Wilda tosses on her pallet, unable to banish the image from her mind: the vileness of two polluted animal bodies twisting together in a lather of poisonous sweat. She jumps out of bed and snatches her clump of blackberry brambles. She gives her ruttish beast of a body a good thrashing, chastising every square inch of stinking meat from chin to toes. She whips herself until she floats. God's love is an ocean sparkling in the sun, and Wilda's soul is a droplet, a molecule of moisture lifted into the air. When she opens her eyes, she does not see her humble stone cell with its straw pallet and hemp quilt; she sees heavenly skies in pink tumult, angels slithering through clouds. She sees the Virgin held aloft by a throng of naked cherubs, doves nesting in her golden hair.

In her melodious voice, the Virgin speaks of Jesus Christ her Son, his tears of ruby blood. The Virgin says her son will return to Earth in May to walk among flowers and bees.

When the bell rings for matins, Wilda is still up, pacing, her braids unraveling. Somehow, she tidies herself. Somehow, she transports her body to the chapel, where three dozen sleepy-eyed virgins have gathered at two in the freezing morning to revel in Jesus' love.

At breakfast, Wilda drinks her beer but does not touch her bread. Now she is floating through the scriptorium. She has slept a mere thirty minutes the night before. She has a runny catarrh from standing in the freezing wind with her hood down, and she shivers. But her heart burns, a flame in the hallowed nook of her chest.

You are all Christ's brides
, said the Abbot this morning.
Do not break the seal that seals you both together
.

“I am the bride of Christ,” Wilda whispers as she sits down at her lectern. She opens her ink, sniffs the blood-red brew. She has a burning need to describe the voice of the Virgin, the frenzy of beating angel wings as the heavens opened to let the Sacred Mother descend. She wants to capture the looks on their faces, wrenched and fierce. But there's Sister Elgaruth, wheezing behind her. Wilda turns, regards the sooty kernel of flesh that adorns Sister Elgaruth's left nostril. Elgaruth is one of God's creatures, magnificent, breathing, etched of flesh and bone.

“Sister,” says the old woman, “mind the missing word in your last paragraph.”

Elgaruth points with her crooked finger, deformed from decades of copying, too crimped to copy text.

“Forgive me. I will be more mindful.”

Sister Elgaruth shuffles off. Wilda eyes the shelves where the unbound vellum is stashed, noting the locked drawer that stores the choicest sheets, stripped from the backs of stillborn lambs. She has never touched the silky stuff, which is reserved for the three ancient virgins who have been penning a psalter for an archbishop.

Now, when Sister Elgaruth departs to the lavatory, Wilda tiptoes over to the old woman's lectern. She opens the first drawer, notes a pot of rosemary balm, the twig Elgaruth uses to pick dark wax from her ears. The second drawer contains a psalter, prayer beads, a bundle of dried lavender. In the third drawer, beneath a crusty handkerchief, is a carved wooden box, four keys within it, looped on a hemp ring. Wilda snatches the keys, hurries to the vellum drawer, tries two keys before unlocking the most sacred sheets. By the time Sister Elgaruth returns, Wilda is back at her desk, three stolen sheets stuffed in her cowl pocket. Her heart, a wild bird, beats within her chest.

She turns back to
Beastes of God's Worlde
.

The goats bloode is so hotte with luste it wille dissolve the hardest diamonde
.

In the kitchen, Aoife chops the last carrots from the root cellar, brown shriveled witches' fingers. Aoife is pale, freckled, quick with her knife. She sings a strange song and smiles. She turns to Wilda. In the Abbot's pompous voice, she croaks a pious tidbit about the darkness of woman's flesh—a miraculous imitation. For a second the Abbot is right there in the kitchen, ankle-deep in onion skins, standing in the steam of boiling cabbage. Wilda feels an eruption of joy in her gut. She lets out a bray of laughter. Sister Lufe turns from her pot of beans to give them both the stink eye. Wilda smirks at Aoife, takes up a cabbage, and peels off rotted leaves, layer after slimy layer, until she uncovers the fresh, green heart of the vegetable.

Wilda kneels on bruised knees. She has no desk, only a crude, short table of gnarled elm. Tucked beneath it are sheets of lamb vellum, her quills, a pot of stolen ink. She faces east. Her window is a small square of hewn stone. Outside, snow has started to fall again, and Wilda, who has no fire, rejoices in the bone-splitting cold. She's mumbling. Shiver after shiver racks her body. And soon she feels nothing. Her candle flame sputters. She smells fresh lilies.

The Virgin steps from the empyrean into the world of flesh and mud.

The glow from her body burns Wilda's eyes.

The words from her mouth are like musical thunder in Wilda's ears.

“My Son will return to choose a bride,” says the Virgin, “a pearl without spot.”

And then the Virgin is lifted by angel throng, back into the realm of pure fire.

Wilda sits stunned as the snow thickens outside. She prays. She whips herself. And then she takes up her plume. She tries to describe the beauty of the Virgin. At first, her words get stuck, stunned as flies in a spill of honey. But then she begins with a simple sentence, in tiny, meticulous script.

Whenne the virgin descended I smelde apples and oceane winde
.

At Prime Service the Abbess keeps coughing—fierce convulsions that shake her whole body. She flees the chapel with her two prioress flunkies, eyes streaming. The Abbot pauses, and then he returns to his theme of Hell as a solid block of ice, the Devil frozen at its core. Satan is a six-headed beast with thirty-six sets of bat wings on his back. The Evil One must perpetually flap these wings to keep the ninth circle of Hell freezing cold.

Wilda frowns, trying to grasp the paradox of Hell as ice, wondering how this same Devil, frozen at the center of Hell, can also slip through her window at night, burning with lust, every pore on his body steaming. But it's morning, and the Abbot is sober. When he returns for vespers, his imagination inflamed with wine, he will speak of carnal commerce between women and Satan. But this morning his theme is ice.

Today is the first day of April, and a crust of snow covers the dead grass.

The chickens aren't laying. The cows give scant milk.

The meat cellar boasts nothing but hard sausage, oxtails, and salted pigs' feet.

The beets are blighted, the cabbages soft with rot.

But Wilda smiles, for she knows that Christ will return this blessed month, descending from Heaven with a great whoosh of balmy air. She has described the glory in her secret book: trees flowering and fruiting simultaneously, lambs frolicking on beds of fresh mint, the ground decked with lilies as Christ walks across the greening Earth to fetch his virgin bride.

On Sunday, in the kitchen, Aoife puts two bits of turnip into her mouth, mimicking the Abbess's crooked teeth. Crossing her eyes, Aoife walks with the Abbess's arrogant shuffle, head held high and sneering. Wilda doubles over, clutches her gut. She staggers and sputters as laughter rocks through her. Her eyes leak. She wheezes and brays. At last, the mirth subsides. Wilda leans against the cutting table, dizzy, relishing the warmth from the fire. A stew, dark with the last of the dried mushrooms, bubbles in the cauldron. Aoife, still sniggering, places her hand on Wilda's arm. Wilda feels a delicious heat burning through her sleeve. Aoife's smile sparkles with mischief, and the young nun smells of sweat and cinnamon.

Wilda's body floats as she looks into Aoife's honey-colored eyes, pupils shrinking, irises etched with green. Aoife murmurs something in her mother tongue. But then she speaks English.

“Man is a rational, moral animal, capable of laughter.”

Aoife removes her hand and turns back to her bucket of turnips.

The Abbess is dead by Tuesday. Her body, dressed in a scarlet cowl, rests on a bier in the chapel. The Abbot, fearing plague, sends a small, nervous prior to conduct the service. The chapel echoes with the coughs of sickly nuns. The prior covers his mouth with a ruby rag. He hurries through the absolution, flinging holy water with a brisk flick of his fingers, and departs. Three farmers haul the body away.

That night, a hailstorm batters the stone convent, sending down stones the size of eggs, keeping the nuns awake with constant patter. Sisters whisper that the world has fallen ill, that God will purge the sin with ice. No one arrives from the monastery to conduct the morning service, and nuns pray silently in the candlelit chapel.

Contemplating the body of Christ, Wilda kneels before her little book, waiting for words to come. She sees him, torn from the cross, limp in the Virgin's arms. He is pale, skinny as an adolescent boy. His side wound, parted like a coy mouth, reveals glistening pomegranate flesh. Other than the flowing tresses and silky beard, Christ is hairless, with smooth skin and nipples the color of plums. He has a woman's lips, a woman's soft, yearning eyes. Wilda imagines him waking up in his tomb, cadaverous flesh glowing like a firefly in the cryptic darkness. His groin is covered with loose gauze. His hair hangs halfway down his back, shining like a copper cape when he emerges into the sunlight.

The world is frozen in sinne
, Wilda writes,
frozen until the Lammbbe descendes to walk among floweres and bees. He wille strewe his marriage bed with lilies. Hallelujah!

Fifteen nuns have been taken by the plague, their bodies carted off by farmers. Not even a prior will set foot in the convent, but the nuns shuffle through their routine, sit coughing and praying in the silent chapel, their hearts choked with black bile. They pine for spring. But the heavens keep dumping grain after grain of nasty frost onto the stone fortress. In mid-April, the clouds thicken, and a freak blizzard descends like a great beast from the sky, vanquishing the world with snow.

Prioress Ethelburh orders the nuns to stay in their rooms praying, to leave only for the lavatory. Kitchen workers will still prepare food but the nuns will no longer gather in the refectory for fellowship. Victuals will be taken from door to door to stave off the contagion.

In the kitchen Aoife is bleary-eyed, and Wilda worries that the plague has struck her. But then the poor girl is weeping over her pot of dried peas.

“What is it, Sister?” Wilda moves toward her.

“Nothing,” says Aoife, “just the sadness of winter and death.”

But then Aoife pulls up her cowl sleeve, shows Wilda her thin arm—pale and finely shaped, mottled with pink blisters.

Wilda jumps back, fearing contagion.