no one doubted the sincerity of her plight. Back then she’d been too weak to lead the community. Now she was too humble, too devoted to her own spiritual life of purity and sacrifice.
Sister Elena emerged from the confessional. Seeing the Reverend Mother kneeling there, she bowed her head once respectfully, then hurried back to her cell to begin her penance. Could words and prayers and fasting really right the wrongs of the past? Or the present, for that matter? It was a nice idea. Evil and goodness existing like numbers on some sort of balance sheet that could be moved around at will. If only that were true.
In the privacy of her bare room she began removing her garments one by one and laying them neatly on her bed. The heavy wool tunic, belt, scapular and veil, all black, followed by a black veil, extra-thick in Sister Elena’s case, then a white one, and finally the white ‘coif’ or headdress worn by all the fully professed sisters at Sikinos. Finally she stood naked, relieved to be free of her torturous habit on this stiflingly hot night.
There was no mirror in the cell, nor any other accouterment of vanity, but at night the fifty-year-old nun could clearly see her reflection in the glass windowpane. Her figure was still beautiful, slender yet rounded, with full high breasts and a narrow waist tapering into softly curved hips and thighs almost as firm as they had been in her youth. From the neck down, she was still a beautiful woman. But her face was marked with sin.
My face is my penance, she reflected.
Then again, there was more to life than physical perfection.
Power, for instance.
Reaching into the pocket of the tunic lying neatly on her bed, she pulled out the piece of paper Father Georgiou had given her, unfolding it carefully with slow, practiced hands. Newspapers were forbidden at the convent, along with all other contact with the outside world. Just seeing the words H Avγ
But not as much of a thrill as the photograph.
The dead child. The sign. Right there, for the whole world to see!
There were many of them out there, children and adults alike, branded like this young boy. Brothers and sisters in fire. In pain. Reaching down, Sister Elena ran her fingers over the grooves of the brand seared into her own flesh, at the top of her inner thigh. A simple letter ‘L’, the same mark as on the migrant boy. How ironic that it should be this child, this nameless refugee – this nobody – whose death had brought their signs out into the open. Put them on the front page of the newspaper, no less, and all over the television news.
God bless you, child.
Putting her hands up to her face, Sister Elena let the paper flutter to the ground, aware of an unfamiliar sensation she couldn’t quite place.
Then, all at once, it dawned on her what that was.
Sister Elena had just done something that she hadn’t done in well over ten years.
She’d smiled.
Jim Newsome felt the sweat trickle down between his shoulder blades and the dust sting his eyes as the preacher droned on.
‘Mimi Praeger … good Christian … good neighbor … back home with the Lord …’
The punishing sun made it hard to concentrate. A wiry outdoorsman in his late sixties, with thin lips and the erect, stiff bearing of a soldier, Jim Newsome stood beside his soft, round wife Mary, betraying no outward sign of his discomfort. But inside Jim was seething. Who in their right mind held a funeral service outdoors, at noon, in the height of summer? All around, the air shimmered with a dry, painful heat, all wind and dust and cracked earth. The kind of heat that made your throat hurt and your skin prickle with the whispered threat of fire. This was desert heat. Only they weren’t in the desert. They were in Paradise Valley, California, at the Praeger ranch, an oasis of lush green pastureland. Or at least it had been, before the drought arrived, drying out the river beds and turning the meadows brown and brittle, like an old man’s skin.
‘As we gather to scatter Mimi’s ashes over the land she loved …’ The pastor took a sip of water, mopping his brow with a handkerchief, his face tomato-red. ‘Let us call to mind our own failings …’
Jim Newsome tuned out. The rancher’s failings were his own business, not some milksop of a preacher’s, barely out of short pants. Jim would call them to mind when he was good and ready.
Instead, he scanned the faces of the mourners gathered outside old Mimi Praeger’s cabin, a simple, pine post-and-beam structure that belonged to another era, another time. More than thirty people had shown up for the service, a good number, especially when you considered how much Mimi had always kept to herself. For years she’d lived totally alone up here, miles from the nearest gas station, and a full day’s walk to the tiny convenience store on Prospect Road. Then the child had come along – Ella – and for a few years it had been the two of them, grandmother and granddaughter, like a pair of pioneer women against the world. But children grow. When Ella finally left the cabin for college in San Francisco, it had just about broken poor Mimi’s heart.
A lot of people never forgave the girl for that.
‘She’s got a nerve showing her face here, if you ask me,’ Jim’s wife Mary had observed caustically, watching Ella Praeger talking to the preacher before today’s service. In a fitted black shift dress and patent leather boots, and with her long blonde hair tied back severely in a single, too-tight braid, Mimi’s granddaughter had certainly come a long way from the scruffy, oddball tomboy kid the locals remembered.
‘She could hardly not come,’ replied Jim. ‘She’s family, after all. Next of kin. And this is her land now.’
‘Not for long,’ Mary Newsome sniffed. ‘You think she’s going to want to hold on to this place, now she has her fancy-pants city life? She’ll sell just as soon as she gets an offer, you mark my words.’
‘Maybe,’ said Jim.
Jim Newsome couldn’t find it in his heart to judge Ella Praeger as severely as his wife – or the rest of the valley, for that matter. It must have been tough growing up out here, with only old Mimi for company. Both parents dead. No TV. No friends. No fun. Little wonder the girl had turned out strange. Withdrawn. Brittle. That kind of loneliness wasn’t healthy for a young person. Or any person, for that matter.
Ella Praeger took the urn from the preacher’s clammy hands and solemnly carried it to the foot of the oak tree. Her grandmother had loved this tree. Ella would watch her stroking it sometimes, running a gnarled hand up and down its ancient bark affectionately, as if it were a pet dog.
It got more affection than she ever showed me, Ella thought. But she wasn’t bitter. Mimi Praeger was who she was: a survivalist and a loner who had chosen a life completely at one with the land. She had taught Ella the things she knew. How to chop down a tree,
