The last year they held the picnic, the three of them waded into the water fully clothed, each holding a piece of thread that they’d yanked out of Mother’s embroidered sweater. Benne and I stood with our toes touching the edge of the ocean and begged to come, too, and Kat said, “No, this is just for us. Y’all stay back there.”
They walked out until the cold water creased their waists, and then they tied the three threads together. “Hurry up,” they kept saying to one another, squealing when the waves lapped against them.
I’d believed then, and I still believed now, that it was some ritual of friendship they’d concocted on the spot, thanks to the wine and the dizziness brought on by their dancing. And Mother’s conveniently unraveling sweater.
Kat flung their tied threads into the darkness, onto the waves, and they laughed. It was a voluptuous laughter, and mischievous, like children laughing.
As they scampered back, Hepzibah found the turtle skull. She practically tripped over it coming out of the water. She stood above it with the waves foaming around her feet, Mother and Kat still giggling and carrying on. “Tie yuh mout’,” Hepzibah said, switching into Gullah, and everyone fell instantly silent.
“Look what the ocean has sent,” she said, and raised the skull out of the water, the ivory bone smooth and dripping, immaculate against the black night.
I believe they all thought it was a sign of some kind. They had bound their lives together out there in the water, and suddenly a turtle skull miraculously washed up at their feet.
For a long time after that—years and years—they’d passed the skull back and forth among them. I remembered it perched on our mantel for a while before it would resurface on Kat’s bookshelf or here on Hepzibah’s table. It must have reminded them of those nights, of the knots in their threads.
Now, sitting in the porch rocker, I rubbed the porous bone with my thumb and looked back at the blue door. Hepzibah obviously wasn’t home.
I got up and put the skull back on the table, and for a moment the table seemed like more than a distant slab of childhood memory. It felt like a living part of me.
I’d known since I was ten that I would leave the island. On the first Ash Wednesday after Dad’s death, the moment the priest touched my forehead, I’d felt myself rise up out of that little smudge of ash with the determination of a phoenix. I will leave here, I told myself. I will fly away. After college, I’d rarely come back, and when I had, it’d been with a dissociating arrogance. I hadn’t even gotten married to Hugh here. The wedding had been in somebody’s generic backyard garden in Atlanta, somebody we didn’t even know that well. I thought about Kat teasing me, saying I’d forgotten the pluff mud whence I’d come, and she’d been right. I’d done everything in my power to erase this place.
The last thing I’d expected was to stand on Hepzibah’s porch and feel a seizure of love for Egret Island. And not just for the island but for the woman my mother had been, dancing around a fire.
Something struck me then: I’d never done any of those things my mother had done. Never danced on a beach. Never made a bonfire. Never waded into the ocean at night with laughing women and tied my life to theirs.
CHAPTER Thirteen
The next morning I walked to the monastery. The sun, perky and yellow yesterday, had burrowed into a hole somewhere. Fog covered everything. It looked as if soup skim had formed over the entire island during the night. I wore my blue jeans and red coat and a clashing garnet baseball cap I’d found in the utility room with CAROLINA GAMECOCKS printed across the front. It was pulled low on my forehead, with my ponytail threaded through the hole in back.
I walked the same path I’d taken a couple of nights earlier when I’d gone searching for Mother. I could smell the dense, primal odor of the marsh carried in by the fog, and it made me think of Brother Thomas. His face formed in my mind, and my insides gave a funny lurch.
I was going to find Father Dominic. If I happened to run into Brother Thomas in the process, that was fine, but I told myself I wasn’t going out of my way.
Naturally I had no idea what I would say to Dominic once I found him. I began to play with various strategies to learn what he knew about Mother’s cutting off her finger.
What if I talk to Dominic, really level with him, and he goes and tells Mother? I hadn’t considered this. Whatever progress I’d made with her would evaporate then and there. She would probably send me packing again.
I’d left her watching an old Julia Child cooking show on television. Mother loved Julia Child. I mean, loved her. She would say to me, “You think Julia Child is Catholic? She would have to be, wouldn’t she?” Mother always copied down her recipes, especially anything with shrimp in it. If she wanted to cook one of Julia’s shrimp dishes, she would simply send a monk out into the creek with a net.
The monks hand-tied the nets—six-and eight-footers—and sold them not only in the Low Country but in seaside boutiques and fishing stores all along the East Coast. I’d seen one once in a shop on Cape Cod when Hugh and I were vacationing. It’d been packaged with a fragment of Scripture printed on the label: “Cast your net.” From the Gospel of John, I believe the label had said, so there was a kind of mandate from God to buy it. “Shrewd marketers, aren’t they?” Hugh had commented. They were priced at seventy-five dollars.
Walking along, I remembered how the monks would sit on the shaved grass in the cloister square with strands of cotton twine and buckets of lead weights, their callused hands moving back and forth in a beautiful, mindless rhythm. I used to think that custom cast nets had to be the most exotic way on earth for monks to earn a living, but then a couple of years ago, Dee had told me about a “really cool monastery” out west that sold hay to movie stars for their llamas. We’d had this whole discussion about which monastery had the more unusual, or more auspicious, occupation. We’d decided it had to be llama feeding. But still, cast nets were a long way from making fudge or rhubarb jelly.
Mike had been a brilliant caster, holding the sides of the net in his hands, the top of it in his teeth, flinging it like a spinning Frisbee into the air. It would sail up into the light, then plunge into the creek with a huge galump! and a spray that rose like smoke rings off the surface. He would tug the net up and shake it, and the wiggling gray shrimp would spill around our feet.
As I came through the last clump of trees, I glanced toward the cottages where the monks lived, the red tile roofs glowing pink in the murky light. I was, I realized, wishing for a glimpse of Brother Thomas—hoping that a crack would appear in the viscous morning and he would step out in the same ghostly way he had in the garden.
Approaching the gate to the rose garden, I thought of Mother’s finger in there and shuddered, remembering something I hadn’t thought of in years. Mother and her milagros.
When I was a teenager, she’d ordered them routinely from a cheesy Catholic catalog. They’d looked like bracelet charms to me, except they were all severed body parts—feet, hearts, ears, torsos, heads, hands. Eventually I figured out that they were offerings, little prayers in the shape of the petitioners’ afflictions. When Mother thought she had a cataract, she’d left an eye milagro at Senara’s statue, and when her knee had flared with arthritis, she’d left a milagro in the shape of a leg.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d intended her finger to be the ultimate milagro.
I skirted the back of the church and headed along a tree-lined avenue toward the Monastery Reception Center, near the abbey entrance. It looked like a small cottage. The porch had a sloping roof and was draped with browned honeysuckle. Inside was a monk with a bald head and uncivilized eyebrows that curled over a pair of black-framed glasses.
He nodded as I moved past him to a room the monks called the Gift Shop. I browsed through the display of cast nets, turned a squeaky rack of rosaries and saints’ medals. Spotting a stack of teal green booklets, I picked one up, surprised to see it was the booklet Kat said she’d had printed. The Mermaid’s Tale.
I
flipped it open to the first page:
According to the legend recounted in Legenda Aurea: Readings on the Saints, in 1450 a beautiful Celtic mermaid named Asenora swam ashore on the coast of Cornwall where a Benedictine monastery had recently been established. After removing her fish tail and hiding it among the rocks, she explored the area on foot and discovered the community of men. She made many clandestine visits—
“It’s the story behind our mermaid chair,” a voice said, and I looked up from the passage to see the bald monk with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, as if he were battening himself down. He wore a large wooden cross around his neck, and there were droop lines at the corners of his mouth. “One of our monks wrote it. Pretty fanciful stuff, I’m afraid.”
“Yes, I’ve always loved the story,” I told him, realizing I hadn’t heard it in ages. Most of it was fuzzy to me now.
“If you’re here for the guided tour, I’m afraid you’ve just missed it, and there’s not another one until three o’clock this afternoon, though quite honestly I don’t see the big attraction. Just a lot of ‘Here is the church where the monks pray, and here is the Net House where the monks tie nets, and over there is the laundry where the monks wash their socks.’”
I thought he meant this to be funny, but when I laughed, he glowered at me a little. “No,” I said, “I didn’t come for the tour.” I dug around in my jeans pocket for the ten-dollar bill I’d stuffed inside it and bought the book. “The author, Father Dominic—where could I find him?” I said. “I’d like to have him sign this for me.”
“Sign the book?” He shook his head. “We won’t be able to live with him if he starts autographing books. We can barely live with him now.” Again, I wasn’t sure whether he was being serious; he had that kind of sour way that made it hard to tell. “I imagine he’s in the library somewhere,” he said. “That would be the white stucco building next to the church. It’s open to visitors, but some areas aren’t. You’d be surprised where people end up. Yesterday a lady came wandering through the refectory while we were eating lunch. She took a picture of the salad bar!”
A woman roaming through prohibited areas struck me as amusing, as did his offense at it, but actually more amusing was the fact that the abbey had a salad bar. I wondered if Mother had come up with that. It was so implausibly current of her.
“I know the places that are off limits,” I told him. “My mother is Nelle Dubois. I’m Jessie. I used to come here as a child.” I don’t know what made me tell him this; he wasn’t the most welcoming person. I was even thinking how peculiar that he, of all the monks, would get assigned to the Reception Center. Perhaps it was part of a conspiracy to discourage visitors.
He said, “We’re sorry about her troubles.” It came out like an automated recording on an answering machine.
“And you are…?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Father Sebastian. I’m the prior here.”
I tried to remember the monastic hierarchy. I was pretty sure the prior was the second in command, the one who, as Mother put it, kept the monastery on the straight and narrow.
Strolling to the library to find Father Dominic, I got a monumental case of cold feet. What am I doing? My steps slowed until I was just standing there, stymied with doubt. I considered going back to the house and calling Hugh. On second thought, you come fix Mother, I’d say. I do not have the balls—or the ovaries, or whatever anatomical part is required.
Glancing behind the church, I noticed the foot trail that led to the edge of the marsh. I followed it to a stone bench that sat beneath an oak.
Coward.
I didn’t sit on the bench but instead plopped on the ground and sat there staring at the creek plaited with mist, the way it moved like a living vein, doglegging into the bay. I’d often come to this spot after my father died, the times I’d felt sad or lost. I’d shouted my name across the marsh, listening to the way it was magnified over the water, as if the spartina grasses were singing it, and how sometimes the wind would hoist it like a gull out toward the ocean. “Jessie,” I would call, over and over and over.
I was holding the booklet I’d bought and opened it to the passage I’d been reading when Father Sebastian interrupted me.
…Suspicious that Asenora was no ordinary woman but a mermaid, and greatly alarmed by her presence, the abbot of the monastery hid himself by the water and waited. He witnessed Asenora swim ashore, remove her fish tail and hide it in a niche in the cliff.
When she wandered off in the direction of the abbey, the shrewd abbot retrieved the fish tail, bundling it into his robe. He tucked it inside a secret compartment hidden under the seat of his chair, in the church. Without her tail, the poor mermaid could never go back to the sea, and soon the wildness of it drained out of her. Asenora was converted, and eventually became St. Senara.
When my father used to tell me that part of the story, he talked about Asenora’s “tragic fate”—losing her tail and getting stuck with a halo—and I got the impression, though it was only reading between the lines, that Dominic felt the same way. And, frankly, something about Father Dominic’s writing this story at all caused an uneasiness in me.
An interesting footnote to the legend states that after her conversion Asenora sometimes missed the sea and her former life so strongly that she prowled the monastery at night in search of her tail. Conflicting stories exist about whether she ever found it. One story suggests she not only found her fish tail but donned it whenever she wanted to revisit her lost life, always returning, however, and replacing it inside the abbot’s chair.
I thought of Mother and her crazy love for St. Senara, and I couldn’t reconcile it with what I was reading. Senara was a saint who sneaked around looking for transportation back to her nefarious past. It had never really occurred to me how incongruous this was.
Some scholars suggest that the story of Saint Senara may have been created to help people choose the path of godly delight over that of sensual delight. But might it also be a way of emphasizing the importance of both?
Both? I hadn’t expected him to write something like that—being a monk. I closed the booklet—sort of slapped it shut, to tell the truth. The tension was vibrating again in my chest.
Dampness from the grass had seeped through my jeans. I got to my feet, and when I turned around, I saw Father Dominic coming along the path toward me. He stopped on the other side of the stone bench. He was wearing the straw hat, and Kat had been right—whole sections of it had sprung loose. It was taking on the farcical appearance of a bird’s nest.
“Knock, knock,” he said, his eyes filled with amusement.
I hesitated. So he remembers me.
“Who’s there?” I felt immensely awkward saying it, but I didn’t see how I could not play along.
“Zoom.”
“Zoom who?”
“Zoom did you expect?” he said, setting loose an opulent laugh that seemed oversize for the joke. “I don’t think I’ve seen you since you were a girl. I hope you remember me?”
“Of course, Father Dominic,” I said. “I…I was just—”
“You were just reading my little book, and from the way you closed it, I’m not sure you liked it very much.” He laughed to let me know he was teasing, but it made me uncomfortable.
“No, no, I liked it.” Neither of us spoke for a moment. I looked off at the marsh, embarrassed. The tide was receding, leaving plats of mud that looked tender and freshly peeled. I could see the holes of dozens of hibernating fiddler crabs, the tip ends of their claws barely protruding.
“Father Sebastian said you were looking for me. I believe you are in need of an autograph for your book.”
“Oh. Yes, that’s right. Would you mind?” I handed him the booklet, feeling caught in my little lie. “I’m sorry, I don’t have a pen.”
He produced one from inside his black scapular. He scrawled something on the inside cover, then handed it back.
He said, “This is a lovely spot, isn’t it?”
&nbs
p; “Yes…lovely.”
The sea of grass behind us swayed with the breezes, and he shifted side to side beneath his robe as if he were one of them, a grass blade trying to get synchronized with the rest.
“So how’s our Nelle?” he asked.
The question startled me. The curious way he’d said “our Nelle,” plus something in his voice, how her name came out softer than the other words.
Our Nelle. Our.
“Her hand is healing,” I said. “The real problem is in here.” I meant to touch my finger to my forehead but involuntarily tapped the flat bone over my heart, and I felt the rightness of that, as though my finger were trying to tell me something.
“Yes, I suppose the heart will cause us to do strange and wondrous things,” Father Dominic said. He rapped his knuckles on his chest, and I had the feeling he was talking about impulses in his own heart.
He’d taken off his hat and was plucking at the wayward pieces on it. I had a memory of him that day the monks delivered the washed-up debris from my father’s boat, how he’d stood at the fireplace in this very same posture, holding his hat, watching the board burn.
“Did you know she called the finger that she cut off her ‘pointing finger’?” I asked.
He shook his head, and his face—such an old, kind face—changed a little, tightening and puckering in places.
I hesitated. Certain things were occurring to me in the moment—guesses, impressions—and I didn’t know whether I should say them. “What if she cut it off to relieve a terrible sense of blame?”
He looked away from my face.
He knows.
A ravine of quiet opened between us. I remember a murmurous hum rising up like the swell of insects. It seemed to last a long time.
The Mermaid Chair Page 9
