Paradise (27 page)

On a clear summer day, as she knelt weeding in the garden along with two sullen wards of the state, a male voice behind her said:

“Excuse me, miss.”

All he wanted was some black peppers.

He was twenty-nine. She was thirty-nine. And she lost her mind. Completely.

Consolata was not a virgin. One of the reasons she so gratefully accepted Mary Magna’s hand, stretching over the litter like a dove’s wing, was the dirty pokings her ninth year subjected her to. But never, after the white hand had enclosed her filthy paw, did she know any male or want to, which must have been why being love-struck after thirty celibate years took on an edible quality.

What did he say? Come with me? What they call you? How much for half a peck? Or did he just show up the next day for more of the hot black peppers? Did she walk toward him to get a better look? Or did he move toward her? In any case, with something like amazement, he’d said, “Your eyes are like mint leaves.” Had she answered “And yours are like the beginning of the world” aloud, or were these words confined to her head? Did she really drop to her knees and encircle his leg, or was that merely what she was wanting to do?

“I’ll return your basket. But it may be late when I do. Is it all right if I disturb you?”

She didn’t remember saying anything to that, but her face surely told him what he needed to know, because he was there in the night and she was there too and he took her hand in his. Not a peck basket in sight. Sha sha sha.

Once in his truck, easing down the graveled driveway, the narrow dirt road, and then gaining speed on a wider tarmac one, they did not speak. He drove, it seemed, for the pleasure of the machine: the roar contained, hooded in steel; the sly way it simultaneously parted the near darkness and vaulted into darkness afar—beyond what could be anticipated. They drove for what Consolata believed were hours, no words passing between them. The danger and its necessity focused them, made them calm. She did not know or care where headed or what might happen when they arrived. Speeding toward the unforeseeable, sitting next to him who was darker than the darkness they split, Consolata let the feathers unfold and come unstuck from the walls of a stone-cold womb. Out here where wind was not a help or threat to sunflowers, nor the moon a language of time, of weather, of sowing or harvesting, but a feature of the original world designed for the two of them.

Finally he slowed and turned into a barely passable track, where coyote grass scraped the fenders. In the middle of it he braked and would have taken her in his arms except she was already there.

On the way back they were speechless again. What had been uttered during their lovemaking leaned toward language, gestured its affiliation, but in fact was un-memorable, -controllable or -translatable. Before dawn they pulled away from each other as though, having been arrested, they were each facing prison sentences without parole. As she opened the door and stepped down, he said, “Friday. Noon.” Consolata stood there while he backed the truck away. She had not seen him clearly even once during the whole night. But Friday. Noon. They would do it do it do it in daylight. She hugged herself, sank to her knees and doubled over. Her forehead actually tapping the ground as she rocked in a harness of pleasure.

She slipped into the kitchen and pretended to Sister Roberta that she had been in the henhouse.

“Well, then? Where are the eggs?”

“Oh. I forgot the basket.”

“Don’t go softheaded on me, please.”

“No, Sister. I won’t.”

“Everything is in such disarray.”

“Yes, Sister.”

“Well, move, then.”

“Yes, Sister. Excuse me, Sister.”

“Is something funny?”

“No, Sister. Nothing. But…”

“But?”

“I…What is today?”

“Saint Martha.”

“I mean what day of the week.”

“Tuesday. Why?”

“Nothing, Sister.”

“We need your wits, dear. Not your confusion.”

“Yes, Sister.”

Consolata snatched a basket and ran out the kitchen door.

Friday. Noon. The sun has hammered everybody back behind stone walls for relief. Everybody but Consolata and, she hopes, the living man. She has no choice but to bear the heat with only a straw hat to protect her from the anvil the sun takes her for. She is standing at the slight turn in the driveway, but in full view of the house. This land is flat as a hoof, open as a baby’s mouth. There is nowhere to hide outrageousness. If Sister Roberta or Mary Magna calls to her or asks for an explanation she will invent something—or nothing. She hears his truck before she sees it and when it arrives it passes her by. He does not turn his head, but he signals. His finger lifts from the steering wheel and points farther ahead. Consolata turns right and follows the sound of his tires and then their silence as they touch tarmac. He waits for her on the shoulder of the road.

Inside the truck they look at one another for a long time, seriously, carefully, and then they smile.

He drives to a burned-out farmhouse that sits on a rise of fallow land. Negotiating bluestem and chickweed, he parks behind the black teeth of a broken chimney. Hand in hand, they fight shrub and bramble until they reach a shallow gully. Consolata spots at once what he wants her to see: two fig trees growing into each other. When they are able to speak full sentences, he gazes at her, saying:

“Don’t ask me to explain. I can’t.”

“Nothing to explain.”

“I’m trying to get on in my life. A lot of people depend on me.”

“I know you’re married.”

“I aim to stay so.”

“I know.”

“What else you know?” He puts his forefinger in her navel.

“That I’m way older than you.”

He looks up, away from her navel to her eyes, and smiles. “Nobody’s older than me.”

Consolata laughs.

“Certainly not you,” he says. “When’s the last time?”

“Before you were born.”

“Then you’re all mine.”

“Oh, yes.”

He kisses her lightly, then leans on his elbow. “I’ve traveled. All over. I’ve never seen anything like you. How could anything be put together like you? Do you know how beautiful you are? Have you looked at yourself?”

“I’m looking now.”

No figs ever appeared on those trees during all the time they met there, but they were grateful for the shade of dusty leaves and the protection of the agonized trunks. The blankets he brought they lay on as much as possible. Later each saw the nicks and bruises the dry creek caused.

Consolata was questioned. She refused to answer; diverted the inquiries into lament. “What’s going to happen to me when all this is closed? Nobody has said what’s going to happen to me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You know we’ll take care of you. Always.”

Consolata pouted, pretending to be wild with worry and therefore unreliable. The more assurance she got, the more she insisted upon wandering off, to “be by myself,” she said. An urge that struck her mostly on Fridays. Around noon.

When Mary Magna and Sister Roberta left on business in September, Sister Mary Elizabeth and three, now, feckless students continued to pack, clean, study and maintain prayer. Two of the students, Clarissa and Penny, began to grin when they saw Consolata. They were fourteen years old; small-boned girls with beautiful knowing eyes that could go suddenly blank. They lived to get out of that place, and were in fairly good spirits now that the end was coming. Recently they had begun to regard Consolata as a confederate rather than one of the enemy out to ruin their lives. And whispering to each other in a language the sisters had forbidden them to use, they covered for her, did the egg gathering that was Consolata’s responsibility. The weeding and washing up too. Sometimes they watched from the schoolroom windows, heads touching, eyes aglow, as the woman they believed old enough to be their grandmother stood in all weather waiting for the Chevrolet truck.

“Does anyone know?” Consolata runs her thumbnail around the living man’s nipple.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” he answers.

“Your wife?”

“No.”

“You told somebody?”

“No.”

“Someone saw us?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Then how could anybody know?”

“I have a twin.”

Consolata sits up. “There are two of you?”

“No.” He closes his eyes. When he opens them he is looking away. “There’s just one of me.”

September marched through smearing everything with oil paint: acres of cardamom yellow, burnt orange, miles of sienna, blue ravines both cerulean and midnight, along with heartbreakingly violet skies. When October arrived and gourds were swelling in the places where radishes had been, Mary Magna and Sister Roberta returned, severely irritated by priests, lawyers, clerks and clerics. Their news was no news at all. Everyone’s fate was being resolved in Saint Pere, except her own. That decision would come later. Mary Magna’s age, seventy-two, was a consideration, but she refused placement in a quiet home. Also there was the upkeep of the property. The title was in the hands of the benefactress’ foundation (which was down to its principal now), so the house and land were not exactly church owned; the argument, therefore, was whether it was subject to current and back taxes. But the real question for the assessor was why in a Protestant state a bevy of strange Catholic women with no male mission to control them was entitled to special treatment. Fortunately or unfortunately, no natural resources had so far been discovered on the land, making it impossible for the foundation to unburden it. They could not simply walk off, could they? Mary Magna called everyone together to explain. Another girl had run away, but the last two, Penny and Clarissa, listened in rapt attention as their future—the next four years of it anyway—which had taken shape in some old man in a suit’s hands, was presented to them. They bowed their beautiful heads in solemn acquiescence, certain that the help they needed to get out of the clutch of nuns was on the way.

Consolata, however, paid scant attention to Mary Magna’s words. She wasn’t going anywhere. She would live in the field if she had to, or, better, in the fire-ruined house that had become her mind’s home. Three times now she had followed him through it, balancing on buckled floorboards and smelling twelve-year-old smoke. Out there with not even a tree line in view, like a house built on the sand waves of the lonely Sahara, with no one or thing to hinder it, the house had burned freely in the play of wind and its own preen. Had it begun at night, with children asleep? Or was it unoccupied when the flames first seethed? Was the husband sixty acres away, bundling, branding, clearing, sowing? The wife stooped over a washtub in the yard, wisps of hair irritating her forehead? She would have thrown a bucket or two, then, yelling to the children, rushed to collect what she could. Piling everything she could reach, snatch, into the yard. Surely they had a bell, a rusty triangle—something to ring or bang to warn the other of advancing danger. When the husband got there, the smoke would have forced him to cry. But only the smoke, for they were not crying people. He would have worried first about the stock and guided them to safety or set them free, remembering that he had no property insurance. Other than what lay in the yard, all was lost. Even the sunflowers at the northwest corner of the house, near the kitchen, where the wife could see them while stirring hominy.

Consolata ferreted in drawers where field mice had nibbled propane gas receipts. Saw how the wind had smoothed charred furniture to silk. Nether shapes had taken over the space from which humans had fled. A kind of statuary of ash people. A man, eight feet tall, hovered near the fireplace. His legs, sturdy cowboy legs, and the set of his jaw as he faced them answered immediate questions of domain. The finger at the tip of his long black arm pointed left toward sky where a wall had crumbled, demanding quick exit from his premises. Near the pointing man, faintly etched on the ocher wall, was a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. The opposite wall was inhabited by what Consolata thought were fishmen, but the living man said, No, more like Eskimo eyes.

“Eskimo?” she asked, bunching her hair away from her neck. “What’s an Eskimo?”

He laughed and, obeying the cowboy’s order, pulled her away, over the rubble of the collapsed wall, back to the gully, where they competed with the fig trees for holding on to one another.

Mid-October he skipped a week. A Friday came and Consolata waited for two and a half hours where the dirt road met the tarmac. She would have waited longer, but Penny and Clarissa came and led her away.

He must be dead, she thought, and no one to tell her so. All night she fretted—on her pallet in the pantry or hunched in darkness at the kitchen table. Morning found her watching the world of living things dribbling away with his absence. Her heart, clogged with awfulness, weakened. Her veins seemed to have turned into crinkly cellophane tubes. The heaviness in her chest was gaining weight so fast she was unable to breathe properly. Finally she decided to find out or find him.

Saturday was a busy day in those parts. The once-a-week bus honked her out of the way as she strode down the middle of the county road. Consolata skittered to the shoulder and kept on, her unbraided hair lifting in the breeze of the tailpipe. A few minutes later an oil truck passed her, its driver yelling something through the window. Half an hour later there was a glistening in the distance. A car? A truck? Him? Her heart gurgled and began to seep blood back into her cellophane veins. She dared not let the smile growing in her mouth spread to her face. Nor did she dare stop walking while the vehicle came slowly into view. Yes, dear God, a truck. And one person at the wheel, my Jesus. And now it slowed. Consolata turned to watch it come full stop and to feast on the living man’s face.

He leaned out of the window, smiling.

“Want a lift?”

Consolata ran across the road and darted around to the passenger door. By the time she got there it was open. She climbed in, and for some reason—a feminine desire to scold or annihilate twenty-four hours of desperation; to pretend, at least, that the suffering he had caused her required an apology, an explanation to win her forgiveness—some instinct like that preserved her and she did not let her hand slip into his crotch as it wanted to.