Outlawed(8)

And once I had been down this list of frightening thoughts, I always came to the worst of all—that Mama must have been down the list too. That she knew it was dangerous to send me away instead of letting the sheriff take me, and she did it anyway, balancing her safety and the safety of my sisters against my life. Deciding my life was worth risking all of theirs.

When I was finished crying there was always a time when I stared blankly up at Holly from my milking stool: her strong shoulder, her calm, contented eye, her pale pink udder already filling again with milk, the simple rightness and sufficiency of her. It was in this position that Sister Rose found me, and though I could have wiped my tears quickly and pretended nothing was wrong, I was tired of being so lonely and instead I let her see.

“Do you miss your family?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Don’t you?”

Sister Rose sat cross-legged on the barn floor. Our dresses were made for this, dark cloth to absorb dirt and spills for six days, until Sister Dolores and Sister Socorro washed them all in enormous steaming tubs on Saturdays and hung them up to dry in the washroom, drips pinging on the stone floor.

“I was married,” Sister Rose said. “He was nice when we were courting. He used to bring me flowers from his mama’s garden. But after we got married, I couldn’t stay pregnant. I miscarried three times in a year, so he kicked me out. And my daddy wouldn’t take me back. He knew he’d never find someone else to marry me. Luckily our priest was friends with the Mother Superior, and she took me in.”

Sister Rose smiled. “This is my family now.”

Every sister had a story like this. Sister Mary Grace’s husband divorced her after five childless years. Sister Dolores started sleeping with the neighbor boy when she was fifteen—when they were seventeen he told everyone in town that she was barren, and then nobody would marry her. Sister Clementine had been married two years with no pregnancy when a baby on her street was born with a hard black crust over its face and neck. The sheriff arrested her for putting a curse on the baby, but because she was just nineteen (and maybe also because she was pretty and sweet and claimed to pray to baby Jesus every day), he let her go to the convent instead of jail.

Sister Rose was right—these girls and women without families were a kind of family of their own. Sister Mary Grace took care of Sister Teresa, who couldn’t use her arms. Sister Socorro was like a daughter to Sister Dolores, who had taught her Latin and Greek and laundry. Sister Rose was not my sister, but in the mornings I let her brush and braid my long hair, like my sisters used to do.

In time I learned to milk Goldie, and even Izzy, who was trouble, and Sister Clementine taught me how to strain the curds out of hot milk to make cheese. Everyone was kind to me except the Mother Superior.

One day as we filed into the chapel for morning prayer, the Mother asked in her loud voice, “Trying to be stylish, Ada?”

I didn’t understand what she meant. I looked down at my dress, my heavy brown shoes.

“Sister Rose,” said the Mother, “after service, show Ada how to tie her headscarf properly.”

“She can be a little stern,” said Sister Rose later as she helped me knot the scarf at the back of my neck, under my hair. “But don’t worry. She’s like that with everyone.”

“She isn’t,” I said. “She loves you and Clementine.”

I’d seen the Mother whisper to Sister Rose as she gave her communion. At breakfast, I’d seen her scoop the applesauce from her own plate onto Sister Clementine’s.

“We’ve been here for years,” said Sister Rose. “It’ll be different for you when you take your vows.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but in the mornings I went to catechism and learned from Sister Dolores about the lives of Saint Hannah, Saint Monica, and of course Mother Mary herself. Sister Dolores made us memorize Burton and recite him aloud, and I felt like a child mouthing those familiar words: “and the orphaned infant she had suckled at her breast was Jesus Christ Himself, come to preach a new gospel to her.” But I allowed the stories to comfort me like everything I had ever learned by heart—the letters of the alphabet, the names of the medicinal herbs, the days of the week, the months of the year.

We also read a book by a pastor, the Reverend Alfred Byrd, called The Justice of the Blessed Infant on Earth. Reverend Byrd had been born in slavery on Mount Haven plantation in the state of Georgia in the United States of America, but by the time he was twelve none of those places existed anymore. The plantation lasted the longest—the old owner survived the Flu and hung on for years after the governor and the president died and the statehouse was turned into a hospital, then a morgue. But with his strong young sons dead and the town’s police force gone, it was only a matter of time before the people he had enslaved rose up, burned down his huge empty house, and fled. Reverend Byrd and his parents settled in one of the Independent Towns near the Kansas River like many other former slaves. Land was everywhere—fields lay fallow and farmhouses empty for the taking, if you were willing to bury the bodies left inside. But the former slaves had no money for seed corn or cotton, horses or plows. Most of them—Reverend Byrd’s parents included—had to hire themselves out as farmhands to the remaining white farmers, and as they got poorer the white farmers got richer and began to cultivate the land the dead had left behind so that within a generation Kansas country looked like the old Southern states, except on paper the black people were free.