Sister Wolf Read online

The backpacker rolled over on his stomach. He bent his elbows and flexed his feet and did some pushups. Then he picked up his canvas bag and rooted around in it. Marit cocked her forefinger and raised her thumb, pointed the finger at the top of his head and made halfhearted shooting sounds. He did not whirl around or clap his hand to his head; he had no sense of danger. He got up to go. Up from the meadow grass also rose a bird, crying a call, kill-deer, kill-deer. It flew low, then skittered along the ground. Marit watched it run and rise back into the air. The killdeer was gone, the hiker was gone, and so was Marit’s little fluster. She ran down the stairs to hug Lola, who was much too debonaire to hold a grudge.

  THREE

  GABRIEL FRANKMAN CARRIED SUNFLOWER seeds in his knapsack, and a compass and clean socks. He hiked through the woods above the Deym sanctuary in the daytime, innocent of trespass, naming and feeding the birds, who became his friends. With his bright brown eyes, beak nose, and quick hands, Gabriel was no stranger to the birds. He reached the wood by walking three miles along the highway from the Meyerling Community, where he taught during the winter and summer sessions. He had marked his own trail through the trees and bushes, although he sometimes followed the new dirt road. Gabriel strode or stomped, as his mood dictated, as far as a semicircular clearing of white birches, where he halted at the sight of the stone house on a rise across the meadow.

  During the summer, Gabriel’s duties at the Meyerling Community were scheduled by rotation, but it was rare that the afternoon hours from three to five did not fall free. By unspoken agreement the Meyerling teachers wrote down their destinations in the off-duty sign-out book, in case there was a crisis or an accident in their absence. Although he was as disciplined as a novice in a religious order, Gabriel did not obey this rule. It cost him something, in tenser nerves, to flaunt it. It would have cost him more to let them know his movements. He had entered a life of service, in which some margin of freedom is doubly precious, both for the renewal of vows and for the protection of the server from resentment. The blind children who came to his poetry workshops got more from him than the skills to earn their secondary diplomas. He wanted to give them the world through their imaginations. He tried to fire them with fine examples. He told them that the heroes of myth and drama were their natural kin, because their blindness was the mark of a special destiny, like the caul surrounding the head of a newborn child, which brought good fortune. They must rise to the occasion of their blindness and bend their efforts to be worthy of their gift. If Joan of Arc had not learned how to hear her voices, they would have called in vain until the battle for France was lost.

  Miss Fellowes, who had been at Meyerling since its founding, sat in the back of the room at Gabriel’s first class. She took him into the living room afterward for a cup of coffee. “We try to treat them like normal children,” she began; but Gabriel did not accept the mild reproof. “If you pretend they are ordinary,” he answered, “you will crush their spirits.” During a catalogue meeting later that fall, Gabriel insisted that they drop the word “creative” from the title of his writing course. All of living is creative, he explained, not just the pockets of people who make art. Gabriel’s colleagues were disturbed by his exalted way of speaking, but they were relieved when he did not criticize their methods. No one was more relieved than Henry Dufton, who liked to be called the Head Teacher, because he found the term “Headmaster” autocratic. Mr. Dufton was almost blind himself. He wanted life to be even and smooth, just as he preferred to stroll in the formal gardens where he could never trip on a root or get smacked across the face by reaching branches. More than Gabriel’s unsparing work and his love for children, Mr. Dufton valued the fact that he never raised his voice.

  Gabriel’s gentle manner and voice did not come to him easily. He paid out his gentleness like a tithe, and his conscience exacted heavy dues. There were sins on his conscience, which he summoned up regularly and marched in review to keep him on guard against future crime and error.

  When he was in the seventh grade he had won the hurdles at the track meet, taking the honors from Johnny Meara, who was a sore loser. Johnny hung around until the crowds had disappeared, watching Gabriel remove the hurdles and rake the track. He went over to Gabriel and called him a dirty name. Gabriel picked up a rock and caught him on the chest. He left Johnny lying on the empty cinder track. The wound on his chest was staining his jersey with blood.

  When Gabriel got home, he was late for supper. He confessed to his parents and told them what Johnny had called him. Gabriel’s mother lifted tired, frightened eyes to her husband. “‘Sheeny’ means ‘Jewboy,’ Ava,” his father answered. His parents took him out of the Catholic school, which was only a block away from his home; but for two weeks he was kept in moral quarantine. His parents did not speak to him, or meet his eyes. The family ate their meals in the kitchen by the wood stove. A plate was left for Gabriel on the glassed-in back porch, which was unheated.

  Gabriel’s great-great-grandfather was a Jew turned freethinker and a music teacher. He had left Hesse-Darmstadt in 1848 to avoid conscription. Once he had settled in Hobart, Indiana, he embraced his wife’s faith and joined the Presbyterian church in gratitude for their safe passage to America. His great-grandson—Gabriel’s father, Joel—was a trustee of the local congregation. Gabriel knew that he was being ostracized not for defending the race of his remote ancestors but for being ashamed of it. Racial shame was the least of his transgressions. He had left Johnny Meara alone, losing blood, and trying to crawl by inches. He had waited an hour before reporting the fight to the track coach. By the time Mr. Meara and the coach had reached the field, Johnny was unconscious.

  Ostracism from the family circle was too light a penalty. The rest of his punishment Gabriel administered himself. Studying at the back of the homeroom while his classmates took Catechism, he had overheard Father Adrian describing the penances of holy monks and zealous retreatants. Now Gabriel pictured himself as a sore and an abscess, from which vile poisons ran; and he wrapped knotted lengths of rough packing twine around his waist to wear all day and night underneath his clothes. He closed the shutters of his room and lived in darkness, imagining the stench of the damned burning in Hell, searing his own palms over a candle flame until he retched from the pain. In order to simulate Johnny Meara’s wound, he drove a sharp lead pencil into his breast, but he broke the point, and only made a bruise. A braver boy would have tried it with a penknife. He remembered the leeches suspended in a jar at the pharmacist’s. He could get some and let his own blood, draining off his evil temper at the same time. But he sickened at the thought of touching the broad flat worm, and he did not know how to remove a leech without leaving some of its suckers in his skin.

  Gabriel enrolled at Western Indiana College of Divinity on his sixteenth birthday. Joel Frankman had used his influence to get his son a scholarship. Gabriel was young to be entering college and small for his age. He measured five feet five inches and weighed a hundred and thirteen pounds. He would put on more weight, but he never grew any taller. It was no comfort, ten years later, when his fiancée told him that John Keats was only five feet two. He was stuck with a runt’s body, and he found out that divinity students are no kinder than other college boys. Gabriel was so belligerent that he brought the jeers down on his own head. The sheeny fights were over; now “mouse meat” and “fly bait” were the fighting words. Gabriel went right for the bruisers; he never picked on anyone his own size. He was as battle-scarred as a tomcat, with a torn ear, most of the time, and two black eyes. His Homiletics professor worried about him, and arranged a meeting with the boxing coach. By then Gabriel weighed enough to qualify in the bantamweight class. He made the team, but he had pugnacity left over. Even the bullies were reluctant to tangle with a star boxer, so he took his load of anger off campus to the dives in nearby Valparaiso. In his senior year he messed up his hands so badly that he could not put on gloves and was dropped from the Olympic tryouts. He could not type or write, because his hands were wrapped with
yards of gauze, so he had to take his final examinations orally. Axel Crowl, who taught Church History, advised Gabriel not to go into parish work until he had mastered his own personality. Dr. Crowl was a happy old man, plump and pink-cheeked and shorter than Gabriel. He understood the yen for purity pinioned inside Gabriel’s still-adolescent body, the feats of studious discipline followed by outbreaks of violence. “There are saints who were brawlers and street fighters,” said Dr. Crowl, “but their way was the hardest. You must forgive yourself, Gabriel; and forgive your father for trying to teach you meekness instead of humility.”

  Gabriel listened to his good adviser and paid him heed, in his own way. He had a wide penitential streak, but he could turn it to positive service, instead of using it against himself. In his last term of college his inner landscape was a perpetual twilight-gray; he knew that it was time to break out and try living in the sunshine. He did not literally mean the tropics, but he copied down a notice that was thumbtacked under “Employment Opportunities” on the bulletin board outside the Dean’s office. The Francis Makemie Medical Mission in Cuba, province of Pinar del Río, town of Cabo Yegua, wanted a combination orderly and driver; room and board, and seventy dollars a month.

  Gabriel stayed in Cuba for five years. Very soon he moved out of the blocklike mission building and paid board to a widowed childless guajiro, Santiago Vélez, who lived in a palm-thatched cottage and raised a flock of chickens. Pepe’s chickens were white, but scratching in the red Cuban soil had turned them rusty. The roosters stopped diving for Gabriel’s ankles after a while, and allowed him to pick up the laying hens to inspect their nests. Gabriel liked the food that Pepe cooked, yuca and malanga and other tubers mashed with rice, and sometimes ground beef spiced with raisins and green olives. Pepe helped Gabriel to learn Spanish by pointing at familiar objects—el vaso, la cama—or by imitating actions: a plant growing (crecer) was one of his best; a hen laying (poner) was an even richer sight.

  Over at the mission clínica and out in the ambulance, Gabriel learned as many skills as any licensed paramedic. This was farm country and the base of the Midland Cement Company. With so much heavy machinery around, accidents in the fields and at the works were frequent and serious. Nothing seemed gruesome to Gabriel, under that sun and sky, until the night when the Midland day foreman sneaked into the clinic by the back entrance and hissed from the shadowy doorway at Gabriel, who was the only man on duty. The fingernails of his right hand had been torn out. He could barely stand, and his eyes were wild with pain or fear. He made Gabriel bandage him and shoot him with morphine right there in the doorway. A week later, Pepe told Gabriel that Mariano the foreman was safe now in the Sierra Maestra, with Fidel y los barbudos.

  Gabriel snapped out of his almoner’s daydream and took a look around him. Among the groups of blue-uniformed guardia civil he noticed more and more reinforcements wearing khaki. He started to count the army jeeps on the streets and back roads. Twice a week the Midland limousine stopped for Cifuentes, the chief of police, and drove him out to the company golf course. One day Gabriel was called off ambulance duty to assist the mission doctor in setting the leg of a Midland laborer. When the doctor told him he would be immobile for two months, the patient broke down completely. He would get no leave or compensation for his accident, because a handbill bearing the picture of a bearded man had been found in his overall pocket during a search of the plant workers’ locker room.

  Now Gabriel’s vision began to alter, as if his eyesight had been damaged by a sty. Even the light changed. The sun, which had danced on the sea and sparkled off the white colonial housefronts, glared down on the town of Cabo Yegua. He saw that the Spanish grillework was rusty and corroded, and the fitted roof tiles loose and chipped. Every oleander bloom was edged with brown. Gabriel had thought of Pepe as a kind of Cuban Thoreau, who had chosen a simple, independent life. It struck him all at once that Pepe was poor, not frugal, that his chickens were scrawny, that his clothes, which were so neatly mended, were almost threadbare.

  Gabriel had made some American friends, the children of executive officers of the Midland Cement Company. The young people he met went to college in the States, but they came home during every term break to go to parties, where they danced all night and spoke to each other in Spanish. The girls were not allowed to go out with Cubans, so Gabriel was invited to ease the shortage of boys. Nancy Billups gave a party over the Easter vacation, in honor of one of her college friends, Francesca Hadley. Gabriel danced the slow dances with Francesca, who was wearing flat heels and only came up to his ear. When she answered his questions, she stood on the tips of her toes to make herself heard. Her fine hair brushed his cheek and her skin smelled like vanilla. Gabriel handled her very delicately, like one of those painted eggs that have had the insides blown out of them through a pinhole. That Sunday he and Francesca rode into Campeche Valley on a pair of mules to see the mogotes, geological hummocks left by backwash from a receding glacier. Francesca wore a big straw hat, but she began to droop from the heat before too long. On the way back he sat her in front of him and held her up, while the riderless mule walked behind them, led by a rope that was tied to Gabriel’s belt. Francesca was so pale and fair, with her slim gypsy feet and small nose, that he fell in love without asking himself permission. A month after her vacation was over, Gabriel left Cuba to its own destiny, bought an airplane ticket with his savings, and rang the doorbell of her apartment in New York.

  Back in New York, like a princess in her tower, Francesca Hadley was studying the arts of Islam. Gabriel took care of her for three years, while she worked toward her doctorate and he started the poetry workshops at Duberman Elementary School which were later picked up as a model by the Manhattan public school system. Gabriel’s pupils were regular rough-and-tumble kids, but Francesca was like an overbright child, the kind that educators call Exceptionally Gifted. Her scholarship was flawless, as was her mastery of Arabic, but she had no life skills.

  Adorable Francesca, with her egg-yellow hair and the soft blonde down on her face. She was a comical little beast, dreaming in the kitchen, pouring milk through a frozen shrimp soup can onto the floor, because she forgot that she had opened the can at both ends. There were squirrel’s nests all over the apartment: Gabriel found a bathing cap filled with orange peels on the top shelf of the china cupboard, and a trove of garters and buttons in an empty box of macaroni. Francesca was so myopic that she needed glasses to find her extra pair of glasses, which was a mercy, because she never noticed spilled coffee on the counter tops, mold in the folds of the shower curtain, or what her housemother at boarding school used to call “dust kitties” under the bed. Her method was simple: it was time to clean house when the closets and drawers were empty and every item in her wardrobe lay strewn on the sofa and chairs and the living-room rug. Gabriel found himself turning into a Scotch nanny, wagging his finger under her nose, and scolding as he picked up after her.

  Airy fragile Francesca, a neutral reproof was like a tongue-lashing to her, a spark of irritation was an indictment of her whole character. “Shrink” and “cower” had been fancy metaphors to Gabriel, or something that puppies did when they wet the floor and not the newspapers. Francesca acted out both verbs when she was reprimanded, with some quailing and flinching thrown in besides. Gabriel practiced saying things like “There are eggshells in the laundry hamper” in a monotone, but her brows would knit and her mouth would start to tremble before he could finish the sentence. Living as he did under the myth of his own vile temper, he felt he was performing contortions of self-control. Still she would react as if he were a sadistic child with a toy chest full of stuffed animals to brutalize: some days she would be the rabbit whose ears he pulled off, and other days the bear whose glass eyes he extracted. He hated the image of himself that he saw in her eyes, but he bowed his neck to it. If he could get through a day, then a length of days, without making her cry, he could atone for his sins of anger and propitiate the violence within him. He saw clearly that it wo
uld be a lifelong task, so he asked her to marry him, and she said yes, with a fey, sweet smile.

  He was asking too much of himself. Such marvels of therapeutic forbearance cannot be exercised in close domestic quarters. He began to wish for a neurosurgical procedure that would cut out his irritability without otherwise harming his brain. Free from criticism, Francesca thrived; she trilled and crowed and made messes like an infant, and never once caught him drumming his fingers or holding his tongue. He took no pride in his silence. Suppressing critical words was no good if he could not vanquish critical thoughts.

  After months of this unnatural regime, he convinced himself that she was secure enough to let him speak and act normally again. She was a bubbly little sprite, and sprites, like cats, have many lives. He was pleased with himself, and began to relax his guard. One night he sat down to add some new exercises to his poetry workbook. The workbook was missing from his desk and from his shoulder bag. He thought he must have left it in his office at school. He went into the bathroom to wash his face. The soap slid out of his hands, onto the floor, and under the old claw-footed bathtub. On his hands and knees he reached for the soap, and saw a mustard-colored paperbound volume wedged between the tub and the bathroom wall. He pulled it loose, shredding the covers and several waterlogged pages as he did so. Francesca liked to read in the bathtub. She had so many fines for damaged books that Butler Library had cut off her borrowing privileges.

  She was curled up on the sofa, eating an apple. Gabriel raised one eyebrow, in a parody of menace, and held the spongy workbook out in front of him. He might have been raising a dagger to smite her. The apple dropped out of her hand. She started to shake her head and shrink away from him. She kept opening her mouth, fishlike, trying to say “no,” but terror palsied her vocal cords. He stood watching, baffled and goggle-eyed, as she inched off the sofa and toward the door. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at the mirror on the wall to see if he was wearing the shape of a fiend. He looked at the workbook, which was still a workbook, not a bludgeon or a loaded gun. She was standing in front of the door, both hands behind her back, grasping the doorknob, her breast thrust forward, heaving. It occurred to him that she was acting and, in the next instant, that it did not matter; she was so absorbed in her role that the line between pretense and belief was nonexistent. He moved a half-step toward her and she screamed like a weasel being hoisted in a snare. The ugly noise set him on fire. For the first time in three years he yelled his brains out, liberated by the injustice of her reaction. He heard his own voice thundering in his ears, drowning out the sound of the door as it slammed behind her. He kept on yelling to an empty house, until his knees buckled and he fell on the couch, lightheaded and punch-drunk and spent.