The Convict and Other Stories

“Hold out your hand,” she said.

I extended my hand and she brought the tricorner ruler down across my palm. My fingers curled back involuntarily and the pain shot up my forearm.

“I hate you,” I said.

She stared hard, incredulously, straight into my eyes, then gripped my wrist tightly in her hand and slashed the ruler down again. I could hear her breathing, see the pinpoints of sweat breaking out on her forehead under her wimple. She hit me again and examined my face for pain or tears or shock and saw none there and whipped the ruler down twice more. My palm shook like a dead, disembodied thing in her grip. Her face was trembling, as white and shining now as polished bone. Then suddenly I saw her eyes break, her expression crumple, her mouth drop open in a moan, and she flung her arms around me and pulled my head against her breast. Her face was pressed down on top of my head, and she was crying uncontrollably, her tears hot against my cheek.

“There, there, it’s all right now,” Father Melancon was saying. He had walked quietly into the room and had put his big hands on each side of her shoulders. “Hop on down to my office now and wait for me. It’s all right now.”

“I’ve done a terrible thing, Father,” she said.

“It’s not so bad. Go on and wai

t for me now. It’s all right.”

“Yes, Father.”

“You’re going to be all right.”

“Yes, yes, I promise.”

“That’s a good girl,” he said.

She touched her tears away with her hand, widened her eyes stiffly, and walked from the room with her face stretched tight and empty. Father Melancon closed the door and sat down in the desk next to me. He looked tall and strange and funny sitting in the small desk.

“Arthur told me he’s responsible for all this,” he said. “I just wish he’d done it a little sooner. She was pretty rough on you, huh?”

“Not so much. I can take it.”

“That’s because you’re a stand-up guy. But I need to tell you something about Sister Uberta. It’s between us men and it doesn’t go any farther. Understand?”

“Sure.”

“You know, sometimes we look at a person and only see the outside, in other words the role that person plays in our own lives, and we forget that maybe this person has another life that we don’t know anything about. You see, Claude, there was a boy up in Michigan that Sister Uberta almost married, then for one reason or another she decided on the convent instead. That was probably a mistake. It’s not an easy life; they get locked up and bossed around a lot and those black habits are probably like portable ovens.” He stopped and clicked his fingernails on the desk, then focused his eyes on my face. “Last week she got a heavy load to carry. She heard his ship was torpedoed out on the North Atlantic, and well, I guess her sailor boy went down with it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So let’s show her we think she’s a good sister. She’ll come around all right if we handle things right.”

We sat silently for a moment, side by side, like Mutt and Jeff in the two desks.

“Father, I told her I hated her. That was a sin, wasn’t it?”

“But you didn’t mean it, did you?”

“No.”

“Claude, think of it this way . . .” His face became concentrated, then he glanced out the window and the seriousness faded from his eyes. “Look, the sun’s out. We’re going to have ball practice after all,” he said.

He rose from the desk, opened the window wide, and the rain-flecked breeze blew into the room. His eyes crinkled as he looked down on the playground.

“Come here a minute,” he said. “Isn’t that Rene LeBlanc standing down there by the oak trees? I wonder who she might be waiting for.”

Two minutes later I was bounding down the steps, jumping over the dimpled puddles under the trees, and waving my hand like a liberated prisoner at Rene, who stood in the sunlight just outside the dripping oak branches, her yellow pinafore brilliant against the wisteria and myrtle behind her, her face an unfolding flower in the rain-washed, shining air.

Sister Uberta went back north that year and we never saw her again. But sometimes I would dream of an infinite, roiling green ocean, its black horizon trembling with lightning, and I’d be afraid to see what dark shapes lay below its turbulent surface, and I’d awake, sweating, with an unspoken name on my lips—Sister Uberta’s, her drowned sailor’s, my own—and I would sit quietly on the side of the bed, awaiting the gray dawn and the first singing of birds, and mourn God’s people for just a moment lest our innocence cause us to slip down the sides of the world beyond the tender, painful touch of humanity.

THE PILOT