It is after the first Mass of the day, in the close hush of the church, and Rachel should be praying. She kneels in the pew with hands folded, her body angled in the pose of penitence. Somehow prayer is remote from her—its ancient syntax seems dislocated, its vows to God like desires unfulfilled.
Near her three nuns sit like old doves, huddled as if threaded together at the shoulders. They want to kneel with Rachel but cannot, their arthritic joints no longer bending even for prayer. The body at war with the soul. Instead they sit with heads inclined, delicate hands held before them. Today the nuns wear plainclothes—shawls at their arms like dull gray wings, dark skirts to their ankles, thin hair drawn out from the habits. This seems uneven to Rachel, as if on this day she awoke in some realm parallel to her own.
In the liturgy the priest spoke of virgin martyrdom—historic women dying for their chastity, for the sanctity of that powerful physical potential, their maidenhood. He spoke of Saint Cecilia, the young noblewoman of Rome whom they tried to behead thrice, and only upon receiving Holy Communion would she succumb. Even then she sang to God. The breaking of her body, the priest said, was like an act of testimony. Of bearing witness to God.
Together the nuns rise, departing in a quiet flutter. Pulled from her reverie, Rachel follows. They pause at the doors and the oldest nun, who Rachel knows well, turns to her. Her face is drained, like a reflection in water.
“We hear that a new gardener has been found,” she says softly, as if the air around her is fragile. She hesitates, glancing at the other nuns.
Rachel tries to speak but cannot—her voice lies flat beneath her tongue.
“We thought it might ease things for you,” the nun goes on. “After Luke. We worry for you—”
“Yes,” Rachel interrupts. “It could ease things, Sister.”
The nun sighs, drawing closer, touching her hand. Her skin is like old paper. Rachel gazes into her face, her eyes wet and folded at the edges.
Hush, let it be, these eyes seem to say, even though Rachel is silent. Be still.
She remembers how these women would smile when she began coming to church with Luke. When she would sit with him, so close to the altar, to pray. His hands, clasped prematurely, still darkened with earth.
“Until tomorrow?” the nun says at last.
Rachel nods, and briefly the older woman’s lips come together in what is almost a smile. Gathering themselves in a flock, the nuns quit the church, in the direction of the convent.
She walks after them, but moves to the church garden instead. She pulls at her hair, tied in a loose knot and slipping around her neck. It is longer than it was before, and sometimes she wears it undone. Like the virgins of ancient Jerusalem, never cutting their hair until marriage. She should cut her hair soon.
It is the edge of autumn, in the drowned light of dawn. The sky is pale as bone. Rachel draws her scarf closer to her neck—the scarf Luke mended for her, its uneven pattern like a song only half-remembered. His broad hand touching the hollow of her throat.
At the garden she kneels into the dampness of the earth. How often would she come upon Luke like this, bent as if in vigil? His hair too long and tousled, twisted against his ears—a small whorl of hair at his collar that she wanted to pull free with her fingers. These fingers that rub smooth the wooden beads of a rosary, her voice halting over the recited prayer. Somehow her whispers always fell in with Luke’s. Even when they came to church for matins, at the bare break of dawn, in that haze of the first moments after awakening, their prayers still merged—they begged God together.
She forgets where her rosary is.
Luke taught her to sink her hands into the ground and hold the tangled bodies of the roots, without ever breaking a single strand. He knelt beside her, his own hands over hers to shape their posture—so that he sensed the tendon trembling at her wrist. So that their faces almost joined, and her fingers aligned on the rough curve of his jaw—
Suddenly she is struck with the silence here, so unlike how it was months ago. In high summer the garden sang with the attention of bees, entering and emerging, their dark music like murmured prayers. Luke tended to gardening as if it were a form of prayer. Folded to the ground, he was almost monklike to Rachel, steeped in the silence of his own interior. And the roses that came from this earth were his congregants.
Rachel gazes at the roses around her. Today they sit scarce and gathered, one upon the other, their stems already weakening in the onset of autumn. In summer these roses bloomed in a tumult of petals. Look into their wild faces, Luke would say. Look at how boldly they stand, how they bare their throats to us. Like they want to sing. He would pause, as if to hear their voices. Rachel was deaf to their song then.
She knows now how sweetly the roses stand to be cut down, surrendering themselves to sacrifice. How they yield to death. An act of martyrdom, of deliverance unto something so much larger. Like the virgin martyrs, their perfect bodies broken open and taken to some higher elsewhere.
Like the breaking of Luke’s own body—that first day he coughed blood.
Her arms were full with the cut roses. They dropped from her hands as Luke bent to the ground, the cough almost splitting his entrails. He twisted, drowning in air, and at the last moment he flung his head upward, as if he would leap toward the sky. Then he sank low.
Afterward Rachel wanted to wipe the blood from his mouth. To wash him, to take from him this ruined flesh. But he pulled away from her outstretched hand, and his shoulders hunkered down and she knew it had broken him. The roses lay crushed at her feet.
The air in the garden is too still, as if on the verge of rupture. Rachel bends close to the ground, so that her forehead touches. Somewhere in this dark loam Luke lingers, in the old holy places of the earth, where bodies lie destroyed.
She remembers Saint Cecilia, how she sang to God even as they cut her throat—the flow of her blood like a fermata in music, like a testament to faith. Rachel’s own voice is suspended in her throat. If she knew where God was, she would open herself and sing. She would speak into the ground and let this earth shape around her voice, taking her in like the roses, standing in that repose of martyrdom.
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