An ancient nun: tiny, wiry, vibrating with the chaotic energy of the insane, sits alone in the dark, mumbling softly to herself as she rocks back and forth in her parked wheelchair. Her knobbly, twisted hands click away at their knitting with the practiced speed of almost a century’s experience. Gray hairs on her head stand out at attention, having escaped the confines of a severe topknot, making her little head appear constantly surprised. Her near-sighted eyes are narrowed and intense, but seeing nothing, staring right through her hands with no focus.
To my untrained, uninformed child self, wandering past her open door, I thought her to be in a trance. I had grown up with Catholic friends and assumed her behavior was a variation on the rosary prayer: rote, compulsive, and necessary. She was a longtime resident of this facility, which was owned by, administrated by, staffed by, and occupied by nuns of the order of the Sisters of Austerity. Doggedly religious women of all ages littered the halls in sturdy, orthopedic shoes.
Then, there was my mother. They called her “Sister Mary Protestant,” with equal parts derision and affection. Despite having senior status on her unit, she was an outsider: a divorced, single mother forced to bring her daughter, an only child, into work due to a lack of practical childcare options. Even the concept of a single child seemed foreign amongst her co-workers, exclusively Catholic ladies and nuns, who had either zero children or several, summertime wards of some church program while their (still doggedly married) parents went to work. As a result, it goes without saying that I was the only ten-year-old at the geriatric hospital. There were no do-gooding girl or boy scouts, no candy-stripers. It was me, alone, wandering the frigidly air-conditioned halls for the duration of the daylight shift while my buddies slept late and rode bicycles in the sunshine.
Even so, I didn’t so much mind going to work with my mother. It was a vast improvement over the long, boring hours I had once spent sitting in the back of dark lecture halls, watching twitchy T.A.s deliver arcane presentations on aseptic techniques and patient confidentiality. (The talk on bloodborne pathogens sounded promising, but turned out to be no more exciting than the white shoe polish my mother dutifully squeaked onto her clogs.) Out of nursing school, I was at least free to roam the halls, engaging the sharper tenants in conversation, and getting the dirt on the ladies’ long life stories from the staff. (So much for patient confidentiality.)
For example, it would have been almost seventy years ago that Sister Anna Joseph first let anyone in on that fact that she was bug-fuck nutso. A brilliant young nun, she was working through her medical doctorate, bookish and reserved, but otherwise fine. But a quick jaunt off the convent for some R&R on a fine autumn afternoon left a few of her friends traumatized. While driving home, Sister A.J. had an episode. She grew wild in the eyes, picking up speed. With a sudden jerk, she cranked the wheel hard left, driving across the opposing traffic lane and into a cornfield. The stalks were high and thick, and each one’s impact was ear-splitting (hah!) on the front fender of the speeding car. Her passengers, fellow nuns, screamed and wailed, certain that they would perish in a fiery wreck, but Sister A.J. pressed the gas pedal to the floorboards. The ladies’ terrifying, wild ride continued through endless Pennsylvania farmland until the car’s gas tank was emptied, the car stalled far from any road. The hysterical nuns sprang from the car, running for the nearest farmhouse, where they could phone home for petrol and backup. Sister A.J. just sat, gripping the wheel, panting crazily while the engine steamed and knocked.
Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and I guess her medical career suffered as a result.
I like to imagine how she might have looked that day, alone in the car, with those colorless eyes narrowed through the windshield with the same sightless intensity that she now turned toward her knitting.
Bored with the obnoxious optimism of the more garden-variety nuns on the floor, I lingered in Sister A.J.’s doorway, scanning the spartan room. A small cross hung on the wall over the narrow bed. A low bookshelf was crammed with stacks of old hardcovers: medical journals and classic literature. Her closet door stood ajar, revealing inside a few shabby house dresses and cardigans, and a crumbling old doctor’s bag made of black pebbled leather, just like the ones I’d seen in old black and white movies, the sort the town doctor pops open on a house call. It looked as if it might turn to dust if I even just touched it.
“Sister?” I called to her from the threshold. She grunted in response, never averting her gaze, which remained locked straight ahead.
“Sister, what are you knitting?” I tried again, taking an uncertain step into the dim little quarters.
Goosebumps rose on my bare arms; it was cold in here! Maybe they could turn off the air conditioning for a while, I thought. Sister A.J. still didn’t respond, but as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I saw that the generously-sized afghan covering her lap was still attached to her needles and growing line by line. It was an ugly thing: a mix of random and unrelated colors and textures, a jumble of leftover yarn donated by crafty staff, residents, and parishioners.
I tried again.
“That’s quite the blanket you have going. Who’s it for?”
“Devil.”
I stopped cold. She had answered me… I swore she did… I had heard it—just one word—clear as day, but I didn’t trust my ears. I backed out of her room, and made a break for the nurse’s station.
I recounted what I had heard to my mother, swinging from side-to-side in a swivel chair.
“The Devil?” She laughed. “Are you sure?”
“I would be sure if it wasn’t so weird.”
A soft, floury dumpling of a nurse’s aide frowned at the other side of some paperwork.
“This is blasphemy,” she said, casting a judgemental gaze across the station. Her scrubs top sported a pattern of kittens frolicking in bright primary colors. A delicate gold cross rested on her pillowy bosom.
I swung my chair in her direction.
“How is it blasphemy?” I asked.
“That’s a woman of God. The poor thing is just confused, and either you heard wrong, or you’ve made her upset. She spends all day right in that very spot. She doesn’t leave her room for anything: not mass, and not even bingo. The only time she ever stops knitting is when we come in to change her and clean her up. Quit bothering her, and don’t encourage her. Her brains are all wrong.”
Feeling sharply scolded, I considered this in silence for a moment.
“I guess she’s really messed up, huh?” I asked my mother, whispering to stay out of ear-shot of the aide.
My mother shrugged, and carried on speaking at a normal volume.
“I don’t know about all that. I wouldn’t pity her, nor write her off so easily. First and foremost, she’s an extremely intelligent, highly-educated woman. Second, don’t dismiss what you know you heard just because you don’t understand it. I’m sure that if she is, in fact, knitting an afghan for the devil, she has a very good reason.”
* * *
Several days went by, which I spent with friends, happily swimming and sleeping in back yards, forgetting all about Sister A.J., toiling away in her dark, refrigerated cell.
Soon enough, my mother temporarily ran out of safe places to stash me, and I returned to work. My very first order of business was to check on Sister A.J. and her afghan.
I knew that she was a quick knitter and that I had been away for over a week, but I was gobsmacked by the progress she had made. The little nun was adrift on a knitted sea. The hodgepodge blanket filled the room, spilling in tumbles over the bed.
“Holy crap, Sister! You really went crazy.” I winced at my own clumsy wording.
“I mean… that is definitely the biggest blanket I’ve ever seen. Aren’t you finished yet?”
Silence. The sound of knitting needles clicking away.
I slowly, deliberately moved to the front of her wheelchair, tenderly moving aside heavy drifts of knitting as I went. I knelt into the path of her vision.
“Sister, who are you doing all of this for?”
“Devil.”
There! She had said it again! I heard the word and I saw her lips move, and I was certain. But I also knew that dementia can trick us into swapping a random word for the one that we really meant. I needed to validate what I had heard.
“Sister, is this for your friend?”
Sister A.J.’s mouth tightened into a mean little line, and her head twitched, palsy-like, in a jerking motion that I took to mean a hard “no.”
“Sister, is this blanket for someone you love?”
Silence. Stillness. The clicking had stopped.
“Sister, are you knitting an afghan for Satan himself?”
“Devil. Devil.” She repeated the word twice, and I was soaring.
More silence. Not even click-clacking. I stared hard into her eyes, as if I could see past the cataracts to know what was going on in her mind.
“Sister… why are you doing this?”
She said nothing, but the clicking resumed furiously, as if she was filled with a renewed sense of purpose.
Why would anybody work so hard for so long to make this crazy blanket for the devil?
I chuckled, feeling a little self-satisfied, and even more curious about this mysterious shut-in.
I stood up, and edged around the room, taking care not to step on the devil’s blanket. I paused, fingered the rigid leather of the doctor’s bag. I looked at the spectacles on her night table, dusty and unused. I stooped down to scan the spines of her books, and there it was—right on top. I stopped short when I saw it, feeling a tingle of excitement. I grabbed it from the shelf.
Infernio.
As a typical bookish, off-kilter child, I knew all about Dante’s “Inferno.” I ran my palm over the faded fabric cover, feeling the scuffs and the mushy, bent corners resulting from years of shelf wear. I opened the book, thumbing through the dry, brittle pages for illustrations. The binding was cracked, and the pages turned themselves to revisit an old, familiar spot. Sure enough, there it was—the same Gustave Doré engraving that I had seen dozens of times.
There was Satan: alone, weeping inconsolably, embedded in ice up to the waist, munching on some poor, damned sinner… for all eternity.
I read.
…he is at the sharpest and universal pain of hell: isolation.
In his selfish, negligent bitterness, his enormous beating wings chilled the air and froze the water from his tears, encasing all the poor souls, cast down to the floor around him, in hellish ice. For in the absence of God’s love and light, hell was, by definition, already frozen over.
“Sister, is this it? Is this why you’re doing this? Because the devil is so cold and lonely? Like this?” I moved around to the front of her chair to show her the book page.
Faster, still, the knitting needles clicked on.
Holy shit, I thought, she just wants to make the Devil happy. Maybe if someone just threw him a frigging bone, like if he had a nice blanket, he could warm up and quit his suffering. The ice would finally melt, and maybe hell wouldn’t be such a bad place to spend eternity. What a hands-on approach! Damn, somebody go tell the pope that for all these years, we’ve been going about this all wrong.
I read further, as Dante’s man-crush, Virgil, explained about the residents of the ninth level: the deepest pit of hell which is reserved for the worst of the worst.
…the inhabitants of the infernal region are those who have lost the good of intellect; the substance of evil, the loss of humanity, intelligence, good will, and the capacity to love.
“Oh, Sister.” There was lead sinking in my guts. I felt sick.
“I’m… I’m sorry. Truly, I am.”
I slid her book back onto the packed little shelf, and shuffled, blinking hard, back into the harsh light of the hallway. I went into the nurse’s station and plopped into my swivel chair, swinging it back and forth.
Back and forth.
* * *
At dinner weeks later, I sat alone at the kitchen table, watching the tiny black and white TV and eating the dinner that my grandmother had set down in front of me, while she busily cleaned up the pans she had used. My mother walked through the kitchen door, home from work. She plopped her keys on the kitchen counter.
“Shit. What a day. I guess your buddy thought we could all use a challenge today.”
She was addressing me, and I was having a hard time figuring out who “my buddy” could have been. Seeing my blank, dumb look, she elaborated.
“Sister A.J.! You know her goddamn endless knitting? Well I guess she finally decided she was finished.”
“What?! No way!! How big was it?”
“It was the biggest afghan you ever did see. You could cover an entire Winnebago with this afghan.”
“Holy smokes. How did you know she was done?”
“Well… She meticulously tied off the ends, rolled it up, and stuffed it down the laundry chute.”
“She what?!” I was already doubling over with incredulous laughter.
“Yeah! She rolled it up and stuffed it into the laundry chute. Of course, it got stuck… That thing wouldn’t have fit down an elevator shaft. She must’ve done it late last night, during the third shift. When I came in this morning, they had already tried everything to move it along, and had called a welder to come in and cut that part of the duct away with the clog. They’re patching it up tomorrow, but that’s all day today and most of tomorrow that our unit, and all the units on the floors above us, have no laundry chute.”
I was in hysterics.
“I’m glad you think it’s so funny.”
“She was sending it to him!”
My mother stared at me, confused and exhausted.
“Yeah! She decided she was finished, and she sent it down to him.”
By this point, my grandmother had put down her washing and joined the conversation. “Who? Who was she sending it to?”
“The devil!”
My mother started laughing.
“I guess she looked in that chute and saw a direct route all the way down!”
“Well,” I reasoned, “It’s the only logical explanation. I mean, logical for her, anyway.”
My mother stopped laughing, musing for a moment.
“I’ve got to tell you, I’m little worried about her, now. You see how her first retirement affected her. Who knows how long she’ll last without a project and a purpose.”
Just a few months later, I had rejoined my peers and normalcy when school resumed in the fall. I had busied myself with homework and friends when Sister Ann Joseph finally shuffled off her mortal coil. Her great legacy, the blanket, didn’t make it. Scorched by the welder’s torch, the great afghan was ruined and subsequently discarded. Immolated.
In my mind, her completely insane effort had elevated her to martyr status. While I never had much use for religion, who wouldn’t love a hand-made afghan?
Image credit: Flickr user