Selections from early chapters in the new Miranda Lamden mystery, Blood on Holy Ground
Prologue
A wall of rain slammed into the pavement in front of the Jeep, spreading a treacherous film of oil and water across the empty highway. Barely a heartbeat later dusk exploded in searing light. Bone-jarring thunder rocked the air. I hit the brakes, sliding to a stop on the narrow verge, three tires resting on a slick mat of fallen leaves, and one spinning idly above a roadside creek. Then like the wrath of a cruel god, lightning pierced the clouds again and plunged into the belly of the whiskey rackhouse on the slope beneath me, all but vaporizing the aromatic aisles. The rackhouse shuddered, shattered, and collapsed on itself, sending flames rocketing into the sky. Wind sheered down the hill, through the narrow valley, whipping fiery fingers toward the other buildings.
My hands trembled as I guided the Jeep’s wheels back onto the road. Switching off the engine, I willed my body to relax—a futile hope, considering the nightmare playing out in front of me. Through a screen of rain I watched the blazing pyre of Kentucky bourbon, a tinder-dry tower piled to the rafters with aging oak barrels of 130-proof whiskey. People were running up the slope now, moths fluttering around the mouth of hell. As I watched, a second rackhouse bloomed with light, exploded, and collapsed. Fire spread across the hill, engulfing everything in its path. Firefighters arrived, sirens screaming, but did little more than swell the ranks of onlookers, their tanks and hoses as useless as the falling rain. Bourbon barrels caromed down the hill, spewing runnels of liquid fire that hissed into the creek and engulfed the creekside distillery buildings. Along the edges of the burn, tiny fire twisters spun and died. Only the heavy downpour kept the whole forest from kindling as flaming whiskey flowed into the creek and raced downstream on the current.
Appalled by the fiery holocaust, I turned away, only to find that memory had supplanted sight: I was in West Africa again, working with a women’s healing circle in an area where independent churches were growing rapidly. Low-hanging clouds reflected the oily flames, while a mob’s exultant howls drowned out the screams of the three women burning in the piled-up brush . . . but what my ears could no longer hear, our soul-deep bond still knew. My friends! My heart’s sisters! I felt the agony of their burning through our linked souls and willed what strength I had to flow back to them. What else could I do? Burn with them? I very nearly had. Only the leaders’ fear of reprisal had kept their hands from the foreigner in their midst. The violence sweeping Africa on AIDS’ dark wings was as cruel as the virus itself. Terror and rage possessed the suffering people until they preyed on each other in their frenzy to find occult cures, each more grotesque than the last. And scapegoats—scapegoats must be found to bear the blame! So they named my friends witches and poured out their gentle wisdom and healing gifts like oil on the reeking altar of despair.
Enough! I sat now in the shadow of a different fire, where rage and death had no part. The past was done, those cruel deaths no more than an eddy in the deep peace that had embraced my friends in their passing. Breathe, release. Breathe, release. Let it go, Miranda. This is someone else’s tragedy. Let it be.
I flicked on the headlights, backed the Jeep around, and discovered that police had set up a roadblock far behind my front-row seat. Apparently no one had noticed me before; I determined to ignore them now. Threading my way through the stares and the crush of purple lights, I headed back toward the parkway in search of some serious comfort food and an alternate route south.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 2 ~ A Place Apart
Eight months later I turned off the parkway toward the ill-fated distillery once more, parked where I’d skidded off the road, and looked at the now peaceful valley. Spring grass had reclaimed the slope, leaving mounds of charred debris dotting the hill like abandoned phoenix nests. Some of the scorched trees along the creek were putting out new leaves, but where root and fragile cambium had drunk deep of the fiery liquor only charcoaled skeletons remained. Flames had gutted the distillery buildings, and the few surviving rackhouses looked deserted. The phoenix nests were only a tease: three seasons had turned, and Abner Beebee’s historic distillery hadn’t reemerged from its ashes.
As for myself, spring classes at Obadiah Durham College were complete, final grades turned in. I was a free woman. Or I would’ve been, if I hadn’t tied myself down with a research grant in Conicoke County. I sighed and considered the empty road rolling away into the south, imagining a summer without commitments. Maybe I should rethink the whole idea, yield to temptation, blow my summer’s pitiful stipend in riotous living, and hope my small-town benefactors wouldn’t notice.
Give it up, Miranda, I grumbled, and pulled back onto the pavement. Monte di Angeles was close now, hardly an hour’s drive to the south, while home lay almost four hundred miles behind me in a backwoods holler in eastern Kentucky. Of course Jack Crispen’s presence in one of those hollers was a serious incentive to turn tail, but even he didn’t wield that kind of clout. Anyway, as if my sworn word weren’t enough to keep me on track, some hidden lure kept drawing my thoughts back to the Mount of Angels. I knew I wouldn’t be content until I discovered its source. Peeling my sweaty back away from the seat, I accelerated down the road.
In the backseat my two outraged cats ripped at their carriers and yowled, but I hardened my heart and turned up the volume on Sting’s Sacred Love until his background singers transmuted even feline wails into throbbing harmony. Struggle was pointless. I’d doomed us all to a sultry summer in a shack politely described as a hermitage . . . without air conditioning. I sighed again. Catherine would be waiting for me, confident that that I would bring long overdue respect to the Conicoke legend, unaware of the dread settling in my gut. What had possessed me to agree to three months’ confinement in a teeming mosquito cloister?
The idea had intrigued me in the fall, but that was before the year turned, and insects began to reappear from their vacation swamps in Florida, recalling me to the realities of summer in Tennessee. Of course, no one was forcing me to move into one of Catherine’s recycled cabins. I could always rent a pasteboard efficiency apartment thirty miles away, probably next door to a wannabe bluegrass band. But, like it or not, I needed to be at the Mount of Angels Arts Center. The documents for my research were locked away in the old convent library, and the legend’s apparent miracle had taken place in the Center forest, on the edge of the tiny Conicoke reservation. Even more crucial, the Conicoke elders had maintained a long friendship with the convent—and with the passing of the sisters now living in the hermitage community that friendship would be no more. No, when I’d committed myself to this project, I’d made my choice.
I’d first arrived at the Center in the middle of the night and spent my days with Catherine in the hermitages, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that everything looked new and strange to me now. The old convent church rose above the surrounding farmland like a Romanesque fortress. Late afternoon sunlight mellowed the curving brick walls and towers, calling to mind the crumbling Italian convents that had inspired it. Of course, the original frontier academy for young women built by the School Sisters of the Poor had never been so grand. A wealthy patroness with nostalgic memories of her own convent days had endowed this stronghold in the late 19th century.
But like most of its sister behemoths, Monte di Angeles had finally succumbed to the secular realities of the late 20th century. Its altars had been deconsecrated, and it had passed into the hands of an eastern Tennessee artists’ colony eager to relocate from the booming tourist sprawl of their erstwhile hometown. Their director had proclaimed the Mount of Angels a godsend destined to propel their small community into a prosperous new century.
The convent’s original occupants took a different view. The remaining hermitage sisters had allowed me a brief glimpse into the daily anguish they endured as they watched their cloister being transformed into an outre arts venture.
I drove slowly past the gate and up the mount. Wherever I looked, groups of brightly garbed retreatants were taking the humid air in landscaped gardens dotted with curious sculptures. The main buildings stood close together on the hilltop, ringed by the rambling Victorian guesthouses. In the valley a Buddhist stupa cast its reflection across the lake alongside a crumbling shrine to the Virgin. A flock of ducks escorted a convoy of ducklings toward a small pier where a group of women waited with breadcrumbs.
Happily, this pastoral scene was not meant for me. I found the small dirt road to the hermitages at the end of the main parking lot and followed it across a broad lawn and through a grove of ancient pecan trees that screened the working farm from guests. From there I bumped around barns, goat pens, cattle pastures and silos, between fields of non-GMO produce and finally through a gate posted with a small warning sign: “Hermitages: Private road. Silence, please!”
Rows of neatly cultivated grape vines stretched along both sides of the road beyond the fence. What kind of wine could north-central Tennessee possibly produce, I wondered? Surely it couldn’t rank much above maiden-auntly efforts with dandelions and parsnips. I shrugged and drove on. Someone must think the grapes worth the effort. Maybe the sisters had once made their own sacramental wine . . . or jellies. Or perhaps the hermitage sisters held Dionysian rites in their forest groves. Hermitic maenads! It could happen.
A line of what looked like Georgia pines towered beyond the vineyard, just far enough away not to interfere with direct sun. “Thus far shall you come and no farther!” the words floated into my head . . . as if these imported firs formed a cultivated barrier, holding the woodlands at bay. I imagined the sisters on the hill pointing disapproving fingers at the forest depths and shutting the wilderness out of their disciplined grounds like the Lord God confining the unruly waters of chaos. If so, did the vineyards side with forest or hill?
Gad, what drivel! Did pious phantasms float through the air here like some rare contagion? More likely the sun on the Jeep’s roof was overheating my brain. But now I was under the forest’s eaves, heading into dappled shade. Native hardwoods arched above me as I bumped down the road. More light penetrated the spring foliage than September’s brittle leaves, but the shadows were still pleasantly cool. Half a mile into the trees the creekstone wall appeared on the right, setting the hermitages off from the forest. I stopped beside the only visible cabin and breathed in the peace before climbing out and knocking at the screen door. The silence was complete except for the chirps of titmice running up and down the trees and the distant clamor of crows. Somewhere in the forest a pileated woodpecker’s weird ululation rang out. No Catherine.
This time I walked down the graveled path to the oratory instead of taking the rutted delivery road. I smiled as the octagonal building came into view. The blue tarp was gone, old barn wood had been shaped into tongue-and-groove siding, and new shingles protected the roof. The oratory stood at the center of the little community, surrounded by cabins so cleverly concealed in their forest groves that I caught only fleeting glimpses of unnaturally straight lines scattered in an erratic semicircle. Catherine had already explained that each hermitage was different, dependent for its design on whatever materials had lain to hand when she’d gotten around to building it. Some were single storied, some two. Each had a screened porch facing away from the oratory into the trees, and a small shed where the sisters stored deadwood for winter fuel. I ventured toward the oratory and called out.
“Catherine? Are you here?”
“Miranda!” a voice cried from tool shed behind me. “I didn’t hear your car! Welcome!”
Before I could reply, she had clasped me in her strong arms, and was delivering hearty kisses of welcome on each cheek.
I wasn’t clear about Catherine’s position at the Mount of Angels. We’d left a lot unsaid. Did the sisters employ her, or did she work for the Center? Or both? She lived in one of the hermitages and functioned as a kind of manager/builder, for which her family’s carpentry business surely qualified her. Still, as far as I knew, she wasn’t a nun. She’d been wrestling with a possible vocation when we’d parted in Arizona, but we hadn’t discussed the issue during my last visit. In fact, everything she’d said left me wondering if her ties to the Conicoke people might be stronger than her devotion to the Church. She’d been raised on stories of the Conicoke miracle, and most of her free time since her return to Tennessee must’ve been spent researching the legend. Now she’d reeled me in as an expert, and badgered me into finessing a small grant from the local historical society. So here I was: the seasonal rent-a-pro.
Disentangling myself from her welcome, I noticed a young girl hovering behind her. “Hello!” I said, peering around Catherine with exaggerated surprise. “I’m Miranda. Who are you?”
The girl smiled and ducked further away. Catherine hauled her out with a rumbling laugh.
“Gloria, meet Miranda. She’s an old friend of mine. Miranda’s come to talk to the Grandmothers about the miracles.
“Miranda, meet Gloria. She’s a very bright young Conicoke girl who helps me out around here whenever she can.”
I smiled at the girl again. Eleven, I thought, maybe twelve, teetering on the verge of adolescence. An aureole of reddish hair framed a beautiful freckled face. She deserved her name. From somewhere in the genetic soup that made her who she was, the aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and sculpted lips of her Native forbears had reached out to bless her. The forest-green eyes were all her own.
Come on, Gloria, let’s show Miranda her home away from home!” shouted Catherine, grabbing the child by the hand and pulling her into a run toward the cabin furthest from the road. Their run rapidly became a race and then a rout. Gloria won hands down.
I might actually like it here, I smiled to myself, as I looked around the tiny house. With her usual tact, Catherine had gathered up her young assistant and left me alone to explore my new home. A minuscule first floor boasted a real bathroom, with toilet—and a tub that might accommodate a medium-sized turkey. In the kitchen Catherine had managed to cram in a counter, hot plate, sink, dorm-sized refrigerator, wall-mounted folding table, pot-bellied wood stove, and a few shelves.
In the far corner steep ladder-like stairs ran up to the second floor’s single room, where I found a narrow bed obviously discarded from an ancient dormitory, its battered frame strung with wire mesh supporting a lumpy mattress. An old student desk, a straight chair, a dilapidated wardrobe, and a small table completed the furnishings. The screened porch ran the length of the room. I eyed the old two-pronged electrical outlets with distaste. My laptop’s surge protector would be no help here. I’d need a hefty book of spells designed to placate the thunder beings . . . casting charmed circles might not be a bad idea, either. Or maybe I’d just stockpile batteries and never plug it in at all.
Peering down from the porch, I saw a creekstone patio below, bentwood chairs and all. I paused and considered my impressions so far. This secluded forest had little to do with power surges and laptops. Even more than the mountains I called home, it seemed to mock my computerized world: it was a place apart. Bemused, I walked back inside and opened a small door in the corner of the bedroom to check out closet space—but instead of a closet, I discovered a narrow tower with a ladder nailed to the outside wall and barely enough room at the top for a platform with a nest of oversized pillows. Feeling as if I were climbing into a rustic dumbwaiter shaft, I clambered up the ladder, wriggled onto the pillows . . . and found myself floating in the treetops, enclosed by four large mismatched windows.
I looked down on the small cleared area around the cabin, carpeted entirely with lush green moss. Later, after I’d settled in, maybe I’d lay my cheek against it to feel its softness. Had Catherine planted it, I wondered? Cut it and carried it in like turf? Or did it grow wild like that here? To one side of the moss lay a half-finished labyrinth of limestone fossils, laid out in the familiar convoluted pattern. From beyond the cabin’s small yard, where the woods sloped down into a steep valley, a creek’s murmur drifted up.
I laughed out loud and felt the tension drain away. This place was drawing me into its heart like a long lost child, whether I would or no. Climbing back down the ladder, I went to fetch the cats and luggage.
Ω
Chapter 3 ~ School Sisters of the Poor
Tuesday, May 15
Somehow I’d failed to anticipate the games Shiva and Shakti might devise in a house of ladders.
The sun was barely over the horizon when I gave up on sleeping and struggled out of the sagging mattress. I muttered under my breath—so as not to disturb my less profane neighbors—and threw a pillow at Shiva, who ricocheted off the walls and ladder in an orange blur and scrambled noisily back down to the first floor. Providence willing, I wouldn’t find Catherine’s virgin drywall gouged with floor-to-ceiling cat scratches.
Shakti’s grey head appeared cautiously from the tower to see if I’d held any missiles back. Satisfied that approach was safe she jumped down and strolled over to greet me, arching her back to meet my hand so I could scratch the base of her tail. I could almost read her thoughts: Nice place, Mir, but a little small, especially with the berserker in residence. When do we get outside?
Thinking about the varied omnivores that probably lurked in the forest around the cabin, I offered the evasive formula beloved by support staff everywhere: “I’ll see what I can do.”
Then Catherine knocked on the door, and the day began.
First we walked to the barns, where Catherine introduced me to Earl Fetter, the farm manager in charge of all the Center’s land holdings, including their small organic agribusiness. Earl was a big man with gentle eyes and a soft voice, dressed in baggy overalls, bleached and threadbare from long use. I guessed that those overalls, and others like them, made up his entire working wardrobe. He struck me as a man with few pretenses. Looking at his gleaming bald head and round face, I couldn’t escape the cliché image of a beaming sun with a smiling face . . . only Earl wasn’t a cliché. He warmed me, body and soul, and touched me with light. Within minutes of meeting him, I’d admitted him to my private world, without hesitation or reserve. Jack might need to watch his step.
Earl insisted on loaning Catherine his battered green ATV to drive me around–otherwise, he pointed out, we’d either be at it all day or I’d miss the best bits. So we puttered around the tidy lakes and paved paths, and explored the working farm with its cultivated fields, outbuildings, creeks and forests, and the rough track that continued on beyond the hermitages to the reservation. She left the buildings until last, almost as an afterthought. First we toured the church crypt, now transformed into vaulted studios for visiting artists. In the deconsecrated chapel above, we interrupted several Center women in the midst of arranging flowers for an afternoon wedding. I might have been a fruit fly droning around the orchids for all the interest they showed in meeting me.
But the glorious stained glass windows overwhelmed any critical thoughts I might have harbored about my welcome. They were the real thing: leaded glass figures and delicately painted details, marching in tall arches along each side of the church and gathering into flaming mandalas on the end walls of the four arms of the church’s living cross. The reds and blues were as rich as those of any Gothic cathedral. Light shining through the glass shimmered in a colored mist over walls and floors, transforming even the old wooden pews into timeless relics of prayer.
I filed away the creation and crucifixion windows for later study. Several odd details tucked in among the orthodox tableaux had caught my eye, leaving me to wonder how much of the scorned Conicoke legend had crept undetected into the convent’s heart. But I had no wish to ruffle feathers before I knew more about the political leanings of the Center. Catherine had been evasive when I’d asked what they thought of my research project.
The wonder of the stained glass faded from my mind like a dying sunset as Catherine led me behind the old student dormitory, now the Center’s main administrative and spa facility, toward a dreary building tucked into its shadow. The faded letters cut into the lintel of the smaller structure removed any doubt: we’d arrived at the convent library. Catherine dug a ring of keys out of her pocket and climbed the worn steps to unlock the door. The old wood shrieked against its metal flashing as she pulled the door open, but she didn’t enter immediately. My puzzlement only lasted as long as it took the mouse-wind to flow down the steps and choke the breath in my throat.
“Oh, Catherine!” I gasped. “How disgusting! Have the little beasts left us any books? Surely the convent kept cats!”
Catherine shrugged and frowned. “When the Center bought the property they agreed to relocate the library collection, but I suspect they’re hoping that time and critters will do the job for them before they get around to it. The hermitage sisters tried to keep up the library on their own, but someone at the Center must have complained, because the diocese told them to lay off.”
She paused before continuing. “And there were cats. The Center brought in a Nashville vet to put them down. The official line was that they were infected with feline leukemia and constituted a health hazard. It was a done deal before anybody knew what was happening. I figured they thought feral cats were bad for their image.”
Shrugging again, she walked into the dim building. Dust motes swirled in the sunlight as she disappeared into the shadows. I followed reluctantly, letting the old door boom shut behind me, closing out the world like a veterinarian’s gas chamber.
Heavy dust lay undisturbed on shelves and tables, except where bits of flaking paint had fallen from the pressed metal ceiling. Drifts of dead flies and wasps spilled off the windowsills onto the floor. Spiders were already spinning new webs across the tatters of past years. Neither the fanlight over the door nor the large windows along the walls let in enough light to see clearly, thanks to years of accumulated grime and streaks from leaking gutters. But then, overshadowed by the dormitory and cloister as they were, the windows wouldn’t’ve let in much light if they had been clean. I could barely make out Catherine’s tracks where her feet scuffed through the dust on the hardwood floor. The mouse stench was overpowering.
This was impossible! How could I work in such a place? Did it even have electricity? I walked over to a light switch and pushed the ancient mother-of-pearl “on” button. Light flickered and flared from hanging glass globes, illuminating a drab memorial to 19th century library science. Three vaulted chambers stretched away into the gloom. I moved further into the first room, noting card catalogues and large drawers for oversized manuscripts. I resisted the temptation to open them and check their contents: as long as I didn’t inspect them, I could imagine that the drawers still contained yellowing paper and cardboard rather than rodent condos. Who could say? Maybe the mice (or rats) preferred hefty theological tomes and had left the drawers alone.
Moving carefully into the second room, I tried to disturb the dust as little as possible. Books, more books, dust, and a jumble of mouse-munched magazines. Neither computers nor microfiche crouched in the shadows of the vast wooden bookshelves. The Information Age seemed to have skipped over the convent entirely, like a tornado making an erratic bounce. I’d have no access to e-books or online journals here, except from my laptop or iPhone, assuming I could even get a signal. I pulled a book off the shelves at random and sneezed loudly. Replacing it carefully, I wiped my hands on my jeans and moved on. The library’s third room lay beyond a locked iron grill still barring access to the closely guarded secrets of the restricted section.
Catherine approached the key box on the wall and removed a heavy brass key. For a moment I teetered on the verge of wonder: as forbidden places do, the locked room teased my thoughts with images of long-lost treasures waiting to be discovered. Then the key turned, and the gate swung open. Catherine stood aside to let me go first.
Alas, the keep had been breached, and the citadel long since overrun by rodent hordes. Precious secrets once protected by that iron grill now drifted in shredded heaps of stinking nest paper—newspapers, magazines, and unbound files processed into library slag.
“The journals!” I moaned, “The convent records!”
Catherine’s laughter bounced around the high ceiling as she reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “They’re OK, Miranda. All the convent records were stored in file cabinets. Over there,” she added, pointing to the far end of the room.
There they were, ranks of tightly constructed grey metal file cabinets, hidden behind the devastation on the open shelves. I walked up and opened a drawer, just to reassure myself that no enterprising rodent family had found an impossibly small crack in the cabinets’ defenses. But no, not even dust had found its way in. I sighed and turned back toward the door, grieving for the less fortunate collections. Given the chance, I’d do what I could for the pitiful remains, but this wasn’t the time. I couldn’t help wondering if this near-criminal neglect lay behind the Center’s lack of enthusiasm for my project. I’d’ve enjoyed eavesdropping on the Center meeting that had approved my visit.
Our last stop on the tour was one of the rambling Victorian guesthouses on the sloping lawns surrounding the main buildings—though not the one I’d stayed in. Each house had several comfortable common rooms on the ground floor, with bedrooms and baths on the second and third floors. If filled to capacity, each could accommodate as many as thirty guests. Clearly the Center had worked to preserve the air of conventual simplicity in their remodeling, but it was definitely overlaid with a veneer of elegance. Either the Center’s staff included a crew of very gifted builders, or they’d made a serious financial investment in remodeling their new property. The refit couldn’t have been cheap. Provincetown came to mind, or maybe Byrdcliffe.
When we left the guesthouses, I was surprised that Catherine bypassed the spa and administration building. Had the Center already dismissed me as a potential client? Maybe my cats had alerted them, or perhaps my battered Jeep.
After Catherine dropped me off, I grabbed some lunch and headed back to the library, packing my laptop, insect repellant, borrowed cleaning supplies, a couple of bandanas, and some archival gloves. I found the library even more depressing in the afternoon light than it had been in the morning, maybe because I was on my own. Just vermin for company: mice, silverfish, centipedes, millipedes, wasps, flies, roaches and spiders, oh my. I covered my hair with one bandana, my mouth and nose with the other, opened as many windows as I could, and brushed out insect carcasses to make room for the new populations sure to arrive. Then I cleaned off a desk in the file room, mopped the worst of the dust into a corner, set up my computer, and donned my gloves. All I needed to complete the scene was a hazmat suit.
Convent files confirmed what I already knew. The School Sisters of the Poor had opened their first log schoolhouse in 1830, just before the Indian removals began. The last of the local tribes had been rounded up and herded down the heartbreaking trail to Indian Territory before the little academy had celebrated its tenth anniversary. Like the determined stragglers of many larger tribes, a few of the Conicoke had managed to stay behind, hiding in the hills from Stonewall Jackson’s troops. The sisters sheltered those they could, welcoming them into their community as laborers, servants and students. Later they supported the Conicoke in their struggle for some land of their own and eventually helped make their reservation a reality.
The Conicoke legend was less firmly rooted in official fact. A sister’s journal from the 1840s was the only eyewitness account I could find. She described a young Conicoke student, 15 years old and born with a clubfoot, who had a vision of Jesus on the cross while she was walking in the forest. But the Jesus she saw was one of her own people, easily identified by his hair, facial features, skin color, and tribal tattoos. She swooned in a faint. When she awoke, the vision had vanished, but where the cross had been, a mighty stag now towered over her. He snorted, pawed the earth, and then bounded away into the forest.
Stunned and awed, she approached the place where he’d stood. There, sticking up out of his tracks, half buried by mud and fallen leaves, she saw a flint spearpoint, perfect in every way. She reached out to pick it up, but in the instant she touched it, the forest blazed with light, and her leg burned like fire. When the light faded, she saw that her clubfoot was healed, and she ran to tell the sisters her good news. Two sisters and the school priest returned with her to find the point just as she’d described it, sticking up out of the stag’s track. The priest picked it up carefully, and took it back to the school, placing it in the chapel near the altar. People came from all around to see it, many whispering—out of the priest’s hearing—of the spear that had pierced Jesus’ side.
The diocese had resolutely ignored both the vision and the spearhead, so when the Conicoke asked for the bit of land where the spearhead had been found, the diocese gave it gladly, and returned the spearpoint to the tribal elders as well. That done, the Church heaved a sigh of relief and closed its books on the whole affair. Many years later a Conicoke artist carved what became known as the Conicoke Christ from a living red cedar at the vision site. It stood there still. The Conicoke considered the place holy ground.
What puzzled me was the absence of other firsthand accounts: nothing from the girl herself, the priest, or the second sister. If they’d left any records, the documents had been lost . . . or suppressed. I wondered if official Church disapproval had motivated their removal. It wouldn’t have been the first time. I looked forward to examining the church windows more carefully to see if the curious details I’d glimpsed were indeed images from the vision. If they were, they might be a valuable testimonial to the legend’s authenticity; the windows probably dated back to the last quarter of the 19th century—less than fifty years after the girl’s vision.
The prospect of trying to separate 200-year-old facts from the Church’s sanitized accounts made me tired even before I began. Not that I had issues with the Christian faith: I didn’t. But its institutional incarnations made me twitch. Catholic, Protestant, independent, or eccentric, Christian believers were mostly honorable, decent people, even saintly at times. Unfortunately, power at any level seemed to corrupt them as easily as it did the regular run of humanity . . . but in the secular world, those with power usually didn’t claim God’s authority in support of their enterprises. And therein lay the problem: human beings who claimed to channel God’s will almost always behaved badly.
I sighed and set the documents aside. Where did I hope to go with this? Miracle stories like the Conicoke Christ were as common as oak apples along the frontier, especially in the years following the Second Great Awakening. Only one thing made this story unique: the vision, while Christian, was wholly Native American in its details. But I’d need to speak to the Conicoke elders before I could even begin to guess how the years had shaped it. Unfortunately, I had no guarantee that the Conicoke would agree to share their memories with me.
On the plus side, the Catholic hierarchy’s rejection of both vision and miracles meant that the least possible encrustation of dogma and holiness had attached themselves to the original events. And Catherine’s description of the Conicoke elders’ determination to protect their oral traditions augured well for the legend’s accurate transmission.
I had reason to hope.
When I returned to my cabin I found Gloria deep in conversation with my cats, both of whom were sitting in the open window above the kitchen counter. I suspected that their motives were entirely unworthy, and related to a possible breakout whenever they could tempt this unwary innocent into opening the door—but I admitted that I could be wrong. She was a very engaging child.
She heard my steps and started to turn away, but I called out to her. “Gloria! I’m glad you’re here! I need some advice, and I thought maybe you could help me.”
She stopped and waited for me to approach, her eyes cast politely aside. I’d never met a traditional Native American, child or adult, who was rude enough to meet a stranger’s eyes—least of all a young girl.
“I see you’ve met my cats,” I smiled. “They’re what I need advice about. Would you like to come in and say hello?”
Caution warred with curiosity, but, as I was fairly certain it would, curiosity won. She lifted her eyes long enough to offer me a blazing smile lit with a spark of woodland magic, and followed me into the cabin. Proper introductions were made, and Shiva condescended to bestow the delights of his person on his new devotee. Shakti only came close enough to sniff Gloria’s finger and then withdrew to consider her possibilities.
“Gloria,” I said, as she carefully scratched Shiva’s ears, “I was wondering about letting my cats outside here. Does the Center allow cats on the grounds?”
“Oh, yes, Sister Miranda!” she exclaimed. “There used t’ be lots o’ cats ‘round the dinin’ room.”
I managed not to choke at her use of this alarming honorific, and decided that now was not the time to explain complicated relationships. I merely continued.
“How about here at the hermitages? Are there cats in the cabins?”
Clearly she wanted to say yes, but I could tell the answer was no.
“Miss Catherine don’t have no animals, and the sisters mostly live by theirselves,” she finally replied.
I spared a glance for Shiva, who had rolled over onto his back and was waving his paws in the air, displaying an irresistible expanse of silken belly fur: a fur-bearing Venus flytrap if there ever was one.
“I heard that the Center got rid of the cats that lived here,” I ventured.
For a moment I saw anger flash in the depths of Gloria’s cool green eyes. “They didn’t have no right t’ do what they did!” she murmured, but then her face cleared like ripples disappearing from a still pool, and she turned back to Shiva.
“What about birds, Gloria?” I asked.
Her hand hesitated over his belly.
“Do you know if the sisters would worry about the cats catching birds? Are there bird feeders around?”
Her face brightened at a question with a definite answer, and she turned away from Shiva for the moment.
“Oh, yes, Sister, there’s lots of bird feeders, but they don’t fill ‘em ‘cept in winter.”
I smiled and asked the question that concerned me most. “What about dogs? Do you have a problem with wild dogs, or maybe coyotes?”
This puzzled her. She paused and grew very still, as if trying to grasp whatever strange meaning might be hidden in my question.
“Coyotes’re all over, Sister,” she said at last, “but we mostly don’t see ‘em. I cain’t think they’re no problem. Farmers got some dogs, and they run loose, but they ain’t wild. We got dogs, too.”
I smiled again. “Thank you, Gloria, that’s exactly what I needed to know. I’ll check with Catherine, too, just to be sure.”
That was a lie. Taking into account free-ranging hounds, coyotes, and my cat-killing hosts, I’d made a snap decision that my cats wouldn’t be sticking so much as a whisker outside the cabin.
Gloria smiled her shy smile and stopped talking, since I’d stopped asking direct questions. Turning back to Shiva, she reached out toward the waiting belly . . . and Shiva purred. She rubbed, scratched, and ruffled, and he just narrowed his eyes and smirked at me. At last, after watching several minutes of Shiva’s apparent personality transplant, I led Gloria back out into the yard. She removed her hand from his embrace reluctantly, without receiving any farewell scratches.
“I have one other question, Gloria,” I said.
Shiva followed us to the door, yowling his indignation at having his massage cut short. I ignored him.
“I see that someone has started making a stone spiral out here in yard. Do you know where they found the stones? I thought I might get more and finish it while I’m here.”
“Oh, I’ll show y’all, Sister Miranda! We kin go now if y’ like.”
I looked at the sun and checked my watch. “How far is it?”
“Real close, Sister! They’re all over.”
“I tell you what, why don’t we wait and do it Saturday when we both have more time. Could you come back then?”
For some reason, I wanted to explore the grounds myself before commissioning a guide, even one as disarming as Gloria.
“Saturdays I help Miss Catherine,” she answered. “Maybe she’d say I could go.”
“I’ll ask her myself, and we’ll work it out when you come, OK? And Gloria?”
“Yes, Sister?”
“You can call me Miranda. I’m not a sister.”
And neither, I concluded, was Catherine, or Gloria would have called her “sister” as well.
Wednesday, May 16
The next day was one of those rare times in May when spring reclaimed Tennessee’s weather patterns and transformed the day into an idyll stolen out of Eden. Grabbing my favorite picnic lunch of green onions, cherry tomatoes, cheese and bread, I set off to explore the places described by the long-ago sister in her account of the miracle. Heading back up the road toward the Center, I turned down a little dirt track near the forest’s edge.
No sign pointed the way, nor was the vision site set apart from the rest of the forest, but I emerged from the trail’s narrow corridor into the heart of a woodland cathedral. Green branches soared into vaulted traceries swaying against the brilliant sky like old Irish lace. Light danced everywhere.
Suddenly I drew back in surprise, my heart pounding absurdly: the carved figure of the Conicoke Christ emerged from the dappled shade like a flesh and blood Conicoke man sliding between the worlds. Nothing I‘d read had prepared me for the power pulsing through his limbs. He hung where an altar table might have been placed in a cathedral of mortar and stone, carved from the near half of a double cedar tree. The rear trunk spread living branches behind the carved figure, causing the anguished body to seem to leap out of the shadows, while still remaining one with them. The starkness of the man’s pain was overwhelming, yet it bore within it the deep peace of the forest. Paradox upon paradox, mystery within mystery. Scholar of church art though I was, I was undone.
When I recovered, I studied the sculpture more closely. In the unpredictable way of red cedars, the closer trunk had grown into the rough shape of a cross with a figure upon it: the artist had merely emphasized the resemblance. The fibrous bark had been stripped away and the wood gently shaped and smoothed. Ropy ridges suggested the musculature of torso and legs, and branches emerged like straining arms. Other branches protruding from the trunk behind the arms formed the crosspiece. The crown of this nearer trunk had been cut away. Only the figure’s bent head with its strongly Native American features and hanging hair was created entirely from the artist’s vision. Shapes suggestive of arms, legs, feet and hands had been enhanced with a knife. Tattoos had been cut into the face, arms, and legs, and darkly stained. Surely some sort of preservative must have been applied through the years, because the wood was still smooth and retained its reddish color.
Why this sculpture wasn’t the focus of pilgrimages from all around the world I couldn’t guess, but I was content that it should be so. I didn’t even open my camera.
I wandered through the forest and fields for the rest of the day, and decided that the large tracts of woodland probably owed their continued existence to the limestone sinkholes that opened everywhere beneath my feet. Some were gaping fissures with clammy breath, choked with rotting branches, others just tiny holes in earthen dimples. No plow would ever tame this landscape. Small wonder the government had agreed to cede the land to the Conicoke!
The white fossil stones lay exposed wherever one of the countless seasonal creeks veined the hillsides. I wanted to call them coral, or maybe sponges, but I was no paleontologist. They looked like stumpy cauliflower trees to me, with celery and broccoli thrown in for variety. Gloria was right: they were everywhere. For the first time, the vague awareness that this area had once been a shallow sea came home to me. Everywhere I walked, the bones of a dead ocean bore me up.
The ground dropped down in mossy terraces when I got close to the larger creeks, and I found myself descending through knee-high forests of small green umbrellas, each with one drooping white flower. Mayapples, I laughed. They were old friends from the mountains. Even my cats knew them well and gave their poisonous leaves a wide berth. But I loved the feel of walking through a mysterious Lilliputian landscape with only its waving treetops visible.
When I finally turned away from the forest to the plowed fields, the sense of magic diminished, but didn’t disappear. I strolled through shoulder-high cornrows and sat down in a field’s center, relishing my total invisibility in its regimented green world, grateful that the Center’s organic farming meant that no toxic agrichemicals lurked in the air or the soil beneath my fingers.
Corn roots had always fascinated me, the way they rose above the soil, creating small caves beneath their stalks. I could never decide whether those dark hollows were mysterious doorways to the underworld or signs that at any moment the corn plants might lift their roots out of the earth and wander away. Like trees, corn always called to mind the joining of heaven and earth, even the idea of a world tree. That corn was sacred to many peoples didn’t surprise me.
I followed the forest’s edge south until a grid of high-tension wires strung along massive wooden poles crossed it from east to west. Figuring the poles were a warning of worse things to come, I turned and walked through the trees parallel to their open corridor until the lines crossed a large creek. Beside the creek a mass of sticks and grass on top of one of the poles caught my eye: a red-tailed hawk’s nest perhaps? But I saw no sign of activity in the nest, no parent birds watching my approach with suspicion. No sign of hawk fledglings. I wasn’t sure how late in the spring young hawks left their nests, but mid-May seemed early for hawks to be fledged and gone. Perhaps it was an abandoned nest, or one commandeered by great horned owls. I looked around for feathers that might identify the most recent residents, but the grass was thick and tall. Even when I relaxed my eyes and scanned for the breathy flutter of a feather’s delicate filaments, I found nothing.
Where the floodplain met the creek, a large canebrake had overgrown the banks. Real river cane had almost disappeared from the South in recent years. I wondered if the Conicoke were responsible for this thriving community. It covered both sides of the creek in dense stands easily fifteen feet high. I could see where stalks had been cut near the outer edges, but impenetrable shadows swallowed the ground a little distance into the brake, leaving only the cane’s feathery tops visible. That many species of snakes called the canebrake home I had no doubt. So, happily honoring the Conicoke’s inviolable right to their cane, I turned up a small tributary creek, back toward the hermitage road and off reservation land. I never reached the Center buildings at all.
The only disquieting moments in the day were caused by sporadic gunshots, some quite close. Allowing hunting on their land seemed out of character and dangerous for a retreat center. I made a mental note to ask Catherine about it.
Ω
Chapter 4 ~ Holy Ground
Friday, May 18
On Friday Catherine took me to meet the Conicoke elders, Gloria’s “Grandmothers.” At Catherine’s suggestion, we walked instead of driving to their village, which lay on the far side of the ridge beyond our own. When we emerged from the trees into a clearing of hard-beaten dirt we found the Grandmothers waiting for us beside a central lodgehouse. The arbor shading the lodge sagged beneath the weight of venerable wisteria vines in riotous bloom. Log houses were scattered among the tall trees so unobtrusively that they reminded me of mushrooms springing up on a shady forest floor. Except for the women, the village seemed deserted.
As we approached the lodge, I saw that it rose above its sunken foundations only as high as a man might stand. Wisteria blossoms hung so low that they caught in my hair and brushed my shoulders as I entered the arbor. The simple act of breathing felt like sipping nectar. We seated ourselves in the offered chairs and rocked and drank strong coffee together in comfortable silence. The Grandmothers were as wrinkled as walnuts, their grey hair pulled back and coiled in buns behind their heads. Sitting in their bentwood rockers, dressed in faded loose-fitting dresses, they looked as much like Appalachian matriarchs as Conicoke Grandmothers.
I studied the woven cane mats spread under the arbor with respect; clearly some Conicoke crafts had survived acculturation. Walnut-stained and natural canes were woven into complex patterns, varying from mat to mat along the arbor floor. Maybe if they invited me back I could ask about them, but for now, my hosts were setting the agenda. The old women inquired after my family, my job, and where I’d grown up. Their smiles were slow and gentle, and they spoke with frequent pauses. They murmured that they would be pleased to see me again to answer whatever questions they could. Perhaps I might see the spearhead; we would talk about it. They were honored that I’d recognized the power of the forest sculpture. I must come back another day.
Their dignity was palpable. I also guessed it would turn adamantine if pressed. I hoped we’d made a start toward mutual trust, but I couldn’t fault their reticence: it was more than justified. Without Catherine’s intervention I wouldn’t’ve gotten this far.
Saturday morning, May 19
Rain was pouring down when I dragged myself out of bed on Saturday morning. Even the sheets felt damp. I navigated the ladder without breaking my neck or maiming a cat and successfully brewed a mug of coffee. My feet squelched like suction cups every time I picked them up off the linoleum floor. I shuffled into the bathroom and glowered. Not only was there barely enough room for me to squeeze into the tub with my knees up to my chin, but the hot water heater couldn’t even deliver enough tepid water to cover my hips. It would’ve made a good tea dispenser.
I crouched in the tub for a very unsatisfactory sponge bath and then washed my hair in the sink with cold water.
Catherine had told me that no one in the cabins would think of intruding on a guest’s privacy if the downstairs curtains were drawn, so between the rain and the closed curtains, I wasn’t surprised that Gloria hadn’t appeared. But no sooner had I climbed the ladder to dress than a loud pounding sounded at the door. I threw on jeans and a shirt and peered down through the porch screen at the top of a familiar wet head and a damp bakery box waving in the air like a white flag.
“Jack!” I yelled and slid down the ladder to unhook the door. “What are you doing here?”
“Why, I missed our sweet sinnin’ ways, Sister Miranda,” he laughed. “And how could I resist a cabin called ‘Heloise’? He cocked his head and peered intently at the small painted sign by my door. “Come on, Andi, let me in before one of your neighbors calls the convent chaperones!”
I looked up at his teasing eyes and dripping hair and hauled him into the house.
“Give me a break, Jack, you know most of the sisters are long gone. But do come in before somebody notices you.”
We said hello properly after he’d closed the door and dropped his pastries.
The skies cleared before noon, and I took Jack out for a tour of the grounds, starting with the Conicoke Christ. For the moment I’d forgotten that he would greet the carved tree with the eye of an artist, but his sudden withdrawal into himself reminded me that he was venturing into fields of wonder I could only guess at. He walked toward the tree with the prowling steps of a cautious cat and reached out to touch the wood as if he expected it to vanish into Otherworld—prickly needles, roots and all. I watched his strong hands curve around the ropy muscles and across the breadth of the chest. He traced the tattoos lightly, and allowed his fingers to drift across the carved face with something like a lover’s caress. Then he turned to me with blazing eyes.
“Andi, how can such a work of art be turning to dust in an empty forest? It should be protected. Surely people would come from all over the world to see it if they knew it was here!”
“You know, that’s what I thought when I first saw it, Jack, but then I left without even taking a photograph. It’s an odd place. The Conicoke consider it sacred. One of their people had the original vision, another created the carving, and this is their land. It’s up to them to decide how it should be protected. They may be doing a far better job than we’d ever guess. It doesn’t seem to be suffering.”
Jack laughed and strode toward me, plucking me off the ground like a child, and whirling me around in a circle. “This place makes me feel alive, Andi!” Then he laughed again and returned to his study of the tree.
The fields lay deep in wet clay after the rain, so we kept to the road when we left the clearing. I pointed out the beauties of the cornfields and vegetable gardens, and then turned down a small rutted road where the sound of roaring water proclaimed a creek in spate, or maybe even a waterfall. A few yards along I realized that the road led to the old dump where the solid detritus of the Center’s life—glass, metal, furniture, construction materials, and fallen trees (as opposed to garbage)—was bulldozed into a steep ravine. Catherine had told me that she hunted for old glass and arrowheads there.
Waterfalls or arrowheads, either sounded tantalizing. Skirting the jumble of trash and mud, we started down the grassy slope, holding onto the trees to keep from sliding on the wet ground. In the end we followed the sound of water upstream toward the forest, its thunder gradually drowning out all other sounds. Not much more than a hundred yards along the creek we came face to face with a thirty-foot cascade of water, falling from a limestone overhang almost completely screened by the torrent pouring over it. A shallow cave hollowed out by untold years of heavy rain teased us with brief glimpses. Once the water reached the creek bed, narrow islands divided the flow, spreading it across the ravine’s broad bottom. Bluets and penstemon rioted on islands and slopes, and even a few violets and blue-eyed marys hung on in the shadows past their April prime. With its overhanging trees, the whole ravine was invisible from field and road, a world apart.
What was it about this land, with its little pieces of paradise hidden away amongst cornfields and dumps?
In the end we retraced our steps instead of trying to scale the near-vertical slopes by the waterfall. Once we reached the dump, I poked around the edges of the spill for bits of cobalt glass that might have eroded out. Then Jack spoke.
“Andi?” was all he said, but his tone brought my head up sharply. Apprehension prickled in my belly.
“There’s something here,” he continued. “I think we should get some help.”
My eyes met his, unspoken questions clear.
“It’s a body, Andi. A child, I think. . . . ”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *