LITURGY OF THE DIRT

We step across the vines as we make our way to chapel. They curl across the stone floor, worms climbing over each other. Mud stains our shoes and dirt fogs our skin. Hanging leaves brush our shoulders, tugging at our veils as if begging us to take them off.

As the bell chimes the Matins hour, we slide around the trunk of a beech tree to slot into our choir stalls. Our habits catch on knobbled bark. The roof of the chapel is lower than it was three weeks ago, hung in wreathed white flowers, and the scent is heady. Candles flicker at the corners of the altar, but what little light they give is trapped in the spirals of leaves.

We begin the nighttime hymn. Our voices are high and whispery: we are all a little tired, a little longing for our beds. The high, ribbed ceiling used to echo with the chant, but now it’s rather muffled, as if we are singing to the garden’s cobblestone walls. The flowers open slightly, just a little—you would not notice were you not paying attention. I watch the yellow motes of pollen dust down on us and stick out my tongue to catch one.

The abbess falters as she approaches the altar, likely because of the Venus flytrap that has taken up residence beneath it. She stands several feet back as she offers up the Body, eyeing the six-inch-long teeth like she might a rabid dog. Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you. The vines hum in amusement. The constant rustle sighs under my skin.

She comes down the choir, stopping before each of us with the soft, bland wafers. The Body of Christ, and then a soft amen. The Body of Christ. Amen. When she faces me, I pluck it slowly from her hand—of course I can’t refuse. Amen. And she continues on. I let it dissolve in my mouth, tasteless.

She gestures to the forest around us that has grown out of shadow and stone. “This,” she says, for her homily is predictable now, “is the work of the devil. God will deliver us, if we only remain strong, if we only remain focused, obedient, devoted in mind and body to our task. Keep up your strength. The forces of the wicked one will always succumb in the end.”

There is more in the same vein. The flowers puff out another hum, this one practically a guffaw. I bite my tongue so I don’t echo it.

But in the afternoon, I wait in almost darkness for the squeak of the cellar door. When it shuts behind her and seals us in, I launch myself at the cellaress’ lips. She paws at my hands, laughing against my mouth. I only kiss her harder, push her into the wall like a wolf to a man’s throat.

“You’re suffocating me,” she complains, and I pull back enough to watch her eyes glisten in the light around the doorframe.

“Blue as the ocean,” I tell her. “Blue as the summer sky.”

“Oh, quit the poetics,” she says. “You’re too much of an artist.”

“You love it,” I say, and her smile melts against mine. 

“You’re happy today.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” I say. “God is good.”

She pulls back a little, brow furrowed. “Since when do you say that?”

“I’m happy today,” I say, and kiss her again, and words are banished for the time being.

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The cellaress sits across the long table from me, across and up several places, because we agreed we should not sit beside each other. The infirmaress to my left would not care, and the cantress to my right would not care, but the abbess sits at the head table like a good, watchful shepherd. So I only watch, in between bites of unusually large carrots and peas plucked from a vegetable garden that has run somewhat amok.

The cellaress’ shorn hair, peering from the edges of her wimple, is black. Her lips are bitten, rawed red. She uses a fork like a sword to a heart, peers into her cup before drinking, like the willow boughs that curve along the ceiling ribs might have slipped something inside. She is always so, so careful. The first time we found each other in the cellar, months ago now, we jerked away at each sound and shadow like someone would burst right through the locked door. I lift my cup and drink like I’m withering away.

But for the clinking of silverware and the sacrist’s low voice—one of the abbess’ favorites, given a seat on her left—the refectory is quiet as a tomb. The abbess’ reply is indistinguishable. There’s something in her teeth. A bit of green. We do not speak at meals, the Rule forbids it, but I nudge the infirmaress and nod up the table. She has just taken a spoonful of soup, and she slaps a hand over her mouth. Her spoon clatters.

Forty-eight heads turn in our direction. The cellaress looks at me in despair.

The abbess snaps my name. Of course she saw it all. I stare down at the wood grain and fit myself once more to the rule of silence.

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I am careful, so careful, with the gold leaf. It’s more expensive than the parchment and the desk combined, and it’s all wasted if I fold it wrong on the bed of glue. Only a slice, thinner than the white of my fingernail. It shines out of the face of the outlined honeysuckle like a small sun.

It’s a commission by a patron, a hagiography of his namesake, copied from a plain and unillustrated book we borrowed from an abbey across the river. With free reign to decorate it as befits his status, I’ve given this page a frame of vines, corners spraying with honeysuckle. I’ve given others twining leaves, fruiting trees, gardens of thyme. It’s one of the most complicated projects I’ve ever undertaken, and I do not intend to botch it. 

I lean to the right for a better view of the honeysuckle flowers peering in through the window, and an agreeable one twists to give me the angle. The petal is too far down. I brush the next pass of glue slightly higher, and press the gold leaf more firmly, so it doesn’t drift. With that one small adjustment, the honeysuckle nods in approval.

“The Reverend Mother is coming,” whispers one of the younger scribes near the door, and the four of us who live most of our days in the scriptorium bend our heads. The abbess peers in, notes our dutifulness, and continues on her way. We have all learned from last time, when we were laughing too hard to hear her footsteps. None of us ate that night.

The honeysuckle raises itself, offering. We have an understanding, this bush and I. The drop of nectar slides out when I squeeze, and I tip it into my mouth, and it sparkles like communion wine on my tongue.

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We lounge in the cloister like birds in a tree, sunning ourselves in the golden summer afternoon. We’re pretending to read saints’ lives and scripture, but it’s too lovely of a day to concentrate. I am back to back with the cantress, passing a scrap of parchment back and forth on the low wall; others sit in patches of sun, reading in murmurs of words that lose their shape through the spouts of flowers. The prioress paces the cloister walk to monitor talk, but when we’re careful, when she’s busy staring at the tangle of thorns clogging the fountain pipes, we send jokes between us. I save my best material for stolen times in stables and cellars, but I seize bits and pieces from here: the prioress’ lips pressed thin as cheesecloth as she watches thorns reaching for the laundry, the way she reaches out to peel them off but doesn’t dare make skin-to-skin contact, darting back like a guilty child when the abbess rounds the corner. I nearly laugh out loud at that. The cantress has to grip my arm, bent over shoulders shaking.

The abbess eyes the thorns settling on the laundry lines like she might a snake crawling into her bedroom. When she tried to take an axe to them yesterday, they only drew themselves up and hissed a sharp and spitting threat. She wheels and disappears down the rhododendron corridor with the prioress, stepping carefully around the grove of cottonwoods that have consumed the refectory entrance.

Petals waft through the air, leaves simmer on stone. God could be close by here. He feels far away most of the time, blocked out by thick stone and too much incense, but in this invading meadow, I can almost feel His touch. So I reach out a cautious hand, and the thorns twist to meet me. 

It’s only a prick, half the tick of a clock, and blood wells to the surface of my skin. The thorns lap it up greedily. The twists and tangles scrape against the fountain’s lip, tearing the slips of moss laid over it like doilies, and slink around my feet for more. 

The cantress watches with furrowed brow. “Don’t touch them,” she says.

“They’re only plants.”

“They’re of the devil.” She slaps my hand aside and shifts to pull her feet up on the wall. “For God’s sake, don’t give him your blood.” 

“How do we know?” I say. “The devil doesn’t come out and identify himself.”

“But he leaves markers. Your blood, he wants your blood,” says the cantress, and curls herself close.

“If it were the devil, God would have delivered us by now. Three weeks and it has only grown.” The thorns slither close, but I am wearing wooden clogs. “Maybe we should consider that this isn’t a curse at all. Maybe it’s a blessing, maybe it’s God’s blessing, and we have been ungrateful sinners and ignored it.”

“The others will see,” the cantress hisses.

They are too absorbed in their books. The afternoon sun hits the cloister just so, limning green grass and black habits alike in gold. Utterly unrecognizable from the bare, brown winter of three weeks ago. It could be an illustration from my manuscript. “Well, He sees all of their thanklessness,” I say, and lower my hand to the thorns again. After weeks of taking, it is my turn to give.

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The cellaress and I find each other in the stables. It’s one of our usual meeting points, far enough out of the way that anyone following the daily schedule won’t find us. If a dignitary decides to visit we remove ourselves to the brewhouse or the greenhouse, but all is safe now. I barely notice the straw scratching my skin, the scent of animals wafting up into the hayloft, in the warmth of her beside me. We stare at the ceiling two feet above as if the wood grains are constellations, our heads buried in each other’s shoulders. I tossed my veil into the corner the second I got off the ladder.

“What would you even do?” I ask, tracing a swirl in the wood. “If you left?”

She laughs. She knows what her lines are. “I’d take passage aboard a pirate ship,” she says to the ceiling. “I’d sail to a land far, far away from here, plundering and looting all the while. When I get there, I’ll be so rich they’ll crown me king of the new land. Everyone wants to be my queen, but I’ll choose you. We live in a castle, and nobody can ever tell us what to do.”

“Or,” I say, more serious. Three weeks to the day since the first growth, and I can feel the time wasted like a weight. “What would you do if you stayed? Say the abbess was gone, say there was no Rule. What would you do?”

It’s unfair. I came up through the ranks, a child oblate to a teenage novice to a sister. She faced a choice, a husband or the convent. Some here are widows, and instead of loneliness and poverty outside, they reached for three meals a day and a fifty-strong community. It is better in here, cloistered and closed, they say over needle and thread. It is simpler, easier, quieter, freer. Yes, we are free, hidden as we are in the furthest corner of the stables.

“That’s rather unlikely, even as a hypothetical,” she says. “An abbey with no abbess is like a chicken with no head.”

The joke doesn’t land right in the heady fumes of hay, the all-encompassing warmth, and I have to struggle to find the words. “It doesn’t have to be,” I say. “The Rule is too strict for a too flimsy reason. We can serve God fine even if we speak during meals. Why are we punished for that?”

“Shh!” The cellaress props herself on one elbow to peer over the loft’s edge. “Don’t say that.”

“Someone should.”

“Please,” she says, quiet, “I told you to be careful.”

But what if I am tired of being careful? I ask, but for her, I don’t say it aloud.

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When I walk into Vespers, the sacrist is kneeling in penance outside the choir, and the evening plants are blooming. Angel trumpet. Night phlox. Star jasmine. The pink and white scents drift up, open as wine. I have learned their names now, though too late, I should have known them before. I make up for lost time; I let them twine around my shoulders and settle in to listen. For the kingdom and the power and glory are yours forever and ever. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. World without end.

“We shall not allow nature to overtake us as if we are already dead. We are women of God, God’s chosen servants, and we do not bow to the devil. To mere vines. We will not be chased out of our home. We will not tiptoe around flowers—flowers,” says the abbess, like the word is sinful.

The angel trumpet constricts around my arm like a snake. I stroke the spot under the flower’s throat, murmuring softly enough that the others beside me don’t hear. The branches brush their cheeks and shoulders too, but they stay rigid: eyes closed, unfeeling. 

The sacrist kneeling below the choir needs the touch the most. She is excommunicated, she has disagreed with the abbess on the handling of Mass too many times, and that familiar guilt-ridden, forsaken feeling is one I do not wish on anyone. I will her to look up, tilt her chin up to receive the blessing of the branches, but she is still.

Relax, I say to the angel trumpet, not now. It loosens its hold, and I continue stroking its soft underbelly until the chapel warms with the loosed breath of a thousand flowering vines.

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The cellaress is strained and pinched, a copy of the statue of St. Anne that once stood in the garden before the vines drowned it. She chooses her words carefully, as always—careful, what a distant word. “You cannot be serious.”

The white, ribbed mushroom in my cupped hands—this name I couldn’t find in the herbal books, but it offered itself to me all the same—beats in tune with my heartbeat. It feels heavier, suddenly. “Please,” I say, though I didn’t intend to plead. The way she is looking at me makes me desperate. “I know it’s strange. I was nervous too, at first. But when you’ve tasted some of it, everything feels right. I can’t explain better than that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s like they say about God, isn’t it?” I am rambling, I am holding the mushroom out like an alms-seeker with a bowl. “He’s already in everything, every leaf and branch and stone. He already knows us, but if you eat, you’ll know Him in return—really know Him, no Rule to block Him out. If we all eat, we’ll all know each other.”

“I already know Him. I sing His praises eight times a day. This isn’t God, anyway, this is—” she gestures wildly at the mushroom—“this is the devil.”

“The Reverend Mother told you that.”

“The Reverend Mother knows wickedness when she sees it. Put it down, please put it down, it’s alive.” She is almost sobbing.

“Of course it’s alive. Things should be alive. It’s a blessing.” Isn’t it better to eat of living things than to kneel before the dead? But she’s too undone to hear it like that.

“Why must you always want more?” she says. “Why can’t this be enough?”

It could be enough, for now. But the thing she can’t understand is that one day it won’t be. One day, we’ll grow tired of going to bed in separate rooms, of meeting in hidden places. We’ll grow tired of saying words that hate us, of dancing around the reason for our habits and our steepled hands and our chapel bells ringing out the liturgy of the hours. One day, when we are old and our knees are capricious, we’ll kneel before the cross and we’ll be too tired to get up. 

“You know the cruelty of the rules as well as I do,” I say. “You know the punishments. This place has so much promise.” The scriptorium, painted in the bright ink of women who know things. The cloister that should be full of talk and song and laughter. The great tables of the refectory, the gardens and stables and coops that provide for us, the huge sheltering bulk of the monastery itself, and it’s all ruined because we cannot break the barriers set up between us. “It could be a sanctuary if we got rid of the worst parts. It’s a cleansing, that’s all this is. God will cleanse it all for us, and we just have to open our hearts to let Him in.”

The cellaress clutches her arms around herself, quiet. I hold the mushroom out again, white as the body of Christ in the abbess’ hands. It waits for her to take it.

“You don’t know how good we have it,” she says, and turns and leaves.

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The abbess likes to tell us how much she hates this part. Likes to tell me—I cannot speak for them. The Rule allows us to be whipped when stern admonishment does not work. This is up to the abbess’ discretion.

“We all have our frivolities, our vanities,” she says. “They are human weaknesses, temptations from the devil that will one day drive us, if we let them, into the ground. And many let them.”

The rod bites into my back. Old scars overlap my skin, ancient stratifying layers. I do not cry out—I haven’t been that weak in years.

“But there is a difference,” she says, “between the people outside these walls and the women within them. We are women of God. We harness the weaknesses inside us. We eat sparingly, we have no luxuries, and we spend our time not in gossiping and folly, but in worship and prayer. We adhere to the Benedictine Rule so that we may devote ourselves wholly to the service of God.”

The others looked away when the abbess came to get me at the close of Mass. They already knew. That is the worst part, I think, that none of them gave me a commiserating smile or a pitying look. The cellaress told everyone everything, except the parts that exposed her too.

The rod comes down again. 

“And this invasion of our abbey is not God.” The abbess pauses, lets the pain sit in my skin. “I have told you of the wicked one. You are familiar with him yourself. You know how he can get under your skin. You have told me before, he forces you to act before you can think. So why have you eaten of the greenery? Why do you expose yourself over and over to wicked impulses? Why do you not realize the devil is whispering in your ear, coursing through your veins, sheltering in your stomach?”

When I don’t answer, she sighs. “Speak.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are putting us all in danger by doing this. Has the devil made a permanent home in you?”

“No.”

“Then harden your heart. Vomit him out. There is nothing greater than a life in God’s service, and inside this abbey, that comes with responsibilities. Obedience. Dedication. Faith. I love you, truly I do,” says the abbess, and her tone wants me to look up. “I do. You only need to learn that this unruliness cannot continue. But if you cannot internalize words, if pain does not motivate you, we will need to think about your status here.”

And I could confess everything here, be expelled, a fresh start with a lightened heart out in the world. But if I hadn’t been an oblate, I’d have been a mother, nurturing a brood of children who looked more like my husband than me. Here, I read. Here, I hold a pen. I make paintings I could never have dreamed of making. I have friends, or I did, and I still could, if I repented. I have a roof over my head. I have a home.

But it comes with rules. There are things I do not get to do by virtue of wearing this veil. The cellaress knew not to jeopardize what we already had, but I can never seem to stop myself from wanting more.

The abbess leaves me to put myself back together. Sit up. Drape your habit over your shoulders in the way that lets the air in best. Go to the infirmaress, she will give you bandages and comfort. But not anymore, she thinks you are delusional, she thinks you worship the devil. 

None of them can see.

A vine curls up from the cracked mortar between stones. It moseys along the floor, lifts its tendrils to my knee, where I haven’t yet brushed off the drops of blood. It bends its head and slowly, tenderly, licks me clean.

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Look, I say. Look, look, please look.

They look. They won’t stop looking, their faces hovering in stone arches around the cloister, but not at the greenery, not at God, they won’t stop looking at me. I am standing in the middle, where the greenery first bloomed from; even more than before, the fountain is drowned in vines and thorns and the hanging branches of a willow. There’s no empty ground to stand on without trampling something holy. My throat is hoarse. I think I have been shouting for a long time.

It is God, I say again and again. He is here, He is with us, and He is begging for a change. Suffocation is no way to live. We could be free and we could love. This is His will, He will see it happen, He will see us happy.

The abbess is shaking her head. Some of them are murmuring, the cantress starts toward me, but those closest pull her back. None of them can see. The moss on the fountain has been shifting ever since I’ve been standing here, and now I feel it on the backs of my legs through my habit, growing fast to hug me close. It’s comfort and strength at once. I speak again, my voice cracking, in case one more repetition will convince someone.

The cellaress appears halfway through, poised on the step down from the walkway. Glowing in the sunset light, and she doesn’t even have the decency to show regret.

“Come back,” she says. “Come out of there.”

I am standing in the fountain. Vines spiral around its bowl instead of water, and they scent me like hounds, encircle my ankles. The moss grows thick around my waist.

“Come here.” I can’t shout anymore. “Come feel it with me, it’s God. It’s really God.”

She just stands there. She protected herself, and I shouldn’t hate her for that; I can’t hate her at all. But I have cast off my armor and I cannot go back. I want, and I think I am sobbing now, I want you.

The rules and retribution of the monastery have never gotten to kill that. I have known God all my life, and I know this shadowed half-existence, alone and detached from everyone else in this tiny place, is not what He wants. Surely it cannot be what He wants. The moss is warm, heavy like a wool cloak as it rises up my chest and closes on my neck, so I close my eyes and let it come. If they won’t let things change, God will carry me out. God will save me, even if none of them will come with me, even if it’s only me alone.

I cannot see the cellaress anymore.

I think I am drowning.