I Could Have Loved You As Far As The Horizon: And Other Mistakes, Short stories from Cape Cod (long reads) Options

[Lindstrom]

Back in high school a friend of mine had a website for whatever art form anyone in school felt like sharing, usually written works. Personally I thought his stuff was the best (he also wrote the Scavenger Hunt which wasn't a big hit with you people), though of course I had my own works which I'll probably get to posting if I can find them. To start, I'll use one of his recent stories, which he actually wrote over the summer. Of course, I won't post anything else if no one seems to care for these stories.

FROM WHENCE COMETH OUR HELP

It was mid-March when the thirty five nuns of St. Therese de Lisieux Seminary of Eastham, MA, played Für Elise on thirty five grand pianos on the rooftops of the nunnery. The nun who orchestrated this world record-breaking event was the Reverend Mother Lilly Howes, whose Bechstein D280 Grand Piano, practically a steal at $67k, was freshly tuned and pristine, its ivory keys polished with two coats of turtle wax, and the Rev. Mother shouted to the bickering nuns on that blustery morning that they were going to play Für Elise and that was final. Not Greensleeves or Chopsticks or any other traditional etude but Ludwig van Beethoven’s Für Elise, written circa 1810, presumably for a woman named Elise. Below them lay the famous gardens of St. Therese, the soil of which was quite visible as the annuals were not yet in bloom.

“It’s a love song, ladies!” bellowed the Reverend Mother from a bullhorn on the top of her living quarters. “I know you all know it. We’re going to break this record this morning, God willing.” Cheers could be heard from the thirty-four other nuns, each with their own grand piano. Eleven sisters were atop East Chapel, thirty yards from where the Reverend Mother stood. In a group of twenty nuns on the roof of the sacristy stood the young novitiate Emily Thomas, her auburn hair still visible, biting at the cuticles of her fingers, and ready to sit at her upright baby grand and play a thirty nun-strong rendition of her favorite Beethoven piece. She awaited the Reverend Mother’s instructions.

“Ok, sisters! I will begin to play a little overture and from that you’ll know when to start. Sit at your pianos!” The Reverend Mother put down her bullhorn and sat at her Bechstein D280 and played a short overture of Für Elise.

What followed was something the people of Eastham, MA, on the forearm of Cape Cod, would never forget. There, the thirty five cloistered sisters of St. Therese Seminary played in unison Beethoven’s Für Elise for exactly 1:06, breaking the world record for most pianos played in the same place at the same time, a record formerly held by a group of two dozen Italian monks and set in the late 40s somewhere around Palermo. The music soared through Eastham, down from the nunnery on Fort Hill, whistling by a handful of Eastern Massachusetts windmills and the tepid shores of the beach on that mighty Atlantic.

The Reverend Mother Lilly Howes stood up and cheered for their triumph, tripping over the bullhorn she placed on the thatched roof of her living quarters, losing her balance and tumbling two stories to the ground into the naked St. Therese gardens. She broke her hip, both legs and immediately went into shock. Two days later her doctor told her she would never walk again. Nobody ever bothered to remove her Bechstein D280 from the roof; when spring arrived and the horticulturally inclined nuns polished their greening thumbs, equipped their trowels and spades and weeders and cultivation tillers and were hard at work on St. Therese Seminary’s famous bay-side flower gardens, the piano was still there.

Before the world record and subsequent medical disaster that led to her wheelchair confinement, the Reverend Mother was much more ecclesiastically vivacious. She even once tie-dyed her habit for the annual St. Therese barbecue and retreat. But during the blooming of the annuals and the planting of lilacs and the rhododendrons, the Reverend Mother was confined to her office in her living quarters, filling out the secular paperwork of the nunnery—food bills, taxes, donations to and from the seminary—always with the shades of her windows down. Her primary concern since the piano incident was overseeing the conversion of the Seminary grounds to fit her newfound handicapability. She had not met with her nuns in quite a while and was particularly fearful of the resulting detachment.

Making Fort Hill in Eastham, MA, on which the St. Therese de Lisieux Seminary resided, handicapped accessible when the Reverend Mother received the news from her doctor that she would need to consider her own mobility as her elderly, already feeble legs had proved themselves useless, was a major undertaking for the predominantly male contractors in the Lower Cape region. The convent of St. Therese had to be outfitted with ramps and this had to be done right away even if it did coincide with the nuns’ planting and caring of the famous St. Therese gardens. It was the first time men had been seen on the premises in years. They had to install elevators and ramps and extra-large stalls in the bathrooms just for the Reverend Mother. For the contractors to even be allowed on the premises, a number of sisters had to go through at least a mile and a half of red tape courtesy of the Archdiocese in Boston and a Cardinal was shipped down to Eastham to lecture the nuns on how to act in the eyes of the Lord and in constant male presence for the next three weeks. He said that men—and it was noted by the nuns that he said men as if he were speaking generally—weren’t really all that interesting and should not be paid attention to and that you ladies should just go about your cloistered lives as you would normally.

The contractors had been at St. Therese for just over a week when young novitiate Emily Thomas entered the Reverend Mother’s office, wearing muddied green kneepads and holding a garden rake in her right hand. Emily had not taken her final vows yet, the only woman to have not done so out of the thirty five living in Eastham. She was young, mid-20s, and an avid horticulturalist. In fact, just recently, after the piano incident that crippled the Rev. Mother, who had normally administered the growing of the gardens but neglected to take the post this year seeing as she couldn’t reach the ground from her wheelchair, Emily had been in put charge of the famous gardens of St. Therese.

“Reverend Mum?”

“What’s that on your knees, Em?” asked the Reverend Mother. She rolled around her desk to face Emily. There was a baby grand piano in the corner of the room by the window with the shades down.

“Kneepads, Mum,” said Emily. “Gardening kneepads.” She used the handle-end of the shovel to scratch the back of her knee covered by the itchy gardening pad. “Did you get a new piano? You know, Mum, since the contractors are here maybe we can ask one of them to bring your Bechstein down from the roof. I’m sure they’d be happy to.”

“Let’s not trouble these fine young men, Em. And that piano can stay where it is for now. I’m fine with this one.” She pointed to the baby grand in the corner.

What made the Reverend Mother so ambivalent regarding the extraction of her Bechstein D280 Grand Piano from the roof of her living quarters was that she very much enjoyed when a large seagull, sometimes flying in from the shores and scavenging for food, landed on the keys of the Bechstein. She liked the unnatural sound it made: webbed feet against the keys of an extravagant ivory piano that hadn’t been tuned since the Ides. The seagull of course would scare itself and fly away almost immediately.

“What brings you to my office?” asked the Reverend Mother.

“I was raking and liming the front lilacs, or around them at least, and I noticed something peculiar. And I know I’m not going mad because I know I planted rhododendrons and peonies by East and West Chapels, respectively. And they come from potted plants, you know that, right, Mother?”

“Yes, Em. I signed off on them a few months before we played Für Elise.”

“Anyway so last week myself and Sisters Faythe and Isobel put the rhododendrons and peonies into the soil, already planted, and arranged them quite beautifully and symmetrically at East and West Chapels. And today I’m out by the entrance, seeding and liming and everything, and the clock of East Chapel struck noon and I turned my head and I noticed that like 70% of the flowers I planted over there were gone, pulled out of the ground.”

“Do you think it was animals that ate your flowers?” The Reverend Mother was practicing balancing on the rear wheels of her wheelchair, something that Emily mistook as boredom.

“Hmm? Oh no it’s not animals. All we have here are coyotes and foxes and raccoons, maybe the occasional deer, but they won’t eat flowers. I think my flowers are being taken.”

“That’s a lofty accusation, my child,” said the Reverend Mother. “Are you prepared to suspect thirty four nuns of stealing flowers?”

“I’m prepared to suspect a dozen men,” said Emily. When she said this she pointed her shovel at the Reverend Mother matter-of-factly. It was true that flowers had never been stolen from the famous gardens before. They were thirty five cloistered nuns with little to no outside contact, ascetics sacrificing the vainglory of modern living and carnal pursuits. “The only changing variable of this year’s gardening is the fact that we have a dozen or so men wandering the grounds, replacing stairs with ramps, blowing out the sacristy’s walls for elevators. Mother, I think these men stole the peonies from East and West Chapels.”

“I shall speak to the foreman about this. You may return to your gardens, Em.”

“Thanks, Mum.”

The Reverend Mother rolled over to the window with its shades down, next to the baby grand. She pulled the shades up and looked out to the rest of the grounds of the seminary. There was a nun with no expression on her face tilling the soil near the sacristy. Sisters Isobel and Faythe stood at the gardens of East Chapel with Emily and stared at the empty spaces of the plot where the rhododendrons and peonies used to be. They seemed to be screaming at each other.

Emily had been let in to the nunnery under circumstances that the Reverend Mother would have otherwise abhorred. It was Em who knocked on the head nun’s door one night asking for safety, sanctuary, anything to get her away from men, she said, men who were nothing but the silt of humanity. At the doors to the Reverend Mother’s living quarters that night, Em told Reverend Mother Howes that she did not like thinking this way, that men were the silt of humanity, and she wanted very much to join the cloistered nuns because, if anyone, they were people who could pluck her taut psychological strings and rewire them in accordance with love and God and the pacific forgiving quality that sisters of the order possess. That same week Emily was given the habit of a novitiate and allowed to roam the grounds of her own volition but not leave. Temptation lingers in the new blood, said the Reverend Mother to Emily, and if one is serious about becoming celibate and cloistered, one must remain docile and within the grounds. It did not help, also, that just down the hill from St. Therese was a beach lauded for its debauchery and half-naked patrons. The last warning that the Rev. Mother gave Emily before the young novitiate was allowed to peruse the seminary was this: “Stay far from that beach. It is the coasts of America to which the hard-bodied and tremendously sinful flock.” Emily heeded.

Out near the entrance, on the west side of the sacristy, were two trailers owned by the Lower Cape Contractors Company (L3C). The trailers had parked there a week earlier so that the men working to build ramps and elevators could have a place to take a breather and store equipment. A few men leaned against the side of the trailers and were drinking coffee brewed by one of the nuns earlier that morning. The Reverend Mother pulled away from the window and faced the baby grand piano.

She had become wary of her greatest passion, making music, since the accident, because whenever she rolled up in front of the piano in her wheelchair, she most often neglected to lock the brakes and the force of her playing lurched her backward, away from the piano.

The only buildings that were handicapped-accessible so far were the Reverend Mother’s living quarters/office and East Chapel. She spent most of her waking hours in the office and only left to attend morning and evening services in the chapel. Noon services were held in West Chapel, not yet ramped. Rumors were circulating that noon-time service had become a joke and that nuns were just reading Andrew M. Greeley novels instead of paying attention to whomever it was giving the service. And the kitchen crew had reported to the Reverend Mother that the amount of food consumed at St. Therese had decreased by some percent, she doesn’t remember what, but just that it was a substantial amount of uneaten food. At the end of the day it took the Reverend Mother five minutes to get out of her wheelchair and into her bed. She refused to let other nuns help her.

That night, from a dreamless sleep, and the Reverend Mother always found the lack of dreams to be more symbolic, she was awoken by a fractured, hideously out-of-tune rendition of “I’ve Got Rhythm” sounding from the unmistakable resonance of her Bechstein Grand Piano on the roof. Not having the strength to get out of bed, into her wheelchair, and outside to see who was playing her piano on the roof, she turned over and fell right back asleep.

The next morning Emily burst into the Reverend Mother’s office. She was wearing a clean pair of kneepads this time. “The rhododendrons are gone, Mum,” she said.

The Reverend Mother had been busy playing around with the brakes on her wheelchair. She wasn’t used to them yet. “What’s this now?”

“The rhododendrons. One of those contractors is stealing our flowers. Somebody is deflowering this nunnery.”

Emily relayed the Reverend Mother the story. She, Em, went to water the rhododendrons by the nuns’ dormitory and when she turned the corner to where the plots were, where she planted the rhododendrons not more than four weeks ago, they were gone, all of them, all of the rhododendrons, the beautiful, yellow subgenus rhododendron luteum, found primarily in Poland, Mum, and we are such darn good florists that we got them to grow here, on Cape Cod, in one of the sandiest and harshest landscapes for even normal-looking flowers to grow in and suddenly they’re up and gone and this is the second theft in as many days and these contractors need to be punished, corporeally or otherwise.

“You can’t be sure that these men are stealing our flowers, Em,” said the Reverend Mother. The brake on her left rear wheel seemed to be stuck.

“I can and I am sure! Tell them to take their business elsewhere.”

“Now I can’t do that. I need them to install ramps and elevators. I need to get around my Seminary.”

Emily put up her right hand, held her index finger 2–3 mm from her thumb and said, “I am seriously this close to firebombing the two L3C trailers out there.”

“Why are you so quick to accuse the men?” asked the Reverend Mother. For the record she did half-heartedly suspect the men too but was fearful of the implicated sin of thinking that someone was guilty without any proof.

“This might sound like the wrong answer,” started Emily, “but the whole reason I became a nun, the whole reason I’m wearing this half-habit right now and two weeks away from taking my final vows to become a full-on 100% cloistered St. Therese sister was that I didn’t have to deal with folks anymore, specifically men.”

The Reverend Mother kind of saw that Emily was indicating that this whole deflowering situation irked her on a number of different socio-emotional levels. The brake on the wheelchair was still stuck. A seagull landed on the grand piano on the roof: a dissonant Dm chord.

“So you can understand, Mum,” continued Emily, “that regarding past experiences and the fact that my only real task in this place is to uphold and beautify the famous St. Therese flower gardens during one out of four seasons that I am seriously considering what it is that makes me want to take these vows of chastity and poverty and obedience in two weeks when someone is mucking around in my flowerbed when I haven’t said bad thing one since enlistment or enrollment or whatever it’s called here.”

“Tell you what,” said the Reverend Mother. “Tomorrow I have no paperwork to fill out, no duties to fulfill. My day off. Tomorrow I will see the foreman and demand that our flowerbeds be kept unviolated.”

“That’s all I ask, Mum.”

“And get some rest, Em. You don’t mean what you say.”

A few minutes after Emily left the room, the Reverend Mother jimmied the lock on her rear wheel and got it unstuck. She rolled out of her living quarters and sat on the concrete path that led from her front door to the sacristy. There was a man strolling by the West Chapel flowerbeds, admiring them, what was left of them, and he bent down to smell the lilacs. He was wearing a blue workman’s jumpsuit. The Reverend Mother found it peculiar the way he walked because as he strolled he took careful steps, each foot brought forward with some kind of reverence or concern for the grounds of the Seminary, and he stopped every few feet to consider the flowers. She took a mental note to find out his name from the foreman in the morning.

The Reverend Mother had another dreamless sleep that night. At about 2:40 AM she was again jolted awake by the sound of somebody playing her Bechstein on the roof. This time it was perfectly in tune and whoever was playing it was playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 17, she recognized that immediately. This time the Reverend Mother had to get up, spend the five minutes transferring her body and dead legs from the bed to the bedside wheelchair, and roll outside to find out who was climbing her roof and playing her piano.

“Who’s up there?” she yelled from the concrete path. Whoever was up there was still playing Sonata No. 17. After the 7-plus minute song, she called out again, “Who’s up there?”

“I tuned your piano, ma’am,” said the anonymous pianist. “Shame it’s up here, though, and you’re without the use of your legs and all.”

“Please tell me who you are,” she said. It surprised the Reverend Mother that she didn’t automatically think that whoever was up there, whoever had woken her up the past two nights, was not some angel or another kind of heavenly messenger. She met this shadowed rooftop pianist with animosity.

“I’m one of the hired hands you hired to ramp up this place.”

“Do I have to call the police? Or your boss?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t mean you any harm. I just wanted to tune your piano. I know you’re the nun who fell two stories after breaking that world record. Considering none of the guys have seen you, not even our foreman, well I kind of took it as a sort of post-injury despair. You’ve always got your windowshades down, anyway.”

The Reverend Mother put two and two together. “Are you in any way responsible for stealing the flowers? Are you that man I saw earlier smelling the lilacs by West Chapel?”

“I must confess.”

“Why? You’re throwing my poor nuns into these terrible quasi-existential despairs. Especially Emily. It’s her passion to plant. Why deprive her of it?”

“I didn’t mean for my exploits to harm anyone,” he said.

“Are you even real?” The Reverend Mother realized she should have asked this earlier in the conversation.

“Yes,” he said. A pause. “Are you?”

“By all accounts, yes,” said the Reverend Mother. “What have you done to our flowers?”

“Being only so educated as to allow for a career in back-breaking manual labor,” started the pianist, “and I’m talking about the bare minimum requirements for a high school diploma, I can only be so safe in my assumptions about religious orders. But what I do know, and I know this because my mother took me to church every Sunday morning just a couple miles south of here, is that nuns are nuns because they feel they have a higher calling. If one of these nuns were to so happen to break their legs in a horrible accident, she would, I think, find other ways to walk, right?”

“I’m not sure you’re in the position to—”

“I’ve been deflowering your nuns,” he said.

The Reverend Mother thought she would try the matronly approach, the kind of approach that sometimes works on wayward boys. “My son, if it’s flowers you need, we do sell them at a bargain price down by the church down Fort Hill.”

“I don’t need the flowers. I’m looking to prove a point.”

“What point do you possibly need to prove? We’re nuns.”

“Nuns with priorities in the wrong place,” he corrected her. “With a Reverend Mother who never leaves her quarters. Wasn’t just your legs that were broken, ma’am.”

“Who are you to say we’ve priorities in the wrong place?” asked the Rev. Mother. By now her rebuttals were just rebuttals for arguments’ sake; she had let in Emily Thomas under shady circumstances, Emily Thomas who, barring any unforeseen happening, would soon become a full-on 100% nun, who came into the order by way of an admittedly feeble excuse to ‘get away from men.’ She had never once seen Emily in chapel, only outside tending to the gardens or in the head office clearing an order for more seeds.

“I attended service at West Chapel the other day, ma’am. Your nuns were reading books instead of listening. And plus you’ve got a legion of your sisters planting flowers and skipping service altogether. I hate to say this but you sisters seem to be falling off the beaten path, spiritually speaking. So now we’re at my point. Just wait until the sun rises. Goodnight, ma’am.” The sound of two feet hitting the ground from a two-story jump could be heard followed by the sound of two legs running away.

In the morning she awoke to the sound of a group of nuns chatting and gasping right outside her window. When she heard Emily Thomas scream, “Now where are my lilacs?—Oh my…,” she rushed into her wheelchair and out the door.

The nuns were looking at the Reverend Mother’s roof. As she rolled backward for a better view, she saw the stolen peonies and rhododendrons and the lilacs aligned perfectly around her Bechstein D280 Grand Piano. It was a beautiful spread of fuchsia and light pink and white. There they were, flowers all accounted for, placed in plots of soil just heavy enough to support plant life but just light enough to keep the roof from caving in. Three nuns who had rushed to the sacristy to retrieve the Seminary’s ladders a few minutes earlier came back and stated that all the ladders were gone. There was nothing they could do.

“Why are my flowers on your roof, Mum?” asked Emily.

“I’m not sure” said the Reverend Mother. “But they’re out of our hands now.”

END