Sister Eleanor never looked healthy to me, but I didn’t worry about it until the day I found out just how sick she was. Sure, there was a question in my mind—her asking me to heal her belly—but Sister Eleanor never said anything about being really sick, and she was very active when the other nuns came over to harvest the peaches. So I set the question way back in my mind.
When the ripe peaches hung heavy on the branches, the nuns rolled up, all sitting in the back of a flatbed truck. Their benefactor, Mr. Gaylord Lewis, drove the truck and let them out before leaving. Must have been eight or nine of them. The wind blew their extra cloth out behind their shoulders like banners.
Sister Eleanor heard them coming up the drive and walked onto the porch, letting the screen door slam behind her. The nuns hopped out and started scampering about, chattering to one another. Sister Eleanor leaned off the porch and yelled, “I hope you left your big mouths at home.”
“You be silent if you want, old girl,” Sister Joan hollered. “We’re the verbose nuns.”
It was hard to keep them all straight since there was such a sameness in their habits (why anyone would call a dress a “habit” is beyond me)—all you really saw were those little square faces. They swirled out into the peach orchard and began setting up ladders and baskets. Then they were in and out of the trees like big brown birds. As the baskets filled with fruit, the nuns sang psalms.
I ladled drinking water from the barrel on the porch into a small bucket, then Bunny and I took it up and down the rows of trees. Some of the nuns stepped down off the ladders to drink. One said, “I’m so glad you are here to help Sister E, stubborn old coot. She won’t take help from any of us.”
All the nuns wore cowboy boots under their dresses, but only Sister Eleanor’s were blue. You could see all their boots on the ladders. One sister said tall boots fought off snake bites. Texas snakes would not rise up six inches to get your flesh, she told me, they would just hit the leather and fall away.
“Don’t tease me,” I said, but another sister said she’d been hit in the boot twice by snakes and she wasn’t the teasing kind. So I wondered if my cowboy boots were tall enough since I was not nearly so tall as the nuns. I imagined snakes clamping down on my knee.
“Snake!” Sister Joan cried, and I jumped.
“Leave that child alone,” another sister said and then assured me, “Any snake in this orchard is long gone.”
“Don’t worry, child,” another one said. “Pigs are the greatest protection against snakes. My father always kept pigs on our ranch for that very purpose. Best snake stompers on earth.”
After that I kept Bunny by my side. If he stopped to eat a fallen peach, I’d wait. If he trotted ahead, I’d trot along behind him sloshing water. If one of the sisters tried to scare me, I’d just say ha ha and walk on. But I was so happy there in the peach orchard with Sister Eleanor and all the nuns teasing me. Some days I almost forgot anything was wrong in the world.
Those women were like a whole flock of mothers watching over me, and they were watching over me in Paradise, a wide-open sunny ranch with peaches growing all around us.
The best part of the day was the smell—ripe peach smell so thick in the air that when I inhaled I could taste it on my tongue, sweet and velvety. I ate one very ripe, dripping peach and made a terrible mess; the juice leaked all over my chin and on my hands and the sticky sugar attracted bees. I jerked my hands away but the bees kept circling back and dive-bombing me. Two hit my chin. I ran around a tree, but they kept up, buzzing in my face. I swatted the air, dashed for the house, and slammed the screen door.
Snakes! Bees! No place is ever totally safe, but I’d rather be in danger from animals than people, that’s for sure.
In the kitchen, I washed up, then made a glass of ice water and sat in the pantry to drink it. I loved a shady pantry; it opened up my imagination. One second I was thinking giant bees, the next it was snakes, then I recalled Mr. Upchuck’s reflecting eyeglasses, then Mother at the campfire back in Hot Springs, her beautiful hair falling around her shoulders. My unleashed mind was better than a slide show.
Suddenly Sister Eleanor came in out of the heat. The door banged and she marched to the kitchen sink where she took off her wimple.
I mean to tell you, she was completely bald.
I didn’t make a peep.
She leaned over the sink, holding her bald head under the running water, cooling off from the heat. She looked like a giant baby hamster. (I saw my friend Bunny’s hairless baby hamsters once, before the daddy hamster got in the cage and ate them.) Sister Eleanor twisted her bald head to one side, then the other, letting the water run over it. Then she stood up and wiped her head dry with a dish towel.
Have you ever seen a bald-headed woman? It’s not normal.
There was a song the Catfish used to sing about an old maid: She took out her teeth and her big glass eye and the hair off the top of her head. If I remember correctly, a burglar came into her bedroom and she shot him. That burglar couldn’t have been any more surprised than I was to see that Sister Eleanor was bald—naked skin from ear to ear.
She put her wimple back on and went back outside to work.
I sat there for a long time digesting what I had seen. The pantry had been so safe, away from all the killer bees and snakes. Suddenly, I didn’t give a whit about bees or snakes. Something more real buzzed my face, coiled in my brain, rattled its tail. What was wrong with Eleanor Rose?
When Sister Eleanor was good and gone from the kitchen, I did something I would have been very ashamed of if I’d been caught, but since I wasn’t caught, I wasn’t ashamed at all. It works that way, you know. I’m not sure why. It is easier to be ashamed of yourself when someone else helps you.
So, what I did shameful was this: I went to snoop in Sister Eleanor’s room. Her writing desk looked out on the peach orchard where I could see her picking, so I felt sure she wouldn’t walk in on me.
Sister Eleanor’s room was almost empty, but the books on her bookshelf told me what was wrong with her. Cancer. The books had titles like Unlikely Survivors, Cancer: A Blessing in Disguise, The Sisterhood of Cancer, The Cancer Diet, Radiation Poisoning, and God Knows Your Fears. (You know my poor opinion about God knowing my fears, but that’s beside the point.)
It all made sense and I hated the sense it made: my aunt had cancer for sure. I did not know much about cancer except that it pretty much kills you dead. That was such bad news to me that I backed up and sat down on Sister Eleanor’s bed. Outside, my flock of mothers sang psalms while they picked peaches. Inside, I knew that my life there in Paradise was going to be taken away from me, like everything else I loved.
* * *
That night after I put on my pajamas, I asked Sister Eleanor if reading from a book counted as talking. She thought about that for a while and said no. So I gave her Oliver Twist and led her to my bed. I crawled in and she crawled in beside me, plumped up the pillows, and snuggled close. Sister Eleanor picked up reading where I had left off:
“I haven’t any sister, or father and mother either. I’m an orphan; I live at Pentonville.”
“Only hear him, how he braves it out!” cried the young woman.
“Why, it’s Nancy!” exclaimed Oliver, who now saw her face for the first time, and started back in irrepressible astonishment.
“You see he knows me!” cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. “He can’t help himself. Make him come home, there’s good people, or he’ll kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!”
I knew, from reading the short book in lower school, that it wouldn’t end well for Nancy or Fagin or any of the other characters Sister Eleanor read about that night, except Oliver Twist; he found happiness in the end.
But happiness was not possible if Aunt Eleanor died of cancer.