CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“Get up there, girls,” a woman’s voice calls as she rings a bell downstairs. The other girls grumble and pull their blankets over their heads. Slipping on my dress, the only item I’ve left from last night’s raid, I leave the room and enter the small kitchen where Marie stirs a pot over the fire. Another woman—a nun, I can tell by the same brown habit they all wear—is emptying some items from her basket onto the rickety table: a loaf of bread, a jug of milk, some cheese, and three apples. My mouth waters at the sight.

“You must be Kathleen,” she says to me. There’s a hint of Irish in her voice. “I’m Sister Phelan.” She looks at my wrinkled dress. “Look at the state of you. Did you sleep in that, or what?” Her accent and tone remind me of Mam.

Marie glances at me and I see her dress is just as wrinkled. With no boy’s clothes, I imagine she must have slept in hers. But before I can answer, Sister Phelan notices my bare feet.

“Where are your shoes, girl?” she asks me as Rose, Norah, and Sheila enter the room.

“Rose has them,” I say.

Marie gasps and drops the spoon. It splatters porridge down her skirts. Rose glares at me from behind Sister Phelan; her dark eyes hit me like black stones from a slingshot.

“I never wore shoes back home,” I lie. “They hurt my feet.”

Sister Phelan shakes her head at me. “Well, you’ll have to get used to them. You can’t work Uptown in bare feet. I guess Rose will take that job. But Rose, try to keep this one. ’Tis the third job this month.”

Rose smiles and grabs an apple. “Of course, sister.”

Sighing, Sister Phelan takes the apple back and cuts it in half. She hands the other half to me. “Our last domestic just quit, Kathleen. The job is yours.”

“A job?” I blurt. Amazed at how last night’s problem of money is already solved. “A paying job?”

“’Tisn’t much, but it’s a start,” Sister Phelan answers, picking up her basket. “You’ll be helping Martha Hagan with the laundry. She’s waiting for you at the boarding house.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough to do that filthy work,” Rose mutters, ignoring the look from Sister Phelan. Rose cuts into the bread, letting a thick slice fall on the table. “You’re welcome to it.”

“Thanks, Rose,” I say, taking the slice of bread and a bit of cheese to go with it. A bold move for sure, but hunger does that to me. Rose scowls, both of us knowing I’d have neither when Sister Phelan left. Not wanting to find out, I follow after Sister Phelan as she exits the tiny house.

I visit with Annie and Tish for a bit while waiting for Martha. Annie hasn’t spoken to me yet; Tish speaks for her. Like peas in a pod, the pair of them. But Annie does sit with me and hold my hand. I even get a wee smile out of her before I have to leave with Martha.

“I take it you’ve done washing before?” Martha asks, handing me a bar of soap.

I nod, thinking fondly of doing the day’s wash with Mam. I don’t mind washing; besides, how dirty could sisters habits be?

She hands me one of the heaping baskets. I realize then it’s the dirty rags of the immigrants. They stink to high heaven from weeks of wear, caked with filth, vermin, and God knows what. They should be burned, not washed. Just like that, my memory of Mam is gone, buried under dark and dingy memories of long days laundering uniforms in Wicklow Jail. That was my penance, my punishment for stealing. Yet, here I am again.

Martha leads me up St. Patrick Street, past the great stone cathedral, over the hill, and down to the water’s edge. The early morning light dances on the Ottawa River as the thick woods around us rustle in the wind. A pretty scene; too bad it’s for such dirty work.

Martha takes a bit of laundry and, kneeling, plunges into the river. Following her lead, I pull a filthy shirt from the basket but drop it quick, for ’tis speckled with nits and lice.

“This is disgusting,” I say, flicking the few that jump up my arms. “I can see now why the last domestic quit.”

“Do you think your clothes were any less dirty when Mother Bruyere washed them?” Martha asks with a smile as she wrings and plunges again.

“Why are we washing these rags anyway?” Taking a stick, I carry and plunge the infested rag into the river, drowning the little devils. “Sure, there’ll be nothing but a collar and cuffs to hang with all the dirt gone.”

“Think of it as prayer,” Martha says.

Prayer? What sort of a church does she attend?

“Every sacrifice is one step closer to heaven,” she explains.

I doubt that, but every rag is one step closer to buying a way out of here for Annie and me.

“Are you an orphan, too?” I ask. She seems about my age, and I wonder why she doesn’t live at Saint Raphael’s.

“No, my parents live in Bytown. My father is Hugh Hagan. He runs a private school on Sussex.”

I know the school. I saw it yesterday in my travels.

“Hagan? So you’re Irish, then?”

She nods. “My parents are from Derby County but I was born in Quebec.”

“Are you a student at the school?” Mother Bruyere had mentioned her school yesterday, as well. It had to close while the sick immigrants took up all the sisters’ time.

“I was,” Martha says. “Soon, I’ll be going to Montreal to do my novitiate studies. I’m a postulant,” she explains, as though any of those words make sense to me. She gestures to her purple dress. “A sister in training.”

I frown. ’Tis beyond me why anyone with a home and family, and a well-off one at that, would choose to leave them, choose this life of orphans, poverty, and illness, choose the very life I am trying to escape.

“There are a few postulants,” Martha continues as she wrings and flicks the shirt in her hands before laying it on the branches to dry. She takes a pair of breeches and starts washing again. “When we make our novitiate vows, we get the habit the sisters wear.”

She says it like it’s a good thing. She is giving up everything I am working so hard to get. Is she mad?

“Oh, so you’re not a sister yet,” I say, dunking the shirt down for another rinse just to be sure. “You can still change your mind. That’s good.”

She stops scrubbing and sits back on her heels, looking at me like I’m the crazy one.

“Kit, doing this work makes me happy.” She brushes a hair off her forehead with the back of her wrinkled, reddened hand. “It’s where God wants me. Why would I say no?”

We stare at each other in confusion, two young girls side by side on the same shore, yet worlds apart.