Rooted in Love: Our Calling as Catholic Women by Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle

Author:Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Religion, Catholic, Christianity
ISBN: 9781594713064
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
Published: 2012-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

She didn’t answer to his knock. He tried the knob but there seemed to be something blocking the door. “Miriam!” he called. “Miriam, are you in there?” Nothing. Not a whisper. He went round to the window, but she’d blocked that too, the casement locked, some sort of material—was that the bedspread?—tacked up so that he couldn’t see inside. He felt a flash of irritation. 107 He pounded the glass with the flat of his hand, shouted her name again. People were watching him—two of the masons, on their way down the hill to the tavern, had paused by the garage to take in the spectacle, joined now by one of the housemaids swinging a pail of scraps for the hogs—and he cursed under his breath. Couldn’t he have a little privacy? Was that too much to ask? In the next moment he was at the door again and this time he put his shoulder to it and felt something give—a piece of furniture sliding back and the door cracking open just enough to give him a view of the darkened room.

At first he could see nothing. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw that she’d nailed a series of shadowy objects to the walls, reckless with the plaster and the wood trim too—another flash of irritation—and what were they? Drawings? “Miriam!” he called again, and when she didn’t answer he lunged at the door with everything he had till the barricade—a bureau with the desk and two chairs stacked atop it—spilled forward with a splintering crash that could have wakened the dead, and he was in the room. Which was empty. He flicked on the lamp and the walls sprang to life—drawings, yes, dozens of them, each a sketch of his head as seen from every conceivable angle, the features monumental and rugged, hair snaking beyond the margins and his orbits as deep as Beethoven’s, but with the eyes left eerily null—and what was this? Clothes heaped on the bed as if laid out for a rummage sale, hats and shoes and undergarments scattered across the floor, a smashed teacup, a spill of roofing nails and the hammer with which she’d crucified each of the drawings. Her slippers. Her robe. The vertical plane of the bathroom door.

“Miriam? ”

He pushed open the door, the first stirrings of alarm working through him like a faint electric current, and there she was. Propped up in the tub. Asleep. Or meditating, perhaps she was meditating. Seeking the cool, the dark—she’d had a headache, hadn’t she? That was it, that must have been it. “Miriam?” he tried again.

Her eyes were shut fast, the lids faintly blue, lashes entwined, her head thrown back against the wall—and her mouth, her mouth was slung open over the dark canal of her throat. She was asleep, of course she was, asleep, that was all. His first thought was that she’d been bathing and dozed off, but she was dressed in her nightgown—the material sodden, painted to her limbs—and there was no more than an inch of water in the tub, softly gurgling round the plug.

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