The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Read Free Page B

body like clear pebbles. His atmospheric trills were the flicker of a tongue. His pauses before the downward sweep of notes nearly drove her insane.
    The Mother Superior knew something had to be done when she herself woke, face bathed with sweat and tears, to the insinuating soft largo of the Prelude in E Minor. In those notes she remembered the death of her mother and sank into the endless afternoon of her loss. The Mother Superior then grew, in her heart, a weed of rage all day against the God who took a mother from a seven-year-old child whose world she was, entirely, without question—heart, arms, guidance, soul—until by evening she felt fury steaming from the hot marrow of her bones and stopped herself.
    Oh God, forgive me, the Superior prayed. She considered humunculation, but then rushed down to the piano room, and with all of the strength in her wide old arms gathered and hid from Cecilia every piece of music but the Bach.
    After that, for some weeks, there was relief. Sister Cecilia turned to the Two Part Inventions. Her fingers moved on the keys with an insect precision. She played each as though she were constructing an airtight box. Stealthily, once Cecilia went on to Bach’s other works, the Mother Superior removed from the music cabinet and destroyed the Goldberg Variations—clearly capable of lifting into the mind subterranean complexities. Life in the convent returned to normal. The cook, to everyone’s gratitude, stopped preparing the heavy rancid goose-fat-laced beet soup of her youth and stuck to overcooked string beans, boiled cabbage, potatoes. The floors stopped groaning and absorbed fresh wax. The doors ceased to fly open for no reason and closed discreetly. The water stopped rushing continually through the pipes as the sisters no longer took advantage of the new plumbing to drown out the sounds of their emotions.
    And then, one day, Sister Cecilia woke with a tightness in her chest. Pains shot across her heart and the red lump in her chest beat like a wild thing caught in a snare of bones. Her throat shut. Her hands, drawn to the keyboard, floated into a long appoggiatura. Then, crash, she was inside a thrusting mazurka. The music came back to her. There was the scent of faint gardenias—his hothouse boutonniere. The silk of his heavy, brown hair. A man’s sharp, sensuous drawing-room sweat. His voice, she heard it, avid and light. It was as though the composer himself had entered the room. Who knows? Surely there was no more desperate, earthly, exacting heart than Cecilia’s. Surely something, however paltry, lies beyond the grave.
    At any rate, she played Chopin. Played in utter naturalness until the Mother Superior was forced to shut the cover to the keyboard gently and pull the stool away. Cecilia lifted the lid and played upon her knees. The poor scandalized dame dragged her from the keys. Cecilia crawled back. The Mother, at her wit’s end, sank down and urged the girl to pray. She herself spoke first in apprehension and then in certainty, saying that it was the very devil who had managed to find a way to Cecilia’s soul through the flashing doors of sixteenth notes. Her fears were confirmed when not moments later the gentle sister raised her arms and fists, struck the keys as though the instrument were stone and from the rock her thirst would be quenched. But only discord emerged.
    “My child, my dear child,” comforted the Mother, “come away and rest yourself.”
    The young nun, breathing deeply, refused. Her severe gray eyes were rimmed in a smoky red. Her lips bled purple. She was in torment. “There is no rest,” she declared, and she then unpinned her veil and studiously dismantled her habit. She folded each piece with reverence and set it upon the piano bench. With each movement the Superior remonstrated with Cecilia in the most tender and compassionate tones. However, just as in the depth of her playing the virgin had become the woman, so the woman in the habit became a