The Best American Mystery Stories 2015

Joyce Carol Oates The Home at Craigmillnar From High Crime Area

Early shift is 6:30 A.M., which was when I arrived at the elder care facility at Eau Claire where I have been an orderly for two years. Maybe thirty minutes after that, when the elderly nun’s body was discovered in her bed.

In fact I’d gotten to work a few minutes before my shift began as I usually do, in nasty weather especially (as it was that morning: pelting rain, dark-as-night, first week of November), out of a concern for being late. For jobs are not easy to come by, in our economy. And in Oybwa County, Wisconsin, where I have lived all my life except for three and a half years “deployed” in Iraq as a medical worker. I am a conscientious orderly, with a very good reputation at the facility.

If I am interviewed by the county medical examiner I will explain to him: it is a wrongly phrased description — Body discovered in bed. For when I entered Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room in Unit D, my assumption was that the sister was alive, and the “discovery” was that she was not alive, or in any case not obviously alive. I did not “discover” a “body” in the bed but was shocked to see Sister Mary Alphonsus unmoving, and unbreathing, with a gauzy fabric like muslin wrapped around her head (like a nun’s veil or wimple), so that her face was obscured.

She was unresponsive to me. Yet even at this, I did not “discover” a “body” — it was natural for me to believe that the elderly woman might have lapsed into a coma.

(Not that death is so unusual in an elder care facility like ours — hardly! All of our patients die, eventually; Unit E is our hospice wing. But the death of the resident in Room 22 of Unit D was not expected so soon.)

In my Iraqi deployment my instinct for things not-right became very sharp. Out of ordinary situations there might arise — suddenly — as in a nightmare — an explosion that could tear off your legs. You had to be alert — and yet, how is it possible to be always alert? — it is not possible. And so, you develop a kind of sixth sense.

And so as soon as I entered the room after knocking — twice — at the door, I saw that things were not-right, and the hairs at the nape of my neck stirred. There was no light in the room and Sister Mary Alphonsus was still in bed — this was not-right. For Sister Mary Alphonsus was always “up” before the early shift arrived, as if pride demanded it. The nun was one of those older persons in our care who does not accept that she is elderly, and will turn nasty with you if you behave as if she is.

Sister? — in a lowered and respectful voice I spoke. Always I addressed Sister Mary Alphonsus with courtesy, for the old woman was easily offended by a wrong intonation of voice. Like a bloodhound keen for scent, this one was sharp to detect mockery where there was none.

Not a good sign, Sister Mary Alphonsus wasn’t yet awake. Very strange, the light above her bed hadn’t been switched on.

And a strong smell of urine in the room. Unexpected, in Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room, whose occupant wasn’t incontinent, and who was usually fussy about cleanliness.

When I switched on the overhead light the fluorescent bulb flickered like an eye blinking open.

The shock of it, then: seeing the elderly nun in her bed only a few feet away, on her back, not-moving; and wrapped around her head some sort of gauzy white fabric like a curtain, so her face was hidden. And inside the gauze the sister’s eyes shut, or open — you could not tell.

Died in her sleep. Cardiac arrest.

By the time of our senior consulting physician’s arrival at the facility, at about 9 A.M., it was clear that elderly Sister Mary Alphonsus was not likely in a coma but had died. The strip of gauzy material had been unwound from the woman’s head by the first nurse who’d arrived at the bedside, and dropped heedlessly onto the floor.

I am not a “medic”: I am an “orderly.” In all medical matters orderlies defer to the medical staff. I had not tried to revive Sister Mary Alphonsus nor even to unwind the cloth from her head, which did not appear to be tightly tied. So far as I knew, the patient might have been alive following a stroke or heart attack.

A legal pronouncement of death can only be made by a physician.

In a senior care facility like ours, Death strikes suddenly, often overnight. Often, within an hour. Cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolism, stroke — like strikes of lightning. If an elderly resident becomes seriously ill, with pneumonia for instance, or is stricken with cancer, he or she is transported to Eau Claire General for specialized treatment; but most of our residents have long-standing medical conditions, of which the most insidious is old age.

In the matter of Death, when a living body becomes “dead,” there are legal procedures that must be followed. Our senior consultant was required to sign the death certificate and the county medical examiner’s office had to be informed. If the deceased had listed next of kin in her file, this individual or individuals would now be notified and arrangements would be made for removal of the body from the facility and for burial.

About this I knew nothing, and would know very little — though I would learn, inadvertently, that the elderly nun had died intestate.

(Intestate: a fancy word for dying without a will! A kind of nasty ring to this word intestate, makes you think of testicles, worse yet in this facility of old men testicular cancer. Not a welcome thought.)

Next time I came into contact with Sister Mary Alphonsus was after Dr. Bromwalder’s examination, when the body was covered with a white sheet. With another orderly, I lifted it onto a gurney to push quickly and as unobtrusively as possible to the facility’s morgue in the basement — Man, she heavy for an old lady!

I couldn’t resist peeking under the sheet: Sister Mary Alphonsus’s face was mottled red, a coarse-skinned face you could not have identified as female. The thin-lashed eyes were shut and the mouth that had resembled a pike’s wide mouth in life hung loosely open.

She anybody you knew, Francis?

No.

There’d never been any doubt in Dr. Bromwalder’s mind that the eighty-four-year-old woman had died of cardiac arrest, in her sleep. She’d been a cardiac patient: she’d had a chronic condition. It had not seemed to be life-threatening, but all signs suggested heart failure and not a stroke; under these circumstances, an autopsy was not warranted.

The gauze wrapped around the nun’s head was certainly too flimsy to have caused suffocation. It had seemed to the senior consulting physician but mildly mysterious — “eccentric” — but many “eccentric” things happen in elder care facilities, among patients who may be mentally as well as physically ill, and so not much was made of the gauzy fabric except by some of the nursing staff of Unit D, who were puzzled, curious — Why would the woman do such a thing? What does it mean?

The fabric was believed to have been taken out of the sister’s belongings, some of which were kept in a small bureau in the room. It did appear to be a curtain, or part of a curtain — white, dotted swiss, somewhat soiled, a cheap material.

Maybe she was confused, in her sleep. Wrapped a curtain around her head thinking it was a nun’s wimple!

Maybe she knew she was dying. It was some kind of religious thing, like after a Catholic confesses her sins to a priest — penance?

Among the staff of Unit D, Sister Mary Alphonsus had not been a favorite. To her face the nurses called her Sister, behind her back the old nun.

Or, the old nun who’d run that terrible orphanage at Craigmillnar.

It would be noted that Sister Mary Alphonsus was discovered to be unresponsive in her bed by the Unit D orderly, Francis Gough, who’d immediately notified the nursing staff. Time: 7:08 A.M.

Less certainly, it was determined that Sister Mary Alphonsus had died several hours earlier — Dr. Bromwalder’s estimate was between 3 A.M. and 6 A.M. This was a reasonable estimate judging by the temperature of the corpse when it was first examined by the doctor, in the absence of a pathologist. In the pitch-black of the early morning, hours before dawn, patients are most likely to “pass away,” for these are the hours of Death.

There was a death here today. Old woman in her eighties, in my unit. She was found dead in her bed — died in her sleep, they think.

Oh Francis! That’s so sad. I hope it wasn’t you who found her.

It’s okay, Mom. It wasn’t me.

Most mornings when the early staff began their rounds we would find Sister Mary Alphonsus fully awake and sitting in the chair beside her bed, a blanket over her knees and a missal opened in her hands, though after near seventy years of the Catholic missal, you would not think that the nun required an actual book to help her with prayers; or Sister might have her rosary of wooden beads twined in her fingers as she waited for an orderly to help her into her wheelchair. Her gaze would be vacant until you appeared — and like a raptor’s eyes the vague old-woman eyes would come sharply into focus.

If you greeted her with a friendly smile — Good morning, Sister! — she was likely to frown, and to make no reply, as if you’d disturbed her in prayer, or in some private and precious drift of her mind. And so I’d learned to say nothing to her, much of the time. What would be rude behavior with other patients had come to seem, to me, expected behavior with Sister Mary Alphonsus.

Sister Mary Alphonsus was one of those residents at Eau Claire who ate meals in the patients’ dining hall, not one whose meals were brought to her room. Despite the difficulty involved in delivering her to the dining hall, which was sometimes considerable, depending upon her medical ailment of the moment, Sister Mary Alphonsus insisted upon this.

In her former life, before “retirement,” she’d been a prominent figure in her religious order — for more than two decades, director of the Craigmillnar Home for Children. This was a Catholic-run orphanage about sixteen miles north and east of Eau Claire, at its fullest occupancy containing more than three hundred children.

In the dining hall, Sister Mary Alphonsus asked to be seated at a table with several elderly women whom she might have considered “friends” — of whom two were, like herself, retired Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who’d also been at Craigmillnar.

You would think that the Sisters of Charity would speak of their shared past at Craigmillnar, but they hardly spoke at all except to comment on the food. Like elderly sisters who’d seen too much of one another over the decades, and who had come to dislike one another, yet clung together out of a fear of loneliness.

Though it was difficult to imagine Sister Mary Alphonsus as one susceptible to loneliness.

Few relatives came to visit the elderly nuns. They’d had no children — that was their mistake. Beyond a certain age, an elderly resident will receive visits only from her (adult) children and, if she’s fortunate, grandchildren. Others of their generation have died out, or are committed to health-care facilities themselves. So virtually no one came to see these elderly nuns, who with other Catholic residents of the facility attended mass together once a week in the chapel.

Their priest too was elderly. Very few young men were entering the priesthood any longer, as even fewer young women were entering convents.

Though I’m not Catholic, often I observed the mass from the rear of the little chapel. “Father Cullough” — who made no effort to learn the nuns’ names — recited the mass in a harried and put-upon voice, in record time — scarcely thirty minutes. Once, the mass was said in Latin, as I know from having seen old prayer books in my family, that had been published in Scotland and brought to this country; now the mass is said in English, and sounds like a story for simpleminded children.

In the front row of the chapel the elderly nuns tried to keep awake. Even Sister Mary Alphonsus, the sharpest-witted of these, was likely to nod off during the familiar recitation. When the priest gave communion, however, at the altar rail, the old women’s tongues lapped eagerly at the little white wafer, the size of a quarter. My gaze shifted sharply aside, for this was not a pretty sight.

Once, when I was wheeling Sister Mary Alphonsus back to her room after mass, the wheelchair caught in a ridge of carpet in the floor, and Sister Mary Alphonsus was jostled in her seat, and lashed out at me — Clumsy! Watch what you’re doing.

Sister, sorry.

You did that on purpose, didn’t you! I know your kind.

Sister, I did not. Sorry.

You will be sorry! I will report you.

Many of the patients threaten to report us, often for trivial reasons. We are trained not to argue with them and to defer politely to them as much as possible.

Think I don’t know YOU. I know YOU.

Yes, Sister.

“Yes, Sister” — the elderly woman’s croaking voice rose in mockery — we will see about that!

I made no reply. My heart might have leapt with a thrill of sheer dislike of the old woman, but I would never have said anything to goad her further. It was said of the former mother superior at Craigmillnar, by the nurses’ aides who were obliged to take intimate care of her aged body — Bad enough she has to live with herself. That’s punishment enough.

Yet by the time Sister Mary Alphonsus was back in her room, her interest in reporting me to my supervisor had usually faded. She’d been distracted by someone or something else that annoyed or offended her. She’d have forgotten Francis Gough entirely, as one of little worth.

Not that she knew my name: she did not. While others called me Francis, Sister Mary Alphonsus could barely manage to mutter, with a look of disdain — You.

She did know the names of the medical staffers, to a degree. She knew Dr. Bromwalder. She knew Head Nurse Claire McGuinn, if but to quarrel with her.

A care facility like a hospital is a hierarchy. At the top are physicians — “consultants.” Nurse-practitioners, nurses and nurses’ aides, orderlies — these are the staff. An orderly is at hand to help with strenuous tasks like lifting and maneuvering patients, including patients’ lifeless bodies; changing beds, taking away soiled laundry, washing laundry; pushing food carts, and taking away the debris of mealtimes; sweeping and mopping floors; taking trash outside to the dumpsters. (Trash is carefully deployed: there is ordinary waste, and there is “clinical waste.”) My original training (at age nineteen) was on-the-job at Racine Medical Center plus a weeklong course in “restraint and control.”

There were few violent patients at Eau Claire, but I was well prepared for any I might be called upon to “restrain and control.” You need two other orderlies at least if you need to force a patient onto the floor. How it’s done is you force him down onto his stomach, an orderly gripping each arm and an orderly securing the legs. It’s going to be a struggle most times — even the old and feeble will put up a considerable fight, in such a situation; the danger is in getting kicked. (When you’re the youngest you are assigned the legs.) In this position — which looks cruel when observed — the patient’s back is relatively free so he can breathe, and he’s prevented from injuring himself.

Unlike cops, who are allowed “pain” as an element in restraint and control, medical workers are not allowed “pain” and may be legally censured if patients are injured.

Despite my training, there have been injuries of patients I’d been obliged to restrain and control, both in U.S. care facilities and in the medical units in Iraq.

None of these were my fault. And yet, there were injuries.

The nurses were gossiping: Sister Mary Alphonsus had no close next of kin.

Or, if there were relatives of the deceased woman, they were distant relatives who had no wish to come forward to identify themselves.

Maybe no wish to associate themselves with the individual who’d been director of the Craigmillnar Home for Children, which had been shut down in 1977 by Oybwa County health authorities and the State of Wisconsin.

Just recently too, Craigmillnar was back in the headlines.

A full week after her death on November 11, no one from the Oybwa County medical examiner had contacted the facility. So it appeared Dr. Bromwalder’s death certificate had not been questioned.

The gauzy strip of “curtain” — unless it was some kind of nun’s “veil” or “wimple” — had disappeared from the premises. All of Sister Mary Alphonsus’s things had been packed up and removed from Room 22 and a new, unsuspecting arrival, also an elderly woman, had been moved in.

Yet the subject of the mysterious “head covering” continued to come up in Unit D. It seemed strange to me — I said so — that I appeared to be the only person to have seen Sister Mary Alphonsus fix something like a “head-shroud” over her head several times in the past. Some kind of cloth — might’ve been a towel (I didn’t remember it as white) — she’d drawn like a hood over her head, for whatever reason. I hadn’t asked the sister what she was doing, of course. She’d have been offended at such familiarity.

One day our young consulting physician Dr. Godai asked me about this, for he’d overheard some of us talking.

So you’d seen the sister putting some kind of “cloth” on her head, or around her head, Francis? When was this, d’you remember?

Might’ve been a few weeks ago, doctor. Maybe two months.

How often did you see the sister putting this “cloth” on her head?

Maybe three times, doctor. I never thought anything of it, you know how old people are sometimes.

Dr. Godai laughed. He was the newest consultant on our staff, from the University of Minnesota Medical School. He had a burnished-skinned Paki look, dark-eyed, sharp-witted. Knowing that certain of the elderly patients and certain of the medical staff did not feel comfortable with him, as nonwhite, Dr. Godai was what you’d call forceful-friendly, engaging you with his startling-white eyes and smile sharp as a knife blade. Between Dr. Godai and me there flashed a kind of understanding, as if the elderly nun was in the room with us, helpless, yet furious, glaring at us in disdain and in hurt, that she could not lash out at us to punish.

Eccentric is the word, Francis. A kindly word. For you wouldn’t want to say demented, deranged, senile — eh?

Dr. Godai and I laughed together. I wasn’t naive enough to think that Dr. Godai could ever be my friend, though we are about the same age.

I told Dr. Godai that each time I’d seen Sister Mary Alphonsus behaving in this way, putting a “shroud” on her head, I’d made no comment, of course. I didn’t even ask her if she was cold, or needed an extra blanket. Nor did Sister Mary Alphonsus encourage conversation with me or with others on the staff. In my memory it had seemed to me that the woman was just slightly embarrassed, and annoyed, by my having seen her with the “cloths.” And so out of courtesy I turned away from her, as if I hadn’t seen.

It’s a strange life, isn’t it, Francis? — I mean, the religious orders. Poverty, chastity, service, obedience these nuns swore to.

To this I made no reply. Dr. Godai was speaking bemusedly, and may have been thinking out loud.

Of course, I don’t understand the Catholics, maybe. Are you Catholic, Francis?

No, Dr. Godai. I am not.

You are an arrogant young man. I will report you.

I know YOU. YOU will not get away with this.

There are two categories of geriatric patient. Those who persist in behaving as if they aren’t elderly; or as if their current condition, inability to walk, for instance, is a temporary one; individuals who shuffle slowly, in obvious pain, leaning against walls, against the backs of chairs, out of pride. And there are those who have conceded that they are not “one hundred percent” but must use a cane, a walker, a wheelchair. (It’s possible to think that a wheelchair isn’t really “permanent” — it is always expedient, helpful more for the staff.) Each step you think is temporary and you will soon return to your real self, but that’s not how it goes.

Sister Mary Alphonsus had been in the second category. She may have been elderly but not old-elderly; and she would resent bitterly your behaving as if she were. Her hearing, like her vision, was impaired, but Sister Mary Alphonsus was more likely to blame you for not speaking clearly, or loud enough, than she would blame herself. In fact, Sister Mary Alphonsus would never blame herself.

If she spilled food, or dropped something, and you were present — somehow, the fault lay with you. At first I’d thought this was a sign of dementia, but later I came to realize it was the woman’s perception of what is: blame must be assigned, only just not with her.

Unlike most of the elderly women in the facility, Sister Mary Alphonsus hadn’t been what you’d call frail. Her body was thick, waistless; her skin was leathery; her eyes were suspicious and close-set; her legs remained heavy, especially her thighs, which strained against the polyester stretch pants she sometimes wore. Her most characteristic expression was a peevish frown.

Sometimes Sister Mary Alphonsus seemed annoyed by rain outside her window, as if it had been sent to provoke her. For there was a small courtyard into which we could wheel patients, in good weather.

Once, I’d wheeled Sister Mary Alphonsus outside into this courtyard and had to go away on an errand, and by the time I returned it was raining hard, and Sister Mary Alphonsus had managed to wheel herself beneath an overhang, by an effort of both hands.

You did that on purpose! You are mocking me.

No one considered that it might have been poison that Sister Mary Alphonsus had taken. Poison that was her own soul.

It was general knowledge in Eau Claire: in recent months the children’s home at Craigmillnar, which had acquired a “controversial” reputation since it had been shut down by state health authorities in 1977, had resurfaced in the news.

Now, interest in Craigmillnar was part of a broad investigation into Catholic-run charity homes, hospitals, and organizations following a flood of disclosures of sexual misconduct by priests in the United States, with the complicity of the Catholic hierarchy. A militant group of former residents of the home at Craigmillnar, which called itself Survivors of Craigmillnar, had been picketing the archbishop’s residence in Milwaukee, demanding acknowledgment of what they charged had been “widespread neglect and abuse” at Craigmillnar. The state attorney general was considering criminal charges against some former staff members who, the former residents claimed, had been responsible for a number of deaths at Craigmillnar in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the very least, the Survivors were demanding financial settlements, and a public apology from the Catholic Church.

Public apology! — my father laughed, bitterly. The Church will apologize when hell freezes over.

Both my mother’s and my father’s families had been Catholic — they’d emigrated to Wisconsin from Glasgow in the 1920s — but no longer. My father and his older brother Denis had expressed disgust with the Church for as long as I could remember, and when I was asked my religion on a form I checked None.

In Scotland there are many Catholics. People think that Scotland is all Protestant — this is not so. But lately, since the scandals of the pedophile priests and cover-ups by the Church, there has been a drop in the number of Catholics in Scotland, as in Ireland.

When allegations of abuse and negligence were first made against the Craigmillnar nuns, the diocese had defended the Sisters of Charity. There were Church-retained lawyers, threats of countercharges. The archbishop, who’d been a bishop in Boston at the time of Craigmillnar’s worst abuses, had issued a public statement regretting the “unprofessionalism” of the orphanage, but absolving his predecessor archbishop, now deceased, from any blame associated with its administration. It was leaked to the media that Church officials believed that the Craigmillnar Sisters of Charity were “not representative” of the order; that there’d been in fact a “very small minority” of Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul who’d been involved in this “unprofessional” behavior. Those nuns still living had been “retired” from the order.

In the Eau Claire elder care facility such subjects were not usually discussed. At least not openly.

The former lives of our patients are not our concern unless our patients want to talk about them, as sometimes they do; for it’s important to some of the elderly that their caretakers have some sense of who they once were. For most of them, showing photos of grandchildren and boasting of careers will suffice.

Sister Mary Alphonsus, who’d been a resident at Eau Claire for the past eight years, had never spoken of her former life as mother superior at Craigmillnar — of course. Some time before I’d come to Eau Claire to work as an orderly, there’d been a coalition of investigators who’d sought to interview the elderly nuns in the facility, predominantly Sister Mary Alphonsus, but an attorney hired by the diocese had rebuffed their efforts with the argument that the nuns had long been retired and were not in good health.

In 1997, in the wake of the slow-smoldering scandal, the name of the nuns’ order was legally changed from the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul to the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul.

Still, there was a lingering wonderment not only in Unit D but elsewhere in the facility regarding the sudden death of the former mother superior of the home at Craigmillnar. As if the staff didn’t want to surrender their most notorious resident quite so quickly.

Maybe (some were saying) Sister Mary Alphonsus had had a hand in her own death.

Since there’d been no autopsy, you could conjecture such things, which were not likely to be disproven.

(For what did Dr. Bromwalder know, or care? The senior consultant’s hours at Eau Claire were the very minimum, if not less.)

Managed somehow to cease breathing. And her heart to cease beating.

The gauzy soiled “veil” or “wimple” wound around her head, hiding her face, had to be deliberate — didn’t it?

Could be, Sister Mary Alphonsus felt remorse. For the children she’d had a hand in torturing and letting die of disease.

Could be, Sister Mary Alphonsus’s death was a penance.

Put herself out of her misery?

Speculations wafted about me. But I was too busy working — pushing trolleys, gurneys, wheelchairs — sweeping and mopping floors, disinfecting toilets, hauling away trash to the dumpsters out back — to be distracted.

Honorably discharged from the U.S. Army with the rank of corporal first class when I was twenty-six, four years ago this January.

Because of my training I’d been assigned to the medical unit. The work was tiring but exciting, always unpredictable. You were made to feel For the grace of God, this could be me. It makes you humble, and grateful. It’s a feeling that will never fade. The first time a soldier died in my arms it happened in a way to leave me stunned, I could not talk about it for weeks. I have never talked about it even with my father. I’d thought, Is this what it is? Dying? So easy?

There is nothing so precious as life, you come to know. Firsthand you know this. And a sick feeling, a feeling of rage, that some people treat the lives of others so carelessly, or worse.

My first work back in the States was in Racine, where I trained; my second job was Balsam Lake Nursing Home, twenty miles north of St. Croix, where my family lives. My third job has been here at the Eau Claire elder care facility, where I am currently employed.

When we were growing up in the family my father never spoke of his own childhood. I knew that he’d had a younger brother — who would have been one of my uncles — who’d died when he was a child. But I didn’t know anything more.

Anything of the past was forbidden. We did not ask, but we did not think to ask. My mother had warned us — Your father isn’t a man for looking back. That can be a good thing.

Francis! Come home this weekend, Denis and I have to speak with you.

It was a weeknight in early November. At this time, Sister Mary Alphonsus had not yet passed away in her sleep.

Such urgency in my father’s voice I had never heard before, not even when I’d left for Iraq.

In an exalted mood my father and my uncle Denis brought me with them to the Sign of the Ram, which was their favorite pub, to a booth at the rear of the taproom behind the high-pitched din of the TV above the bar. Leaning our elbows on the scarred table, hunching inward. My father and my uncle Denis on one side of the table, and me on the other.

I felt a mounting unease. The thrill of such intimacy with my father and my uncle was not-right.

In fierce lowered voices they revealed to me their long-kept secret, which no one else knew: not my mother, and not my aunt who was Denis’s wife. Not anyone in the family at the present time, for those who’d known had died, and had taken their knowledge of the secret with them, in shame.

Here was the situation. My father spoke, and my uncle interrupted to complete his sentences. Then, my father interrupted. Then, my uncle. These are not men accustomed to speaking in such a way in lowered voices and with an air of commingled shame and rage. For it seemed articles in the local papers had stirred in them memories of Craigmillnar. TV interviews with “survivors” of the home whose faces were blurred to protect their identities. One night Denis had called his brother during one of these interviews on the local station — Jesus God, I think I know who that is. And you do too.

As boys, Denis, Douglas, and their young brother Patrick had been committed to the Craigmillnar Home for Children. Their father had died in an accident at the St. Croix stone quarry when he was thirty-three. Their mother, only twenty-six when Patrick was born, had had a mental breakdown and could no longer take care of herself and her sons; she began to drink heavily, she fed medications to the boys “to keep them from crying,” she died in 1951 of a drug overdose. One day an uncle came for them to take them to the orphanage, saying there was “no place” for them now — but he would come to get them again soon, in a few months perhaps. In time for Christmas, he’d promised.

Christmas 1951! It would be Christmas 1957 by the time they were freed of Craigmillnar, and their little brother Patrick dead.

In raw indignant voices the men said to me, God damn these jokes about nuns, stupid TV shows about nuns, on TV a nun is meant to be a comic figure but in life there was nothing funny about these women. They were like Nazis — they followed orders. What the mother superior instructed them, they fulfilled. Some of them were like beasts, mentally impaired. The convent had done that to them, you had to surmise. There was a kind of madness in them — you could see in their eyes, which were always darting about, seeking out disobedience. The mother superior had been the cruelest. For the woman had been intelligent, you could see. And her intelligence had all turned to hatred, and to evil.

How the sisters groveled, like all in the Church when confronted with a superior! The ordinary nun groveled to her superior, the mother superior groveled to the bishop, the bishop to the archbishop, and to the cardinal, and to the pope — a vast staircase, you are meant to think, ascending to God the Father.

It was strange, when you thought about it — years later. That the orphanage at Craigmillnar had been theirs to “administer.” By the standards of the present day, was any one of the nuns qualified for such work? Did the director — this woman identified as Sister Mary Alphonsus — have any training in such administration? Were the “nurse nuns” trained nurses? Were the “teacher nuns” trained teachers? Had any of the nuns been educated beyond high school? (That is, parochial high school taught by nuns.) Very likely, many of the Sisters of Charity at Craigmillnar had barely graduated from middle school.

The brothers had vowed to protect Patrick, who was so small, and always terrified. Yet, at Craigmillnar, at once the brothers were separated and made to sleep in separate dormitories according to age.

The orphanage was overcrowded, drafty, and dirty. Often two children shared a single narrow bed. You were — often — marched from one place to another through high-ceilinged corridors. There were mealtimes — school times — prayer times — bedtimes. There were “outdoor times” — these were irregular, and brief. You were not allowed to speak except at certain times and then you dared not raise your voice. Laughter was rare, and likely to be a mistake. Prolonged coughing was a mistake. Sharp-nosed as bloodhounds, the sisters were alert to the smallest infractions of law. The sisters could detect a squirming bad child amid a room of huddled children.

Most frantic were the sisters about bed-wetting. The children were wakened several times a night to check their beds. Bed-wetters were singled out for terrible beatings, children as young as two and three. They were made to drape their soiled sheets around themselves and to stand in the cold for hours until they collapsed. You were punished for being unable to eat by being force-fed through feeding tubes wielded by the sisters.

There were degrees of “discipline” — “punishment.” One of them was “restraint” — the child’s arms were bound by towels, tightly knotted, like a straitjacket. Circulation was cut off, there was likely to be swelling, and terrible pain. A child might be bound, water thrown over him or her, so that the binding was allowed to dry, and to shrink. (This had been done, more than once, to both Douglas and Denis. To this day, the men carried the physical memories of such punishments in their arthritic joints and jabs of pain in their muscles unpredictable as lightning strikes.) There were beatings with the nuns’ leather belts. There were beatings with pokers. There were slaps, blows with fists, kicks. Striking a child’s head with a rolled-up newspaper — this was surprisingly painful. Husky shot-eyed Sister Mary Agatha beat children with a mop handle. Shut Patrick in a cupboard, saying the “little devil” coughed and wheezed “for spite” and kept other children awake.

We were all beaten, we were made to go without proper food, we were made to sleep in cockroach-ridden beds, bed-bug infestations, and no one gave a damn. Neighbors in Craigmillnar must have known — something. The officials of the Church must have known. All those years! The Sisters of Charity could not have been so crude and so cruel at the start. The younger nuns — they were hardly more than girls — must have been shocked, and frightened. Just entering the convent — and being sent to Craigmillnar. Yet, at Craigmillnar, they became crude, cruel women. “Brides of Christ” — what a joke! Their order of nuns was a service order — service to the poor. Saint Alphonsus was one of their patron saints — he’d founded communities for the poor in slums in Rome. They’d vowed for themselves a life of sacrifice — celibacy, poverty, service, obedience. The catch was, the sisters hadn’t had to vow to love their charges, only to serve God through them. Soon, then, they came to hate and despise their charges. A young child must be difficult to hate and despise, yet the sisters of Craigmillnar hated and despised. They were quick to flare into anger, and into rage. They shouted, they screamed. They kicked and they struck us with rods. The teaching nuns struck us with the rods used to pull down maps over the blackboards. In their fury at our fear of them they threw pieces of chalk at us. They knocked us to the floor. They locked us in closets — “solitary confinement” — no food, and lying in our own shit. We did not know what we did wrong. There were crimes called “insolence” — “arrogance.” A ten-year-old girl in the desk next to mine was struck in the face by our teacher, and her nose bled terribly. Her clothing was soaked in blood. She was forced then to remove her clothing, to stand naked and to wash her stained clothing in disinfectant. The bleach, the lye, was such that our hands burned. Our skins were so chafed, they bled easily. We worked in the kitchen, we helped serve up the maggoty food, and we washed the dishes after meals in scalding water, with such meager soap there were scarcely any bubbles. Everything was covered in a fine film of grease that could never be scrubbed away. We worked in the laundry, in the stinking lavatories we were made to clean the toilets and the floors. We cleaned the nuns’ rooms and their stinking lavatories and bathrooms. Their stained tubs and toilets. We worked as grounds crews. We hauled trash, we mowed the rocky lawn. Denis ran away once, twice — how many times! — always brought back by county authorities, sometimes beaten, for he’d “resisted arrest.” Douglas ran away once, and was brought back to the home in a police van, like a captured criminal.

We believed that we would die in the home at Craigmillnar, as Patrick had died, and so many others. We had lost all hope of ever leaving. We were made to pray on our knees, on the bare floor — the prayer I remember was Christ have mercy! Christ have mercy! Christ have mercy!

It was a custom of the Craigmillnar staff to punish children for being ill by refusing to treat their illnesses or medical conditions — rheumatic heart, asthma, pneumonia, diabetes, influenza; contagious sicknesses like chickenpox, measles, and mumps, even diphtheria, swept through the drafty filthy dormitories. Catholic physician-consultants who were allegedly on the Craigmillnar staff failed to come to the home or, if they did, spent most of their time chatting with the mother superior and did not meet with sick children.

Children who died were often buried before their relatives were notified, in unmarked graves at the rear of St. Simon’s churchyard a few miles away.

We never knew if any child had actually been killed outright, in the years we were there. There were rumors of such murders in the past. It was more likely a child might die of injuries eventually, or was let to die of illness. There were many “accidents” — falling down stairs, scalding yourself in the kitchen. Patrick was always hurting himself, and being “disciplined.” He’d had asthma before Craigmillnar that had not been treated. He got sick, he was never well but always coughing, puking. He coughed so hard, his ribs cracked. We begged the nuns to help him, to take him to a hospital, we thought that we could take him ourselves if we were allowed, we knew that pneumonia had to be treated with “oxygen,” but the nuns laughed at us, and screamed at us to shut up. Mother Superior Mary Alphonsus knew of such things, and did not care. She had her own TV in her room. She ate well, she favored sweets. She had a heavy woolen coat and good leather boots for our terrible winters.

He died in January 1953. We had last seen him in the drafty, dank place called the Infirmary. He could scarcely breathe. There was a terrible wheezing in his lungs. It sounded like a wheezing of air from another part of the room — we kept looking up at the windows, which were so high, and ill-fitting. Patrick was shivering, yet his skin was burning hot. His eyes were enormous in his face. His teeth chattered. He could not speak to us — he was too sick. Yet he clutched at us — his hands clutching ours.

He was let to die. They killed him. Asthma and pneumonia, poor Patrick couldn’t breathe. Suffocated and none of them cared. And his body buried in the paupers’ cemetery with the others.

They hadn’t even let us know, when he died. A few days passed before we were allowed to know.

In St. Simon’s churchyard, the nuns and the priests of Craigmillnar are properly buried, with marble headstones. Facts of their birth dates and death dates are inscribed in stone. But the children’s bodies, at the back of the cemetery — there are only little crosses to mark them, crowded together. Dozens of cheap little rotted-wood crosses, each at an angle in the earth. And Patrick, who would have been your youngest uncle, among them.

All their bones mixed together. As if their child-lives had been of no worth.

She had not commented, when the inquiries had first begun a few years ago. The pedophile priests had been protected by their bishop also. But investigators for the county and the state began listening to complaints and charges against the Craigmillnar staff. A younger generation of prosecutors and health officials, taking the lead of investigators in other parts of the country. Journalists who weren’t intimidated by the Church because they weren’t Roman Catholics.

Yet, she held her ground. She hid behind a lawyer, the Church provided a lawyer to protect her, because of her position and rank. She had refused to give testimony. She had not been arrested, as some others had been in situations like hers. She’d been served a subpoena to speak before a grand jury in Oybwa County, but had suffered a “collapse” — and so had a medical excuse. With the excuse of being “elderly” — in her late seventies — the woman was spared further “harassment” by the state.

Journalists referred to Sister Mary Alphonsus as the “Angel of Death of Craigmillnar,” since so many children had died in the home during her years as director: the estimate was as many as one hundred.

Sister Mary Alphonsus was reported to have asked, how one hundred was too many? They were poor children, from ignorant families, they’d been abandoned by their parents, or by their (unwed) mothers — they were the kind of children who made themselves sick, eating too much, stuffing their bellies, refusing to wash their hands, playing in filth, fighting with one another, falling down stairs, running outdoors — that they would get sick was hardly a surprise, yes and sometimes one of them died. Over twenty-six years it came out to only three or four a year who died, out of the 350 children at the home: how was that too many?

In the Sign of the Ram we’d been drinking for more than two hours. The men’s voices were low-pitched, trembling with rage. I had scarcely spoken except to murmur My God and Yes. For I was shocked and sickened by what the men had told me — and yet, not so surprised. As my mother would be shocked and sickened and yet — not so surprised. Your father isn’t a man for looking back.

Leaving the pub with my father and my uncle, seeing the men older than I’d recalled, each of them walking unsteadily as in fear of pain. And I realized I’d been seeing my father and my uncle walking this way all of my life. Big men, men for whom the physical life is the primary life, men-who-don’t-complain, men who laugh at discomfort, these were men who’d been deeply wounded as boys, the memory of pain in their tissues, joints, and bones, pain of which they would not ever speak, for to speak in such a way was to betray weakness, and a man does not ever betray weakness. And I felt a son’s rage, and a sick fear that I would not be equal to this rage. For I thought, Why have they told me this? Why now?

My car was at my parents’ house. My father drove me back, with Denis. Wasn’t I going to stay the night? my father asked. Laying his hand on my arm. And my mother too asked, wasn’t I going to stay the night, my bed was all made up. Seeing in the men’s flushed faces that something had been revealed, she could not share. I told them no, I wasn’t staying. Not tonight. I had to get back to Eau Claire that night.

My father walked me back outside, to my car in the driveway. And he did not say, She is at that place you work — is she. She is in your “care.”

That November morning, the morning of the discovery of the body, I was the first of the early shift to arrive.

In the pitch-dark pelting rain making my way to the side entrance of the facility. At this early hour the building was but partially lighted, with a warm look inside. No one? No one to see me? Quickly and stealthily I made my way to Unit D, which was near-deserted at this hour. Soon the facility would come awake: the nursing staff and the orderlies would begin their rounds, the patients would be “up” for their interminable day. But not just yet, for it was 5:46 A.M.

From a closet I removed a single pillowcase. In the pocket of my waterproof parka was a three-foot strip of gauzy curtain I’d found in a trash can. I’d snatched it out of the trash — not sure why. A smile had twisted my mouth — What’s this? I thought I would find a purpose for it.

I have learned to trust such instincts. I have learned not to question my motives.

Quietly then I pushed open the door to Sister Mary Aphonsus’s room, which was at the end of a corridor. I did not breathe, my rubber-soled sneakers made no sound. Yet the elderly nun was part awakened by my presence.

I shut the door behind me. Without hesitating, as if I’d practiced this maneuver many times, I stooped over her bed, gripped her shoulder with one hand to hold her still, with the other yanked the pillow out from beneath her head, and pressed it over her face. So swiftly and unerringly I’d moved, Sister Mary Alphonsus had no time to comprehend what was happening, still less to cry out for help. Now in the throes of death she struggled like a maddened animal, her fingers clawing at my wrists.

I was wearing gloves. Her nails would not lacerate my bare skin.

In this struggle of several minutes I crouched over the figure in the bed, the head and face obscured by the pillow. I was panting, my heart beat quickly but calmly. I did not utter a word.

I thought of my father Douglas, and of my uncle Denis. I thought of my uncle Patrick as a child, whom I had never seen. Buried in a pauper’s grave, and his bones scattered and lost. But I did not speak. I did not accuse the evil woman, for what was there to say? You soon come to the end of speech as you come to the end of cultivated land, and stare out into the wilderness in which there are no names for things, as there are no familiar things. For what words would be adequate at this time, so long after the fact? — God damn your soul to hell. Disgusting old bitch, this is not the punishment you deserve.

Her hands tried to grip my wrists, to push away the pillow. But her hands grew feeble. I smelled urine. I did not flinch. A pillow held tight over the face of an elderly cardiac patient will snuff out her life within minutes, if you do not flinch.

When I was sure that it was over, I removed the pillow. The pillowcase was soaked with the woman’s saliva, tears. Her body, which was surprisingly heavy, with a hard round stomach like an inverted bowl, lay limp and unresisting now. The face like a bulldog’s face, contorted in death. I heard a harsh panting sound — my breathing. Hers had ceased, abruptly.

When death is only a matter of seconds, you think that it might be revoked. Life might be called back, if one had the skill.

But no. Once the match is shaken out, the flame is gone.

Without haste, with the precision of a veteran orderly, I removed the pillow from the soiled pillowcase, and pushed it snugly inside a fresh pillowcase. I took time to shake the pillow well down into the pillowcase. This action so frequently performed by me, in my role as orderly, like clockwork I executed it within seconds.

The bedclothes were badly rumpled as if churned. These I tidied deftly, tucking in bed sheets as you learn to do in the U.S. Army as well.

There is pleasure in executing small perfect things. One, two, three — completed! On to the next.

(The soiled pillowcase I might have tossed into the laundry. No one would have thought to look for it there — for the death of the eighty-four-year-old nun would not be considered a “suspicious” death. Yet, I was cautious, taking time to fold the pillowcase neatly to slide it into my backpack, to be disposed of when I left work.)

I lifted Sister Mary Alphonsus’s limp head, to wind the strip of cheap gauzy curtain around it, and to hide her flushed and contorted face. Bride of Christ! Here is your wedding veil.

Why did I take time to do this? — why, to risk suspicion where there would be no suspicion?

I’ve thought of it, often. But I don’t know why.

A smile comes over my face at such times — a strange slow smile. Am I happy, is that why I am smiling? Or — is the smile involuntary, a kind of grimace?

I could not have explained any of this. Not even to my father. It seemed the “right” thing to do, at the time. It would be my secret forever.

“Dorothy Milgrum” had left no will, it would be revealed. And so the deceased woman’s modest estate would be appropriated by the State of Wisconsin.

How much did “Dorothy Milgrum” accumulate, in her years as chief administrator of Craigmillnar? It could not have been much. It was whispered among the staff that there was barely enough money for a decent headstone in the St. Simon’s churchyard at Craigmillnar, where Sister Mary Alphonsus had secured a plot for herself years before.

I was the orderly charged with emptying, cleaning, and preparing the room for the next resident.

In the bureau in Sister Mary Alphonsus’s room, amid her old-woman undergarments, stockings, and woolen socks, there was a packet of letters. I appropriated these, for there was no one to prevent me. It was a surprise to see so many handwritten letters, dated 1950s. Who’d written to the mother superior at Craigmillnar so often? And why had the mother superior kept these letters? The return address was Cincinnati, Ohio. The stationery was a pale rose color. The salutation was Dear Dotty. The signature was faded maroon ink — it looked like Irene. I tried to read a few lines, but could not decipher the curlicue handwriting. Another nun? A dear friend? There was also a packet of snapshots, yellow and curling. In these, Sister Mary Alphonsus was a young woman in her thirties — with sharp shining eyes, bulldog face, wide glistening smile. She wore her nun’s dark robes with a certain swagger, as a young priest might wear such attire. The wimple was tight around her face, dazzling white. Her face looked cruelly and yet sensuously pinched, as in a vise.

In several snapshots the youthful Sister Mary Alphonsus was standing close beside another nun, a stocky broad-shouldered middle-aged woman with a moon face and very white skin. Both women smiled radiantly at the camera. The older woman had flung off her nun’s hood, her hair was close-cropped, gray. The older woman was taller than Sister Mary Alphonsus by an inch or so.

In the background was a lakeside scene — a rowboat at shore, fishing poles.

In the last of the snapshots the women were again standing close together, now both bareheaded, arms around each other’s waist. These were thick arms and thick waists — these were husky women. Then I saw — it was a shock to see — that both women were barefoot in the grass, at the edge of a pebbly lakeside shore.

I thought — They took these pictures with a time exposure. It was a new idea then.

The snapshots and the letters covered in faded-maroon ink I burnt as I’d burnt the pillowcase soaked with a dead woman’s saliva. If it had been in my power I would have burnt all trace of Sister Mary Alphonsus on this earth, but the truth is, some smudge of the woman’s sick soul will endure, multiplied how many hundreds of times, in the memories of others.

I would say nothing — not ever — to my father or to my uncle Denis, but a certain long level look passed between us, a look of understanding, yet a look too of yearning, for what was concealed, that could not be revealed. When I next saw them, and the subject of the nun’s death arose. My father had kept a newspaper to show me, the front-page headlines, though I didn’t need to see the headlines, knowing what they were. In a hoarse voice Dad said — Good riddance to bad rubbage.

By which Dad meant rubbish. But I would not correct him.

Now that months have passed there is not much likelihood of a formal inquiry into the death of Sister Mary Alphonsus aka “Dorothy Milgrum.” The Oybwa County medical examiner has never contacted us. Dr. Godai has left Eau Claire to return to Minneapolis, it has been announced. (Many, including me, were disappointed to hear that Dr. Godai is leaving us so soon, though it isn’t surprising that a vigorous young doctor like Dr. Godai would prefer to live and work in Minneapolis, and not Eau Claire.) Yet, I have prepared my statement for the medical examiner. I have not written out this statement, for such a statement might seem incriminating if written out, but I have memorized the opening.

Early shift is 6:30 A.M. which was when I arrived at the elder care facility at Eau Claire where I have been an orderly for two years. Maybe thirty minutes after that, when the elderly nun’s body was discovered in her bed.