“Love, then?” said the old nun, tucking the quilt back around her patient, who quietly thanked her. She patted his frail hand and carried the slops to the next bed. “Love is a worthy motivation, although you see how quickly it can sour into guilt. He loved his sister, after all.”
Jeanne involuntarily, painfully, leaped to Tess’s mind. Will wasn’t far behind. “Are they really separate things?” Tess asked, glancing up. “I can’t seem to tease love and guilt apart.”
“You’ve been thinking about it,” said Philomela, sounding pleased and surprised. She busied herself with the next patient, an old woman. “You’d never guess, but hospice is an excellent place for thinking while your hands, almost incidentally, do good. I’ll tell you this: love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.”
She emptied another pan. “Here’s an analogy I like: guilt is a runaway wagon down the mountainside. It may carry you a long way, but it usually ends in disaster. Love, on the other hand, is much slower—just your own two feet, really,” she said, casting a meaningful look at Tess. “But it’s more likely to take you somewhere worth going.”
Tess had never met anyone who talked like this, all up on the abstract plane, and she didn’t know quite how to respond. “I do like walking,” she said at last, limply.
“You’ve got good boots for it,” said the nun, bustling over to the last patient.
Tess smiled wryly. “And callused feet. Walking the road gives you time to think, too.”
“I could tell you were a philosopher,” Philomela said warmly. “Let’s hear what you’ve come up with, then.”
“Walk on,” said Tess, feeling unexpectedly shy as she said it, as if she were showing the sister the inside of her heart.
Philomela was silent as she emptied the pan, then said, “What, that’s it?”
“It’s harder than it sounds,” said Tess, folding her arms. “Whenever I start feeling like I want to…like I’m not going to make it, I decide to walk on until tomorrow, at least, and—”
“And then you do it, eh?” said the old nun. “Sounds a bit like running away.”
“No!” cried Tess, stung. “It’s the opposite of running away.”
“Running toward?” said the nun, hefting the slops bucket. She gestured toward a double door with her head; Tess opened it. Outside, in the courtyard, rain spattered noisily. Mother Philomela left the bucket under an overhang and shut the door again. “I’m not saying don’t run—or walk, as you say—only that it sounds incomplete, as a life’s philosophy. I meant to prompt you to think further.” She dried her hands on her apron. “What do you do when you get there?”
“You don’t get there,” Tess said, growing crabbier. “You’re on the Road, and the Road goes ever on and on.” Tess felt herself capitalize Road, as if it were a person; she hadn’t realized she felt this way until she said it aloud.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. We’re all on this road, metaphorically,” said the old nun, returning to the hearth. “This is our lot. Is that what you’re getting at? And one must choose to walk on, rather than petulantly sitting on one’s rump and pouting?”
Why did it sound stupid from Mother Philomela’s mouth when it had felt so profound while she was walking? “I guess,” said Tess, who was beginning to pout, and almost certainly would have sat down petulantly if there’d been a chair available.
“It’s a start,” said the old woman, washing her hands in a basin near the fire. “Tell me something, though: is walking the only virtue in your philosophical system? What if someone decided to stay in one place and not walk on—on purpose? Would that be bad?”
Tess considered. “I have been walking, literally walking, for two months, and I feel…right when I do. My mind is clear; the world makes sense. Walking is a good in itself.”
“Of course it is,” said Philomela brusquely, “but it’s not the only good. Since we’re being literal now, have you felt clear and sensible at other times during your travels?”
The question startled Tess into thinking. “While turning hay. Swimming in the river, crawling through caves…once I was lying under a cattle guard, eating bread, and the sky was blue and there was a bee—” She cut off, embarrassed. It was hard to explain about the bee.
“Right,” said Mother Philomela firmly. “Working, swimming, eating. Walking.”
Tess blinked, unsure what she was getting at.
“You feel whole when you’re doing things, Jacomo. When you’re in your body,” said the nun slowly, as if Tess were stupid. “The mind may hare off in all directions, but truth is centered in the body, ultimately.”
The body sounded like a corpse at a funeral. “The body, as in…the wellspring of sin? The author of excess and misery? That body?” Tess said, trying to plumb the nun’s meaning.
“Don’t quote me St. Vitt,” snapped Philomela, her face like a bulldog’s. “That is not what I mean. We don’t subscribe to his contemptuous credos here.”
“?‘The flesh is but a sack of goo’?” Tess sang badly, batting her eyes.
The nun raised her jowly chin. “Goo is a description, not a judgment. How could I do this work”—she encompassed the ward in a broad gesture—“if I held the body in contempt? Our sisters are midwives, too, you know.” Tess did know. “We usher bodies into this world, and we usher bodies out. As your aged friend here so poignantly reminds us, the mind goes. The soul…who can say what it is or where it’s located? In the end, often as not, our bodies are all we are.”
Tess’s chest felt suddenly very tight under her jerkin.
“I would guess, based on your knee-jerk quotations, that you were raised to despise the flesh and all its fleshly doings. So tell me, young gentleman,” said Philomela, putting a light emphasis, not quite sarcastic, on gentleman, “in your philosophical estimation—or in St. Vitt’s—is the body born evil, or does it do evil for the sheer anarchic joy of it?”
Tess went cold. Philomela was quoting her father. She’d seen through Tess, deduced who she must be. She shouldn’t have sung that snatch of song. “Born evil,” said Tess, heart pounding. “St. Vitt says explicitly that the female—”
“Wrong,” snapped the old nun, her sharp green eyes taking in every nuance of Tess’s reaction. “First, I gave you two choices as a test: there are never just two choices. That is a lie to keep you from thinking too deeply. Second, and more important: the body is innocent. Deeply, beautifully, fundamentally innocent.”
“That isn’t true,” Tess half whispered. Every one of Philomela’s words was a knife, prodding a deep, unhealed wound.
“Third,” said the sister, as if Tess hadn’t spoken, “consider children, who merely follow their natures. They may be born difficult or contrary, but never evil. The ones who enjoy misbehaving can be taught better. Too many, alas, have parents who hold them in contempt.”
Tess trembled so hard her teeth chattered.
“So it is with the body,” said the nun, eyes narrowing fiercely. “The hated innocent becomes hateful. Goodness withers when it is continuously ground underfoot. We fulfill our parents’ direst prophecies, then curl around our own pain until we can’t see beyond ourselves. You want to walk on? Walk out of that shadow. Walk, girl.”
Tess wrestled back tears.
“I saw what they thought of you,” said Mother Philomela, her voice gentling. “I rejoiced that you’d struck out on your own, but you’ve a long way to go still. Your kindness toward this one, when you needn’t have troubled yourself”—she gestured at Griss—“shows me the true heart of you. Your credo goes further than you realized: walk on, yes, but don’t walk past people who need you. Uncurl yourself so you can see them and respond.”
Tess was too distraught to take everything in. The words bounced off her like a stone skipping over the surface of a lake.
A stone may skip a long way, but it always sinks eventually.