Ch 2 Sister Isabel

I returned to the convent with Sister Isabel, not quite sure why we had left so abruptly. I had had very little interaction with people other than the nuns. Twice a year, Sister Evangeline would travel to the city to fetch supplies. A nearby farmer would let her ride in his cart. I never got the privilege of going along – in fact no one but Sister Evangeline went – but I had seen the men she travelled with on a few occasions. Very rarely, a beggar would show up at the door, and the Sisters would feed him and send him on his way. They were never offered a bed, even if they showed up in the middle of the night. It wasn't appropriate for a man to sleep in the midst of nuns. A few had slept in the sheep shed, conveniently overlooked by the nuns.

One time when I was ten, a mother and daughter had appeared at our door. They were dirty and wearing rags. Their feet were bare, and they were skinny. Mother Phillipa allowed them to stay with us for a week. They stayed in the one small empty bedroom, right next to mine.

The daughter, Rashel, helped with my chores each day while they were there. She told me many things, while the nuns weren't listening, that I had never heard before. She told me about cities and about castles with kings and queens – not that she had been to a castle herself, but she had heard about them.

Rashel told me about normal family life, with a mother and a father and children. Her father had died three years prior, but she talked about him as if he were the greatest man to ever live. I never realized that my way of life wasn't normal until then. She also told me about boys. That most of them were mean, pulling her hair and even spitting on her, but that there were a few nice ones. She told me that they had something different between their legs, although she wasn't sure what.

After Rashel and her mother left, I began asking questions of the nuns. I asked about my mother, but no one knew anything except Mother Phillipa. The only thing she would tell me was that my mother had been ill and passed away right after I was born. She had asked the nuns to raise me.

At first I thought that my mother had been a nun, and so it was natural that her daughter would be raised in the convent. Only from reading stories in the bible and wondering why there weren't any other children around did I realize that she could not have been a nun – or not a very good one at least. It took a mother and a father to have a child. But if I asked, "Who is my father? Where is my father?" I was simply told, "The Lord God is your father and he is in Heaven."

I suppose that I could have been the product of a virgin birth, like Jesus. But I didn't think that very likely considering that there were no worshippers coming to see me.

I continued asking questions and getting no answers or vague replies. It was frustrating until Sister Isabel joined the convent, and became like an older sister to me.

Isabel was the youngest daughter of a poor farmer, and considering that he had three other daughters to marry off, it wasn't surprising that he sent one of them to become a nun. His required gift to the convent, a bushel of grain each year for ten years, was less than he would have paid for a dowry, not to mention the cost of supporting her until she was married.

She told me about growing up in a large family with five brothers in addition to the three sisters. Additionally, her grandparents had lived with them until they both passed away within a month of one another. Her stories just made me more curious about why I didn't have parents, and sad that I would never know them.

Isabel hadn't chosen to join the convent on her own, but she had taken her vows out of an obligation to her father. She intended to keep them to honor him and her family name, although I could tell there were times when she struggled with the restrictions imposed. Such was the case with the farmer's sons who lived on the other side of our grove.