Summer Moon

Twenty years later . . . Saint Perpetua's School for Orphan Girls. Applesby, Maine. October 1869. Kate awakened, heart pounding, blood racing. She did not move until her pulse settled back into a slow, steady rhythm; then she drew back the sheet and slowly slipped out of bed. Moonlight spilled across her pillow. She had long ago given up trying to sleep when the moon was full. Nights bathed in moonlight held too many memories of the life she had lived with her mother. It was fall again. Maine nights had grown desperately cold already. Kate shivered as she walked through a puddle of milk-white light to the only window in her sparsely furnished attic room. A utilitarian piece of unbleached muslin hung limp before the pane, as unadorned as everything else in this world of routine and orderliness where she had spent the better part of her life. I stayed too long. Kate drew aside the curtain and stared back at the man in the moon, unable to think of anything except what Mother Superior had told her after dinner when she had called her into the office: "I received word today that the archdiocese is closing the school at the end of the month, Katherine. We sisters are being sent to a new church school in Minnesota. The girls will be relocated, but I'm afraid that you will have to find other employment. I'm so sorry, Katherine. I wish it could be otherwise, but there is nothing I can do." Eleven years before, desperately in need of another teacher, the good Sisters of Saint Perpetua had asked her to stay on after graduation. She was given room and board and a small stipend in exchange for teaching history and elocution to girls of all ages. At eighteen, rather than face the streets of Applesby, she had accepted the offer without hesitation, knowing that someday she would have to go out into the world again. She promised herself that one day she would resurrect her old dreams, that she would have that pretty little home of her own and a family to hold dear. As time slipped away and spinsterhood crept upon her, she devoted eleven years to Saint Perpetua's orphan girls and all the joys and challenges of dealing with them. She had made a home here, one that was safe and warm and familiar. The nuns and the orphans had become her family. She had a certificate of education. She could read and write in Latin. She was a teacher, a scholar. A spinster with no living relation. The thought of having to leave after so long filled her heart with dread. She had a little money put by, surely enough on which to survive until she found other employment. She would have to find another place to liveno easy task in a hamlet where her mother had been the town whore. She had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn, and no one to turn tonot even her mother. On Kate's eleventh birthday, Mother Superior had told her that the old shack near the wharf had burned down, that her mama had died, trapped inside. Even in death, Mama had been infamous. Kate could not go to her mother and tell her that she had forgiven her abandonment, or that she had cried herself to sleep for months, missing her mama more than she would have missed her heart if it had been taken from her. Now she looked out the window at the round face of the man in the moon. "Where will I go? What will I do?" The moon man smiled back. Or perhaps he was laughing at her. She could not tell. At the end of October, when the butcher made his final call to the nuns for an accounting, he found Kate standing outside the kitchen door with a hand-me-down satchel in hand. When he asked where she was going and she said that she did not really know, he took pity on her and told her she was welcome to rent the empty room above his shop. He was middle-aged and married,Landis, Jill Marie is the author of 'Summer Moon', published 2002 under ISBN 9780345440402 and ISBN 0345440404.