[Eleanor]: 668.Prose.Saint Beatrice: Virgin Martyr

(In the fall of 1983 my husband and I visited a friend who was then a monk at Conception Abbey in Conception, Missouri. He took us to visit the relic chapel of their sister convent down the road, and this story came out of it more than 20 years later. If you Google the title, you will get more of the actual truth, but I think my story is more interesting.)


Saint Beatrice: Virgin Martyr of the first Christian Centuries

I was just a child then. I suppose I will forever be a child, for death puts an end to one’s growing. I may even have been beautiful, but that wasn’t important to me then, and it certainly makes no difference now.

I took orders very young, possibly against my will, for death makes you forget much. I cannot even remember if I had begun my monthly bleeding yet. I was a quiet girl, obedient and studious. My family was poor and my mother fecund, so I was the obvious choice to send to the convent. I had a brother who entered the priesthood as well, but I’ve forgotten his name. I barely remember my own. Was it Clara, Elizabeth, Beatrice, Josephine? Yes, I have forgotten. That doesn’t matter now either.

At the nunnery I no longer saw my parents or my siblings. The sisters became my family, but I still pined after my natural relations. There was not much in the way of warmth among the inmates and many was the night I cried myself to sleep on the hard palette in my small cell. I especially missed my puppy and the cat that kept the mice from the grain. The mother superior would not let me befriend the convent cats. She was a mother in name only, possessing little of any milk of human kindness for me and the other young initiates.

Eventually I fell into the routines of the convent and got used to the bad food, the lack of sleep, being woken up at all hours to troop down to the chapel in bare feet on the freezing stone floor. As I said, I was a quiet girl and my silence must have been taken for piety. I started spending much time alone in the chapel meditating, remembering carefree afternoons with my sisters, my lips moving silently as I mouthed the songs we sang together. My rosary reminded me of a necklace my older sister had given me but my vow of poverty prevented me from now owning, and I would finger it as I knelt and dreamt of lost freedom.

Everything changed when the war broke out. The bad food got worse, there were no new habits and small clothes to replace the ones I was rapidly growing out of, and suddenly we nuns were required to turn our cloisters into hospital rooms. The little joy I took in my privacy was set aside for a shared cell with one of my fellows. We girls learned how to clean wounds, to sew severed skin together, to bandage and, on occasion, to amputate. The work disgusted me, but I said nothing as always, and the soldier patients found my manner and my silent stolidness reassuring. They would even ask for me by name, the name I have since forgotten. This did not go unnoticed by the priest and the mother superior.

Then one day our makeshift hospital itself was attacked by the enemy. We were dragged outside into the smoke-filled yard as our convent was set to the torch. The soldiers, boisterous in their conquering mania, did not care that we were servants of God, but proceeded to have their way with the sisters. I was sickened by what I saw, more so even than when I had sawed off a festering leg, as I watched my cellmate stripped naked and raped by an armed man. Her screams cut deeper than the bone saw, her tears more draining than the blood that spurted out of his arteries, and when it was my turn I would not yield, but siezed my would-be rapist’s weapon and slashed my own throat, hoping for a quick oblivion that would end my adolescent suffering. Alas, my death did indeed end the lustful violence, but the mother superior quickly canted my own life blood as it spilled from my wound. My broken body was spirited away and I was declared a saint, for I had died a martyr, defending my chastity as Christ’s virgin bride.

There is not much left to tell. My bones now lie in a glass case beneath this altar, clad in silken raiment. Pieces of my crushed skull are hidden inside a beautiful wax head, the rest are in a bag hanging around my spine and resting inside my empty ribcage. Golden locks the like of which I never possessed in life adorn this effigy, golden mesh gloves encase my skeletal hands, and a bottle decorated with a cross guards the dried blood that flowed from my corpse. I cannot sleep, I cannot leave. There is no rest and there is no exit.