she walked out of her mother kitchen in the spring of 1974. I knew those round, slanting letters the way you know the voice of a person you have lost. Margaret. The note I held was dated the week before Virgil passed away, and it began, Dear Virgil, the corn is in, thank you for the picture of the barn. Logan was reading over my shoulder. “Grandma,” he said, very softly, “this lady is alive.” My hand would not stop shaking. I sat down on the stool Virgil had sat on for fifty years. The wind pushed at the window of the workshop, and I swear it sounded like someone saying her name.
We read for hours. Every note was short, kind, and dated. Thank you for the seeds. I prayed for Walter today. Tell Ruthie I forgive the quarrel, I always did. In a lower tray I found a small photograph of a woman in a gray habit, standing at the gate of a stone building with a wooden bell tower. On the back, in pencil: Sister Mary Margaret, Quill Prairie, Missouri. I put my face in my hands. “She did not run away,” I said. “She was not lost. She was only gone.” I counted the notes and stopped at six hundred, because I could not see the paper anymore.
The next morning Logan drove us three hours south. The Carmelite monastery at Quill Prairie sat on a hill of cedar trees, with a gravel drive and a small iron bell. A gentle sister in a gray veil led us to a parlor with a wooden screen across the middle. I sat down on my side with my purse in my lap, an eighty one year old woman shaking like a schoolgirl. A voice behind the screen said, “Evelyn. Walter wife. I would know your footsteps anywhere. Virgil described them.”
The notes were from Margaret, the lost sister, who had become a Carmelite nun, and Virgil had protected the farm so she would always have a home.
She told me she had a calling at twenty. Their father, a hard and frightened man, said no daughter of his would be locked behind a wall, and for eighteen years Margaret stayed home and kept house and said nothing. In March of 1974, at thirty eight, she left a note and took her suitcase and forty dollars. “It was not that I did not love them,” she said. “I could not say goodbye to my mother without begging to stay. So I did not say it. I have asked forgiveness every day since.” She said it without bitterness, like a woman setting down a bag she had carried too far.
“Virgil found me,” she said. “He drove to every convent in four states, in his truck, for nine months. When he knocked on this very door, I told him I was sorry. He said, Maggie, I did not come to bring you home. I came to ask what you need.” I heard her laugh behind the screen. “I told him, a seed catalog. And he mailed me one that Christmas, and then one every Christmas for fifty years. The notes came with the seed catalogs.” The truck was rusted and the ride was bumpy, and he never missed a Sunday.
I asked her why Virgil would never sell the farm. She said, “Because I asked him not to. When our father passed in 1975, Virgil put my third in a trust. He said, if she ever comes home, she will need somewhere to stand. He wanted our mother house to be here when I was ready. He paid Ruthie for her share rather than let the land go.” Her voice caught. “And every morning at Mass, he prayed that you would forgive him for fighting so hard and telling nobody why.”
I thought about the wind company, and the lawyer, and every cold Christmas I had spent hating that man. “He promised me he would never tell,” she said. “It was my secret, Evelyn. I am a coward about my family. I thought they would not forgive me.” I put my hand flat against the screen. After a long minute, I felt hers press back through the little wooden slats. “Margaret,” I said, “all of us would have sat in the last pew with you.” My cheeks were wet, and I did not care who saw.
Logan had been quiet in the corner the whole time, and now he stepped forward and said, very politely, that he would like to meet his great aunt. The sister behind the screen laughed out loud, and the sound filled that little room like a bird. She asked what he was studying, and when he said engineering she said the farm needed a better drainage tile on the north forty. Virgil, she told us, had written about it for years. Logan took out his phone and started typing notes while I wiped my eyes with the hem of my coat. Even the Mother Superior, standing in the doorway, wiped one eye with her sleeve.
The Mother Superior said that for a family homecoming the sisters can leave the enclosure, and that a farm visit after fifty two years was close enough. So three weeks later, at ninety, Sister Mary Margaret stepped out of Logan truck, into the October light, and stood on the gravel by the machine shed. She walked the porch of the house that Virgil kept for her. She touched the kitchen table where her note had been. She did not cry. She said, “Well. The barn needs painting.” The truck went quiet on the gravel drive, and Logan took off his cap.
We did not sell the farm. Margaret gave her third to Logan and to the church, and we turned the old workshop into a small chapel with a woodstove. Every first Sunday, Margaret comes for the day. We eat at the long table, and I read her one of the notes aloud from the tackle box, and she corrects the spelling. Last week she wrote me a note of my own. It was folded very small. It said only: Thank you for the sixty years of Christmas cards.
