A Dog Named Hope, 
Chapter 4

By Michael Mooney

It’s not easy to say good-bye to a dog you’ve learned to work with and respect. But Marcia had received a favorable impression of Sister Mary and thought she could read in their brief acquaintance that the nun was an intelligent, straight forward, sensible kind of woman who would give Hope the kind of opportunity and support she needed. Hope needed to work, but she hadn’t the stamina for a working farm, and Marcia knew she was kidding herself if she thought Hope could stay on the farm with her and Jim and be anything other than a pet. 

Still, every morning Marcia woke up thinking about her, especially when the wind blew from the east and she could hear the Lake roar and sometimes even, as it seemed to her at that early hour, the individual clamorous waves pacing down the Lake Michigan beach. And during the day when she was in the field and heard a car pass along the road, she thought of Alice Tomey’s blue pick-up and worried about Hope. 

The convent of Mount Carmel was on the opposite side of the state, in the rugged highlands east of the Mississippi River. The chapel sat on top a steep hill. The road wound close to its front door, coming up from below, so that if you came by car you saw the chapel first at a distance and at an angle, a little startling in the starkness of its contrast to the green and growing countryside, and then not at all until the road turned and it stood right above you. Having seemed picturesque and charming from the distance a couple of hilltops away, the chapel suddenly loomed very large. 

In fact, the chapel inside its walled enclosure was not large at all. The convent stood at the other end of the enclosure, right below the chapel and inside the high masonry wall. The barns and the fields were below that.

Modeled after the chapel of Saint John the Hermit in the town of Palermo on the island of Sicily, the Mount Carmel chapel had a rounded dome that at one time had been painted red. The red was now faded to pink, and the chapel itself, as a building or piece of property, was in need of much repair, brick work and tuck pointing and a new tile roof. The roof leaked, and some of the decorative terra cotta had been replaced with pieces of concrete. The fresco mural inside, in depiction of the Twenty-third Psalm and showing the Lord as the Good Shepherd, was cracked and faded and in want of cleaning and restoration. 

The nuns had been in the habit of washing the murals twice a year, with warm water and a mild detergent, to cleanse it of dust and mildew, until they discovered to their dismay that their efforts were causing the mural to fade. They had expressed their concern in writing to the archdiocese, that the chapel and in particularly the mural stood in need of restoration which they themselves were unable to provide, and had received in response only silence.

Sister Mary believed that money was the issue, that the archdiocese hadn’t the money to spare, and this made her reluctant to write again. Energetic woman that she was, she made inquiries in the nearby town of Wyalusing to know if there were any roofing contractors who knew the business of terra-cotta tile roofing, and went herself to the library to study from books the business of masonry and the more arcane work of restoration of fresco murals. 

In the back of her mind was the fear that the archdiocese’s silence meant that the archbishop considered the possibility of closing the convent and moving the sisters to another convent, in La Crosse or Madison or Milwaukee. They were a fragile community, in Sister Mary’s estimation, and if they were able to sustain themselves financially and not be a burden on the diocesan pocketbook, then the archbishop would have less reason to close them down. 

Sister Mary knew the archbishop to be a kindly man, well disposed to the community of the convent, inclined to let things go along as they always had. But she knew, too, that there were many calls upon his time and the resources at his disposal. From books at the public library Sister Mary studied the business of tile roofing, and terra-cotta masonry, and plaster frescoes.

She was aware that the other sisters feared the same thing, not so much in terms of bricks and plaster perhaps as in the more imaginative terms of the Good Shepherd and His sheep. The chapel and the convent in its original conception had been dedicated to the Twenty-third Psalm and the spirit of the Lord as the Shepherd. They raised sheep, washed carded and spun the shorn fleece into yarn, and wove the yarn on looms into bolts of cloth which they then endeavored to sell, as bath mats and area throw rugs. If they should fail in their mission to emulate that ideal, then surely they would have lost their reason for being. 

In acknowledgment of this, Sister Mary had sought out the advice of Alice Tomey, who, although she was not the local small-animal veterinarian, had grown up in the town of Wyalusing and returned home once a month or so in the course of visiting her aging parents. Alice had suggested a good many things concerning the care of the flock and its breeding, all of which the sisters had taken into consideration. For the handling of the flock, Alice steered Sister Mary to Marcia, which had led, of course, to the dog named Hope.

The chapel bell sounded twice a day as a call to morning and evening prayer. The ringing of the bell was assigned to one of the sisters in the community, and Sister Mary herself usually conducted the services in the chapel. It was customary for the sisters to wear their black-and-white habits at services, and in fact most of the older nuns wore their habits exclusively, even when they were weaving in the weaving room or working about the farm. 

Now and then someone from a nearby farm, usually a farm wife, would attend a service in the chapel, for the chapel was open to the public and the nuns made a point of welcoming a neighbor. There was no priest in residence, and Mass hadn’t been said in the chapel in many years. On Sundays the sisters, all twelve of them, clambered into two vans and followed the serpentine road to services at the Catholic Church in the little town of Wyalusing on the Mississippi River.

With only twelve sisters in residence, the convent was indeed a fragile community. At the top of the hill you could look out a windows and not see another house or building except, far away, the silo of a neighboring farm and the faded red walls of a distant barn. There were farms all around, and nearby hillsides given over to pasture land or cultivation, but apart from the occasional car on the road or a snorting tractor in a distant field, you could go for days and be unaware of other human beings.

Sometimes at night when the wind blew, the sound it made rushing past the bell in the belfry seemed to give voice to the passionate loneliness of the hearer’s solitude. In such a community, animals are a comfort. Apart from the sheep out at pasture, there were five cows in the field behind the barn who came into the stalls to be milked morning and evening, and two dozen chickens who lived in a shed beside the barn. The barn had a supply of cats, which had been more or less unnumbered until Alice Tomey suggested that some restraint be put upon their breeding, which advice Sister Mary took and had all the males neutered and all the females apart from the youngest spayed.

The arrival of Alice’s van was a great occasion any day in the week. Alice had talked to the nuns about getting a stock dog, and they were aware of the possibility that Sister Mary might return with one. When the pick-up with the blue truck cap entered the compound and parked in the courtyard between the dormitory and the chapel, everybody stopped work, whatever she was doing, and came into the yard.

Hope had made the trip in the back of the pick-up inside her carry-crate. It was where she would feel most comfortable, Marcia suggested. When the truck stopped and the nuns crowded around, Sister Mary got out on her side beaming with pride, while Alice opened the back and, speaking a word or two of reassurance to the young dog, led Hope from the darkness of her enclosure into the bright clear air of the convent’s courtyard to make her new acquaintances.

Hope did so with dignity and reserve, without jumping down from the pick-up’s gate, and instead of crowding forward in a group, each of the sisters seemed to take her cue from the young dog and approached singly, as if waiting to be introduced. One of the nuns, noting Hope’s black-and-white coat, remarked that if she had come to be one of their number she had certainly come dressed for the purpose.

Everybody laughed at this, and Hope wagged her tail, jumped down from the gate, and circled amidst the crowd of delighted women. Someone decided that this was an occasion to ring the chapel’s bell, or perhaps it was only that the time for evening services had arrived, but the sudden clamorous ringing high above caused everyone to look up and catch her breath -- until Hope let forth with a mournful howl.

Alice and Sister Mary looked at each other, each realizing that, for as long as she had been with Hope that day, neither had heard her make a sound much less bark or howl. In the belfry high above, the bell continued ringing with clamorous enthusiasm, and as long as it did, and even perhaps a little longer, Hope answered with her lonely howl.

(to be continued)
 
 

Author Michael Mooney lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.