MaineCourse

Snow In Vietnam

Rea Killeen

When I am nine, we pray all the time because Sister Patricia Anne says somewhere on the other side of the earth “our boys are dying in the jungles.”
St. Pius X Church is my family’s new church after we move into a fancy neighborhood away from downtown Albany. It’s shaped like a cross and has an orange wall-to-wall rug that muffles our steps. I don’t like this church. It doesn’t have a railing or kneeling pads at the altar and there’s no Jesus hanging on the cross suspended high over the altar, way out of reach.

One night we all go to church. Snow falls under the streetlights, like white whispers.

“Draw the seasons,” says Sister Patricia Anne. I draw the spring in tulips, yellow and red. The summer in green. The fall in a waxy mat of layered reds, yellows and orange. And here is winter. I draw a gray sky with branches, black and thin. See my winter? I hold my paper up to Sister. See my grove of birch trees? See the snowflakes neatly trimming the top edge of my paper? See?
“All the snowflakes are different,” she says.
“Yes Sister,” I say.
“They’re beautiful,” says Sister.
“Thanks Sister.”

Someone drops a missile on the pew; someone else coughs. A mother hushes her children and a young child cries like a foghorn. Tittering, chatting, yipping and yapping. Our whole school is here. All the parents are here too. I genuflect and then scoot as far away from everyone as I can. I think that God can hear me better if I pray away from the other voices. We pray for peace in Vietnam. We are praying for peace in America. Our parish priest, Father Durgin, tells us that if we pray together, God will hear us.
Doesn’t he hear us all the time? Sister says he knows what we think. Sister says we don’t even need to speak our thoughts. God knows all our thoughts, she says. I bow my head anyway. I pray with all the other voices in the church shaped like Jesus’s cross with the orange rug beneath us.

Lord have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
Lord have mercy.

Sister says there is hope in the seasons. “Every season has its own color. Every season has its own shape and time. Every season returns to us.”

I pray as hard as I can because Jimmy Tucker is in Vietnam and even though none of the adults like him because he was always lighting off firecrackers in the mailboxes, I like him. He called me “Sprout.” “Hey Sprout,” he’d say and mess up my hair with his hand that smelled like the sulfur of a newly lit match. “Hey Sprout,” he’d say, like he knew me. Like I was his little sister or something.
I pray as hard as I can because Jimmy Tucker is wearing army boots instead of his sneakers, which dangle on the telephone wire in front of his house. I can see them when I pull up my bedroom shades in the morning. I think, “It’s night where Jimmy is.” I wonder if Vietnam has seasons. I try to picture snowflakes in Vietnam. I try to picture maple leaves. I cannot.

“Hi Sprout,” he says to me. I can hear his voice in the cross- shaped church.
Dear God, bring us peace. Keep our boys safe. Bring Jimmy home. End war and poverty and suffering and sickness. Amen.

Sister says waiting is a winter thing.
I wait for God to hear me, to hear all these voices.
I look for a sign.
The snow falls sideways. Is the earth spinning faster? Will the seasons happen sooner?

I lift my head and listen to the winter. And I wonder if God hears us in the muffled brightness of St. Pius Church, if Jimmy knows I prayed for him.
And I wonder if Jimmy is scared, all alone, taken from everything he knew and put someplace where he knows nothing at all.

Wonderful. Brings the fear and uncertainty of Vietnam AND childhood in general right back into my mind.

Posted by jan queijo.

Wonderful, lyrical writing. Stands firmly in the worlds of both adult and nine-year-old. Strange turn of phrase, the first 9 words -- her use of verb tenses is unusual, arguably inconsistent, but it adds to the immediacy of presence despite the memoir format.

And I wonder if the misspelling of "missal" in the fourth (third?) paragraph was intentional..... Took me awhile to get past it.

Thanks for putting this up. Pass on my compliments, please.

Posted by adam.

Is this the Rea Killeen of the Boston Globe?

Posted by rakkity.

That would be her.

Posted by verifier.

Sister Patricia Anne, get out your ruler and whack the proper verb tenses into that nine year old!

Posted by reader.

Posted by Michael at November 13, 2003 06:15 AM