I would like to begin by saying that my upbringing in the cathedral has not been pleasant.
There are rats in the walls– so many that when you finally lay in bed after a hard day’s of work, you lie awake due to the everlasting sound of their skittering. The only chances of the cats catching the rats is if the rats come out from the walls and into the rooms or hallways, but they have become smarter over generations. They have learned to avoid traveling in open spaces and instead, tight spaces.
Some days I find myself wishing that I were a rat. A creature that would crawl along the floor, with the equal amount of intelligence as a small dog and the cleverness of a fox, and be able to steal all the food it would like from the kitchen or sleep wherever it wanted to. Obviously, being hunted would not be an ideal situation, but my life at the moment was far worse than being hunted by an animal 20 times the size I was.
I was being overworked– sent to scrub the toilets, crevices between cabinets that nobody had cleaned in decades (some had ill growing mold in it– I had to take a long shower afterwards), the cat’s litter pans, and switch out the numerous amounts of decorative candles there were in the cathedral.
It was imperative that these candles were lit and replaced at all times. They represented everything, to the nuns. Life, death, revival, peace, war, love. Having the candles burn out until none of them was left was the largest sin that could happen in the cathedral.
The candles burning out meant conflict was coming.
The candles blowing out meant that the monsters deep within would take their wrath upon us.
Again.
My first day residing in the cathedral, I had been assigned the job of running back and forth between rooms in the cathedral to replenish the supply of wax candles. Each room or hallway had a pewter basin with grooves in it, each divet meant to hold a candle. A person could stack 50 or 60 of these candles in each basin. Depending on how many candles were in each room, the number of basins varied. The largest, which was the praying area, required 20 basins. Poor children like me had to keep running back and forth to fill these basins in, and whenever we were done filling them, we would go back an hour later to find that they had all been used.
It was a never ending job, and nobody wanted to be blamed for letting the candles burn out.
A young woman like me– our only job, was to never let the candles burn out.
Young girls would spend half their time learning how the cathedral worked and how we kept it working. When old enough, they would begin candle duty (like I currently am). When reaching a typical marriage age, about 16 or 17, they would have to recite their vows again to swear off childbirth and remain a virgin until death. Once done with that, they would do record-keeping, or supply management.
To this day, I still have no clue as to what people older than that do.
I can only assume people’s ages by their voice.
Nobody knows what the other looks like. Curiosity and vanity is a sin, the head nuns repeated several times every week. The phrase was drilled into my head. Everybody’s head. To see another was to force a comparison, and comparison started conflict.
That was another one of the cathedral’s teachings– avoid conflict.
Avoid, avoid, avoid.
But it was difficult, trying to close my eyes shut for modesty so I couldn’t see what the nuns who slept in the same room as me looked like. Everybody and everything became so similar that for me, finding something different was imperative. I wanted to see a dead, wilting flower in the hallway vanity instead of a freshly cut rose, or a candle that was blue instead of yellow in the chandelier.
The sisters sensed this, and because of my actions, they had avoided me. Earning a spot in the cathedral was work– it was a guarantee to reach heaven, to serve God, and to earn his favors for the rest of your soul’s existence. The sisters felt as if they had stood close enough to me long enough, they would catch my curiosity bug and start flying away on their own, on their own imaginative wings. Being curious was defying God, and if they could not go to heaven, then their entire life was wasted doing hard manual labour that even no ordinary farm boy could ever do.
If my curiosity were a sin and angered God, then I had long already lost my spot in heaven. I decided, on an angsty stormy night, that I would do my best to anger him as much as I could.
During that stormy night, I got out of bed and gathered the largest rocks I could possibly find. I smashed the windows from the inside out when I had finally lugged them all over into the prayer room so that nobody could tell how they broke. The wind immediately began whistling in such volume that my hands automatically clapped over my ears and I winced, cringing from the sudden cold. The wind billowed against my black robes so hard that the fabric began to snap loudly. The pressure of the cathedral changed– a voice was hissing, whispering in my ear. The left, swearing that I would be punished– the right, cooing, encouraging me, telling me how good of a girl I was for finally giving into my thoughts.
I let the voices into my head. I let the wind swirl around me. I watched the candles.
I watched.
It was amazing how the candles didn’t instantly blow out. I vaguely remembered one of the elder nuns telling us newly recruited how all the candles had been placed strategically so that if one candle blew out, then it would almost instantly be re-lit by another candle sharing its flame. In order to blow all the candles out, one would have to do it all at once.
Which was why having the flame blow out was a much graver situation than having the candles burn out.
Wind fought against flame for what seemed like forever. Eyes wide, I observed, as these two natural forces collided and struggled to win the battle, until a gust blew from all cardinal directions– North, South, East, and West– and the candle flames blew out at once.
The sudden darkness blinded me and I forced myself to blink. My eyes adjusted to the darkness of the praying room. The area around me seemed so familiar yet unfamiliar. The darkness eerily wrapped around me, yet I was still comforted. Warm.
Warm.
11/1/1865, 1:21 AM.