I.

The color of 1976 was brown: brown walls, beige ward, mustard plastic cushions on the chairs in the waiting rooms. Brown coffee poured from the never-washed pot in the corner of the common room, mahogany streaks etched permanently into the glass, tan powdered creamer stirred to paste in brown paper cups with brown plastic sticks by the broken men who gathered there. 1976 was the year of the explosion in the mine, an uncontrolled blast that shook the ground across two counties and killed fourteen men, then filled an entire ward with survivors pulled from the ruined earth. The living were darkened by burning chemicals until only the weeping whites of their red-rimmed eyes revealed that what was left was human. These were the men who left muddy stains in the bottoms of brown mugs and sticky rings on the furniture in the common room, who turned their clean white dressings brown with seepage from the sutures across their amputated limbs. They were the men who, in 1976, nicknamed her Sister Mary Crackerjack.

In the evenings, the men gathered to watch the late-night comedy shows, commenting on the politics of the smooth-haired hosts and the breasts of the actresses in the interview seat. When the chrome antennae were in need of adjustment, they called her nickname down the hall until she dropped whichever task was in her hands and emerged from some darkened room. The nickname, they said, was because she could fix anything, from the wires inside ancient table lamps to the bound staplers at the nurse’s stand. She hoped that was the real reason, that they weren’t lying to her out of some uncharacteristic politeness. Their nicknames for the other sisters were derogatory, and their kindness to the nuns came with a sort of sideways condescension, winks and nudges behind their backs. The names they had for the nurses on the ward were outright foul, defiantly vulgar, names which she understood to be more utilitarian in their foulness: less about sex, and more about servitude. There was a familiar tone to their derision, something vaguely recognizable in the way they muttered their dirty jokes to one another, sideways through the new gaps between their teeth, a safe distance from the women who cared for their bodies, who emptied the ashtrays and bedpans that held what was then their only contribution to the world, though they talked through the nights about the machinery they’d controlled, the walls of rock they’d blasted through, the depths they’d reached in the earth.

II.

The problem of the blood came in the summer, in the brown months of August and September, when the air went to war with itself and trees tipped and felled the power lines and everything turned hot and dull. The generators hummed in the heavy dark, intensifying the smell of electricity that hung in the blanket of air. A fug of coastal heat pushed down relentlessly, like a thumb pressing on the hospital for days, and the sisters sweated gold rings around the necks and armpits of their white gowns, crowns of gold across their foreheads into the bands of their wimples. The sky emitted low rumbles all night, its canvas marbled with lightning, and the futile ceiling fans over their beds turned against the gusts of hot air from the windows. Their starched white cotton nightgowns stuck to their skin and red patches bloomed like burns in places where they moved against the grainy threads of the fabric.

When the fever of the storm broke, power returned to the grid in slow waves, forgotten lights glowing from brown to yellow. They had tightly stacked the blood like bricks in ancient industrial coolers, as much as they could fit, but the machines were too hungry for the generators and limped along at half power until the storm’s end, when one of them hummed a warning note and then shut down for good. The blood was long gone, vinyl bags already degrading, hardening at the edges, assuming the bronze hue of aged plastic. The sisters counted off one two three and heaved the dead and dying coolers full of ruined blood to one side of the storage room until something could be done.

On her night shifts, Sister Cecile stood on the concrete slab outside the door of the ward. The figure she cut in her white robe, outlined against the blackness of the trees beyond and encircled in the red lights glowing down from above, cast a frightening vision for anyone not expecting it, or anyone who saw it from the sides of their eyes. She released her pipe smoke into the night air, slow puffs rising like doubtful clouds, then rapped the bowl against the top of the smoker’s urn to dislodge the plug of tobacco. A woman of muscular shoulders and straight lines, she was square in her shape and in her thinking, and sometimes filled the pipe a second time, puffing silently, moving as slowly as a snake on a hunt until she had explored all four corners of a problem.

In the end, it was a question of cost: pay to dispose of the blood, or pay for new generators. The sisters arranged themselves, knees nearly touching, in a tight half-circle of folding chairs inside the windowless room where the chairs were stored, which they called “the meeting room.” They knew better than to think that they were summoned to the meeting room to offer their opinions, knew that Sister Cecile’s plan was born fully-formed and with parts already in motion. Her decisions were as evident and final as the interstate highways growing all around them, curving and feeding into one another until they reached the point where they turned back and began again, impervious to change.

A small gift of grace allowed them a night of cool breezes in which to do their work. Sisters Cecile and Freda went ahead in the borrowed ambulance. The other sisters followed on foot, white gowns billowing in the wind, stretched across the black horizon like a row of clean bedsheets left out on the line overnight. Sister Cecile drove slowly along the service road to the fields behind the hospital, and they watched as the ambulance’s taillights disappeared. They followed in silence in the whispering dark for nearly a half mile, then crossed the ditch at a culvert, walking until they could see the glow of taillights in the northwest field, where the ambulance was parked. A man waited inside the cab of a digger, near a fresh and neatly dug hole. He tossed his cigarette out of the low edge of the cab’s open window, a gesture that could have been out of reverence or annoyance, and studied the row of ghostly women passing in a line between him and the hole in the ground.

The first bags hit the wet earth with a crack, the blood inside thick and glutinous, heavy with time. In the glow cast by the ambulance lights, they arranged themselves into a fire line and passed down two bags at a time from inside the vehicle. They pulled blood from banker’s boxes, canvas sacks, deep metal kitchen trays, and an assortment of other mismatched, unused containers they had found tucked away in closets and on ignored shelves. The wind traced their sweat like cold fingers across their brows and under their arms as they worked. They rode back in silence, seated in two short rows in the body of the ambulance, balancing piles of empty bins and plastic milk crates across their knees.

III.

2001 was blue: the impossible color of clear skies, electric dish soap, and muted fabric softener. It was the year she began to notice the milky blue clouds of scar tissue spreading across her eyes, etching her vision in wayward patterns like little puffs of smoke. In the cluttered kitchen of the home she shared with her retired sisters, a robin’s egg blue tea service was stacked neatly inside the cabinets, cups suspended from hooks, all except for the one with the once-broken handle, the one Sister Marie had said wasn’t worth keeping after that kind of damage. With glue and bitten lip, a slight shaking in her blue-veined hands, she’d repaired the cup at the long dining table one night after vespers, while the rest of them sat together in the living room piecing together a quilt in shades of navy and cornflower, an ocean draped across their frail knees as they sipped tea from the undamaged cups. The repair had held, had made the cup useful again, if only for a modified version of its former duties.

The sisters walked the pale blue hallways of the mother and child ward, on the ground level of a new building where the men’s rehabilitation center once stood. They tapped on doors and peered into plastic bassinets at the swollen faces of swaddled infants, handed out the blue and pink hats they knitted, and offered prayers for the sea-swept mothers. They sat in rows of uncomfortable chairs at groundbreakings and dedications throughout the springs and summers, as the hospital expanded ever outward, absorbing the fields and consuming the tree lines between its grounds and the highway.

2001, she recalled in a cyan haze some time later, was the year that one of these ceremonies ended in a way unlike the others. Patrons and hospital administrators had dispersed, and the sisters stood clustered beneath the tent in conversation with a new priest, a young priest, the youngest yet. The day had gone quiet, the hum and buzz of men at work, drilling and digging somewhere beyond the tent, dropped out of the atmosphere as suddenly as a bird falling from the sky. Through the eye of the silence came a flash of white, a pickup truck climbing over the hills, moving slowly over the bumps and divots hidden in the grass. It rolled past the sisters at its painfully careful speed, until finally its cargo came into focus: men streaked and smeared with some undefinable gore, spatters and thick threads of a grease-like substance that clumped on skin and soaked into clothing. The men coughed and spat, wiped their eyes on corners of their shirts. One of the men cradled a hard hat against his chest as he twisted himself sideways and vomited down the side of the truck, a spray into the grass. The moment the truck’s tires hit the boundary of the old service road, it began to speed toward the emergency unit on the other side of the complex, and the cluster of men in its bed huddled down, hanging onto the sides and to one another. They were followed by a second truck, its bed filled with men who had perhaps been further from the initial explosion of fluids, whose features were still visible between spatters of browned ichor, but whose eyes were no less empty with shock. Their faces twisted between confusion and terror, their pale shrouds etched in betrayal by what the earth had hidden from them, what she had held inside herself for so long, waiting.

The sisters bobbed in the seats of the small bus hired to return them to their retirement, and none spoke until Sister Abigail, who had joined the convent in 1979, the year of wind, of nuclear energy and violent revolutions, wondered aloud about the incident. How strange, she said, how could such a thing happen? Surely they will find out who did this? And the rest of the sisters responded with silence, so Sister Abigail never mentioned it again.