Small Things Like These

Chapter 4 introduces the convent, “a powerful-looking place on the hill at the far side of the river” (26). The Good Shepherd nuns who preside over it run a training school for girls as well as a laundry business that services all the facilities and wealthy homes in town. The townspeople are unsure of the exact nature of the laundry. Rumors spread that the training schoolgirls are corrupt and made to do penance by washing stains out of dirty linen. Others claim the nuns are pure-hearted, long-suffering servants doing the grueling work. Yet another rumor holds that the place is “no better than a mother-and-baby home where common, unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth” (27). If this is true, it means the girls’ own people sent them there, and their children were sent off for adoption to America and Australia, with the nuns pocketing the profit.

Furlong does not like to believe any of these rumors. However, when he goes to the convent to deliver a load of fuel, he encounters a group of women and girls polishing the floor. They are shoeless, look “scalded,” and are poorly cared for.