Love Medicine

MA

They murmured. I heaved a sigh, and a golden beam of light suddenly broke through the clouded window and flooded down directly on my face. A stroke of perfect luck! They had to be convinced.

Leopolda still knelt in the back of the room. Her knuckles were crammed halfway down her throat. Let me tell you, a saint has senses honed keen as a wolf. I knew that she was over my barrel now. How it happened did not matter. The last thing I remembered was how she flew from the oven and stabbed me. That one thing was most certainly true.

“Come forward, Sister Leopolda. ” I gestured with my heavenly wound.

Oh, it hurt. It bled when I reopened the slight heal.

“Kneel beside me,” I said.

She kneeled, but her voice box evidently did not work, for her mouth opened, shut, opened, but no sound came out. My throat clenched in noble delight I had read of as befitting a saint. She could not speak.

But she was beaten. It was in her eyes. She stared at me now with all the deep hate of the wheel of devilish dust that rolled wild within her emptiness.

“What is it you want to tell me?” I asked. And at last she spoke.

“I have told my Sisters of your passion,” she managed to choke out.

“How the stigmata … the marks of the nails … appeared in your palm and you swooned at the holy vision …… “Yes,” I said curiously.

And then, after a moment, I understood.

Leopolda had saved herself with her quick brain. She had witnessed a miracle. She had hid the fork and told this to the others.

And of course they believed her, because they never knew how Satan came and went or where he took refuge.

“I saw it from the first,” said the large one who put the bread in the oven. “Humility of the spirit. So rare in these girls.”

“I saw it too,” said the other one with great satisfaction. She sighed quietly. “If only it was me.”

now N Leopolda was kneeling bolt upright, face blazing and twitching, a barely held fountain of blasting poison.

“Christ has marked me,” I agreed.

I smiled the saint’s smirk into her face. And then I looked at her.

That was my mistake.

For I saw her kneeling there. Leopolda with her soul like a rubber over boot With her face of a starved rat. With the desperate eyes drowning in the deep wells of her wrongness. There would be no one else after me. And I would leave. I saw Leopolda kneeling within the shambles of her love.

My heart had been about to surge from my chest with the blackness of my joyous heat. Now it dropped. I pitied her. I pitied her. Pity twisted in my stomach like that hook-pole was driven through me. I was caught. It was a feeling more terrible than any amount of boiling water and worse than being forked. Still, still, I could not help what I did.

I had already smiled in a saint’s mealy forgiveness. I heard myself speaking gently.

“Receive the dispensation of my sacred blood,” I whispered.

But there was no heart in it. No joy when she bent to touch the floor.

No dark leaping. I fell back into the white pillows. Blank dust was whirling through the light shafts. My skin was dust.

Dust my lips. Dust the dirty spoons on the ends of my feet.

Rise up! I thought. Rise up and walk! There is no limit to this dust!

L WILD GEESE Gr (1934)