The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

1. NAKED WOMAN PLAYING CHOPIN

1910–1912

Eighty-some years previous, through a town that was to flourish and past a farm that would disappear, the river slid — all that happened began with that flow of water. The town on its banks was very new and its main street was a long curved road that followed the will of a muddy river full of brush, silt, and oxbows that threw the whole town off the strict clean grid laid out by railroad plat. The river flooded each spring and dragged local backyards into its roil, even though the banks were strengthened with riprap and piled high with rocks torn from reconstructed walls and foundations. It was a hopelessly complicated river, one that froze deceptively, broke rough, drowned one or two every year in its icy run. It was a dead river in some places, one that harbored only carp and bullheads. Wild in others, it lured moose down from Canada into the town limits. When the land along its banks was newly broken, paddleboats and barges of grain moved grandly from its source to Winnipeg, for the river flowed inscrutably north. Across from what would become church land and the town park, over on the Minnesota side, a farm spread generously up and down the river and back into wide hot fields.

The bonanza farm belonged to easterners who had sold a foundry in Vermont and with their money bought the flat vastness that lay along the river. They raised astounding crops when the land was young — rutabagas that weighed sixty pounds, wheat unbearably lush, corn on cobs like truncheons. Then six grasshopper years occurred during which even the handles on the hoes and rakes were eaten and a U.S. cavalry soldier, too, partially devoured while he lay drunk in the insects’ path. The enterprise suffered losses on a grand scale. The farm was split among four brothers, eventually, who then sold off half each so that by the time Berndt Vogel escaped the latest war of Europe, during which he’d been chopped mightily but inconclusively in six places by a lieutenant’s saber and then kicked by a horse so ever after his jaw didn’t shut right, there was just one beautiful and peaceful swatch of land about to go for grabs. In the time it would take for him to gather the money — by forswearing women, drinking cheap beers only, and working twenty-hour days — to retrieve it from the local bank, the price of that farm would drop further, further, and the earth rise up in a great ship of destruction. Sails of dust carried half of Berndt’s lush dirt over the horizon, but enough remained for him to plant and reap six fields.

So Berndt survived. On his land there stood a hangarlike barn that once had housed teams of great blue Percherons and Belgian draft horses. Only one horse was left, old and made of brutal velvet, but the others still moved in the powerful synchronicity of his dreams. Berndt liked to work in the heat of this horse’s breath. The vast building echoed and only one small part was still in use — housing a cow, chickens, one depressed pig. Berndt kept the rest in decent repair not only because as a good German he must waste nothing that had come his way but because he saw in those grand dust-filled shafts of light something he could worship.

The spirit of the farm was there in the lost breath of horses. He fussed over the one remaining mammoth and imagined one day his farm entire, vast and teeming, crews of men under his command, a cookhouse, bunkhouse, equipment, a woman and children sturdily determined to their toil. A garden in which seeds bearing the scented pinks and sharp red geraniums of his childhood were planted and thrived.

How surprised he was to find, one morning, as though sown by the wind and summoned by his dreams, a woman standing barefoot, starved, and frowzy in the doorway of his barn. She was pale but sturdy, angular, a strong flower, very young, nearly bald and dressed in a rough shift. He blinked stupidly at the vision. Light poured around her like smoke and swirled at her gesture of need. She spoke with a low, gravelly abruptness: “Ich habe Hunger.”

By the way she said it, he knew she was a Swabian and therefore — he tried to thrust the thought from his mind — possessing certain unruly habits in bed. She continued to speak, her voice husky and bossy. He passed his hand across his eyes. Through the gown of nearly transparent muslin he could see that her breasts were, excitingly, bound tight to her chest with strips of cloth. He blinked hard. Looking directly into her eyes, he experienced the vertigo of confronting a female who did not blush or look away but held him with an honest human calm. He thought at first she must be a loose woman, fleeing a brothel — had Fargo got so big? Or escaping an evil marriage, perhaps. He didn’t know she was from God.

SISTER CECILIA

In the center of the town on the other side of the river there stood a convent made of yellow bricks. Hauled halfway across Minnesota from Little Falls brickworks by pious drivers, they still held the peculiar sulfurous moth gold of the clay outside that town. The word Fleisch was etched in shallow letters on each one. Fleisch Company Brickworks. Donated to the nuns at cost. The word, of course, was covered by mortar each time a brick was laid. Because she had organized a few discarded bricks behind the convent into the base for a small birdbath, the youngest nun knew, as she gazed at the mute order of the convent’s wall, that she lived within the secret repetition of that one word.

Just six months ago, she was Agnes DeWitt. Now she was Sister Cecilia — shorn, houseled, clothed in black wool and bound in starched linen of heatless white. She not only taught but lived music, existed for those hours when she could be concentrated in her being — which was half music, half divine light, only flesh to the degree she could not admit otherwise. At the piano keyboard, absorbed into the notes that rose beneath her hands, she existed in her essence, a manifestation of compelling sound. Her hands were long and blue veined, very white, startling against her habit. To keep them supple, she rubbed them nightly with lard, sheep’s fat, butter, whatever she could steal from the kitchen. During the day, when she graded papers or used the blackboard, her hands twitched and drummed, patterned and repatterned difficult fingerings. She was no trouble to live with and her obedience was absolute. Only, and with increasing concentration, she played Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy, Schubert, and Chopin.

It wasn’t that she neglected her other duties, rather it was the playing itself — distilled of longing — that disturbed her sisters. In her music Sister Cecilia explored profound emotions. Her phrasing described her faith and doubt, her passion as the bride of Christ, her loneliness, shame, ultimate redemption. The Brahms she played was thoughtful, the Schubert confounding. The Debussy she sneaked in between the covers of a Bach Mass was all contrived nature and yet gorgeous as a meadowlark. Beethoven contained all messages, but her crescendos lacked conviction. However, when it came to the Chopin, she did not use the flowery ornamentation or the endless trills and insipid floribunda of so many of her day. Her playing was of the utmost sincerity. And Chopin, played simply, devastates the heart. Sometimes a pause between the piercing sorrows of minor notes made a sister scrubbing the floor weep into the bucket where she dipped her rag so that the convent’s boards, washed in tears, seemed to creak now in a human tongue. The air of the house thickened with sighs.

Sister Cecilia, however, was emptied. Thinned. It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes. One day, exquisite agony built and released, built higher, released more forcefully until slow heat spread between her fingers, up her arms, stung at the points of her bound breasts and then shot straight down.

Her hands flew off the keyboard — she crouched as though she had been shot, saw yellow spots and then experienced a peaceful wave of oneness in which she entered pure communion. She was locked into the music, held there safely, entirely understood. Such was her innocence that she didn’t know she was experiencing a sexual climax, but believed rather that what she felt was the natural outcome of this particular nocturne played to the utmost of her skills — and so it came to be. Chopin’s spirit became her lover. His flats caressed her. His whole notes sank through her body like clear pebbles. His atmospheric trills were the flicker of a tongue. His pauses before the downward sweep of notes nearly drove her insane.

The Mother Superior knew something had to be done when she herself woke, face bathed with sweat and tears, to the insinuating soft largo of the Prelude in E Minor. In those notes she remembered the death of her mother and sank into the endless afternoon of her loss. The Mother Superior then grew, in her heart, a weed of rage all day against the God who took a mother from a seven-year-old child whose world she was, entirely, without question — heart, arms, guidance, soul — until by evening she felt fury steaming from the hot marrow of her bones and stopped herself.

Oh God, forgive me, the Superior prayed. She considered humunculation, but then rushed down to the piano room, and with all of the strength in her wide old arms gathered and hid from Cecilia every piece of music but the Bach.

After that, for some weeks, there was relief. Sister Cecilia turned to the Two Part Inventions. Her fingers moved on the keys with an insect precision. She played each as though she were constructing an airtight box. Stealthily, once Cecilia went on to Bach’s other works, the Mother Superior removed from the music cabinet and destroyed the Goldberg Variations — clearly capable of lifting into the mind subterranean complexities. Life in the convent returned to normal. The cook, to everyone’s gratitude, stopped preparing the heavy rancid goose-fat-laced beet soup of her youth and stuck to overcooked string beans, boiled cabbage, potatoes. The floors stopped groaning and absorbed fresh wax. The doors ceased to fly open for no reason and closed discreetly. The water stopped rushing continually through the pipes as the sisters no longer took advantage of the new plumbing to drown out the sounds of their emotions.

And then, one day, Sister Cecilia woke with a tightness in her chest. Pains shot across her heart and the red lump in her chest beat like a wild thing caught in a snare of bones. Her throat shut. Her hands, drawn to the keyboard, floated into a long appoggiatura. Then, crash, she was inside a thrusting mazurka. The music came back to her. There was the scent of faint gardenias — his hothouse boutonniere. The silk of his heavy, brown hair. A man’s sharp, sensuous drawing-room sweat. His voice, she heard it, avid and light. It was as though the composer himself had entered the room. Who knows? Surely there was no more desperate, earthly, exacting heart than Cecilia’s. Surely something, however paltry, lies beyond the grave.

At any rate, she played Chopin. Played in utter naturalness until the Mother Superior was forced to shut the cover to the keyboard gently and pull the stool away. Cecilia lifted the lid and played upon her knees. The poor scandalized dame dragged her from the keys. Cecilia crawled back. The Mother, at her wit’s end, sank down and urged the girl to pray. She herself spoke first in apprehension and then in certainty, saying that it was the very devil who had managed to find a way to Cecilia’s soul through the flashing doors of sixteenth notes. Her fears were confirmed when not moments later the gentle sister raised her arms and fists, struck the keys as though the instrument were stone and from the rock her thirst would be quenched. But only discord emerged.

“My child, my dear child,” comforted the Mother, “come away and rest yourself.”

The young nun, breathing deeply, refused. Her severe gray eyes were rimmed in a smoky red. Her lips bled purple. She was in torment. “There is no rest,” she declared, and she then unpinned her veil and studiously dismantled her habit. She folded each piece with reverence and set it upon the piano bench. With each movement the Superior remonstrated with Cecilia in the most tender and compassionate tones. However, just as in the depth of her playing the virgin had become the woman, so the woman in the habit became a woman to the bone. She stripped down to her shift, but no further.

“He wouldn’t want me to go out unprotected,” she told her Mother Superior.

“God?” the older woman asked, bewildered.

“Chopin,” Cecilia answered.

Kissing her dear Mother’s trembling fingers, Cecilia knelt. She made a true genuflection, murmured an act of contrition, and then walked from the convent made of bricks with the secret word pressed between yellow mortar, and the music, her music, which the Mother Superior would keep from then on under lock and key as capable of mayhem.

MISS AGNES DEWITT

So it was Sister Cecilia, or Agnes DeWitt of rural Wisconsin, who appeared before Berndt Vogel in the cavern of the barn and said in her mother’s dialect, for she knew a German when she met one, that she was hungry. She wanted to ask whether he had a piano, but it was clear to her he wouldn’t and at any rate she was exhausted.

“Jetzt muss ich schlafen,” she said after eating half a plate of scalded oatmeal with new milk.

So he took her to his bed, the only bed there was, in the corner of the otherwise empty room. He went out to the barn he loved, covered himself with hay, and lay awake all night listening to the rustling of mice and sensing the soundless predatory glide of the barn owls and the stiff erratic flutter of bats. By morning, he had determined to marry her if she would have him, just so he could unpin and then from her breasts unwind the long strip of cloth that bound her torso. She refused his offer, but she did speak to him of who she was and where from. In that first summary she gave of her life she concluded that she must never marry again, for not only had she wed herself soul to soul to Christ, but she had already been unfaithful — her phantom lover the Polish composer — thus already living out too grievous a destiny to become a bride. In explaining this to Berndt, she merely moved her first pawn in a long game of words and gestures that the two would play over the course of many months. She didn’t know, either, that she had opened to an opponent dogged and ruthless.

Berndt Vogel’s passion engaged him, mind and heart. He now prepared himself. Having dragged army caissons through hip-deep mud after the horses died in torment, having seen his best friend suddenly uncreated into a mass of shrieking pulp, having lived intimately with pouring tumults of eager lice and rats plump with a horrifying food, he was rudimentarily prepared for the suffering he would experience in love. She had also learned her share of discipline and in addition — for the heart of her gender is stretched, pounded, molded, and tempered for its hot task from the age of two — she was a woman.

The two struck up a temporary bargain and set up housekeeping. She still slept in the indoor bed. He stayed in the barn. A month passed. Two. Each morning she lighted the stove and cooked, then heated water in a big tank for laundry and swept the cool wooden floors. Monday she sewed. She baked all day Tuesday. On Wednesdays she churned and scrubbed. She sold the butter and the eggs Thursdays. Killed a chicken every Friday. Saturdays she walked across the bridge into town and practiced the piano in the grade school basement. Sunday she played the organ for Mass and at the close of the day started the next week’s work. Berndt overpaid her. At first she spent her salary on clothing. After she had acquired shoes, stockings, a full set of cotton underclothing and then woolen, too, and material for two housedresses — one patterned with twisted leaves and tiny blue berries and the other of an ivy lattice material — and a sweater and at last a winter coat, after she had earned a blanket, a pillow, a pair of boots, she decided on a piano.

This is where Berndt thought he could maneuver her into marriage, but she proved too cunning for him. It was early in the evening and the yard was pleasant with the sound of grasshoppers. They sat on the porch drinking a glass of sugared lemon water. Every so often, in the ancient six-foot grasses that survived at the margin of the yard, a firefly signaled or a dove cried out its five hollow notes.

“Why do so many birds’ songs consist of five?” she asked idly.

“Five what?” said Berndt.

They drank slowly, she in the sprigged berry dress that skimmed her waist. He noted with disappointment that she wore a normal woman’s underclothing now, had stopped binding her breasts. Perhaps, he thought, he could persuade her to resume her old ways, at least occasionally, just for him. It was a wan hope. She looked so comfortable, so free. She’d taken on a hardiness. Though still thin she had lost her anemic pallor. She had a square boy’s chin and a sturdy, graceful neck. Her arms were brown, muscular. In the sun, her fine hair, growing out in curls, glinted with green-gold sparks of light and her eyes were deceptively clear.

“I can teach music,” she told him. “Piano.” She had decided that her suggestion must sound merely practical, a moneymaking ploy. She did not say how well she could actually play nor did she express any pleasure or zeal, though at the very thought each separate tiny muscle in her hands ached.

“It would be a way of bringing in some money.”

He was left to absorb this. He might have believed her casual proposition, except that Miss DeWitt’s restless fingers gave her away and he noted their insistent motions. She was playing the Adagio of the Pathetique on the arms of her chair, the childhood piece that nervously possessed her from time to time.

“You would need a piano,” he told her. She nodded and held his gaze in that aloof and unbearably sexual way that had first skewered him.

“It’s the sort of thing a husband gives his wife,” he dared.

Her fingers stopped moving. She cast down her eyes in contempt.

“I can walk to town and use the school instrument. I’ve spoken to the school principal already.”

Berndt looked at the three-quarters-moon bone of her ankle, at her foot in the brown, thick-heeled shoe she’d bought. He ached to hold her foot in his lap, untie her oxford shoe with his teeth, move his hands up her leg covering her calf with kisses, breathe against the delicate folds of leafy cloth.

He offered marriage once again. His heart. His troth. His farm. She spurned the lot. The piano. She would simply walk into town. He let her know that he would like to buy the piano, it wasn’t that, but there was not a store for many miles where it could be purchased. She knew better and with exasperated heat described the way that she would, if assisted with his money, go about locating and then acquiring the best piano for the best price. She vowed that she would not purchase the instrument in Fargo, but in Minneapolis. From there, she could get it hauled cheaper than the freight markup. She would take the train to Minneapolis and make her arrangements in one day and return by night in order not to spend one extra dime on either food she couldn’t carry or on a hotel room. When he resisted to the last, she told him that she was leaving. She would find a small room in town and there she would acquire students, give lessons.

She betrayed her desperation. Some clench of her fingers gave her away. It was as much Berndt’s unconfused love of her and wish that she might be happy as any worry she might leave him that finally caused him to agree. In the months he’d known Agnes DeWitt, she had become someone to reckon with. Even he, who understood desperation and self-denial, was finding her proximity most difficult. He worked himself into exhaustion, and his farm prospered. Sleeping in the barn was difficult, but he had set into one wall a bunk room for himself and his hired man. He installed a stove that burned low on unseasonably chilly nights. Only, sometimes, as he looked sleepily into the glowering flanks of iron, he could not help his own fingers moving along the rough mattress in faint imitation of the way he would, if he could ever, touch her hips. He, too, was practicing.

THE CARAMACCHIONE

The last grand piano made by Caramacchione had been shipped to Minneapolis, and remained unsold until Agnes entered the store with her bean-sock of money. She made friends with a hauler out of Morris and he gave her a slow-wagon price. The two accompanied the instrument back to the farm during the dog days. Humid, hot weather was beloved by this particular piano. It tuned itself on muggy days. As the piano moved across the table fields of drought-sucked wheat like a shield, an upended black thing, an ebony locust, Miss Agnes DeWitt mounted the back of the wagon and played to the clouds.

They had to remove one side of the house to get the piano into the front room, and it took four strong men the next day to do the job. By the time the instrument was settled into place by the window, Berndt was persuaded of its necessary presence, and proud. He sent the men away, although the side of the house was still open to the swirling light of stars. Dark breezes moved the curtains; he asked her to play for him. She did. The music gripped her and she did not, could not, stop.

Late that night she turned from the last chord of the simple Nocturne in C Minor into the silence of Berndt’s listening presence. Three slow claps from his large hands died into the waiting quiet. His eyes rested upon her and she returned his gaze with a long and mysterious stare of gentle regard. The side of the house admitted a great swatch of moonlight. Spiders built their webs of phosphorescence across black space. Berndt ticked through what he knew — she would not marry him because she had been married and unfaithful, in her mind at least. He was desperate not to throw her off, repel her, damage the mood set by the boom of nighthawks flying in, swooping out, by the rustle of black oak and willow, by the scent of the blasted petals of summer’s last wild roses. His courage was at its lowest ebb. Fraught with sheer need and emotion he stood before Agnes, finally, and he asked in a low voice, “Schlaf mit mir. Bitte. Schlaf mit mir.”

Agnes looked into his face, openly at last, showing him the great weight of feeling she carried, though not for him. As she had for her Mother Superior, she removed her clothing carefully and folded it, only she did not stop undressing at her shift but continued until she slipped off her large tissue-thin bloomers and seated herself naked at the piano. Her body was a pale blush of silver, and her hands, when they began to move, rose and fell with the simplicity of water.

It became clear to Berndt Vogel, as the music slowly wrapped around him, that he was engaged in something for which he would have had to pay a whore in Fargo, if there really were any whores in Fargo, a great sum to perform. A snake of dark motion flexed down her spine. Her pale buttocks seemed to float off the invisible bench. Her legs moved like a swimmer’s, and he thought he heard her moan. He watched her fingers spin like white shadows across the keys, and found that his body was responding as though he lay fully twined with her underneath a quilt of music and stars. His breath came short, shorter, rasping and ragged. Beyond control, he gasped painfully and gave himself into some furtive cleft of halftones and anger that opened beneath the ice of high keys.

Shocked, weak and wet, Berndt rose and slipped through the open side wall. He trod aimless crop lines until he could allow himself to collapse in the low fervor of night wheat. Sinking back, he bit off a tickle of kernels, chewed the sweet must. It was true, wasn’t it, that the heart was a lying cheat? And as the songs Chopin invented were as much him as his body, so it followed Berndt had just watched the woman he loved make love to a dead man. Furthermore, in watching, he’d sunk into a strange excitement beyond his will and let his seed onto the floor Agnes had just that afternoon scrubbed and waxed. Now, as he listened at some distance to the music, he thought of returning. Imagined the meal of her white shoulders. Shut his eyes and entered the confounding depth between her legs.

BLESSING

Then followed their best times. Together, they constructed a good life in which the erotic merged into the daily so that every task and small kindness was charged with a sexual humor. Agnes DeWitt was perhaps too emotionally arrogant to understand what a precious gift she shared with Berndt. She possessed, and so easily, a love most humans never know, yet are quite willing to die or go mad for. And Agnes had done nothing but find her way into the barn of a good man who had a singular gift for everyday affection as well as the deepest tones of human love.

Through fall and winter, Agnes DeWitt gave music lessons, and although the two weren’t married and Miss DeWitt, existing in a state of mortal sin, took no communion, even the Catholics and their children subscribed. This was because it was well-known that Miss DeWitt’s first commitment had been to Christ. It was understandable that she would have no other marriage, and also, although she did not take the Holy Eucharist upon her tongue she was there at church each morning, faithful and extremely devout. And, so, when the priest spoke from the pulpit, his reference was quite clear.

“Jesus insisted that Mary Magdelene be incorporated into the holy body of his church and it is said by some that in her hands there was celestial music. Her heart clearly contained the divine flame — and she was loved and forgiven.”

Therefore, every morning Miss DeWitt played the church organ. She of course played Bach with a purity of intent purged of any subterranean feeling, but strictly and for God.

ARNOLD “THE ACTOR” ANDERSON

Only a short time into their happiness, the countryside and the small towns were preyed upon by a ring of bank robbers with a fast Overland automobile. This was before small towns even had sheriffs, some of them, let alone a car held in common to chase the precursors of such criminals as Basil “the Owl” Banghart, Ma Barker’s Boys, Alvin Karpus, Henry LaFay. The first, and most insidious, of these men was Arnold “the Actor” Anderson.

The Actor and his troupe of thugs plundered the countryside at will, appearing as though from nowhere and descending into the towns with pitiless ease. The car — the color of which was always reported differently: white one time, gray the next, even blue — always pulled idling into the street before the doors of the bank. The passenger who emerged was sometimes an old man, other times a pregnant woman, a crippled youth, someone who inspired others to acts of polite assistance. A Good Samaritan would open doors and even escort the Actor to the teller, at which point the object of good works would straighten, throw off his disguise, shout to his gang in a ringing voice, and proceed to rob the bank. It would all be over in a trice. Sometimes, of course, there was resistance from a bank official or an intrepid do-gooder, in which case a death or two might result — for the Actor, who took on the disguises and masterminded the activities of the gang, was entirely ruthless and cared nothing for human life. It was said that he could be quite charming as he shot people, even funny. Eight people in the past two years had perished laughing.

One clear but muddy spring day Miss DeWitt removed her egg and butter money from the crevice between two stones in the root cellar. She told Berndt that she was walking to town to deposit the money against the mortgage payment. He agreed, absently. Touched her arm. They’d had a breathless week of sex. Some mornings the two staggered from the bedroom disoriented, still half drunk on the perfume and animal eagerness of the other’s body. These frenzied periods occurred to them, every so often, like spells in the weather. They would be drawn, sink, disappear into their greed until the cow groaned for milking or the hired man banged and swore on the outside gate. If nothing else intervened they’d stop only out of sheer exhaustion. Then they would look at each other oddly, questingly, as though the other person were a complete stranger, and gradually resume their normal treatment of one another, which was offhand and distracted, but with the assurance of people who thought alike. Even when they fought, it was with impatient dispatch. They were eager to get to the exciting part of the fight where they lost their tempers and approached each other with a frisson of rage that turned sexual, so that they could be slightly cruel and then surrender themselves to tenderness.

He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him. Just as he unbuckled his pants to enter her, though, she shoved him off balance, ducked from under his arm, and ran out the door laughing at his awkward hops and shouts. She slowed and picked her way along the ruts of the muddy road, breathing in anticipation of their night. Their night in which she would not refuse him. The huge canopy sky threatened gray-blue in the northwest, but the weather was far away and the wind desultory, the air watery, clear, the buds split in a faint green haze. The first of her tulips were pink at the green lips, ready to bloom. Under the tough grama and side oats, the new shoots of grass were strengthening and gathering their power. She thought of Berndt’s head tossed back, the cords running taut from the corner of his jaw. The way he nearly wept as he threw his famished weight into her again and again, and the way he glanced sideways, hungrily, after, until they began once again. Her need to touch him moved through her like a wave and she stopped, distractedly, passed a hand over her face, almost put her errand off, but then moved on.

The bank was a solid square of Nebraska limestone, great windowed with deep blond sills and brass handles on the doors. The high ceiling was of ornate, white, pressed tin set off by thick crown moldings and a center medallion of sheaves of wheat. In the summer great fans turned the sluggish air, and the velvet-roped lanes and spittoons, the pink and gray mica-flecked granite countertops, and the teller’s cages seemed caught in a dim hush of order while outside the noise of the town continued, erratic. The relationship between the getting of money, a scrabbling and disorderly business, contrasted with the storing of money, an enterprise based on the satisfactory premise that human effort, struggle, even time itself, could be quantified, counted, stacked neatly away in a safe.

Outside, on the day Miss DeWitt walked swiftly into town, the streets seemed unusually quiet and orderly. Even the bum sleeping against the side of the young elm had his arms neatly folded, and the one automobile parked, idling, was an elegant car of the sort — well, yes — she thought, oddly, that a bishop would use. Sure enough who but a priest should remove himself from the back seat kicking to the side his black soutane. With a meek and tentative squint at the bank, through tiny rimless eyeglasses, he made his way up the walk and steps. On the way, he bowed to Miss DeWitt, who followed him respectfully. As they walked together up the roped path in the lobby she said to him, loudly and clearly, in an amused tone of voice, “Sir, why this pretense? You are not a priest!”

Whereupon the stooped old man straightened, magically broadened, and waved a hand across his face very much as she herself had, in the road, to erase her thoughts. Only he erased his character. He removed his glasses and from beneath his robe drew a snub-nosed pistol, which he pointed straight at Miss DeWitt’s forehead.

“Righto,” he said.

There was no other perceptible signal, but all of a sudden another male customer held a gun out as well, first at the chin of a florid redheaded woman teller and then at the broad chest of the other teller, a young dark-haired bristling man. This young former baseball star’s heart filled immediately, then swelled. He wanted to be a hero, but was struggling with the how of it. Foolish! Foolish! Miss DeWitt wanted to tell him. But it was clear from the beginning that he had just the right amount of stubborn stuff in him to be killed. Which he was. When he fell down dead behind his cage of iron, mouth open to catch the punch line of a joke, the money was harder to get. The red-haired woman was handed a canvas bag, called upon to open his drawer, and instructed not to trip the alarm. When she did anyway, the eighteen customers, including Agnes, were all instructed to gather in one corner behind the velvet rope. Exactly, Miss DeWitt thought, like a flock of blank-eyed sheep. There was a shout outside. It was the sheriff, Slow Johnny Mercier, who really was slow and clumsy, and his deputy with him, pistols drawn. They stood just outside the door yelling for the robbers to come out.

It was clear, then, to Miss DeWitt and probably to the others that their sheriff was an amateur and that the professional involved was inside the bank. For the Actor continued gesturing to the red-haired teller to add to the bills, add more and add more. Then, in his dull black robe with its give-away wrinkles, creases that no self-respecting Catholic lay or nun housekeeper would have allowed him to don, and his ridiculous brown Episcopalian shoes, he sprang to the bunched people swift and graceful as a wolf, chose from just behind the rope Miss DeWitt.

He chose her as though choosing a dancing partner. He did everything but bow — walked up to her and took her hand with a polite but peremptory firmness, so that it would not have been out of character with his manner for the two of them to step out onto the dance floor and begin a slow waltz. And it was as though they were engaged in some sort of dance as they walked out the door. Only she was held the wrong way. When she stumbled, perhaps purposely, not following his lead, he wrenched her closer. As he pulled her against the door of the car he’d entered, as she balanced on the running board, he called out, “Come after me and I will blow her head off, Mister Sheriff.”

Then the ragged bum who had sat with arms neatly crossed at the side of the street accelerated the car with a roar. Slow Johnny the sheriff, solid in his tracks, raised his pistol, sighted carefully along the barrel, pulled the trigger, and shot Miss DeWitt. She took the bullet in the hip. So much was happening all at once — more shots fired, mad swerving to avoid an ice truck, two children diving into the roots of a lilac bush, sheer speed — that she felt the impact as a blow that rang her bones, but did not pain her, until the car hit a great freak of earth that nearly threw Miss DeWitt halfway into the open window on the driver’s side. Immediately, she was cast into an almost mystical state of agony. The heavens seemed to open. Black stars rang down. She heard the motor and then, later, more gunshots as from a great, muted distance. Thick strains of music looped through her mental hearing, all jumbled and spectacular. Held on the running board by an arm that seemed strung of pitiless wire, proceeding at a dreamlike pace down the smoothly tamped and rolled roadbeds that led out of town, in a state of clarity and focused keenness she told herself, I am being kidnapped. I have been shot.

As the auto jounced her along she began to lose certainty. In her pain she imagined herself back at the convent in her tiny closet of a room. She closed the door, crawled doglike into the wet bush of unconsciousness, lay huddled small and unknowing. From time to time, she experienced a moment of reprieve. She was capable of standing upright. Gravely, she surveyed the country she passed through and found in the faint spring clouds of green a raw sweetness. The robber’s arm gripped her waist. She gripped the luggage rack. Her hair, unpinned and flying backward, made a short banner in the wet, fresh wind.

The Actor took the old Patterson road, by which she knew he understood the lay of the land, and by which, too, she knew if he took the turnoff he would pass by one of Berndt’s fields, their fields, where Berndt was likely to be working. Her heart pounded in hope. But the driver dressed in rags did not turn and she then thought instantly in great relief that Berndt wouldn’t be put in danger now. Just as she did so, the car sped first past the hired man and then farther on, Berndt, on his big slow horse, plodding. He was dragging along a harrow to be repaired. She tried to hide herself when he came by, but she was still balanced on the running board. So it was, he saw her approach from down the road like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. She stood at grand attention, her one leg a flare of blood. He stopped. His face went slack with uncomprehending shock. She rushed by close enough for their hands to meet and then she was gone, swallowed into the distance.

BERNDT VOGEL

Berndt followed the car not because he saw fear in her eyes — there was none, only a dreamy concentration — but because he grasped the whole scenario. Unhitching the harrow, then turning on his horse, he had no precise notion of her danger or any thought of how to rescue her but acted on instinct and absurdity. He was not afraid for her. Having met her in the first place nearly naked within the smoky radiance of his own barn, he knew she would survive the ordeal. There was always a side to her he could not touch. He felt indeed that she was a woman created of impossibility.

Although he sent his horse along at a smart pace, the car was soon out of sight. He had to keep an eye on the road to know from the tire marks at each turnoff that they had, in fact, stayed on the main road. And they did, moving farther from him at every moment. He moved, following them, wondering in useless desperation the location of Slow Johnny. On the chase?

No, not quite. The sheriff and the deputy, in trying to commandeer a car, met resistance not so much from the owner’s lack of agreement about the need for it, but because Slow Johnny was a notoriously poor driver. Beyond that, the two or three citizens whom he approached thought he would do more harm than good chasing down the Actor and probably get Miss DeWitt completely killed, if not himself, the deputy, and any bystander in a stone’s throw radius.

Berndt was far ahead, then, of any other form of help. As he traveled along behind the Actor’s car, he put his mind to the subject. By the process of recalling certain news items about local robberies, he had pretty well figured out what was happening. His equilibrium failed, and he experienced a wave of terror for Agnes so intense that he whipped the poor horse to a momentary froth. As soon as the Percheron rocked into a huge gallop, Berndt realized that he would kill his horse if he continued. Speed now was useless, and besides, with each mile covered he gained a distinct advantage. The car would eventually run out of gas. The horse, if Berndt was careful to conserve its energy, would last. And then, too, Berndt had the advantage of terrible road conditions. Since it was spring, it would be surprising if any car could get through the big washout Berndt knew of six miles up the road.

THE BLUE HORSE

The Actor’s car ripped through the silent country until, just as Berndt anticipated, they hit the washout. The car shimmied to a perplexed stall. The Actor pulled Agnes roughly into the back seat and the driver revved twice without result. With a fabulous jolt the powerful engine caught and they lurched free, only then to slip off the other side of the road into a more serious predicament. There was no moving, not at all, no matter how the men pushed, roared, swore, kicked. Turning in a circle of frustrated fury, the Actor spied at some distance the horse, the rider.

“Look sharp,” he spoke. The men and he changed suddenly to meeker, commoner sorts and began to work with assiduous uselessness on the car’s engaged tires. Pulling up beside them, Berndt casually offered his assistance. The words did not strangle his throat. He was calm. He tapped his farmer’s brim as he glanced into the back seat. The Actor had spread a blanket over Miss DeWitt’s legs, and she looked all right, though pale and dazzled.

Berndt did not know that the Actor, with an eye to concealing the stolen money, had taken wads of it from the canvas bag. During the ride he had thrust as many bills as he could into his shirt. He had shoved the bag itself under the blanket, next to Miss DeWitt, whom he instructed to not bother getting out of the car. He smiled a genial greeting to Berndt, who nodded at Miss DeWitt, and set to work.

As did she. Quickly, surreptitiously, with a busy intelligence, Agnes pulled sheaves of bills between her fingers and thrust these bills into the ripped lining of her jacket — and was able to feel, in spite of the swooning pain in her hip, that she was very glad to have been a careless seamstress. As for Berndt, by eagerly hooking the good beast to the car’s bumper and making an ostentatious show of straining its powers, Berndt made every appearance of helping the gang. Yet by degrees, through prods and signs, he actually caused the horse to mire them ever deeper. Soon they were in a more helpless state than before. The Actor didn’t see it at first, but then, trained to supersensory human clues, he caught a glance between the farmer and the hostage that betrayed their connection. Just as he moved to grab the reins and question this, there appeared at last Slow Johnny and the deputy, riding in the dead teller’s car.

The men of the law stopped close upon the robbers and gingerly stepped toward them, guns drawn.

“You’re done for,” shouted Slow Johnny.

“Halt, you jackass!”

Crouching so that his body was shielded by the car door and his gun level with the head of Miss DeWitt, the Actor warned off the sheriff.

“Back! Back!” Berndt signaled to Johnny.

“I’ll shoot her, yes by damn I will,” called the Actor.

At a great distance from herself, Agnes felt her mouth open and words emerge. She spoke to the Actor, who cried out, warningly, again. Slow Johnny, though, was hard of hearing as well as slow and he kept walking forward. Berndt saw the thumb of the Actor lift off the hammer of the gun. He struck him just as the gun went off, so that the last Agnes DeWitt saw of the Actor was his unflinching look at her. The last thought she had about him was amazement that he did not regard her words or her life as important or even useful at all, or have a moment’s hesitation about ending all of the thousands of hours of tedious intensity of musical practice, ending the rippling music that her hands could bring into being, ending the episodes of greed and wonder in the arms of Berndt, and the several acts she’d learned to do that men paid whores great sums to perform and that she enjoyed, and further back, ending her time of devotion in the convent where her sisters had already unsewn, pressed, and restitched her habit for another hopeful. None of which was of any consequence. Not even the mountains of prayers for the souls so like his or the vivid attempts beseeching Mary to intercede. Nothing mattered. None of that. And beyond that, to her childhood and the tar roofs of the homestead and the alien bread of her mother’s cruel visions and her father’s terrifying gestures of love and all the precious jumble of her littleness, her thoughts, her creamy baby skin, her howls and burbles, all of this was as nothing to his casual wish to kill her.

This fact smote her as a marvel and a sorrow, and she knew it was because of what she saw, straight on, in the Actor that she so fervently loved Chopin. And God. Now, she had to give herself entirely to God’s will, whatever that might be. And it was just as she wondered, indeed, if for her to die was that will, that the gun went off at her temple and blackness stormed behind her eyes.

While Berndt jumped to her side, the Actor neatly grabbed the reins and somehow pulled himself onto the table-broad back of the horse. He dug in his heels, gave a desperate kick to the horse’s belly, and they were off, though the horse slowed at once just as soon as they entered the vast horizon-bound treeless wet field of thick gumbo. Berndt, kissing Agnes in a strange roar of grief, then followed the Actor, leaving the other two bank robbers and Slow Johnny and the deputy shouting back and forth and leveling their guns but not knowing whom to shoot. Berndt walked straight on. Just as he had when the car sped past, he understood his advantage lay in the increase of distance. He knew how exhausted his horse was, and he knew, too, that he, Berndt, could bend over from time to time to clean off his feet, but his horse could not. Either the Actor would have to dismount, or the horse would eventually slow to a stop, repossessed by the dirt.

And so it was — a low-speed chase.

There in that empty landscape they were a cipher of strained pursuit — one man plodding forward on the horse, the other plodding after. They seemed on that plain and under that spun sky eternal — bound to trudge on to hell no matter what. The clods on the hooves of the horse were soon great rich cakes. Still, on and on, slower, they pressed. Then slower yet so that the Actor kicked in savage indignation until the horse’s flanks bled. Slower yet. Berndt kept coming. The Actor screamed straight into the ear of the horse. With a frantic ripple of muscles it attempted to undo itself from the earth. Only sank itself farther, deeper. Raging, futile, the Actor saw the horse was stuck, leaped off, and put the pistol to its eye.

The shot echoed out, a crack. Another thinner crack echoed, against the mirage horizon. By the time the echo was lost, the horse was dead. Berndt saw his horse kneel in the wet cement dirt the way the animals worshiped the Christ. Then, to Berndt’s grief and rage, there was added a contemptuous bewilderment, which made him capable of what he did next.

The next bullet that the Actor fired struck Berndt in the chest but went through without touching a vital organ. Berndt merely felt a stunning rip of fire. He staggered one step back and then kept moving. When the bullet after that struck him mortally, he seemed to absorb it and strengthen. Rising to the next steps, he skipped from the mud. The Actor’s face stiffened in green shock and he fired point-blank. The empty chamber clicked over just as Berndt clasped the Actor by the shoulders and spoke into his face.

“If you hadn’t shot my horse, you wouldn’t have to die now,” said Berndt, abstractly stating a fact by which he perhaps meant that he would have preferred to deliver the Actor to the terrors of justice, or perhaps that Berndt would have preferred to die in the place of the horse, or yet, that the last bullet would have been his own coup de grâce. As there was life left in him, Berndt set his hands with a dogged weariness upon the Actor’s face, put his thumbs to the gangster’s eyeballs, and pressed, pressed with an inexorable parental dispassion, pressed until it was clear the gangster’s aim would be forever spoiled. Then Berndt toppled forward onto the ground, into the nearly liquid gumbo, pinning the Actor full length.

It was hours before anyone got to the scene and in that time Arnold “the Actor” Anderson could not budge the dead man. Inch by inch, with incremental slowness and tiny sucking noises the earth crept over the Actor and into him, first swallowing his heels, back, elbows, and then stopping up his ears, so his body slowly filled with soupy, rich topsoil. At the last, he could not hear his own scream. Dirt filled his nose and then his tipped up straining mouth. No matter how he spat, the earth kept coming and the mud trickled down his throat. Slowly, infinitely slowly, bronchia by bronchia the earth stopped up each passage of his lungs and packed them tight. The ground absorbed him. When at last the first member of the reluctantly formed posse arrived, he thought at first the robber had escaped, but then saw how only the hands of the Actor, clutching Berndt’s arms and back like a raft, still extended above the level of the horizon.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

After she came to, nursed by her own former sisters in the hospital, a bullet crease shadowing her mind, did Agnes DeWitt sorrow in her bones that she had teasingly pushed Berndt away that morning? Did she dream all that month, while she hovered in and out of death, of his entering and her receiving him? Recall looking into his eyes pillowed close to hers? Long for the rough cup of his hand on her breast? No, not for a moment. Rather, she thought again of music. Chopin. The kind bullet that split and roped her scalp had remarkably fused her musical joys with all memories of Berndt.

She didn’t even recall, donning her jacket, how it came to be fitted behind the satin lining with an astonishing amount of money. Though she’d lost portions of her memory, she had not lost her wits, and she said nothing. Counted it in secret. Kept it safe in a Fargo bank. So she was well off. Berndt had written a will in which he declared her his common-law wife and left to her the farm and all upon it. There, she continued to raise rose-comb bantams, dominickers, reds. She played piano, too, for hours, and practiced more intensely than ever. She began to read. In the convent, she had not been permitted to read beyond her daily prayers and the lives of the saints. Now, with a town library full of volumes she’d never touched, she became a reader. A wolfish, selfish, maddened, hungry reader who let the chickens scream and peck one another to death, who ignored the intelligent loneliness of the pig and forgot to milk the groaning cow. She read or she played piano, did little else except that she did keep teaching. Only her toughest chickens survived.

Perhaps a season or so after Berndt’s death, her students noticed she would stop in the middle of a lesson and either pick up a book to gulp a page in with her eyes, or smile out the window as though welcoming a long expected visitor. One day the neighbor children went to pick up the usual order of eggs and were most struck to see the white-and-black-flecked dominickers flapping up in alarm around Miss DeWitt as she stood bare upon the green grass.

Tough, nonchalant, legs slightly bowed, breasts jutting a bit to either side and the dark flare of hair flicking up the center of her. Naked. She looked at the students with remote kindness. Asked, “How many dozen?” Walked off to gather the eggs.

That episode with the chickens made the gossip table rounds. People put it off to Berndt’s death and an unstringing of her nerves. Still, she lost only a Lutheran student or two. She continued playing the organ for Mass, the celestial Bach, and at home, in the black, black nights, Chopin. As she had formerly when a Christ-dedicated virgin, she played with unbearable simplicity. Her music was so finely told it hurt to listen to the notes that struck the high sweet breeze. If she was asked, once, by an innocent student too young to understand the meaning of discretion but having overheard some story about Miss Agnes DeWitt — some very alert student longing perhaps to see the dimple where the bullet was dug from her hip or push aside the lively darts and strands of her hair to find the curved clef of a scar — if that student were to ask Miss Agnes DeWitt why she did not wear her clothes, sometimes, Miss Agnes DeWitt would answer that she removed her clothing when she played the music of a particular composer, when she played at her finest, and when the mood would strike her. No other display of appreciation could express her pure intent. Miss DeWitt would meditatively nod and say in the firmest manner that when one enters into the presence of such music, one should be naked. And then she would touch the keys.

FATHER DAMIEN MODESTE

(THE FIRST)

When she didn’t show up for several days on end to play the organ, it was known that Miss DeWitt was suffering from nerves again. Incrementally, tortuously, unnecessarily, she was unblessed by tiny fragments of memory. Berndt materialized, cruelly, touch by touch, until he was all there but not there. A word and a look, a moment they had spent together, had apparently entered the heart of Agnes to be kept sealed and safe until, for no particular reason, she was to be tormented by an elusive recovery. She shut herself away. Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship. Some grieve with tears and some with dry howls. Some grieve like water, some burn. Some are fuel for the fire of sorrow and some are stone. Agnes was pure slate, dark and impenetrable.

Even books didn’t help — she began and discarded them until they threatened her couch in tottering stacks.

A priest en route to his Indian mission and taking wayfarer’s advantage of the local rectory’s hospitality was dispatched to the suffering widow with communion — of which she now partook as she lived no longer in a state of mortal sin. She heard his knock, but did not rise to meet him, only called out from her place on the couch that he should enter, and so he did. Father Damien Modeste was a small, prunish, inquisitive man of middle age who had been called by his God, from a comfortable parish near Chicago, to missionize Indians. Momentarily intrigued, she sat up, but then almost immediately she lost interest. He gave her communion. Took what food she’d set out. And then, as she was silent in her blanket, brooding, he remained a bit longer and attempted to raise her spirits by telling her of his zeal.

“I am going north,” he insisted, and went into detail regarding the harrowing details of his trip to the reservation. “Letters addressed to me by my fellow priest, Father Hugo, confirm the deep need for my service. Oh, there had been inroads. We are not the first generation of priests, but the devil…”

Here Father Damien paused, gauging Miss DeWitt’s despairing reserve, licked his thin lips, and went on, “The devil works with a shrewd persistence, Miss DeWitt, and is never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven. Our labor is required here on earth, in the ordinary world. Evil, oh yes, evil—”

“What do you know of evil?” Miss DeWitt’s attention shifted suddenly from the acorn pattern of the wallpaper to the prematurely withered face of the missionary. He opened his mouth to go eagerly forward. But before he could speak, Miss DeWitt did.

“I’ve seen evil,” she told her confessor, firmly. “It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size ten. The feet are narrow. The hands are square. The build is slight and I’d say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I’ve seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock.”

Father Modeste, already in possession of the story, nodded with barely hidden avidity.

“God dispensed great justice that day.”

“Selectively.”

Now Miss DeWitt glared tiredly at her piano.

“I couldn’t play this afternoon. Something haunts me, as though another terrible memory is ready to pour into my mind and only a sheer finger’s breadth of earth is holding it in place.”

“I suppose you are referring”—here Father Damien coughed delicately—“to your… ah… companion.”

“Yes,” Agnes admitted, unwillingly. She hated being pegged and didn’t much like this priest with the avid eyes. She touched the frail mend of the bullet’s crease. “Only a short time ago, I was a sister in the local convent, having taken my temporary vows at a very young age. I remember every word, every Mass, every confession I made, every note I played. But only at times do I remember Berndt’s features. And yet I recall with unwished clarity the face of the man who killed him! Fortunately, I often see another man, one I’ve never met, hair parted far over to the left, a deep-eyed brow, a broad, beaky nose, a small and rather full mouth and low cheekbones, lumpy and sad.”

“Is it him?” The priest was curious.

“Him who?”

“Your companion, may he rest—”

“No, not him,” said Agnes DeWitt, her fingers moving suddenly, flying on the tea plate, tapping, possessed by the thought of the photograph reproduced in the frontispiece of her favorite musical text. Chopin! Chopin! Father Modeste changed the subject in some bemusement. What was there to say? He tried to round the horn and cleave to his original subject all in one sentence.

“Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways. For that reason, I’ve studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo. Ah, poor unfortunate Father Hugo! His death of the sweating fever was compared by witnesses, I have it in a letter, to Christ’s agony in the garden. Blood, yes, beads of it all over him. He sweated blood from every pore of his body.”

Diverted, Agnes imagined the scene. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked, but her voice was mocking, for truly, there was more to fear for her in a simple bank visit.

Father Damien raked his strands of hair back. His hand was a yellow claw. Something about the distracted way he mumbled out an answer in the negative told Agnes that he was, indeed, nervously disposed. The urge to tease him came upon her.

“I would be afraid,” she said. “Not so much of the Indians themselves, but of the many plagues and vermin that assail them — most pathetic of all God’s doomed creatures! Lice are very catching, for instance, and the devil trains them to descend in droves on the unwary priest who forgets to bless himself before he enters one of their homes.”

Father Damien was silent in surprise.

“Oh, I’ll bless myself all right,” he said at last. “With a lye bath every week. And constitutionals. I will look after my health.”

Agnes DeWitt could not help but tease more sharply. “Will you really bathe in lye? How brutal! And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in séances.”

“Most likely.”

“Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne.”

“No doubt.”

“There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers!”

Father Damien could not help glancing down at his lean thighs, pressed together under his cassock. They didn’t look all that tempting even to him. He really had to go. He dispensed a quick blessing and left with the cookies pressed on him by Agnes DeWitt, whom he had managed, though not by the avenues he’d attempted, to cheer so thoroughly that she rose from her couch, folded her blanket, and sitting down at her piano laughed so hard her fingers dropped off the keys.

THE MISSION

Into her brooding there intruded an absurd fantasy, the possibility of escape, though it was to a place few would consider so — the mission and the missionary life. She thought of doing good. Alleviating the pain that others felt might help to assuage her own. She began to pray, asked to regain the clarity of her original religious impulse, her early vocation. Chopin had stolen her from Christ to give to Berndt. Christ had stolen Berndt from her to take for himself. Now she had only her Chopin, his music, for Christ was preoccupied with introducing Berndt to all of the other farmers in heaven and for Agnes he seemed to have no time. She prayed. He did not answer. Chopin was more reliable. She could not stand the farm — not without Berndt. Now that she remembered him, the place was treacherous with the raw ache of memory that returned in unexpected bits, then vanished before she could get the whole of it firmly laid out in her mind.

In her thoughts, she spoke to the priest again, questioned him strenuously, found her own answers. The Ojibwe, she had heard, the Indians up north, were an agreeable people not known for their ferocious instincts, even in the past. She was, of course, not afraid. She was curious, and her curious nature led her down tangled pathways. What was it like up there — wild? She could understand wild. Though her world was tame, the peace she sought was lost within the wilderness of her own heart. Sometimes she howled and savagely tore the wallpaper of her bedroom and then lay on the floor. Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief.

THE FLOOD

The river pushed over the banks that spring and ripped from the ground the dead horse, the mired car, and the money that had lain unseen underneath the gangster, fallen out of the waistband of the trousers he’d worn under the cassock. The horse swirled to pieces, the car tipped slowly downward, the money floated in thin wads straight north and was in a month or two plowed into the earth of a Pembina potato field. Meanwhile, Agnes kept hers locked in the Fargo bank. Tracing her elusive memories, she had gone where life was deepest many times, and she did not fear the rain. Of course, she did not know the history of the stream — at times deceptively sluggish or narrow as a whip, then all of a sudden pooling in a great, wide, dangerous lake with powerful currents that moved earth in tons. What began as a sheer mist became an even sprinkle and then developed into a slow, pounding shower that lasted three days, then four, then on the fifth day when it should have tapered off, increased.

The river boiled along swiftly, a pour of gray soup still contained, just barely, within its high banks. On day six the rain stopped, or seemed to. The storm had moved upstream. All day while the sun shone pleasantly the river heaved itself up, tore into its flow new trees and boulders, created tip-ups, washouts, areas of singing turbulence.

Agnes rushed about uneasily, pitching hay into the high loft, throwing chickens up after the hay, wishing she could toss the house up as well, and of course the fabulous piano. But the piano was earth anchored and well tuned by the rainy air, so instead of fruitless worry, Agnes lost herself in practice. She had an inner conviction that, no matter how wide the river spread, it would stop at her front doorstep.

She didn’t know.

Once this river started to move, it was a thing that gained assurance. It had no problem with fences or gates, wispy windbreaks, ditches. It simply leveled or attained the level of whatever stood in its path. And moved on, closer. Water jumped up the grass lawn and collected in the flower beds. The river tugged itself up the porch and into the house from one side. From the other side it undermined an already weak foundation that had temporarily shored up the same wall once removed to make way for the piano. The river tore against the house from all around. And then, like a child tipping out a piece of candy from a box, the water surged underneath, rocked the floor, and the piano crashed through the weakened wall.

It landed in the swift current of the yard, Agnes with it. The white treble clef of her flannel nightdress billowed as she spun away, clutching the curved lid. The thing was pushed along, bobbing off the bottom of the flower beds first and then, as muscular new eddies caught it, touching down on the shifting lanes of Berndt’s wheat fields, and farther, until the revolving instrument and the woman on it reached the original river, that powerful vein, and plunged in. They were carried not more than a hundred feet before the piano lost momentum and sank. As it went down Agnes thought at first of crawling into its box, nestling as though for safety among the cold, dead keys. So attached was she to the instrument that she could not imagine parting from it but, as she actually struggled with the hinged cover, Agnes lost her grip and was swept straight north.

2. IN THE THRALL OF THE GRAPE

REPORT THE FIRST

THE MIRACLE OF MY DISGUISE

3 A.M., March 20, 1996

Your Holiness, I was the woman on the lid of the piano.

Agnes. Beloved of Chopin and Berndt Vogel, raiser of chickens, groomer of blue horse, girl shot by the Actor. Student of memory. I remember some things and have forgotten others. I do know that I was tumbled into the flood of the cold Red River, which is not red but a punishing gray. Whirling once, twice. Even now, the ride stands clear. I sank toward the sludge bottom, struggling in my gown, my shoes like clods on my feet. I had the sense to tear them off and tried to get the nightdress, too, but I had sewn it with too many buttons. This proved my salvation, as it filled with air and ballooned around my shoulders like a life buoy. So I whirled off. I opened my mouth to wail. There was darkness, and I sank into its murmur.

I met the undertow, a quick dark funnel not visible from shore. It must have pulled me farther down the stream, for when I came up, I was floating swiftly, moving in a grand swell. The current crested at the surface and all I had to do was paddle lightly. Even in my swirling gown, it took almost no effort. My dress caught air and floated behind me like a wedding train. It could have dragged me under, but instead I was pushed along. Buoyant, I dropped fear, dropped worry, went beyond cold into a state beyond numb. The rush was so swift and strong.

Blessed One, I now believe in that river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new. Memories resurfaced. Berndt’s square hand in mine. The careful baritone of his warm voice. Perhaps, soon, I would join him. Then again perhaps I would live. The latter prospect suddenly intrigued me. I looked at the banks as I swept by and I wondered why Agnes was sad in such a strange world. Things look different from the middle of a flooded river. In the flow, time is erased. I had new eyes. Branches of toppled trees and upended roots. Houses split. The banks undercut and caving. Cows. Horses. Cows.

I took the groaning roar that widened before me to be the mouth of a great white drop, and yet I stayed calm. I moved on faster, faster. But it was not tangled white foam rapids that met me. Instead, it was a drowning herd of cows, hundreds of cows. Wedged in trees, they had made a floating bridge so compact that I stepped, half frozen, onto it like a raft, stumbled across to the bank, fell off there to firm ground.

Once my feet touched solid earth fear came over me. I went utterly weak; my strength drained. I sank upon the ground and knew nothing more.

MIRACLE THE SECOND

DIVINE RESCUE OF MISS DEWITT

1912

Knocked out by exhausted fear, Agnes slept. That cessation of awareness proved a bridge between her old life and her new life. Before she woke, she was one who believed without seeing, felt spiritual emotion without experience of its source, kept an orderly faith and haphazard observance without the deepest marks of conviction. Creation had spoken to her in ways she could encompass — in the splendor of sexual love, the grand Dakota sky, the arcane language of cramped, black musical notes. Yet her God had never sent a spirit, never spoken to her directly, never employed a visible shape or touched Agnes with a divine hand, unless you believe that God’s hand was Berndt’s and nudged the wrist of the Actor, causing the bullet to plow a shallow groove instead of to burrow deep. She had believed in her music. Now she was to lose that. But that loss would be replaced.

She woke later, who knows how much later.

It was night. Lamplight, a glowing glass, a roof over her, four walls. Agnes found that she was lying on a bed, covered with a quilt and a sheepskin. The air was heavy and warm with the smell of cooking venison and she was hungry. Beyond all measure, starving! She was young, barely a woman, and never full. A spoon was held to her lips. She moved toward it, lured like an animal, and she tasted a broth of meat that brought tears to her eyes. Then she saw a man’s hands held the spoon and the bowl. She slid her gaze up his strong arms, his shoulders, to his broad and open face.

Kindness was there, sheer kindness, a radiance from within him fell upon her and it was like a pool of warm sunlight.

Instantly, she remembered the river.

“Who are you?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer she grabbed the bowl and drank its contents with such a steady greed that it was only when she’d reached the very bottom that she realized several things all at once: they were alone in the tiny hut, no woman had prepared the soup, and she was naked in the bed.

The sheepskin dropped away from her body, and she felt the slight breeze of his breath along her throat. He stroked her hair, smiled at her. She felt warmth along her thighs, hovering elation. Bands of rippling lightness engulfed her when he moved closer. And then his hand, brutalized and heavy from work, fell gently as he held her arm and took away the empty bowl, the horn spoon, and wiped her lips. She felt his rough hair as he leaned closer, as he moved his length alongside her on the creaking boards, as he slowly turned her toward him. His breathing deepened, he relaxed. She lay there, too, spent and comfortable, curled against a sweetly sleeping man, a very tired man who smelled of resin from the wood he’d chopped, of metal from the tools he’d used, of hay, of sweat, of great and nameless things that she’d known, as in a dream, in her human husband’s arms.

She lay her head beside him, and although she remained awake for many hours in that beautiful stillness, listening to his even breath, eventually she, too, fell asleep.

Morning dawned with rain on the wind, the sky a sheet of gray light. Agnes remembered where she was, turned, and found that he was gone. Not only that, but she was lying in no comfortable settler’s shack, but in an empty shell of a long abandoned hovel with the wind whipping through, swallows’ nests in the eaves, no sign of the man, no bowl, no track, no spoon, no sheepskin covering or blanket. Only her nightclothes fit back onto her, dry, still smelling of the river. She stood in the doorway for a long while. As she stood there, she gradually came to understand what had happened.

Through You, in You, with You. Aren’t those beautiful words? For of course she knew her husband long before she met Him, long before He rescued her, long before He fed her broth and held Agnes close to Him all through that quiet night.

Dear Pontiff,

Since then, through the years, my love and wonder have steadily increased. Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death? How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend Him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships.

Modeste

THE EXCHANGE

Disoriented, Agnes walked farther north instead of south, for the river’s flow was mixed up in swirls and futile commotions now and there was no clear sign of the current’s force. The sky, too, was a low ceiling of thick gray through which the sunlight diffused evenly over the flooded landscape — no direction to be gathered. So Agnes walked and in walking she saw too much. A tangle of rats. Skeletal twisted machinery from tattered farms. A baby carriage with no baby in it. Pieces of houses. A basket of eggs afloat. A priest hanging on a branch.

Not far up the river Agnes DeWitt came upon poor Father Damien Modeste, whom she freely admitted she disliked even as she pitied him now. The drowned man was snagged in a tree, gaping down at her with a wide-eyed and upside-down quizzicality. The wreckage of the rectory auto was already sucked upstream, if he had taken the auto. She didn’t know. Perhaps he was on foot. For a long while, she sat near the tree with the body, considering. She prayed for a sign — what to do? But she already knew. Once she was ready, she acted. She dislodged the priest with a branch that she used like a hook, pulling him down. His body, weighted like a sand-filled sack, shook the loose roots of the tree as it struck the ground. The man was green-white, and in his death more powerful than in life, more severe. Agnes had no way of digging him a grave but to use her two hands. The ground beneath was so soft, so saturated, that she was able to scrape out a rough hole to fit him, though it took her the day. All the time that she worked, the certainty grew.

It was nearly twilight before she rolled him in. Her heavy nightgown was his shroud. His clothing, his cassock, and the small bundle tangled about him, a traveler’s pouch tied underneath all else, Agnes put on in the exact order he had worn them. A small sharp knife in that traveler’s pocket was her barber’s scissors — she trimmed off her hair and then she buried it with him as though, even this pitiable, he was the keeper of her old life.

She could think of nothing to which she was required to return. In fact, as though the cold water had flooded her brain, her memory, again, was a distressing patchwork of eroding islands. Berndt was gone, she knew that, and she remembered that she had loved him, she thought. Also gone: the blue horse, her lovely lattice dress, her leather boots, and even her chickens were probably drowned, too. She could at least recall the chickens in reassuring detail, each of them particular and opinionated. The hens made such a proud fuss over each new egg. Even in the muck, covering the dead priest, she nearly laughed, thinking of her chickens. Then she breathed out, troubled.

There was something, something… it was huge and it belonged to her, and it was vast…. When she tried to grasp at it the form faded like a dream. A grand dream, prophetic and important. Lines, black dots. She shook her head. Whatever it was, gleaming for a moment, shiny black, had it to do with her hands? She flexed her fingers doubtfully. Sound? She hummed a few bars of Die Lorelei, German Lied. Was she a singer? She cleared her throat, tried her voice. No, that definitely wasn’t it. Well, whatever it was, it was gone. She had no way of knowing that she had lost the vast gift of her music, but she did have the sense that the stark, searching motions of her hands were part of some larger complex of actions. Well, she shrugged, let them tingle away on the ends of her arms. Let them drum, and step-march and ripple. There was nothing to hold her back, now, from living the way she had dreamed of in the hot dark of her loss.

When Father Damien’s grave was tamped over, she stood hungrily in the wreckage as the dusk winds blew the clouds aside. The clear sky revealed its map, star after star, until the world was again marked out for her. In the priest’s hidden pouch there was money, some papers, a crust of cheese. A biscuit spongy with river water. She squeezed out the biscuit and ate the handful of crushed wet crumbs. The priest’s clothes were wool. Though damp, she was warm enough. In time, the moon bobbed up in a cool blur to show her way, and then, under its light, Agnes began to walk north, into the land of the Ojibwe, to the place on the reservation where he had told her he was bound.

3. LITTLE NO HORSE

1996

A gentle morning. Lucid, calm, the sky a sweet wash of virgin’s cloak blue and a sparkling freshness of temperature. A visitor knocked loud and hard on Father Damien’s door, but there was no answer because wild floods raged in Father Damien’s sleeping head. Trees cracked over in his dreams. Walls crumbled into the river. Stones. The visitor, a priest, grew discouraged and left, but returned in the early afternoon to find Damien sitting just outside the door on his tiny patio, snoring mildly in the unusually warm slant rays of sun. Although the visiting priest drew a chair up noisily and sat, creaking and shifting his weight, although he coughed and even muttered aloud, Father Damien did not stir. The visitor was forced either to disturb the ancient one or to wait with uncharacteristic patience for the old priest to awaken naturally.

The man’s vibrant red-gray hair was plastered down in stubborn tufts. Though polite, he looked from his sharp eye to have a temper and a fluent tongue. He was Jude Miller, a thickly built, shrewd and impatient priest. An athletic concentration in his stance suggested a man anticipating a tennis serve… that never came. At last, he folded his arms, the forearms lightly downed in coppery hair, and put one hand to his squared-off jaw. His fingers were blunt and he looked to have a powerful grip. He wore a clerical collar, a casual short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and soft-soled court shoes. After sitting in obvious frustration, he came to a decision to use his time, somehow, if only to observe. He leaned forward in scrutiny of the old priest, who still slept in warm sunlight next to the remains of a late breakfast.

In his age, Father Damien had developed the odd and almost alien appearance of a wrinkled but innocent child. His head still grew bits of fluff and it was large in proportion to the rest of him. His body was hunched and leathery, his lean arms and legs bent wood. Because of his tender feet, he wore soft moccasins at all times. On his off days, he shuffled to keep his balance and used two canes, one in each hand, like ski poles to anchor and guide him. Other days, he was fervently young and walked in surprisingly limber strides. When asked, he said the source of his longevity was not God but the devil, who constantly tempted him with healthy idleness. He took long walks around and around the yard, the grounds of the church, the cemetery where he greeted and sometimes reminisced with the dead — for Father Damien was more connected with them than with the living, and even sensed their changing moods.

Father Jude Miller took in the venerable, elfin appearance of the man who slept, head thrown back in the chair, sensitive mouth slightly gaping in a frown. Other than his mouth, the old priest rested neatly, feet close together, hands clasped, head cradled by the fold of the battered easy chair.

A great leaf-shaped pattern of clouds passed over the sun, and a breeze lifted, but the day was still unseasonably warm. Now, as though summoned from within, the still sleeping Damien leaned forward and propped his hands on his knees. His eyes drifted calmly open. They were vast and staring, and had returned to the murky blue of newborn’s eyes, so his look had a fixed, blind, amphibious clarity. He gazed straight at Father Jude. “Are you there, my Lord?” said Father Damien. “Where is the soup?” Father Jude Miller had heard of the old man’s waking confusion. Instead of pursuing any possible answer he sat in polite suspense until Father Damien’s thoughts focused. It took some time. At first, Father Damien called the younger priest closer and whispered in some anxiety that there were no stamps. He needed stamps. Foreign postage. Airmail.

“Commemoratives, please,” said Father Damien, looking significantly at the visitor. He fumbled two letter-folded pages from his gown and thrust them at Father Miller, who read in some bewilderment.

Most Estimable Pontiff,

Having revealed to you the specifics of my story, it is my profound hope that you will take into consideration my motives in assuming the identity of your drowned and wretched servant Modeste. I can only think how heavily my unusual act must weigh upon your sense of the right and proper order of your servants’ vocations. However, should you be indisposed to mercy, may I request that you take into consideration the seven principal goods I have accomplished on this most lonely of God’s outposts?

Number one: I have vanquished the devil, who has come to me in the form of a black dog.

I have also contained, discharged, influenced, and negated the dangerous pieties of a nun of questionable allegiance (this requires a separate letter).

Two: I have caused there to be cleanly disposal of wastes that threatened the health of our parish. I have made improvements in the style, location, and comfort of the venerable institution known as the outhouse.

Three: I have introduced the wholesome peanut to the diet of the indigenes.

Four: I have willingly exchanged my prospects for eternal joy in return for the salvation of the soul of one of the more troublesome of my charges (who loves me but who doesn’t in the least appreciate my sacrifice).

Five: In resolving a specific injustice levied by the ignorance of government officials, I have assisted in attempting to add twelve townships to the tribal land base.

Six: Although my mind is a tissue of holes, I have learned something of the formidable language of my people, and translated catechism as well as specific teachings. I have also rendered into English certain points of their own philosophy that illuminate the precious being of the Holy Ghost.

Seven: I have discovered an unlikely truth that may interest Your Holiness. The ordinary as well as esoteric forms of worship engaged in by the Ojibwe are sound, even compatible with the teachings of Christ.

Lastly, this. May I ask if you would be so specifically kind as to answer this letter!

I remain, a hopeful penitent,

Yours in the Lamb.

Father Damien Modeste

As though suddenly realizing he had broken some taboo, the old priest snatched the letter from Jude Miller’s hands.

“Who are you?”

Trying to regain his balance, Father Jude introduced himself.

“Believe it or not,” he said, with self-deprecating amusement, “I am sent here by the Vatican.”

There was an eerie sweep of wind through the trees. Then silence. The old priest took this news like an electric blow and went rigid in his chair. The current of the statement so held him that Father Jude became concerned, at last, that the old priest’s heart had seized. Just as he was reaching forward to take his pulse, Father Damien sagged forward onto his knees. Arms outstretched, he tried to speak but could not, although an odd sound caught in his throat, eft, eft. His head nodded back and forth, slowly, unbelievingly. An expression of wordless wonder gradually fixed itself onto his features and then joy welled in Father Damien’s eyes, spilled over, sank down his cheeks.

A good long while passed before Father Jude Miller dared address the old priest again, for the palpitations of the old man’s frail heart caused a dizzy sweat and then his lungs, brittle with age, shuddered in his chest like rawhide sacks and refused to inflate properly. But, although when he tried to speak, Father Damien’s skin mottled and his lips went cyotic blue, he managed to welcome the visitor he believed had come straight from the Pope. He even managed to address him in Italian phrases he had memorized for the occasion. All of this alarmed Jude, but just as he was about to rush for the phone to summon an ambulance from the reservation hospital, Father Damien emitted a huge dragging cough. Loud as a death rattle, it had the effect of clearing his chest and restoring his oxygen so that he suddenly snapped back to consciousness.

“Ah, bene, bene,” he declared, gazing happily at Father Jude. “And when does the inquiry into the life of Leopolda begin?”

Father Jude, whose mission it was to impart the news of the inquiry, a most highly secret undertaking entrusted to him by eminent Catholic authorities, was taken aback. The route to sainthood was exhaustive and the proceedings highly confidential. Not only was he having trouble adjusting to Father Damien’s instant recovery, but the old priest behaved as though he knew in advance his visitor’s commission. In a way, this was irritating. Never before had Father Jude’s assistance been required by Church authority at such exalted levels, never before had he imagined, even, the type of trust that was abruptly bestowed on him by reason of his lifelong proximity to the people and places now in question. What was for him an awesome and unexpected undertaking, however, seemed for Father Damien entirely expected.

“A lay Catholic, a professor of sorts, has introduced the subject. She has written a great deal on Sister Leopolda but from, you understand, an academic standpoint. We are looking now for firsthand and thoroughly witnessed fact.”

Father Damien took this information to himself with prideful glee. Father Jude was nonplussed at such enthusiasm.

“And who will form the council, do you think?” Father Damien now inquired in the bright tones of a younger man. As though he was still involved in the machinery of the Church, he began to speculate aloud. Some of those whom the old priest named were dead or married. Still, he was not so entirely out of touch as his feeble appearance would excuse. The old one named several eminent scholars, Jesuits who were known as investigators, and he inquired shrewdly after the opinions of Bishops Retzlaff and Kelly, Archbishop Day, and the status of any petitions or people’s acclamations. In addition, he asked whether proofs had yet been furnished of Leopolda’s intercessions and gave his opinion that the most delicate points would rest upon the singular question of her mode of existence.

“By which you mean…” Father Jude gazed into the fairy-pale face, the white hair spread in a flossy halo, the great uncanny eyes.

“Her daily example.” Father Damien raised one finger in the air. “Did she lead an exemplary existence? Was she fair, was she honest? Did she give up her foodstuffs, her blankets, her comforts to the poor? Did she have any bad habits, tipple unblessed communion wine? Smoke?” Here Father Damien gave a dry cruel laugh that surprised Jude. “Had Sister Leopolda indulged herself in some area she might have sinned less forcefully in others…? Yes, yes! If only she had smoked!”

Father Damien held up two fingers in a V.

“I don’t smoke,” said Father Jude.

“Well then, look, neshke… I only have one on special occasions.”

Early on, Ojibwe words and phrases had crept into Damien’s waking speech and now sometimes he lapsed into the tongue, especially in his frequent confusion over whom he was addressing.

“Neshke! Daga naazh opwaagaansz!” He gestured again at a small tin box set on the tilting plastic lawn table. Father Jude opened the box, removed a cigarette from a package, lighted it for the old priest, and then sat down patiently to wait as Father Damien breathed in the rank, dry heat. As he intermittently drew quiet puffs and gazed into the fractured halos of moving branches, he spoke.

“Now tell me”—Father Damien’s lips pursed in a calculating bud—“what would be the most, let us say, effective time to reveal what I know of this departed nun’s character?”

Father Jude attempted a reply, but the side-to-side jolts of Father Damien’s mental processes were wearing. Father Damien disregarded the other priest, smoothed his cassock thoughtfully around his knees, adjusted his eyeglass lenses along his nose, and continued in tones of firm analysis.

“I would like to establish myself as the crucial witness in the archive. I want to tread the quicksand of the bureaucratic process. I want to walk on hidden trails of solid ground! I have lived, I believe”—here Father Damien raised a finger to his lips, inhaled absently from the now dead cigarette—“a quiet life. I have sought no following, engaged in no behaviors, holy or otherwise, that would bring me notoriety. I have done only as I was directed by Jesus, with whom I have a personal understanding. In no way have I attempted to invoke or incite spiritual response from others based solely on features of my own personality. I have tried, in other words, to serve God invisibly.”

Father Jude Miller held his peace with an air of vacant gravity. He believed he knew where the old priest was heading, and he did agree: the nun in question’s life had been a contrast. No retiring servant was she, Leopolda, but a fiercely masterful woman whose resounding bitterness of spirit had nonetheless resulted in acts of troubling goodness, inspirations, even miraculous involvements. Which raised the question: Were saints only saints by virtue of their influence, their following, their reputation for the marvelous, or was there room for personal failure — especially when, as evidenced by the miracles and eighteen letters so far, the results of that difficult life were so dramatically good?

“I have here,” said Father Jude, “a copy of a crudely written letter that I will read to you in order to inform you more thoroughly on the important uncertainties we face in regard to Leopolda.”

“By all means.”

“ ‘Dear Bishop,’ ” read Father Jude, “ ‘I run my farming operation just west of town nearby which the place is where the nun Leopolda was hit by lightning and her ashes blown into the convent beehives produced in one $2.99 jar (large) of honey I bought from there concern the following cure of livelong piles….’ ”

Father Damien remained impassive as Jude finished out the missive.

“And this one,” Father Jude went on, choosing from a file folder he had with him. “ ‘I am a strict atheist engaged in the practice of medicine. My specialty is cardiac surgery. My private practice, based in Fargo, North Dakota, encompasses unusual cases from the surrounding region. In February of this year I saw a young girl who suffered a severe case of an unusual virus that destroyed the membrane surrounding the heart and had begun to attack the muscle itself…’ ”

“That last,” said Father Damien, lips pressed in a worried line, “fully documented?”

“Complete.”

“Ah then…” Father Damien shook his head. Consternation soured his features. “What to make of it. Medical cures!”

“Well, the one, the first…” Father Jude shook his head, raised his brows.

“I would never make light of piles,” said Father Damien, “but is there incontrovertible proof that this man suffered from hemorrhoids through the course of his life and then was cured by the honey sold by the bee-keeping nuns? The proof is marginal, at best.

“And this ash and bee connection, what of that?” Father Damien went on. “Can you shed some light on that?”

“What light I can.” Father Jude took a long sip of water. “According to the most lucid witness — the person who saw Leopolda in the hour before her death — Leopolda was left in the garden to pray, and of course, as we regret, struck by a bolt of lightning. Next morning, we remarked on the mysterious cross made of ash that was found in the place she’d been left — of course no one knew she was missing yet. The ash blew into the flowers. The flowers, visited by bees, were the source of the wonder-working honey, and then of course… the witness—”

“Who was this witness?”

“Sister Adelphine. She cared for most of Leopolda’s earthly needs. The night she died, Adelphine left her sitting piously in her ground-floor cell, which opened into the garden. The old nun often ventured outside, to contemplate the image of Christ as she saw it in the growing plants.”

Jude stopped, eyeing a wan cinnamon bun left on Father Damien’s plate. He couldn’t help it. His appetite was constant, vexing.

“Have it,” said Father Damien, wishing it were an adequate bribe.

Father Jude reached over and delicately, with his soft, blunt fingers pinched up the bun and ate it in two bites.

“The question, or task before us right now,” he said, chewing, “is establishing your knowledge of Sister Leopolda, your history, your”— here he sought the word—“claim. No, I don’t mean that exactly. Your authority. Your expertise. Frankly”—and here Father Jude smiled—“I don’t anticipate a problem. Everybody else… her contemporaries are dead.”

“Oh really,” said Father Damien, and though he cast down his eyes in seeming respect there was a gloating satisfaction in his frail voice that made Father Jude glance sharply at the profile of the older priest. As soon as he felt his composure slip, Father Damien recovered and assumed a righteous, blank, carefully focused clerical air. Still, Father Jude’s pale eyes remained upon him, and the gaze he maintained revealed a sharp speculative intelligence.

“Just for the hell of it,” he said, smiling a tight smile, “or the heaven of it. I’m going to ask, I mean, in general. Was she?”

“Was she what? What are you saying?” said Father Damien, although he knew full well.

“Was she a saint?” asked Father Jude simply.

There was silence after his question, in which a hush of wind trembled in the leaves. Suddenly, through that corridor of extreme quiet, there sounded a harsh cacophony. Crows with human thrill had mobbed a great owl. The bird floated eerily, like a gray thrust of wind, in and out of Father Jude’s eyeshot, chased by a wheeling tumble of black feathers. Dark laughter. Their shrieks seemed to Jude’s ears both hilarious and foul. Father Damien’s voice barely cut through the din.

“There is your answer,” he said.

Creamed corn and ground-beef casserole, macaroni, a dish of hot, vinegary string beans, squares of rhubarb crumble. Lunch came wrapped in foil with twin place settings. At a small table of chipped enamel, set outside beneath the wild grapevine arbor, the two sat and made appreciative sounds as a brooding and massively built woman removed the aluminum sheets, folded them for future reuse, and loomed silently over Damien.

“Father Jude, I would like to introduce you to Mary Kashpaw. She is my housekeeper, keeper of the church grounds, master general of all you see.”

A slight smile tweaked the corner of Mary Kashpaw’s line of a mouth, cut like a seam in stone. Her eyes gentled as they rested on the old man, then narrowed as she turned her attention to Father Jude. As she slowly assessed the visitor, she stiffened into a mountain and became so monumentally rooted that it was almost a surprise when she walked away. Slightly shaken by her presence, though without any reason he could discern, Jude busied himself, poured thin coffee into white ceramic mugs. Father Damien frowned.

“Have you,” he peered behind Father Miller, “brought a bit of wine, perhaps, to complement the meal?”

“If I’d known.” Father Miller hooked his shoulders.

“No matter.” Father Damien waved his hands. “Best, anyway, that I abstain. At least for this particular afternoon.”

“You’ll need your wits about you.” Father Miller was teasing, but even so his demeanor was challenging enough to quicken Damien’s pulse, causing, in turn, an increase of circulation that often led to heartburn. Damien picked slowly at his food, raised a string bean to his lips, bit the end off, chewed, put it down again. In the meantime, Jude Miller ate two-handed, busily sopping up extra juice with a piece of soft white bread while rhythmically forking the hot dish into his mouth. He was a powerful and appreciative eater, and he gave his whole attention to the mediocre meal, took another portion of the string beans, polished his plate with more bread, ate his dessert with gusto, settled back to the coffee while Damien nibbled another bean.

“They’re good,” said Jude Miller, unconvincingly.

“Mary Kashpaw. I know her beans, only too well. A little white vinegar, pinch of sugar, salt.”

“Pepper, too,” Jude said, coughing. He put down his fork. “Your housekeeper…” He asked how long she’d been with Father Damien, and was surprised when he answered that the great woman had worked on the grounds, cared for the church and graveyard, lived with the nuns since she was a child, and then cared for his household since she was grown.

“The story of her existence is also my story here,” said Father Damien. “Her story and mine are twined up from the roots of the place. There is no telling my story without hers! It began immediately after my arrival here in 1912, with a visit to the notorious Nanapush, who tricked me into obtaining for him a wife. Mary Kashpaw was the victim of my earliest mistake, an innocent, though she has seen all of life one way or another since. It all goes back to conversion, Father, a most ticklish concept and a most loving form of destruction. I’ve not come to terms with the notion even now, in my age, when I should be peacefully moldering up there on the hillside with the bones of my friends.”

Father Jude followed the other priest’s gaze, saw the gentle brown granite markers, the sheltering oak trees, the pale lichen-eaten crosses, the neat and faded plastic flowers on wire legs, the whole array of memoria spread out up and over the quiet hill.