The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

4. THE ROAD TO LITTLE NO HORSE

1996

The old priest tottered exhaustedly into his little house and closed himself into the bathroom. Washed his face, his hands, dried them carefully and slowly with a soft hand towel. Combed his white fluff. He felt a burning sensation along the corners of his eyes and he realized that he needed to weep. That afternoon with Father Miller, he’d drowsed and awakened to hear himself talking, talking too eagerly, though of course he kept back his deepest secrets. He’d known then what memories he was headed for, what scenes, what sorrows beyond imagining that had forever changed him. No! He lunged toward his desk, for the task of letter writing would, he hoped, throw him off course and allow the memory of his first years to pass him much as storms passed over bearing within their clouds whirlwinds that did not touch the earth.

On the Eve of St. Dismas, once again. At some late hour.

Dear Holy Father,

It is with a sense of gratitude and excitement that I address you tonight, largely in order to praise and give thanks for the notice denied me by your predecessors, but also, if I may be so unworthy, to lodge a small complaint. Although you’ve no doubt dispatched a priest deemed competent by his superiors here in the Middle West of the United States, I feel it my compelling duty to sadly inform you that not only is Father Jude Miller an obvious amateur at interviews, but he seems to have in coming here some agenda ulterior to that which he is dispatched to learn. In short, master of my vocation, I think he’s something of a dud. With false intentions to boot. I cast no aspersions upon those who chose him for this task. Your cardinals did, of course, check his credentials, but with the explosion of technology these days it is so easy to present an impressive paper face to the authorities when in actuality the subject lacks…

Useless ploy. He smelled the ashes of fever, the scent of wormwood and roses, tinctures of blessed oil. Here it came. Father Damien’s vision sank inward, into the past.

THE ARRIVAL

1912

Just as in a dream or under extreme duress, we make plans and decisions that panic us with their force and strangeness by the light of day, so Agnes shocked herself. The first morning that she woke on the train heading north, in disguise, she reeled with her own foolhardiness and thought of leaping out of the caboose. The train was slow enough, but was traveling through a waste of open land in which only rarely could she pick out the slightest human feature. Surely she’d die of exposure out there. And then the train stopped at a small board shack hardly bigger than an outhouse.

She spent the night there, curled around the lukewarm flanks of a rusted stove. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll get rid of this cassock and be Agnes DeWitt again, formerly Sister Cecilia, who has lived enough for two women and two nuns already, let alone a mission priest. She imagined that she’d find some way of trading clothing or if all else failed come clean with the nearest sane person in North Dakota. But she was alone. And considering what she’d just done, probably no judge of sanity. The next morning, she waited miserably for the driver who, it said in a tattered note nailed to the wall, would transport the priest to Little No Horse. By the time the wagon arrived, Agnes was so famished with hunger that she had dipped into a sack waiting next to her and chewed some raw, dusty oats. Though in a daze of passivity, when she found herself climbing into the seat of a rough wagon drawn by winter-shagged horses and driven by a man still rougher than the whole lot, her heart clenched and the urge again took her to bolt back into the skin of Miss DeWitt. But how could she? Perhaps once the wagon stopped, once they’d arrived, she’d seize a chance.

They started out for the reservation in the wake of a killing sickness, on the eve of St. Dismas in the gain of the year. March, Onaabani-giizis, it is called. Crust-on-the-snow moon, for the angle of the sun strikes just so, enough to melt and refreeze the surface while the snow lies beneath. Ever after that day, Agnes was to mark St. Dismas upon her calendar because it was the first day of her existence as Father Damien, the first day of the great lie that was her life — the true lie, she considered it, the most sincere lie a person could ever tell.

Agnes was a person of deep curiosity, and so even in extremity she couldn’t help observing all around her that was new. She rode along with interest, even though her brain was half frozen and she suffered stabs of intense cold. On the way to the reservation, she found intriguing correspondences with her old life. The river was flooding three hundred miles to the south because to the north its mouth was still frozen. So in a way, she thought, the region had conspired with itself to bring her north, to dump her from her house into the current where she was rescued and where she changed clothing with the priest — ah, the priest’s clothes! That was another thing. Even now, the driver treated her with much more respect as a priest than she’d ever known as a nun. He was deferential, though not uncomfortable. Agnes was surprised to find that this treatment entirely gratified her, and yet seemed familiar as though it was her due. Robes or not, I am human, she said to herself. So this is what a priest gets, heads bowing and curious respectful attention! Back on the train, people also had given Father Damien more privacy. It was as though in priest’s garments she walked within a clear bell of charged air.

Priest or not, the rain fell, wetting and then filming the road with a dangerous slick, coating her face and icing the goods crowded into the loaded wagon. She hunched underneath a powerfully dusty old buffalo robe, shook miserably, and then warmed as the ride bumped her forward, into her strange new life.

Kashpaw was the driver’s name. He was the first Indian she’d ever met and he would be one of the first she’d bury, come that summer and the feast of saints. He was dark and in the cold his skin took on a purplish cast. Dressed as he was in a French red wool capote with a swirl of hot yellow turban cloth and weighted by moosehide leggings, great mitts made of wolves’ fur, velvet shawls, and another curly buffalo robe thrown on besides, he was a mountain of texture and sharp color. He spoke, of course, no German, only some English, and his French was of a vintage extremely valuable were it only wine. In addition, that eighteenth-century trapper’s French was knocked aside or disarranged by words only to be guessed at — probably the language spoken by Ojibwe. And yet in spite of their language problems, Agnes couldn’t help questioning Kashpaw eagerly. Something new was at work, she could feel it, an ease with her own mind she’d never felt before, a pleasure in her own wit she’d half hidden or demurred. As Agnes, she’d always felt too inhibited to closely question men. Questions from women to men always raised questions of a different nature. As a man, she found that Father Damien was free to pursue all questions with frankness and ease.

On the long drive north, she learned all of the polite Ojibwe she could cram into her brain — how to ask after children and spouses, how to comment on the weather, how to accept and appreciate food. These last phrases, unfortunately, would be useless until there actually was food on the reservation.

The road was slick, frozen muck under the hooves of the wild, tough horses, so Kashpaw halted the wagon. From under the seat he took eight snugly made straps that fitted neatly around the horses’ pasterns. He fixed onto the bottom of their hooves sharply studded contraptions that enabled them to grip the ice. Along they went, then, more secure. As they traveled, Kashpaw laboriously made known further details of the situation Father Damien would face. There was starvation, but with luck the thaw would end its grip. In addition to the priest, Kashpaw had picked up eighteen sacks of horse-grade oats. This rough slurry was to be distributed among twice as many families and would make up their diets until the false winter entirely broke — the snow and ice still looked to have a strong hold on the land.

“What can be done?”

Kashpaw looked shrewdly at Father Damien. He took in the open, girlish earnestness, the curiosity, the restless hands tapping patterns on the robes, the intelligent regard. At last, he decided the priest was both harmless and worth challenging.

“Some say, go back to the old ways.”

“And what do you say?”

Kashpaw narrowed his eyes at the ice road, snapped the reins lightly on his horses’ rumps. When he smiled to himself, his huge soft face rounded in gentle humorous curves that Agnes found compelling. The only Indians she’d known were pictures in a book — in her part of Wisconsin, they were hated and cleared out. Once she had escaped her family, entered the convent, and taken up music, of course, there was very little to see or know of the outside world. So this new sort of human next to her, his self-possessed knowledge, upset her with an intense wish to understand everything about him.

“Here’s what I say,” he answered at last. “Leave us full-bloods alone, let us be with our Nanabozho, our sweats and shake tents, our grand medicines and bundles. We don’t hurt nobody. Your wiisaakodewininiwag, half-burnt wood, they can use your God as backup to these things. Our world is already whipped apart by the white man. Why do you black gowns care if we pray to your God?”

All that he said was strange to Agnes, and again she had to question him on each point. The half-burnt wood referred to half-breed people. Nanabozho was someone she would hear of often — a god, a story figure. The sweats and the shake tents were houses where Ojibwe ceremonies took place. All of this, he took his time to patiently explain. Agnes watched him closely, memorizing him, feeling in her heart he was so certain of himself that he would be impossible to convert. The great firm slabs of Kashpaw’s cheeks were pitted with dark pocks. As she found out later, he had survived that particular killing scourge only to lose many of his family. The abyss of loss had led him to his present complex marital situation — a problem with which Father Damien would presently become involved. For the time, as they endured the miles, Kashpaw’s openhearted ease was reassuring. Between the two, there grew a pleasant, thoughtful, silence. The space around the wagon, boundless and gray, serene and cold, changed only subtly as they passed through on the nearly invisible road. Suspended in the whiteness, they could have been traveling in place. The wheels moved, the wagon jounced and rocked, but nothing changed. The land rolled on in bitter white monotony.

The cold bit down, harder. Kashpaw maintained a politely fixed expression while his thoughts turned. He was a shrewd man, and he sensed something unusual about the priest from the first. Something wrong. The priest was clearly not right, too womanly. Perhaps, he thought, here was a man like the famous Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife, where he had lived until old, well loved, as one of the women. Kashpaw himself had addressed Wishkob as grandmother. Kashpaw thought, This priest is unusual, but then, who among the zhaaganaashiwug is not strange?

The two fell deeper into private thoughts, and let the screeching and knocking of the wheels take over until at last the horizon grew, upon its distant edge, a deeper set to the filmy pearl, then a definite gray patch that slowly gained detail. There were hills now, covered in bare-leafed oak, and soon there were houses among those hills, small and modest little cabins neatly plumed with smoke, for a windless, icy seizure gripped the settlement and woods beyond. The wind of the great plains dropped off in this complex shelter, diminished by windbreaks of earth and mixed forest. They passed into the hills, through a town that centered around a modest trader’s store, seeing only one or two Indians at a distance. The people were dressed in farmers’ clothes, some in thin swaths of cloth and some heavily jacketed in wools.

The road to the settlement at Little No Horse led up, gently at first, but there was in those days a fierce, ungraded climb near the end. At last, the ice became too smooth for even the strong horses — their heavily feathered fetlocks and thick necks showing draft blood along with Sioux war-pony fleetness and nerve. One nearly slipped to its knees. Kashpaw stopped the wagon and wished Father Damien bonne chance in climbing the rest of the way on foot.

All alone, then, bearing on her back the thinly strapped bag, Agnes slipped and toiled, smashing continually through the snow’s glassy crust. The sharp ice pierced the crude leggings she’d made of a rough stole found in the priest’s bag and bloodied her shaking calves. By the time she clawed and scrambled to the hilltop, she was exhausted to the point of nausea and lay down to gasp for breath.

There was stillness, the whisper of snow grains driven along the surface of the world. It was the silence of before creation, the comfort of pure nothing, and she let herself go into it until, in that quiet, she was caught hold of by a dazzling sweetness. In the grip of this sudden, sumptuous bloom of feeling, Agnes rose and walked toward a poor cabin just behind the log church. Entering this new life, she felt a largeness move through her, a sense that she was essential to a great, calm design of horizonless meaning. There was the crooked-built church, the cabin silent as a shut mouth, the convent painted a blistering white — the scenery of Father Damien’s future.

Silence held.

In that period of regard, the unsettled intentions, the fears she felt, the exposure she already dreaded, faded to a fierce nothing, a white ring of mineral ash left after the water has boiled away. There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here. The true Modeste who was supposed to arrive — none other. No one else.

DEATH ROBES

All great visions must suffer the test of the ordinary, and Agnes’s was immediate. She unlatched the door of the small tight-built cabin, her first rectory, and stood in the dim entry adjusting her eyes to the sadness. Just here, Damien’s predecessor, Father Hugo LaCombe, tough and well trained, one of the first, had died of a sweating fever. Upon the cabin’s floor a scatter of stiff photographs. Agnes picked up the card of a woman, perhaps a sister of Hugo’s, wearing a floral hat. His brother, cradling a gun. These people stared out, frozen in a bad dream. She stacked the pictures on the table. Touched an extra folded cassock, underclothing, a silver holy medal on a nail driven into the frosted gray wood next to the window. The bed made of sagging willow poles was covered with heavy quilts and buffalo robes, stripped beneath. Had someone at least taken out the linen? No, there it was, balled in a corner, rusted with the blood of poor Father Hugo and, even in the cold, smelling of shit and gall.

Father Damien didn’t want to pray. Nevertheless Agnes went down on her knees and spoke earnestly aloud. There was no answer but the howl of wind rattling shingles, the mice drifting in the eaves. There was no wood for a fire. No water but ice. Enough, she thought. Wearily, she climbed into Father Hugo’s deathbed. She wrapped herself tightly into the death robes, slept.

She dreamed first of black nails driven through the tender bloody sac of her heart. Dreamed second of Berndt’s trusting gaze. In a third dream, which lasted the rest of the night, Agnes ate and drank at an endless table. Boiled carrots. Foaming milk. Fresh, buttered potatoes in their jackets, thick stews of meat and onions. She woke more desperate with hunger than ever in her life, her stomach gnawing, pinching, her mouth still working on the rich imaginary meal. Some Catholic on the train had given her a bit of jerky, which she chewed still huddled in the quilts. There was no need to dress, as she’d slept in Father Damien’s clothes for warmth. There was no washbasin. She reached out, rubbed her teeth and face with a handful of snow sifted onto the sill of the ill-fitting window. She combed the tatters of her hair back with stiff fingers, swatted strings of dust from her arms and chest. She then bundled on the dead priest’s heavy black wool cloak and walked out.

MIRACLE OF THE MEAT

The nuns lived in a small white frame building of two rooms, one for eating and one for sleeping, pitilessly cold within. There were no sisters in sight, but on the rough board table Agnes spied a pot of tea steeping lukewarm on a towel. She drained it from the spout, then opened a cupboard and found a poor rock-hard bit of bread beside a thimble’s worth of raisins. The meal, however paltry, gave her the strength to walk over to the church, where the six nuns had dragged themselves to say their morning prayers.

Snow as fine as smoke blew in as she entered the church, but the nuns did not move. They knelt, hunched in cold, swathed in layers of patched wool, quiet as stones. There was only one parishioner in attendance, and in spite of the extremity of the cold and the tension of her first test in saying Mass, Agnes noticed her. The girl seemed, in her stiffness, to creak as she turned to watch. She stared as Father Damien walked to the nave of the church.

The girl’s nose jutted, her face was white and beak-thin, and her mouth was shaped by birth into a pale and twisted line. She stared at the priest with great, starved, black, disturbing eyes. Stared unblinking and with fixed aggressiveness. Young and scrawny as a new bird, she opened her mouth as though to shout, then shut it as Father Damien put out his hands to the women, the sisters, and held their hands and greeted them — the sight of their resigned and exhausted faces washed over him with a familiar tenderness.

“My dear sisters in Christ, my dear, dear sisters…”

They rose in surprise. Apparently, Father Damien wasn’t expected to arrive — thus the terrible disorder of the cabin. Their faces, gazing dull, were the maws of starved animals and their fingers were limp as wilted stalks. By the shape of their skulls, the wrinkled hands of privation, it was easy to see death was poking through their very skins. For the first time, now, Agnes was afraid, for she knew that the food she had eaten back in the convent was absolutely all they had.

“Let us pray,” Father Damien’s voice squeaked. Agnes tried to control the shaking and keep her voice low, but her tongue was thick with cold despair. She remembered to venerate the relic in the altar — what was it: splinters from the true cross? a filing from St. Peter’s manacles? perhaps a bit of bone, a slice of skin, a toe, an ear? What saint? How would she find out or ever know? It was the priest’s job to know. There was no altar boy, no vestments, and the chalice was humble pewter, but when Father Damien opened the sacristy and found fourteen holy wafers and a thread of wine, he turned in elation to the sisters.

“We have no choir”—he was already half delirious again with hunger—“but we will raise our best hymn! Body of Christ, blood of Christ, same here as in the richest cathedral. This is our cloth-of-gold.” He touched the burlap weave of the mantle, laid out on the altar stone. “This is our pearl-studded gospel.” He lovingly stroked the rag-bound book. “Our incense is God’s own breath — the wind through these rough walls!”

The women sighed together, all except for the one parishioner, the seething girl in a black scarf. She laughed out loud, screeched really, then coughed to contain her mirth. The nuns seemed numb to her. They prayed together and a cloud of breath stirred from their lips. Their hands were blistered with cold, their cheeks frostbitten and raw. The priest’s words were brave, but the sisters were at the razor edge of their endurance. They slumped against the wood of the pews, barely managed to hold themselves upright.

At least, now, the fire in the little tin stove had begun to warm the cabin of the church.

The Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive. The phrases were in her and part of her. Once she began, the flow was like the river that had carried her to Little No Horse. In the silences between the parts of the ritual, Father Damien prayed for those women in his charge.

“Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam…” He crossed his breast five times, within those words, and the next: “Qui pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas…” And lifted his eyes and said the words “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” and the bread was flesh.

Of course it was, as it always was.

“Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti: mysterium fedei…” The wine was blood.

And again, as she had before, the strange girl in the front pew emitted a sudden croak of laughter.

On her lips, in her mouth. Real and rich, heavy, good. Agnes choked with startled shock. She hesitated, put the food to her mouth again. Real! Real! Hunger roared in her as she broke the bread. Ate the flesh. Delivering the communion meal to her starving sisters, Agnes was caught in a panic of emotion. She heard nothing, saw nothing, went through the rest of Mass on reeling instinct. Was it really true and had they, as well, experienced what she’d felt? Was this something that happened, always, to priests? Did their part of the sacrament transubstantiate in real as well as metaphorical terms? Had the dry thin consecrated Host turned into a thick mouthful of raw, tender, bloody, sweet-tasting meat in the mouths of the sisters? And the wine to vital blood? And were they all full, as Agnes felt, satisfied and calm? They finished the Mass and stumbled back, holding one another by turns, all except for the black-eyed child, who abruptly left, quite alone, prompting Agnes to ask the nun nearest for the name of this striking person.

“She’s a Puyat,” said the sister. “Her name is Pauline. She is here every morning, most devout, but…” She paused as if to say something more, but only shrugged as though, after all, she was too weak to explain.

Once alone, Agnes went dizzy with questions.

Had Christ’s real presence entered them? Certainly, now, they were saved from the place of skulls, from the bones of death. Were they fed with the fat of the wheat and honey out of the rock? Was this just part of the ritual or was it miraculous?

That night, she composed Father Damien’s first letter.

March 1912

Gracious Leader of the Faith,

I write in humble fearfulness and wonder. To whom else might I turn? I beg you to indulge me, Your Holiness. Please forgive my attempt to explain, though it be insufficient. It is just that to reconstruct, to go back, to establish the scene requires at present a spiritual energy I cannot summon. I am reeling. I have such questions.

To wit: Have you or your holy minions knowledge of a case in which the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ has in actuality (and I mean physically, not only in a spiritual sense) nourished the flock?

In other words, did the wafer turn into visible meat, the wine to actual blood?

And also, to your understanding, would it be wrong for a cleric to request a visit by the devil, just to make certain of his physical shape?

I await your reply.

SISTER HILDEGARDE’S VIEWS

The Superior, Sister Hildegarde Anne, was a woman of German resourcefulness. Short, boxy, impenetrable, she had saved her sisters, as well as many others, early on that winter by ordering the church horse butchered while it still had flesh, and distributing its store of oats and grain. She had a toughness of expression unusual in a nun, and spoke bluntly. Also, she was effortlessly cheerful in a way that often outraged or frightened other people. Now, for instance, as she spoke to Father Damien in the intimacy of the kitchen, she shaved the last of that poor beast’s hooves into a pot of boiling soup water. As she worked, she hummed and then sang out, trimming the great rocky chunk of chitin with a sharp filet knife. Beside the soup pot, half a precious potato soaked in salted water. The sparsity didn’t seem to bother her. Someone had left six other potatoes and a rind of bacon, held now under lock and key. All of this would keep the religious band alive today, and today, she said, was as far as she ever went in her prayers.

Although Agnes felt what she felt, believed what she believed, about what had happened during the Eucharist, the two exchanged no more than a significant sentence. Agnes was to find that Sister Hildegarde was of such deeply skeptical stock that she did not entirely accept her own experience as true. Hildegarde’s concerns were down-to-earth. Since she was on the reservation to be useful, she lost no time in telling Father Damien how he could make himself useful too.

“Father,” said Hildegarde, “you must go visiting with the sacrament. The poor Indians are dying out. Now is a good time to convert them! They live like wretches anyway, and then the sweating fever takes them. Some are gone in only hours once the illness sets in, so you must be quick. Some wait for death to walk down the road. They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick. You could easily baptize them while they’re tranced.”

“What cures this fever? Who is our doctor?” Agnes ignored the nun’s avidity regarding souls. Yes, she thought, Father Damien was bound to baptize. But she must read up because she couldn’t remember much of anything about the ritual or the words. She pursued the subject of the illness itself.

“We have no regular doctor, but the cure is plain. Food, warmth.”

“Simply that?”

“It is possible, with skillful care, to nurse even a weak subject through this fever. We could have saved Father Hugo, had he only come to us!”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Father Hugo wouldn’t endanger us, and so hid his condition. Barred himself inside of his cabin. He was sick to death by the time we broke in. And then, of course,” she said with hurt pride, “you found the place in sad repair. We hadn’t any notion you would stay there but had a place for you with a pious family. You see, we have not entered to clean for fear of the fever… only the Puyat doesn’t fear most illness. She was supposed to have cleaned.”

“The one at the Mass this morning?”

“That one.”

“No need,” Agnes said, anxious even then to avoid contact with the girl. “I’m trained to keep my surroundings in good order.”

“Oh,” Hildegarde was a bit surprised. “Very unlike poor Father Hugo!”

Poor Hugo. With a powerful thrust, a scene stabbed into Agnes’s mind. She saw the priest laboriously sinking, taking leave of the world alone, speaking his good-bye prayers. She struggled to gain control of her exhaustion. The walk from the river had been endless, the train smoky and jolting, the miserable wait in the foul railroad hut a foretaste of hell. The drive with Kashpaw was encouraging, but Agnes had hardly slept the previous night and now could not battle the pressure of tears and more tears. She tried to lean on last night’s certainty, tried to keep her faith with the Christ who had fed her broth and taken on a human shape to give her comfort. She must follow through with the original plan, the vision. But to find herself here, in the midst of another’s vocation, was shockingly difficult. What had she supposed? Father Damien was in charge of these souls!

“I am nowhere near as strong as the confidence Christ has placed in me,” she said to Hildegarde Anne, who sighed.

“None of us is.”

Agnes was tempted, next, to confess the specifics of her identity, the nature of her calling, to this good nun. After all, she looks much more capable than I, she thought with a certain faint hope. But Sister Hildegarde, perhaps sensing the despair of her tormented self-sympathy, squeezed Agnes’s hand in hers so hard she cracked the knuckles.

“I prayed for a priest just like you,” she said, “young, with a tough, fresh faith!”

So Agnes shut Father Damien’s mouth on that revelation.

“Show me all you know of this place,” she demanded instead, steadying Father Damien’s voice and stilling the quaver in her heart.

Sister Hildegarde drew out a path with the stub of a pencil. “This bisects the land they call ‘their’ reservation,” she said. “The place is shaped roughly like a house with a square beneath and one slanted roof, a jutting outpost like a chimney. They’ll lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan. Yet, it’s going constantly into private ownership and already they are selling out to lumber interests. Father, your poor charges cannot read the documents they sign.”

Here, Hildegarde was obviously distressed — she hated a bad business deal. “The government is not so much our problem,” she blurted out. “It is the thieves that surround us!”

She showed every path and road, labeled cabins on the reservation, pointed out where certain of the most faithful parishioners lived.

“Here, here, and here”—she pointed at nearly every spot—“the sickness has taken someone. Here, it took them all.” She stabbed out several places upon her map. Seeing the nun’s finger smash down, Agnes’s heart was touched with horror. The still cabin. The huddled forms. The unspeakable loneliness. Tears flashed again and Hildegarde, seeing this, slapped a dish towel on Father Damien’s arm.

“No use for that,” the nun grumped. “Now here, here, here, and here all died but two, I’ve heard — a stubborn girl, an old man. They live out there yet.”

“I must go to them.”

Sister Hildegarde agreed, but looked a bit worried. “Father Damien, they live way out in the bush, if they’re living at all yet. The older man is a stubborn, crafty, talkative sort, much resistant to conversion. The vile things he says, the reprobate! He had a big old toot with my communion wine two years ago. Sneaked it from my cellar cask. He’s too tricky to die, him. And the other, that Fleur. Truly the daughter of Satan, so they say. The two of them, almost the only ones to survive from their respective families, are rumored to have special powers.”

As the nun spoke, Agnes breathed in deep drafts to gather control of her sorrow, and when she had, she took on the studied authority she’d mustered in private.

“I’m always intrigued with special powers,” she said mildly. “What sort of skills do you mean?”

Hildegarde shrugged, dismissive. “The usual. Drumming their drums. Singing until it breaks your ears. Shaking stuffed skins, rattles, and bones, so I’ve heard. All ineffective against the slightest of colds.”

“I see.” Though Agnes did not see. “What else?”

“They are the last of their families, as I’ve said. I think that gives them some sort of conjuring skill. There are magicians among them, of course, cheap tricksters. They throw their voices and levitate. They scare the gullible to death and are said to wing balls of fire toward their enemies at night. We’ve seen a few, you know, whiz by us up here! Unimpressive!”

“So you believe in their skills.”

Hildegarde looked sharply at the priest.

“Believe, why yes, just as I believe it is possible to hide coins and pebbles behind the ears of small children and draw these objects forth to delight them. It is easy to mystify children. Their conjurers employ just such means to prey upon the gullible. That is all.”

I am sent here, thought Agnes, to accept and to absorb. I shall be a thick cloth. Therefore, she nodded and said nothing in answer, but only thanked the nun for speaking frankly.

Some Rules to Assist in My Transformation

Make requests in the form of orders.

Give compliments in the form of concessions.

Ask questions in the form of statements.

Exercises to enhance the muscles of the neck?

Admire women’s handiwork with copious amazement.

Stride, swing arms, stop abruptly, stroke chin.

Sharpen razor daily.

Advance no explanations.

Accept no explanations.

Hum an occasional resolute march.

A parishioner had left a Sears catalog near the door of the church, and Agnes rifled through it secretly, as much to revisit the clothing, the china, the unfamiliar feast of powders and perfumes, as to scheme a way to purchase Dr. Feem’s Scientific Programme of Muscular Expansion, a kit that involved a set of dumbbells, a book of directions, and one muscle tonic that promised to improve the tone of the entire upper body and another bottle that worked on the half below.

5. SPIRIT TALK

1912

The reservation at the time was a place still fluid of definition, appearing solid only on a map, taking in and cutting out whole farms sometimes on the say-so of the commissioner, or the former agent Tatro, and other times attempting to right itself according to law. It was a place of shifting allegiances, new feuds and old animosities, a place of clan teasing, jealousy, comfort, and love. As with most other reservations, the government policy of attempting to excite pride in private ownership by doling parcels of land to individual Ojibwe flopped miserably and provided a feast of acquisition for hopeful farmers and surrounding entrepreneurs. So the boundaries came and went, drawn to accommodate local ventures — sawmills, farms, feed stores, the traplines of various families.

Many did sell for one simple reason. Hunger. As the government scrambled for the correct legal definition of the land, any fluctuation meant loss, any loophole was to the advantage of the thieves, boosters, businessmen, swindlers, sneaks, Christians, cranks, lumber and farm dealers, con artists, and reprobates of all types who had drifted to the edges of reservations hoping to profit from the confusion.

Into this complex situation walked Father Damien, with only the vaguest notion of how the ownership of land related to the soul.

THE LOSS

She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that she finally defined as the loss of Agnes. Ah, Agnes! She lived at night in the shelter of bedclothes. Disappeared in daylight, bandages wrapped as when she had been a nun. As she left the cabin, her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts. Her voice his voice, which deepened as his stride lengthened and grew bold. Agnes’s speech had always been husky and low for a woman. Father Damien’s voice was musical, for a man. There were gestures left over from the convent, and also from her life as a woman in love. In the convent, she’d been taught to walk with eyes downcast. Now, Father Damien tipped his chin out and narrowed his gaze, focused straight ahead. As a farm wife, Agnes had leaned out with a hand on her hip, carried things on her hip, nudged doors open and shut with her hip. Men didn’t use their hips as shelves and braces. Father Damien walked with soldierly directness and never swayed. Nor did he touch a finger to his tongue and smooth his eyebrows, or glance at himself in mirror surfaces. Sternly, he nodded up and down when he listened instead of tipping his head to the side.

Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?

Now and then Agnes recalled a tiny portion of her encounter with the Actor, and she came to understand it as a sure prefigurement and sign of what was to come. The Actor had influenced the quality of Father Damien’s disguise, for when Agnes was held by that rope-tough arm against the car door she’d felt remote enough, from blood loss, to marvel at and assess the Actor’s change in personality from priest to robber.

Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? Wasn’t he robbing all who looked upon him? Stealing their trust? Shameful, perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought only gave her satisfaction. She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.

NANAPUSH

Agnes said Father Damien’s office early and long one morning, with extra fervor because she was still in bed. She needed the strength. She had decided to visit the reprobate Nanapush, who survived marginally in the bush somewhere with the young woman named Fleur. The air deeply chilled her and cold stabbed up through the icy boards. She put on every stitch of clothing, even Father Hugo’s. Still, she trembled walking out into the bitter air. Longing for the sad warmth of her predecessor’s willow-pole bed, imagining the comfort of burrowing under the leaden quilts and buffalo robes, she ate a sorry breakfast of cooked potato skins and tea. Such food, now, only worsened the stab in her stomach. She was comforted by the news that the roads were open and there would soon be supplies, enough for everyone. Six wagons would be arriving with relief.

She wrapped her blistered and frost-burned feet in several layers of the nun’s dish towels, pulled on her boots, then she took from Sister Hildegarde the scratchings of a map. Before she could think about what she might encounter, or change her mind, she started off, walking into the bush.

Her trek began on a road of packed ice that turned to snow that turned to unpacked snow that turned to nothing, so that she would have sunk to her knees at every step, were it not that Sister Hildegarde had insisted that she sling Father Hugo’s snowshoes across her back. She tied them onto her feet and then, in shelter of the trees where the crust on the snow was tough, she was able to maneuver with an almost galloping swiftness. Physical elation filled her. She made her way through wild throngs of birch, skirted the cracked, sere slough grass, pushed through thickets of red willow. The sun was high and bright, but the air was cold and bubbled in her blood like sleep. Several times, sitting down to rest, she imagined curling up in the snowy bays underneath the trees, but she always forced herself to her feet, kept moving.

At the time, she still possessed an untested belief that, having survived the robbery, the chase, the bullets, and the flood, then transformed herself to Father Damien, she could not be harmed. That inner assurance would make her seem fearless, which would in turn increase the respect she won among the Anishinaabeg. So complete was her faith that on the journey to visit Nanapush she ignored the hardship and even danger she might encounter if she lost her way.

What occupied Agnes was the misery of concealing the exasperating monthly flow that belonged to her past but persisted into the present. As she sprang along on the clever winglike snowshoes, she occasionally asked the Almighty, in some irritation, to stop the useless affliction of menstrual blood, so she could more confidently pursue the work cut out for an active priest. Her requests were heeded, for she definitely felt a lessening and then a near cessation. The heavy cramping faded until, stopping to change the cloth that she buried deep in snow, she found it barely spotted with darkness. No sooner had the evidence vanished than she felt a pang, a loss, an eerie rocking between genders.

The sun was sweet, the air liquid. Kneeling in the momentary warmth, she washed lightly with a handful of fresh, wet snow. She shivered with shock and a lost sensation gathered, swept through her, and was gone with a shimmer of musical notes. She closed her eyes, tried to make the physical climax into a prayer, but her mouth dropped and she cried out in a quiet voice, feeling the ghost touches of her lost lover.

When at last she returned to the present, stood again to make her way, Agnes consulted the angle of the sun, the trees, the careful map Sister Hildegarde had drawn, anxious not to lose the new priest. It did not take her long to arrive at the place. It looked ordinary enough — a low cabin made of silvery logs with a split-plank door, the spaces between the logs tamped with a fine cracked yellow-gray gumbo. There was nothing about the cabin to suggest it was the home of a serious miscreant, a guzzler of communion wine, an unregenerate and eager pagan who gave Sister Hildegarde such trials. The place was quiet. There was among Father Hugo’s papers a crude calendar, which sometimes included notes on the Indians he’d baptized — the day and hour. One day there were the words “Baptize Nanapush.” Under that self-command the exclamation “Folly!” Agnes took a step forward. It was said that Mr. Nanapush had excellent command of English as a result of several years with Jesuit teachers. It was also said that the old man had stubbornly retained and deepened his Ojibwemowin and that he wrote and thought in his language and conducted the very rites and mysteries that Kashpaw had mentioned.

“Boozhoo! Aaniin!” Agnes called out the various greetings she’d learned from Kashpaw. She stood shifting uneasily from foot to numb foot. No sound came in answer, no stirring from inside. Up and down the side of a nearby tree, a tiny gray-capped bird zipped, uttering a sharp complaint. Some curled brown leaves, still attached to the nodes of an oak tree, ticked together. And then the wind stopped. Everything stopped. The stillness was profound.

In that cessation, Agnes DeWitt was flooded with uneasy agitation. A prickle touched on the back of her neck, and she gave her head a shake. A low unease struck her. A voice cried out. She whirled. No one. Now a piping child’s voice, laughing, but again no source. She felt a mutter of presences, rustling and arguing on all sides, and she froze in place as their voices, speaking incomprehensible words — only a few of which she knew from Kashpaw’s talk — crushed toward her.

The voices merged with her senses, filling her head. She tried to regulate her breathing, not to panic, but a vast weakness swallowed her and she thought she heard, maybe knew, could not be sure — were there spirits beyond the experience entrusted to her so far?

“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”

She waited, increasingly disturbed, for long moments, until finally there was nowhere to go but in. Making the sign of the cross, she burst through the door of the lonely cabin into the stink of ghosts.

Two beings, hollow and strange, stared quizzically out of the shadows at the priest, who gaped at them in return. One frowned in dignified hauteur at the crack of light within which the priest was caught, there in the doorway, hand on his throat and eyes wide in snow-blind shock. Another blinked and passed its hands across its bone features. Agnes stepped closer, pity flooding her as well as a curious horror at their condition. At first, she could not tell the old man from the young girl. Their faces were pale smears, porous and frail as birch-bark masks. Their hair burst out, ferocious, alive with sticks, mud, lice, tangled in intricate bushes on their heads. Their eyes glittered from deep in gray pits. They moved as though they’d break apart. As though their bones were brittle reeds. They were shells made of loss, made of transparent flint, made of the whispers in the oak leaves, voices of the dead.

THE LIVING

When the new priest burst into the cabin door, causing that great crack of light to interfere with death, the girl and old man were annoyed. That they were abandoned by their families who took the four-day journey into the sun-going-down world was bad enough. That some of the dead came back and waited outside the door, urging them to follow although their bodies clung to life, that was hard. And now, just as they had weakened and slid into a state somewhere between death and life, a drifting torpor from which they saw far ahead down the road and also marvelously lived vivid scenes from the past, here came this priest.

The light dazzled, the dark spun. The priest’s pleasant interest was both irritating and surprisingly powerful. Fleur felt a faint impulse stirring in her to melt snow, or fetch water, then make tea, which meant a fire must be kindled, which seemed impossible and then imperative. She was sure that she was mostly dead. She hadn’t moved from her corner for days, maybe weeks. But somehow on stick legs she lurched out the door into blinding radiance. Light stabbed into her brain, subsided gradually to show the world in whirling shapes. A crust had formed across her mouth. She put a handful of snow on her lips, to unseal her tongue, and allowed a trickle of water to pass down her throat. Then the painful knowledge that now she would rejoin this life, which was only loss after loss, caused her heart to catch in a sob that became a snarl, and she struck out wildly at the air, behind the house, in the deep, warm snow.

As for Nanapush, he still blinked inside the cabin like an owl and whispered bewildered answers to the priest’s awkward questions in his language. Finally, in English, Nanapush said, “That is enough from you, my friend, quite sufficient. Now for a moment you must be silent. The master calls and I must go out and have a shit.” Then, holding his pants up with both hands, the old man toddled from the cabin and did not return for quite some time.

Fleur brought in wood, sticks, some rolls of flammable bark, and quickly brought up a blaze in the rusty can used as an indoor stove. Outside, as the sun was at its height, they could hear the dripping of snow water from the trees. They could hear the clumps of snow sliding down the mud-pole sides of the house. Water dripped from the soaked sod roof down the inside walls. The ice was retreating, but not inside of Fleur. She hated priests. The priests had brought the sickness long ago in the hems of their black gowns, in their sleeves, in the water they flung on people to make them holy but which might as well have burned holes in their skin. All these things, and more. She’d like to stab the priest’s heart, pull it out of his body. She’d look into his face as he died and take satisfaction from his anguish for all her loved ones, her little brother and sisters, her beloved father, her mother who had died last of all.

Who should see such things?

“What can I do to make you feel better?” asked the priest. “Gigaa minwendam i’in?” he tried in Ojibwe.

In spite of herself, she almost laughed. What he actually said was, Can I make you feel good? Which was easy to take as sexual. Mistakenly, the priest took the smile for encouragement and earnestly tried out a little more Ojibwe, which now made her hold her hand up to her mouth to stifle the laugh that almost emerged. What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could. She banged a can of water on the stove and went out. She could not be around the priest. He stank. Or she stank. She would fire up a blaze to heat stones for a sweat and purify herself. She would smoke her clothes with sage. Burn sweet grass to clean the cabin’s air, sweep the sad litter out, the chewed twigs, the nests of hungry mice. Then she would know it was not she, but the priest, who stank. And the old man. He could use a sweat and a good wash, too. For sure, she hated priests. As she left the cabin, voices surrounded her, airy hands plucked at her sleeves, but she shook them off. She pushed snow away from the stones, the grandfathers, gathered last summer when no one knew what killing sorrows this winter would bring.

As for Nanapush, he entered the door and pleasantly announced to the priest, “I have accomplished my end.” When the priest looked amused, instead of chastising Nanapush, the old man was sufficiently interested to want to live just a little longer in order to shock the priest. He rubbed his numb hands, his feet, and thought perhaps he would tell this priest the story of the inquisitive mouse rained on by the big vaginas, and how the mouse reported to and described these beings to his friends down in the holes that had filled with piss and nearly drowned them out. Or maybe the story of how Nanabozho got his penis changed from smooth to knobbed on the end when a clam he tried to fuck closed tight. Or maybe he would just proceed in his best English to tell the priest the many and specific ways he had made love to his wives, all of whom he’d outlived, but then the thought laid his heart down. He couldn’t breathe for the sorrow. He sat in the blankets, speechless. For a long time, he tried to gather himself out of his despair and perhaps the priest sensed this, which was good, for Father Damien maintained a neutral, kind, meditative watchfulness that had in it no hint of impatience.

The water boiled. Fleur came in, made spruce-needle tea, went out again. The priest and the old man sipped the stuff from cans. Maybe, thought Nanapush, as with all things there was a reason for this intrusion and something in it for himself. He set his mind to it. There must be some way that Nanapush could use this priest, if he couldn’t get rid of him. And the priest looked set to stay. The priest would probably not do much about Nanapush’s lack of zhooniyaa — priests never gave out money, that he knew. And food, from the starved look of the black robe, was probably not forthcoming. He didn’t seem to have so much as a piece of bannock with him. No, there was not much good that this priest could do in an immediate way. Nanapush thought harder. Grief over his last wife still pressed him, and it was perhaps that grief and longing, coupled with the Nanapush-like need to take advantage when advantage could be taken, that led him to decide — since the priest had yanked him from the calm world of the dead to thrust him into the strife of the living, where he did not want to go — he at least would not sleep in a cold bed. No, if he had to stay alive, Nanapush would get a wife — a big, warm one. She would make a little nest for him every night, blankets spread over cedar boughs. He’d curl beside her and he’d get warm and then he’d make them both happy with what he’d been given, his gift, unless that, too, had starved so skinny it was useless.

So while he sat quietly, Nanapush’s mind was really hard at work, and when it found a direction, his tongue was triggered and wouldn’t stop. Somehow, and Nanapush did not know how it would occur, the talking itself, if he did it long enough, always brought him by roundabout and unexpected ways to the place he intended. And so although he started somewhere altogether far from any discussion of wives or beds, he had no doubt that he would end up where he was going. He spoke what came to mind then, and told a story that he suddenly recalled hearing from a zhaaganaash-akiing Cree.

NANABOZHO CONVERTS THE WOLVES

Nanapush

Our Nanabozho was like me, said the old man, launching it, very poor once — in fact, so poor he didn’t even own a rotten old rag such as I have to dress in, no, he had to go naked and his family, too. So it interested Nanabozho very much when he heard the Frenchmen were traveling around his home ground buying up furs and wolf pelts and buffalo robes. Yes, he thought, that sounded very interesting. He even saw people who had many furs and had bought warm new clothes. But yet, sadly enough, Nanabozho had no furs to sell.

So he went to a Frenchman anyway and tried to persuade him to give some credit, telling him that soon he would have a great many furs to put down on his debt.

Then the Frenchman, who believed Nanabozho, gave him blankets and coats and even a gun. Also, a great deal of clothing. Nanabozho brought these things home and gave them all to his wife. But she was angry and called him crazy.

“How are we going to pay?” she yelled.

“Oh,” said Nanabozho, “I will go back to this Frenchman. You’ll see.”

So Nanabozho went back to the Frenchman and this time he asked for some medicine, poison. He took that poison home and then told his old woman to give him some fat, which she did. She gave him fat. Then he turned around and put that poison into the fat. He patted out many little flat lumps of poison fat and cooled them until they were hard. Then he took them all and went to look for the wolves.

Nanabozho walked along until he came to a place where there was a wolf.

“Brother,” said Nanabozho, “come here!”

But the wolf would not, saying, “You only want to kill me!”

“No, my little brother,” said Nanabozho, “I want to hire you.”

Well, that sounded interesting to the wolf, so he came around.

“I want to give you the job of going everywhere to summon all the wolves and the foxes, oh yes, all the best-looking of the wolves and foxes, to come and see me, on this little hill. I have taken the Jesus road, my friends, and I wish to preach to you all!”

Then once the wolves and foxes arrived, he spoke some more.

“My brothers,” he said, “these things I am going to tell you are good, and you should accept them indeed! If you take on this religion, no one can kill you. It’s true. But if you do not believe along with me, you will surely die. Now look what I have for you!”

Nanabozho displayed the poisoned lumps of fat.

“If anyone eats of this, long will he live!” declared Nanabozho.

Then the wolves all threw themselves forward, hoping to live long, and Nanabozho dispensed the fat.

A wolf would come forward, eat the fat, then go. One by one, Nanabozho placed the fat in their mouths, and the foxes, too, until the fat was all gone. And then Nanabozho held up his hand and blessed all the wolves, saying, “Long may you live!” And as he said this and blessed them, the wolves leaped in the air and howled, turned twice in agony, and fell back to earth dead.

That’s the way Nanabozho gave religious instruction to the wolves. After he saved their souls, he skinned them all and the foxes, too, and as he walked to the French traders carrying their skins, he laughed and laughed. Truly, he said, I have converted them — to money.

That’s all. Mi’sago’i!

* * *

Fleur had entered the cabin to hear the end of the story, and with a cold sarcasm laughed at the unmanly priest and asked what he thought of that?

Father Damien, for a fact, looked extremely thoughtful. He said nothing as he sipped the tea, and at last he answered that he thought the story was extremely clever but that, if he read the meaning right, the Anishinaabeg were not as stupid as wolves nor did Father Damien need to skin them in order to pay his debts. Nanapush looked happily at the priest now, and started feeling glad he was alive, if only to be presented with the challenge of rattling a promising opponent. At the same time, just to speak of those lumps of fat made him so hungry that his stomach stabbed and groaned. He tried to kill the hunger with another swallow of tea.

GAAG

After they had finished the last drop of tea, the three looked gloomily at the walls of the little cabin, as though the tamped poles would somehow leak porridge. As they gazed with a sad, fixed blankness into their private fantasies of food, they heard a sound. At the very first scrape of this sound, Nanapush held up his hand. “Bizindan,” he whispered. He looked at Fleur, and then upon his face there appeared the happy wonder of a child discovering a stash of sweets. The priest listened, mystified. The sound occurred again, right at the southeast corner of the cabin. It was, there was absolutely no mistake about it, a definitive chomp. A munch. A distinct chewing sound.

“Gaag,” said Fleur, and she and Nanapush dropped down to their knees, crept across the dirt floor wearing such gleeful looks that Father Damien, caught up in their madness, crawled behind them out of intense curiosity. Their stealthy whispers inhibited him from asking any questions. Anyway, they’d forgotten about him. They went outside, stood, slowly sneaked around the side of the cabin and found there an enormous porcupine. Startled, it removed its teeth from the log side of the house and backed away, eyeing the humans with a grave and glistening black stare, apprehensive and somehow, thought Father Damien, pleading.

Fleur gently crept near the animal, brushed her hands over the porcupine’s quills so they all lay one way. Suddenly she grasped it and raised it by its ferocious tail, at which point it gave a very human gasp, a surprised eeee! With a giant’s swing, she brained the creature on the side of the house, and then knelt with her knife and gutted it in the yard.

In the past few weeks, in the extremities of hunger, Father Damien was surprised to find how many things he’d eaten that he’d formerly considered inedible. Even covered with quills, the porcupine was making his mouth water. So he gladly helped Nanapush split wood and build up a fire, stoking it so furiously that the flimsy tin stove turned red hot. Fleur brought in the animal and quickly removed its best quills, dipping her hands in a shovelful of wood ash from time to time in order to increase their grip. When she had the quills she wanted off, she spitted the porcupine and roasted it slowly, singeing the remaining quills into the flesh. That, said Nanapush, gave the gaag a better taste.

Nanapush talked quickly and happily, now, waiting for their meal. He spoke of oddities and miscellany until the meat was roasted. Then they ate. They ate every little scrap. They ate the toes, they ate the brains. Sucked every bone completely clean. Only the teeth and nails were left when, in a genial well-fed mood, Father Damien asked Nanapush if he knew the man named Kashpaw who had given him a ride to the reservation.

Nanapush did not answer the simple question at once. He stared at the priest in what seemed a sudden fit of idiocy. His mouth dropped. His eyes dulled. That was a smoke screen. He was thinking. For to his great delight, there it was, it all spread from that one question. Nanapush had at last found a way through the thicket of words to the end he sought. And it was easy, so easy, it all lay ripe before him now.

Changing his expression suddenly to a look of intelligent interest, Nanapush said that of course, Kashpaw was as close as a brother. He told Father Damien that he and Kashpaw had been through much together in their youth, had hunted near and far, through the northern plains, and even lived for a short time in the same lodge. He went on to say that Kashpaw and he were half brothers and that a more distant relative of Nanapush’s was married to him.

“Of course,” said Nanapush casually, “he has so many wives that this one relative, a niece of my uncle, her name is Fishbone, is hardly noticed in that woman-wealthy lodge.”

“Wives?” said Father Damien.

“Oh yes,” said Nanapush.

“How many?”

“Let me see…” Nanapush proceeded ostentatiously to try to remember exactly, to count on his fingers.

“Four left now. That’s all.”

Father Damien was still not shocked, but he was at least intrigued, and as he was clearly stumped for what to say, Nanapush was satisfied. Besides, he was just beginning the slow work of influencing the priest, and he didn’t want to frighten him off. Therefore, he chose other subjects for a short time until the priest himself returned to the question of the wives.

“My… colleague”—Father Damien coughed; he was referring to the actual Father Damien, now long buried in the shadow of a tree—“was concerned about the problem of irregular unions. This must be what he meant. How are such things dealt with here? Who has the authority?”

Nanapush, though thrilled to be asked the very question he had sought, still did not reel in the priest, but let him drag the line. Again, pretending not to have heard, he spoke of his empty trapline and the lack of good weather until Father Damien grew impatient and tried once more.

“The authority on such matters,” he reminded.

“Ah!” Nanapush pretended to collect himself. “Pardon an old man. Here is the truth. Father Hugo was forced to break many an illegal liaison, and his zeal was well-known. But since he died, well, my friend Kashpaw moved down here and got bold. Even some of us old traditionals,” he said, in a fit of outrageous betrayal, “think that he should get rid of some of his wives!”

“Eyah! So you can have one!”

Fleur was outraged by the old man’s cunning attempt at sanctimony, and in spite of her hatred of black robes she tried to warn the priest. If Father Damien had only listened, she gave away the transparent strategy right there. “Don’t you see, he just wants a wife all for himself? He’s willing to break up his friend’s life just to do it.”

But Father Damien was dazed with the unaccustomed feeling of a full stomach. Nanapush pulled a long face, though, and answered he only wished that he could handle a wife, but that was impossible in his present weakness.

It wasn’t that Nanapush ever wanted to hurt his friend, or that family, or to lay blame for all that would happen on Father Damien. Nanapush was incapable of imagining such things as would occur. He knew very well that Kashpaw’s situation had to give, somehow or another. Though the arrangement was based on complicated practicalities and all were seemingly content in Kashpaw’s lodge, a change was coming. Drawing near. No, it wasn’t that Nanapush wanted to destroy his friend’s family and peace of mind, or even that he had to have one of those wives (although if given his choice, Nanapush knew which one he’d pick). It was only that he saw what he saw, and the time was coming. It was like when they were boys and they dammed up a stream to collect the fish. Below the dam, they set out a net, ready for when they let the water go. That was all Nanapush wanted to do. When the dam burst, he wanted to be there, downstream, to catch the fish that swam into his hands.

Now came Father Damien’s first lesson in Ojibwe social planning. When he rose to take his leave, Nanapush gathered his blanket and snowshoes, ready to leave with him. Fleur had crawled into her small, domed sweat lodge, removing herself in disgust. It was a surprise to Father Damien that by listening to Nanapush’s description of Kashpaw’s whereabouts and nodding politely, he had in actuality agreed to visit, but as they walked Nanapush persuaded him that, though it was growing dark, Kashpaw’s place was not far off, right on the way back to the church, in fact, and even better, there was a good possibility that Kashpaw’s family might have food in the kettle, for not only Kashpaw but a couple of his wives and sons were good hunters. Even though his stomach had felt bursting tight an hour before, Father Damien’s starving body had magically emptied it. Food sounded good. So it was that Father Damien was introduced to the endless Ojibwe visit, in which a get-together produces a perfectly convincing reason to seek another, and then that visit another, and so on. Father Damien tramped earnestly along and looked forward to meeting the household of Kashpaws.

6. THE KASHPAW WIVES

1912

Their arrival at Kashpaw’s camp was greeted with a loud blast from Mashkiigikwe’s powerful rifle. She stood in the clearing, round and strong as an autumn bear, the barrel held upright in one hand. With a fascinated contempt, she observed the priest’s clumsy approach. Obviously, the black robe was still not adept at walking through the bush. Thorns grabbed his cassock. Vines bound his ankles. His steps gave way in pockets of watery snow. Exhaustion gripped him. His weak knees trembled as he slogged behind Nanapush, from whom the wife of Kashpaw had already turned with a groan of disgust.

Kashpaw lived with his wives in two houses, one a cabin very similar to Nanapush’s, the other an old-style lodge constructed of limber saplings bent over, sunk in the earth, tied, and covered with slabs of bark. There was also a rough pole shed, which housed the horses that Kashpaw loved and bartered. Several milled in a corral; others were picketed by the edge of the woods, where they could paw up old grass through the snow.

Mashkiigikwe returned, bloody to the elbows. In her hand, she held a dripping piece of the deer she’d just shot. When Kashpaw appeared, she tossed the meat to him and delicately, wielding his razor-sharp hunting knife, he sliced it into strips and offered each of the men a portion in greeting.

Even without the vast red capote, the yellow turban, the buffalo robe, wool shawls and velvet, Kashpaw was impressive. He was a powerful, hunched, comic-looking man, rather ugly Father Damien supposed, looking at him closely, and yet attractive for his keen eye and a sense of barely withheld mirth. The priest and Nanapush entered the smaller bark lodge behind Kashpaw. He began singing a soft tune in a mournful and teasing tone. Inside the shadowy large birch-bark lodge, well behind him and seemingly unaffected by the cold, two women worked at some task with a concentrated air.

“Boozhoo!”

At his word, one of the wives poked her head at the men. She wore a red knitted hat that flopped over her brow like a crest, her nose was sharp, and Father Damien could not help thinking of her as an angry woodpecker. Of the two, she was much older, and she seemed to have been disturbed in the midst of a satisfying tirade, for she jumped up and laughed harshly at her sister wife, who suddenly rushed from the hut, stifling a racking sob.

Nanapush and Father Damien settled themselves on a pile of skins and blankets, and Kashpaw made all of the gestures of a generous host while Father Damien appreciated all he saw and ate like an affable guest. Nanapush sat back. He made an effort to stop his tongue, to contain himself. It was important to proceed with delicacy. Not to give away his plan, but to let it unfold as if it were natural, in the course of things. He told himself that all he had to do was put the priest into the situation, and wait. Priests and extra wives were mutually opposed, he had seen it before. This priest was of course much younger, oddly feminine, and a good deal subtler than Father Hugo, but that his intentions were fundamentally those of a priest, Nanapush had no doubt.

While he sat at Kashpaw’s fire and waited, Nanapush appreciated the wife of his friend, the hunter who’d just shot the deer, the one whom he intended to take for his own when the dust settled. Mashkiigikwe’s legs were oak fence posts and her neck, solid, was packed with a power that surged up through her body and flashed from her eyes. He drifted in admiration as she tore wolfishly at a piece of deer liver with strong little teeth, and chewed each piece with a thoughtful frown, as though she was masticating some inner meaning from her food. Yet, when well fed, she could be very jolly, too. Her singing voice was of a surprising lilt and softness, and her songs were often children’s games. It charmed Nanapush to watch her and spurred him to help matters along.

Children popped out, hair sticking straight up. They were deliciously round, seemingly healthy, and completely naked. Two ran out just as they were into the frigid air and, chased by the oldest wife, dove back into the lodge, bearing in their fists some tiny tidbit from the carcass. And then two men showed up, young men, older sons of the sharp-tongued Margaret. A boy named Nector glanced inside, took in the configuration, nodded, and left. A quiet woman emerged, fully pregnant, from a pile of robes and arranged the children carefully before her. She was softer, plainer than the others, and moved with extreme grace, even pregnant and huge. She rubbed the faces of the children, patted their hands, and when she was given a piece of the venison she spitted morsels of it on green sticks, elegantly roasted the meat, and cooled each bit with her breath before offering it to each child. They obeyed her with huge gravity. As they chewed, she ate, too, and told them a teasing story in her language.

Her name was Fishbone, and Father Damien later baptized her Marie. Margaret, of course, already had a chimookoman name and was a good Catholic, except in respect to her married life. The woman she had caused to cry, Quill, was later christened Marie as well. As for Mashkiigikwe, Father Damien never got a chance to name her, for she cleft to her own religion, and would have knocked the dipper of blessed water from his hand.

The priest sat silently and simply watched the goings-on around him, while the other men talked over old times. It certainly was not Father Damien’s intention to walk into the family and make a declaration of any sort, but Nanapush kept giving him encouraging sideways glances, then somewhat sterner nods, even little gestures. Finally, Nanapush purposely let a lull develop in the conversation, which he’d artfully maneuvered toward his topic of interest by inquiring about the health of each wife, and in that small silence he motioned toward the priest.

“Let the priest speak,” he encouraged.

“If you’d ever shut up,” said Margaret, “the priest would have spoken before.”

“My friend Nanapush has such a kind heart,” said Kashpaw, “that he had to ask after each one of the women.” Kashpaw glanced shrewdly at Margaret, and she gave a sour little suspicious frown.

“Funny that he is so interested in our health.” She turned away. She was unripe gooseberry, pure vinegar. Margaret’s presence puckered up the room like a basket of chokecherries. Her glance dried laughter, her hard snakelike impenetrable glare shook men to the core but also, in Kashpaw’s case anyway, caused a certain shiver of interest. There was something both frightful and seductive about her cold temperament. As for Kashpaw, he allowed as it was odd that Nanapush was suddenly so very solicitous, but he sat back with amusement and said nothing else, for he knew very well the reason for his old friend’s attentive inquiries. They were nearly brothers, after all, and had sat with their foreheads touching, smoked their pipes in grief over many deaths. Kashpaw knew the lay of his friend’s mind and understood that he was lonely, that his bed was cold, his arms empty, his wiinag bored, his days given to sad memory. Kashpaw knew his own wives were now more than a source of envy, they were a possible selection pool for Nanapush himself if this priest, who sat with them now trying not to look bewildered, prevailed upon him to give them up. Oh yes, Kashpaw had no illusions. Yet he didn’t hold these things against Nanapush but accepted the scheming as an inevitable part of his friend’s nature. The fact was, Kashpaw enjoyed anticipating Nanapush and thwarting his plans, so when the priest failed to respond to the pointed hints he dropped, Kashpaw was happy to further distract the priest. He asked questions, as if he was considering conversion. Can Jesus kill a windigo? Why did their god kill Father Hugo? He enjoyed the slow attention that Father Damien gave the questions, and even more, the steaming frustration of his friend beside him. He would have a good laugh later on with Margaret over the way Nanapush prodded and tried to steer the priest toward his purpose.

Father Damien, for his part, finally tired of receiving obscure signals from Nanapush. He made motions, as though to leave, which panicked Nanapush into blurting a reproach.

“You are the one who is supposed to hold forth!” Losing all sense of reserve, and infuriated by Father Damien’s blank stare, he cried out the louder. “It’s your job to set this married man right! You are the priest!”

Father Damien’s expression did not change. He merely regarded Nanapush with bemused speculation, seeing the shape of the subterfuge at last — and he was the last one to see it, he was sure. How naïve of him, how willingly he’d been put to the use of this rascal. Visit, indeed! The priest had merely been the tool of this old man’s lust.

“Nanapush,” said Father Damien, sternly, at last. “I see why you have taken me to visit Kashpaw. It is your hope that I will forbid him to have his wives!”

“Ii’iih,” said Nanapush, trying to slow himself down now that his game was discovered, “isn’t it the rule of the church? One husband? One wife?”

“Well, yes,” said Damien unwillingly.

“See there!”

“You are putting words into my mouth,” said Father Damien, angry at the entire situation, exasperated with Nanapush. “Of course it is Church doctrine, but Kashpaw does not belong to the Church.”

Nanapush was suddenly crushed. He had not foreseen this.

“Do you mean to say it is a question of belonging to the church?” he shrieked. “Then if Kashpaw stays a pagan he can keep his wives?”

“I have no say in it.” Father Damien was now at the exploding point. He could feel Nanapush trying to herd him through a small gate and stubbornly decided to dump doctrine, sound principle, everything that he should rightly have defended as a priest, in order not to let this man’s woman-hunger steer him too.

“But he will go to hell!” Nanapush was desperate. “I only fear for my friend, as the hell of the chimookomanag sounds extremely painful.” He then proceeded to paint a picture of the flames and pincers that made Kashpaw and Margaret, and then the entire lodge, roll with laughter.

“To be quite specific about it, no,” said Father Damien when the hilarity was spent. Even he had been tempted to laugh at the old man’s transparent pretense at saving his friend. “Kashpaw will go to a place called Purgatory where there isn’t much to do, and where he won’t ever see God.”

“I’ve seen enough chimookomanag anyway,” said Kashpaw, “without having to meet the one responsible for creating the white race.”

“I’d like to see him,” said Mashkiigikwe. “I’d tell him what I thought of his work.” She spat. Father Damien ignored her, focused on the seething Nanapush, and couldn’t help an unpriestlike thought from coming to him. Earlier, the old man had told him something of his life, and now he decided to use his revelation against him.

“Nanapush,” said Father Damien, in a voice that got everyone’s attention, “you have told me that you, like Kashpaw, were at one time the husband of several wives. What was your reason?”

Nanapush reluctantly told his story.

PATAKIZOOG!

Nanapush

Father Damien, said Nanapush, struggling with resentment but soon, as always, caught up in the pleasure of talking, if you must know these things, only listen to my story, for it is the way things happened until only just these last few seasons. Here’s how it goes:

Our band of people in the north were struck at one time with the spirit of disease. The spirit killed so many of us that when the dead were counted it was found that we survivors numbered less than a quarter of our camp. At the time, I wasn’t born, yet I am told how the mourners sat grieving together, willing themselves to be struck down, too. But the destroying spirit had passed. It was then suggested that they kill themselves, all together for courage, and journey as a band to meet their beloved dead in the land of the aadizokaanag. But then one older, wiser woman, a large woman, strong and powerful, stood upright and spoke.

“Mii’e etaa i’iwe gay onji shabwii’ing,” she said, “gakina awiyaa ninaandawenimaa chi mazhiweyt. Neshke idash tahnee pahtahneynahwug gey ani bimautiziwaad.”

There were some who looked shocked, who protested, who were surprised that she would exhort the women to make babies in their sorrow, to order the men to stand up their wiinagag, to endeavor valiantly to procreate until they dropped! But, as she had always been a faithful and virtuous woman, they listened to her. She calmed them down and explained her idea. She pointed out how the Bwaanag, or Dakota, to the south had fought against the whites to try conquering them, but that hadn’t worked out as well as the Ojibwe method of making Michifs and wiisaakodewininiwag. She said what everyone knew, that the Creator gave his people the Ojibwe a special love skill that they could always use in times of crisis.

“Gakinago giigaa kitchi manitiminin. Ininiwag, dagasaa patakizoog! Ikweywug, pagetinamahgehg! Ahau, anishinabedok, patakizoog! Ahua! Manitadaa!”

With that, she left them to think. As the evening went on, they all came to see it her way. They saw that if they followed her advice there would be new Anishinaabeg by the turn of three seasons. She had even closed by saying that although her hair was gray, she intended to have more children.

In fact, that very night, she picked the strongest and handsomest young man left among the people. That young man, Mirage was his name, did a lot of work all that night, and the next and next — but the women kept him fed and warm and they all got pregnant. The old woman was my mother, and the young man, who still lives, was made chief for the great duties he continued to perform with his uncounted wives. He re-created our tribe. So you see, that which you Catholics abhor — our gift, which is to mazhiwe at any time of the day or night — is why we do remain strong and why we have not died out.

And as you see, Father Damien, your friend Nanapush has only followed his mother’s orders. I am an obedient son.

That is it! Mi’sago’i!

* * *

Kashpaw’s powerful shoulders hunched around his ears as he listened to Nanapush, and his tiny eyes, dark with shrewd hilarity, took in the configuration before him.

“My reasons are no better or worse than those of Nanapush,” he said. “I, too, am the son of that generous young stud who saved us all, and one of the woman who gladly slept with him. We survived. I am proud of it. Why should I change?”

Nanapush looked resentfully at Kashpaw, who simply shrugged, and let his eye wander appreciatively over the tight barrel of Mashkiigikwe’s rear.

“What would the white god want with you, anyway?” he said to Kashpaw. “You’re ugly and full of mischief!”

Kashpaw made a mocking face.

“Maybe Jesus wants to know my love medicine.”

“Howah! More likely you can sell your knowledge to Matchimanito, the bad spirit. Eyah.” Nanapush stroked his chin. “I always wondered how it was you got these women to live with you. Now my question is answered. You worked your love snares.”

“This is the only love snare I need.” Kashpaw gestured down at his sex. Father Damien kept his gaze steady, though his breathing faltered. Nanapush was not in the least embarrassed, but craned to look critically into Kashpaw’s lap. “Yes, it is shaped like a snare, all right, limp and skinny!”

“Saaa!” Mashkiigikwe walked up behind Nanapush and swiped at his head with her brush, an ingenious thing, not store-bought but created of clipped porcupine quills fastened into a strip of rawhide.

“I don’t hunt with snares, sweetheart,” Nanapush crooned to Mashkiigikwe. “I use a nice, long, heavy stick.”

Mashkiigikwe sneered down on him with amused contempt, stuck her little finger out, and wiggled it at him.

“All you’re good for is bait,” she declared.

“Let’s go fish together, then,” said Nanapush.

“I only fish with my old man.”

“What do you do,” Nanapush inquired, “those lonely nights when he satisfies your sisters?”

Mashkiigikwe’s mouth opened. She glared at him with false outrage.

“Me,” said Nanapush confidingly, “when I had six wives—”

“Six!” Mashkiigikwe interrupted, laughing sarcastically. “He was drunk and seeing double!”

Nanapush ignored her. “I was able to put them all to sleep!”

“By talking!” said Kashpaw, not in the least embarrassed or offended at Nanapush’s suggestive behavior with his wife. He only snickered to himself and looked significantly at Father Damien, who felt that it was his responsibility to take charge and return the conversation to some semblance of a priestly visit; therefore, he accidentally asked a question that would have repercussions, “Mr. Kashpaw, have you solemnized your vows with any one of your wives?”

Kashpaw shrugged. What did it matter, his frown said, but one of the wives did step up.

“Niin sa!”

It was Margaret, her red hat bobbing. Beneath it her tough face was carefully cut as though with fine tools. Her thinning hair still rose fiercely off her brow and was collected in braids. Her mouth, both sweet and treacherous, now twisted sarcastically. Perhaps, thought Father Damien, she would have been beautiful — if there was any softness to her. Her voice was sharp as thorns. “I forced him to take the Eucharist and then we were joined by Father Hugo.” She looked furiously from side to side, as though someone would challenge her.

“Kashpaw says they scrap like badgers,” said Nanapush. “The other wives send them from the house when they fight. She bit him once.”

Kashpaw displayed his arm, a short, thick white scar.

“Right to the bone,” said Margaret in satisfaction.

“Have you confessed your sin?” Father Damien asked, irritated by this woman’s smug ferocity.

“What sin?” she answered. “He deserved it.”

“Dispensing punishment is God’s task and right,” Damien went on. “In all ways a good spouse is gentle.”

“And slow,” said Nanapush solemnly to Mashkiigikwe, “and takes his time where it counts, and…”

She turned away and hummed, as though suppressing a yawn.

“If the priest won’t say it,” Nanapush lost patience at last, “I will say it. Kashpaw! You have too many wives. You’ll have to get rid of at least three!”

Kashpaw probably expected this outburst, for now, with a dramatic pause, he concentrated on his pipe, drew it from its case of red cloth and fitted its bowl to the carved stem. Once he had done this, everyone around him fell silent and in the vacant quiet the coals of the fire hissed and flared. He loaded the rose-red bowl with pinches of tobacco, then proceeded to light the pipe and to draw meditatively on the stem, emitting two thin streams from the corners of his mouth.

At last, he set down his pipe and looked reproachfully at his visitors. His expression slowly registered convincing bewilderment. “Wives?” he said. “Who is calling these fine ladies my wives?” Craftily, he feigned insult, knowing that he could be considered in violation of certain laws, not of his tribe’s making, but of the government’s. “I offer shelter to these women beneath my roof.”

“And I,” said Nanapush, unable to contain himself around Mashkiigikwe, turning to her, “I offer shelter to you in my bed. And since my cabin has a leaky roof, I’ll offer to lie down over you to keep the rain off.”

He looked directly at Mashkiigikwe, who pressed her lips together in pretend fury and then covered herself with indifference.

Kashpaw ignored this absurd sweet talk and addressed the priest. “I am still interested in this god who kills off his favorites, wipes them from the earth. I would like to know”—here he eyed Damien with frank curiosity—“what makes you walk behind this Jesus?”

This question of great simplicity caused the priest’s thoughts to wheel together like a flock of startled birds. What indeed? What cause? All Father Damien could do at first was contemplate the pattern of the flock out of which the great logos of his passion was written.

“It is love,” he said. “That is the sole reason. Love.”

The others looked uncertian. In the Ojibwe language the word does not exist in the same sense — there is love out of pity, love out of kindness, love that is specific to situations or to the world of stones, which are alive and called our grandfathers. There is also the stingy and greedy love that white people call romantic love. This love of Christ, this love that chose Agnes and forced her to give up her nature as a woman, forced Father Damien to appear to sacrifice the pleasures of manhood, was impossible to define in Ojibwe.

The boy named Nector ducked into the lodge, sat down next to him, peered at the slight new priest with curiosity. The boy was well dressed, extremely neat, and even wore an expensive-looking, smart, plaid cap. His father finally spoke.

“I am going to send my boy here, this Nector, to your church. He will investigate,” said Kashpaw. “He will tell me if this spirit is any good. If there is something to this god, I’ll come see for myself.”

There was a mutter of protest and consternation from the women in the tent, then, and Mashkiigikwe pounded the earth with her feet.

“Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?”

Father Damien, whose task it was to steal even the intangible about the woman beside him, had no answer.

KASHPAW’S PASSION

Kashpaw sat on the ground with his sacred pipe before him on a flat pale rock. Gizhe Manito, tell me what to do, he prayed. His heart was so dark and heavy that when he bent over to take up his pipe, it felt like it might tumble from his chest. For all of his power, right now he felt like a frail container. So much conflict was stuffed inside him that his skin seemed too thin to contain it. This young priest’s arrival had disturbed everything. Margaret, his one church-married wife, lambasted the others. Pushed past her limit, Mashkiigikwe threatened to brain the older woman. Fishbone drooped quietly and poor Quill, whose mind was sensitive, desperately clung to her older sister and begged Mashkiigikwe not to leave.

“The time for this arrangement is long over,” said Mashkiigikwe, “even the other full-blood families are starting to laugh at us. Now that this priest listens to old Nanapush, who as we know is only fishing for a leftover wife from Kashpaw, we’ll have no peace.”

Kashpaw pressed his knuckles to his eyes. A man’s heart was generous, giving, like a skin that could hold more and more water. But there was always a limit, the last drop, a sorrow that could burst it. Thinking of parting with Mashkiigikwe, of not hearing her bold call as she entered the clearing with good news of her hunting, that was unthinkable. Not to laugh at her jokes or wonder at her kindness to her sister, Quill, whom she had begged Kashpaw to marry in order to save her from facing a situation in which her peculiarities of mind were exploited. No, he could not grasp what would happen if Mashkiigikwe were to leave. And yet Fishbone, pregnant, could not be the one to leave either. Vulnerable as she was, and helpless, she must surely stay. She had no family to return to. Kashpaw tried not to allow the vision of her calm grace to sway him, or his wish to curve her against him at night, to feel the heat of her gravid body. He tried not to think of her long fingers or the sadness in her hidden smile. Fishbone, he greatly loved. And he loved Margaret as well. Her acid humor pleased him and the times she allowed him near, unexpectedly, her startling inventiveness and bold behavior overwhelmed him with admiration. Besides, she was the first of his wives, and they had come to each other very young and as virgins. He could not forget those nights and how they had been the teachers of one another. Their children came one after the next, and each was stronger and more intelligent than he had any right to wish. No, Margaret could not leave. Impossible.

The leaves rustled inconclusively. His thoughts turned back and forth in the wind. First one side then the other, quick as popple. This young priest possessed a surprising power, one he seemed unaware of, which made it all the more effective. The young priest had calmed Quill and made her happy. His mere presence had affected the change. After his visit, Quill fell to her knees whenever her mind swelled. By striking her breast and crying out in her own words a message to the priest’s god, she emptied her mind of the deadly thing that possessed it. Nothing else, no doctoring, had helped. But the priest, she liked.

So that was the first of several arguments Kashpaw’s mind put up. He didn’t listen to the self-serving evidence that his covetous friend Nanapush laid out before him. Even thinking of Nanapush’s transparent scheming, Kashpaw had to laugh. If Mashkiigikwe ever got her hands on the old dog, she would break him like a twig. And Margaret, he doubted anyone but himself could survive the ravages of Margaret’s love. Yet what could he do? It was clear that things must change, only he didn’t have the ability to make a decision. Each loss was impossible. Each solution meant destruction. If he did nothing, would his land be seized? Margaret mentioned that, but was she inventing the possibility for her own purposes?

Kashpaw grasped his pipe tenderly and touched the warm red bowl of the stone to his forehead. Why did a man have to love so much? The stone cooled in his fingers while he let his mind wander through all of the sorrows of possible answers.

*

Agnes tried to tell herself, later, that it was not one thing or another that broke up the Kashpaw family and set chaos into motion. Yet she could not ignore the fact that Father Damien started it with his visit. Later, when she was able to reflect upon the fall of events, Agnes pictured a tornado descending, one composed of political gusts and personal fabrics of wind, a twister in the eye of which rose Pauline Puyat, later to become Sister Leopolda, nemesis and savior.

Father Damien knew all that happened through the boy with the plaid cap, for Nector Kashpaw did show up, at first to stand uneasily within the nave, and then later to become an altar boy. The boy served Holy Mass each Sunday with great seriousness and precision, a contrast to his increasingly desperate home life, which he recounted to Father Damien over the post-Mass rolls and meat, tea and dried apples that Damien provided and Nector ate with strict intensity.

The violently independent Mashkiigikwe left her little sister, with Kashpaw’s promise that Quill would be the one wife he kept. Mashkiigikwe left at night, knowing that Quill would howl and clutch to her skirts. She took her gun and pack and disappeared onto her trapline. Kashpaw’s next youngest son, Eli, was already gone. That left Kashpaw another gun short and in want of hunters to feed the group. Fishbone’s baby was stillborn; she fell ill and could not be moved from the cabin. During spring sugaring, her older child crawled into the fire, and for days his screams and whimpers rang the little clearing. Margaret finally struck the child, silencing its cries to bewildered gasps. Kashpaw, sore over Mashkiigikwe, struck Margaret fiercely in return and didn’t even care to follow her when she hobbled off in fury to complain to Nanapush.

Who fell in love with her.

Nector didn’t tell this last development to Father Damien. The priest found out himself, and the situation provided him with much to consider. So it was Nanapush who threw the Kashpaw household like a pile of sticks into the air, in the night, and waited blindly underneath to catch what fell, or who, and wasn’t it a well-deserved and sad piece of luck that the one he caught was Margaret?

During the months that followed, it was apparent that Nanapush wasn’t over his first infatuation with Mashkiigikwe. He often thought about her, spoke of her great hunting skills with bashful adoration, spread his hands one way to show the size of her feet to Father Damien, spread his hands differently to show the weight of her breasts, threatened to follow her with gifts of love.

Gradually, though, and with increasing ardor, his attention turned to placating Margaret Kashpaw. She was composed of a shrewd toughness that intrigued him. Her features communicated regal scorn. She was surprisingly light on her feet and could easily run a dog down and whack the rabbit from its teeth. Nanapush had seen it. She could chop wood, haul water, drop a wild goose from the sky by clipping off its head with one shot. Nobody bested her and nothing intimidated Margaret. She was a challenge that Nanapush could not resist.

QUILL’S MADNESS

Without her older sister, Quill lost her bearings, for it was Mashkiigikwe who always told her what to do. Mashkiigikwe had soothed her and carefully unwrinkled the pain that crumpled her mind. She had stroked her younger sister’s face and sung an old song about the clouds lifting off the surface of the lake. Then she fed her tidbits from her own fingers and lightly pulled on Quill’s braids, as though to guide her back to the living. Eventually, Quill would respond slightly, and then Mashkiigikwe would know that once more she’d succeeded in reaching her. And she had wanted desperately to reach her sister, guide her back, for on this side of the spirit world Quill had a daughter who was turning out to be as massive as her father, but very shy, and needed a mother’s attention.

Mashkiigikwe had also kept things running smoothly, along with Margaret. There was always food, always wood, always water. Now, all Quill did for hours each day was chop, haul, gather. A frail sapling, her shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the family. Taking care of all the children including her own daughter, and the burnt boy, enduring a lack of food and the nerveless despair of her husband, Quill imagined that she had bent to the ground and been rooted by the ends of her fine, black hair. When she pulled herself upright, earth rained down on her and her thoughts were weak as dust.

Quill sat hunched on pukwe mats while her daughter, whom she’d just named Mary after the female whiteman’s god, combed through her hair with her fingers, then the clever brush. Mary divided off the hair strand by strand and removed from the hairs louse or egg of louse or husk or sign of such a creature. Lately, Quill had come to abhor these intimate vermin and to believe that they were biting her to disturb and to disarrange her thoughts. From time to time, her daughter dipped her fingers in a little can of kerosene and pinched off a louse. Quill’s thoughts burned. Temptations flared. A harsh volatility depleted her. Quill imagined that if Mary should purse her lips and blow on her head it would burst into flame like a candle. She slapped off her daughter’s hands, jumped up, started working.

Quill wove pukwe angrily, not half as well as Margaret. She moved the reeds between her fingers so quickly that they blurred, but the mats were uneven, the edges loose and sloppy. Who cared? One mat, another, appeared. When she stopped, her strength faded and her eyes rolled back, white around the iris. Her breath came short. A strange fear rode in her, and the only way to keep going was to keep working. Faster. Harder. She knit an extra mat and tossed it aside. Another materialized. The mats kept collecting until the reeds were gone. Yet her heart would not be still.

In the center of the day, she abandoned everyone, left them howling for her, crying for n’gah, n’gah, weakly asking for nibi or soup. She stood and walked into the bush, hiked her skirts and peed standing, frowning distractedly at the moving reeds onshore. Mashkiigikwe had always helped her drive away a spirit that annoyed her, a wild old skeletal woman who kept visiting her and putting evil thoughts into her mind. Suddenly, here the old thing came, scratching her way along through the undergrowth until very suddenly she was right next to Quill, invisible, fingering her skirt, lifting her blouse, touching her legs, laughing at Quill’s slow tears of fright.

At first Quill resisted. As always, once the old witch operated on her with her words and torture, Quill eventually agreed to accomplish the cruel tricks that the matchimindemoyenh laid out in her mind. When she returned to the lodge, Quill stuffed earth into the mouths of her children. She poured earth into the barrel of her husband’s rifle, flung earth into the soup pot, and tamped earth into her vagina. She sat grinning at the world, holding a great makak of dirt. Eat, she said to her husband, offering it when he returned.

DOCTORING QUILL

They tried the sucking bones again and they tried the old remedies but always, halfway through the procedure, Quill rolled over with an alert cry and darted her arms in the air beseeching them to fetch the priest. Perhaps, by then, she had seen too many die too young, too soon, and Quill’s nervous mind could not accept this. She’d had only her sister left. Many people went mad to protect themselves from the grief of witnessing the wreckage. Perhaps the old woman with the white hands and black face, hissing in her mind, was the cause of Quill’s agitation. The priest, Father Damien, had given her assurance without really knowing how to help her.

Desperate to bring her mind back, Kashpaw brought Quill into Holy Mass. He led her to the front of the church and placed her in the seat beside him, holding her two arms like a large, temporarily docile doll who might at any moment come to life and lash out. Next to them, their great strong daughter gazed impassively upon the altar. When Father Damien raised high the body of Christ, Quill’s body went rigid and her eyes crossed in ecstasy. She fell sideways onto Kashpaw’s lap and could not be roused until the Blood of the Lamb met her lips. Then she wept, sadly and with copious hunger, for God or for her many precious dead who could say. Father Damien, who sat with her long after Mass was over and who listened to her outpouring with great sympathy but limited comprehension, for it was all in Ojibwe, was shocked when she suddenly changed the cast of her features, laughed low in a harsh unconscious tone, bit down, and ripped the flesh from her own finger.

Rock of the True Church,

I very much wish to know how I am to treat the cases of irregular connection that abound on this reservation. There are some who have remarried in the Church without annulment — can their unions be regarded as a natural bond? Which woman may a man keep who has had several and must be married to one?

My other question is as follows: How far am I permitted to enter into the political picture? At present, I am regarding it from the vantage point of an observer, though I have gathered information. In what ways is a priest allowed to protect the interests of his parish?

The opinion of Your Holiness on these matters is absolutely vital to me.

Modeste

JOHN JAMES MAUSER

One name appears and reappears among the papers that I handle, wrote Agnes in a hand that she had adapted only slightly. She had never written in a particularly feminine hand anyway. Now she stiffened her letters and stacked the words together with a neat solidity that matched, she hoped, the toughness of the priest she was becoming.

“John James Mauser,” she wrote in Father Damien’s daybook. “I have now begun to conduct a methodical search for information, and found that John James Mauser is a man whose actual person, if not identity, is mysterious. From a news story and engraving, I have determined that he is a tall, curve-lipped, and jut-nosed son of eastern mill barons and shrewd New York socialites. He is a restless man who got his lucky start by correctly guessing where the Northern Pacific railroad would cross the state line.

“John James Mauser bought the land that, in what seemed a matter of weeks, became downtown Fargo. He went from land speculation into lumber, minerals, quarries. He now purchases areas lost to the continual census that shows a dwindling number of Indians. He buys the land tax forfeited. He buys the land by having the Ojibwe owners declared incompetent. He buys this parcel and the next and the next. He takes the trees off. He leaves the stumps.

“New legislation passes. Is reversed. Mauser prospers with every fumble. His hands are always open, ready to receive. He denudes all holdings as they come his way, though sometimes he waits for certain special parcels that produce, as do one series of prime allotments on Little No Horse, oak trees of great density, beauty, and age that will never again be seen in this region.”

Agnes threw down the pen and rubbed her face. A desperation gripped her, an irksome anxiety. She took up the pen, twisted it, bit the end, continued.

“Many people think of the papers that Mauser offers as a treaty. He has taken interpreters and ribboned officials with him to meetings. He himself gives out bolts of cloth, old-time kettles, and twists of tobacco. Though he speaks of and counts the government’s agents as his friends, he is careful never to claim them. Up until this time the only agreements that Anishinaabeg have signed have been with the government, and John James Mauser is not government. He is a single man who wants trees, in general, and a particular set of trees also, and to get them he offers what seems a vast sum of money to each head of household, so much money that it seems unthinkable to turn it down.

“A great many sign and take the money. It must seem they can surely buy land somewhere else. But then the winter drags out, children need to be fed, old people buried, and the craving satisfied that never quits. Thanks to Mauser, ishkodewaaboo, the smooth fire that takes their land money, is tidily available just across the reservation line….”

7. THE FEAST OF THE VIRGIN

1912–1913

Seating himself on an overturned cream can at the cooking fire of Alexandrine and Michel Destroismaisons, the latter a well-respected canopy bearer for the Host, Father Damien accepted a cup of strong, black, sugared tea. There was a clash of pots and the rich smell of bannock, pork, oats, more tea, and makade-mashkikiwaaboo. Gratefully, he drained the first cup. Sipped the next. He was just about to ask Alexandrine to press her children into service picking wildflowers for the altar, when, across from where he sat, a strange apocalyptic figure reared.

The Puyat — dressed in her own homemade habit — staggered past, her arms piled with buffalo skulls. Jutting from the veil, raw and planar, her face, like another of those skulls, stared out with deep, unseeing, hollow eyes. Her complexion was bone white and her gaze held a withering power. Gaunt and spectral in her thin height, she stalked through the shallows like a heron, sharp beaked, ravenous. She passed behind Alexandrine and Michel, and was gone. Turning his full attention back to the Destroismaisons, Damien resumed conversation, but with an inner disturbance that he recognized only later not as the effect of the strong hot tea but as an agitation of the heart produced by those great, dead, appalling eyes.

The day continued mild and glorious, and as the sun’s light strengthened the Catholics fell in line behind the cart bearing a borrowed statue, for the parish hadn’t one of its own yet. As they passed along, men fell to their knees in the dust of the road and women raised a trill — a high-pitched tongue of wild joy, a sound that never failed to tighten Damien’s throat. Kashpaw’s washed, white horses pulled the wagon with nervous alacrity, rolling their eyes and starting suspiciously at the supplicants. The newly baptized and morose Kashpaw drove it, with Quill sitting just alongside him.

White scarf alight in the sun, Quill sat bolt upright, stiff in her abashed fear. She threw back her head from time to time, eyes rolling, and laughed. Mary Kashpaw, huge in a white dress, crept to her mother and stroked her hand. Quill swiped her daughter’s hand like a fish from a stream, madly tore at it with her teeth, continued to laugh. Her daughter winced at the bite, but did not cry, just turned and hunkered low in the back of the wagon with her cousin and the borrowed statue.

The poor, chipped Virgin wore an expression of distaste, but she was decked brightly with wreaths and a crown of wild lilies and arum. At her feet, the two girls sat and threw the petals of prairie roses, pink and blushing, from baskets made of willow withes the red black of old blood. Damien stepped on the petals as he walked behind them, bearing the Sacred Host.

Held visible in an intricate glass lunette, the wafer trembled before his eyes as he prayed. These days, Agnes and Father Damien became one indivisible person in prayer. That poor, divided, human priest enlarged and smoothed into the person of Father Damien. As though the unseen were a magnetic draw upon Father Damien’s spirit, his thoughts leaped like iron filings. His requests, sharp black slivers of metal, pierced the sun, and his praises melted in his ears. Now, in that rapt concentration, he moved along the road. Sometimes he held the Sacred Host aloft, feeling a soft power flow through his arms. Sometimes he held the Host before him at a more intimate level. With each step, gentle waves of air brushed around him as though the earth cheerfully flexed underneath each footstep. Each breath was sunlight. Green love surrounded him. Present on the hillside with the body of his Christ, he breathed an easy adoration. One step. The next. Sorrows, confusions, pains of flesh and spirit, all melted into the sweet trance of the moment.

Then, he tripped.

Agnes thought, later, how odd — odd or typical — that she should stumble in the full flow of the gift, in the radiant immediacy of pure grace. What happened next, and next, followed from the first misstep. Father Damien went down holding fast, but, as though an unseen hand yanked, the monstrance bearing the Host bounced upward, turning in the sun. The moment, fluid as he rolled over swamped in flowing vestments, could have been rescued. Had he jumped directly to his feet. Had only the procession halted…. But no, it appeared that he was part of something larger. Uncanny, the design. For now it happened. Just as he went to earth, the presence white as flowers and dead as bone, the Puyat woman with buffalo skulls and jackal face, emerged from a hidden spot. Barefoot, dragging the skulls on thongs fastened somewhere within her habit, she raised her arms in horror to see the Host defiled. She bounded forward just before the garlanded wagon bearing the brooding statue, the children, Quill, and Kashpaw. Her oversize habit flapped like a sail. She flung herself into the wagon’s path.

The horses panicked and reared in their traces. They pranced, hopped, twisted away from the Puyat, then exploded with a wild energy. They shot down the path until they reached the bottom and could run cross-country. They tore pounding through tangled farmsteads. Through town. Men chased as they wheeled by, shouting, “Cut the lines!” But Kashpaw carried with him only one dull hatchet, and the best he could manage in the wild tumble were awkward scrapes across the reins. Rounding a curve the statue of the Virgin shot out like a torpedo. That, in itself, was an event that caused repercussions deep into the future. For her halo sliced right through an oiled paper window and the rest of the statue followed, straight into the house of seven of the most notorious drunks in Little No Horse, who lay groaning that very moment for whiskey.

THE SEVEN DRUNKS

Instead of a bottle, the Blessed Virgin flew through the window. Skidding across the room, she tipped upright so that, by the time the sodden ones looked blearily up, she stood tall. Her glance of disgusted sweetness shone down upon the four men and three women, including a much too young Sophie Morrissey and a couple of Lazarres. Their sore eyes pinned upon the Virgin, who stood directly in the square of light from the broken window. Of course, the drinkers all knelt, blessed themselves, wept in astonishment and converted — not to Catholicism, but at least to a much less potent form of alcohol: to wine. Henceforward, they were strict in their loyalty to the grape — even though, they claimed, no matter how much they poured down their gullets, they couldn’t get satisfyingly shkwebii anymore. And even as a result of their encounter with the Virgin, some were afflicted with a mild friendliness and industry.

THE RUNAWAYS

The children in the back of the wagon jounced along, thrilled at first, then shrieking. The fortunate little girl cousin popped over the edge of the wagon and landed safely in a heap of slough grass. Still, the vehicle flew, banging crazily behind the horses as they galloped toward disaster. It was over in an instant.

The wagon approached a sudden fold in the land with ravenous ease. The violence of the drop broke the back of Quill. A low-branched tree speared Kashpaw. They were mortally wounded, though they lasted in their mutual agony for several hours. Their daughter survived in the overturned wagon box, dragged along until the horses came to the end of their terror. The men who found her deep in the bush had to pry away the crushed and splintered boards from the child. They later told their wives in low voices how she’d wept, as from her arms and her legs they drew the nails.

KASHPAW’S VISION, QUILL’S PEACE

The men laid Quill and Kashpaw out together side by side in the long fine grass underneath a deep-grown oak tree. After her rescue, their child was allowed near to hold their hands and would not be moved from them even in her pain. So the three at least possessed the comfort of one another’s presence. In that time, Quill, at peace though her back was severely broken, spoke to her daughter and to Kashpaw, who answered, though the branch that pierced him made his voice pinched and strange. Though the helpers and gapers who approached muttered at the helpless horror of it, they listened. For Quill and Kashpaw were able to talk. In talking, they gave reason for those present to think that in this extremity the eyes of Kashpaw saw into the near future of his people, while the heart of Quill saw far into the past.

The two of them prophesied while they were dying. Quill was rational and spoke in a sincere attempt to right wrongs stubbornly fixed between reservation factions. For his part, Kashpaw first saw a spirit approach, and it was one he knew well, and had spoken with, and feared. Nanapush was called to sit with his old friend and sing him into the next world.

“N’tawnis,” whispered Kashpaw, “he approaches. I see him.”

“Who, my friend?” Nanapush spoke lightly, though his heart was bursting in his breast. Each breath he took stabbed him with pity and yet he smiled gently so as to ease along his brother-cousin.

“That tall spirit wearing the black hat. My brother, it is he himself, the one who comes to warn me of disease.”

“Where is he going, this spirit?” asked Nanapush.

“Coming toward us. Coming here,” Kashpaw gasped. “Ah! He will take me first, then he will return for many others.”

“This is sad news,” said Nanapush, in truth, terrified. “I will give you a smoke.” With that, he lighted his sacred pipe and the two shared the fragrant tobacco. A slender curl of it crept out of the hole the stick made in Kashpaw’s lower breast and Nanapush nearly cried out, seeing it.

“Give niwiiw a smoke, too,” said Kashpaw, jabbing his lip sideways to indicate Quill, and Nanapush brought the pipe to her side — in fact, he then sat between them, passing the pipe to each, hearing as they spoke.

“Our daughter will dig our grave for us and then she will keep on digging,” said Kashpaw. “She will dig graves for two hundred Anishinaabeg who will die of this sickness that approaches from the east.”

“It comes from the east, you say,” said Nanapush.

Father Damien, kneeling beside him in a miserable state of despair, praying with his whole being, looked to the east and then passed a trembling hand over his eyes. Silhouetted against the horizon, a gaunt and precipitous walker wavered toward them. There was a dot at its side, a dog, a companion. Who saw what? This thing was too tall to be human.

It was gone when he blinked.

“If we lighted great bonfires or dug ditches full of water or allowed no visitors—” said Nanapush.

“No use, my friend, it is borne on the wind,” Kashpaw answered.

“And you…” Quill whispered to Father Damien, who was still kneeling beside them, far gone in stunned confusion at the mystery. “How…”

“I stumbled,” said the priest wretchedly. “I beg your pardon, I tripped on the beauty of the day.”

“And now we must die for it,” said Kashpaw, his voice accepting and almost marveling at the strangeness. “Not you, but the Puyat, she is the cause. Life is leaking out of us now, priest. All because of the Puyat.”

Pauline Puyat then, with an audacity that spoke both the boundless arrogance and violent compassion of her nature, approached them. With no leave, she knelt beside the sufferers. Freed of the skulls, her back torn, and in a state of pain herself, she stared nakedly into their faces. Her eyes were molten and her face calm with an immense and soothing pity. Wordlessly she dipped a cloth into a bowl of water that she held and allowed a trickle, just the right amount, to pass Quill’s lips and then Kashpaw’s. She murmured as she bathed their temples, their brows, their chins, their eyelids, and when she was finished with Quill, the madwoman’s eyes fixed on the Puyat’s face and they exchanged, Father Damien saw it, a look of tenderness and sweetness that would have astounded him then if everything was not already so far beyond acceptance or belief. Quill’s face cleared. Her eyes focused. She smiled with pleasure to feel a sudden and poignant sanity, and she squeezed her daughter’s hand. The gentle firmness of her touch calmed the big girl’s agony. When Quill spoke, it was with the old voice, the soft and compelling tones she had used before the onset of her affliction.

“Hear me,” she said. “Come near, for I have something important to say to you all, here on the reservation.”

A silence enfolded all, and many knelt to listen.

“Lazarres and Pillagers should eat from the same kettle,” Quill said, “join together for strength against the truer threat which is not each other but the damn chimooks robbing every straw from the fields and stealing even the lice from our heads and the tongues from our mouths and the shit from between our butts and the little sense we got left in us after the liquor. Stay together, you families, don’t let the land and money divide you!”

Her prophecy was right to the mark, said many, and they went away repeating it — that is, until they saw an enemy Pillager or Morrissey, Kashpaw or Lazarre.

Astounded with joy to hear the sensible quality of his wife’s words, Kashpaw gasped, moving the core of wood in his chest a fraction, which completely killed him.

The girl fell senseless, then, still holding her mother’s hand. Quill, mercifully, was soon too far gone to notice her husband’s absence on the ground beside her, or see the animal anguish of her child. She merely closed her eyes, drifted, came to no shore, drifted farther, until she was somewhere new.

QUILL’S DAUGHTER

Even the nuns were heard to say that Christ took such pity on the girl’s suffering, so like his own, that she should never have the cause to weep again. She grew phenomenally, put on weight and bulked up like her father, Kashpaw. And she toughened. During the next, desperate, winnowing winter she avoided every illness, even though she went without mittens or shoes. She would flourish while other girls coughed tubercular blood, increase her strength and quickness until she could wrestle down any boy. The trick of her quiet would help her hide from trouble, too, for after the accident, she seldom spoke.

Quill had a cousin named Bernadette Morrissey, a bony and bleak-spirited woman who took in children to help work the land she kept with her brother, Napoleon. Immediately after Quill’s death, Bernadette requested of Sister Hildegarde that the girl live with her. Bernadette took the daughter of Quill home, but soon reported that she regretted her charitable impulse. The big girl apparently turned violent. Unexpected rages shook her like freak storms. Once, she struck Bernadette, and worse, Napoleon seemed to tap some vice in her. If the big man came within arms’ reach, she set upon him with claws and teeth. The family soon called the priest to their allotment, where he experienced a fearsome sight.

Mary Kashpaw had left off attempting to destroy her caretakers, and instead took out her frustrations on their land. On the day of Father Damien’s visit, she was moving earth with a careening fury. She had already raised mounds of dirt and created a confusion of deep and irregular holes and ditches through the yard and woods. She could not be stopped. Not even a grown man like Napoleon dared step within reach of her shovel, and no word from any woman or girl pierced the intensity of her concentration. She hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. It looked as though she was determined to dig until she dropped to her death.

For a time, Father Damien watched. It was a dry spring day and the crust of the earth was waking and softening. He thought perhaps the girl would hit frost but apparently the dirt was warmed as far down as she cared to dig. A shuddering fear ran through him as he recalled Kashpaw’s vision. Was his daughter digging those two hundred Anishinaabeg graves? The holes were the shape not only of graves, but worse, of many interconnected and searching graves.

Since it was useless to remonstrate with her or ask questions, Father Damien took up a shovel. Alongside the huge mad child, where no one would go, he then began to dig. One shovelful after another, careful ones, a heap of dirt to the side. It was not an unpleasant task. In fact, he found, there was much in it immediately that calmed and soothed. Before the girl even recognized or took the slightest notice of the priest, then, Father Damien was digging along in a state of agreeable oneness with his work.

After a while, Mary Kashpaw did notice. She didn’t stop, but she did turn to regard the priest as her arms rhythmically swung. A spasm, not a smile, crossed her face, a wave of nerves, and then she more powerfully relaxed into the current of her labor and dug, unceasingly, with renewed strength. Dug to the east for a time, then casually reversed and carved a long pan into the ground heading west. At random moments, she quit her trajectory. Inspired by some other spot, she crossed to the place and sank her shovel. A northerly foray twisted like an eel and then veered counterclockwise until she’d swung directly south. And through the day, through the long afternoon, hands bound with rags on the handle of the shovel, Agnes dug, too.

The desolation of the great child shook Agnes to the core. The girl reminded her of herself. There was no doubt about it. Grief has its own rules and power. Agnes sat with Mary at the table by the stove, where the girl wolfed down huge chunks of bread sopping with gravy-grease. Eyes glazed, Mary Kashpaw gave herself over to eating, chewed with grand solemnity. Her massive jaws crushed and pulverized the food, and she seemed to have no other purpose or interest.

“Your mama and your deydey are not in the ground anymore,” said Father Damien in a firm voice, hoping to stop the digging. “They have been taken up into the sky.”

Mary Kashpaw frowned, lowered her face like a bull, and walked out the door. It was a fair day. The sky over them was massive and blue with random clouds. Perhaps, thought Agnes, Mary would catch a glimpse of their faces or invent the imprint of their smiles in the vapor. Perhaps she would experience some comfort, but no. Mary Kashpaw raised her eyes and gazed with fixed gravity upward, upward, scanned the brilliance and then turned her gaze onto Father Damien.

“You can’t see them,” he tried to insist, “but they are up there. They love you.”

She looked at him with pity and scorn.

“There is something,” Father Damien tried to explain to Hildegarde, “profound about her suffering. And she is most intelligent. I’m afraid she can’t be kept at the government school, and an asylum would destroy her.”

“Yes, Father,” said Hildegarde perfunctorily, as she did when he became, to her mind, either too fanciful or too tender of heart.

“I have an idea about the uncle, as well. Her hatred of the man is abnormally intense.”

“She’s mad,” said Hildegarde flatly.

The nun’s stubborn pragmatism annoyed Agnes, but at the same time she could not quite wrestle the proper evidence to life. Why had grief given this particular task to Mary Kashpaw? Perhaps the girl was looking for something buried, maybe the way a dog hides a bone and forgets exactly where. Maybe she’d needed this object, too well hidden. Later, her plan began to take on a cosmic shape. Agnes tried to think of the excavations as a design with some strategy. If birds viewed it from above, what would they see? She took the large view but saw only a tangle of upsettingly random desecrations of the spring undergrowth — it made no sense. And by that lack of law it made no sense, either, to place upon the girl’s actions any rational construction. She was digging. The purpose must be poetic, thought Agnes. Perhaps only poetry could explain it, and Father Damien was a priest.

In fact, the answer would come slow and only by degrees over days, until it was entirely explained in a dream: she herself was digging when she uncovered a dream Kashpaw and a dream Quill who rose, brushed off their clothing, and complained of the coldness of the earth. Fetch my daughter, Quill said to Agnes, for the man hurts her. Agnes woke knowing that Napoleon had done something terrible to the girl. Now Mary Kashpaw was looking for her parents for protection, and to soothe her. Agnes also realized that Kashpaw and Quill held Father Damien responsible.

The next morning, Agnes went to visit. Mary Kashpaw’s ravaged stare struck her as more than a look — it was a passageway between this reality and the next. The Kashpaw girl had entered a dark peace from which she would never be disturbed. She sat on a solid mental ledge and frowned passively upon the world, a great brooding child who was too well traveled a visitor in the dream world and the land of the dead. The only place for Mary Kashpaw was the convent itself, or at least the grounds of the church — she didn’t like to sleep indoors. The girl must come to live near Father Damien.

At his insistence, Bernadette drove the girl to the convent, where she was to live for the rest of her life. When Mary Kashpaw got down from the wagon seat upon which, curiously, she seemed much at home, untroubled by the frightful events that drove her into silence, Agnes felt a curious twist. Her theory of rescue was upended by an acute intuition. The girl’s presence was all of a sudden reassuring. As Agnes approached and took the girl’s hand she understood, with a positive prescience, that Mary Kashpaw had come to shield her and heal her — how, there was no saying.

Mary Kashpaw ate more than all of the nuns put together, but when food was scarce she gathered her own, and then some. She was discovered chewing wild tonic of fresh dandelion spears from the borders to the nun’s path and munching green apples; sometimes she made herself a stew of gopher and acorns, stolen eggs from the nests of finches and doves, wild currants, cattail root; she gnawed a gum of spruce and occasionally, for the nuns, snared a rabbit or mesmerized a grouse in the weedy graveyard. If all else failed, she brought them a meat she called “ground meat,” already skinned and boned, so it was quite some time before they realized it was named for its habitation — it was snake. She could always catch bullheads and frogs. She knew well just how to survive. With her mother’s slim height and her father’s powerful build, she grew into an arresting presence, though she seemed content to turn her back upon the world.

Summers, she slept in the shack where the sleigh was kept, made a bed on the hard seat and curled up like a babe. In winter, she made a pallet on the convent floor behind the kitchen stove. Her prayers were constant, a mutter just under her breath. Surely, her piety found favor in God’s eyes. The sisters envied her simplicity a little and grudged her the loaf of bread she ate each meal. She had no shame — hooked her skirt between her legs, fastened it in her belt like a great wide diaper when she wanted freedom of movement. Her thighs were rock hard and golden. The nuns made trousers for her, underwear, modest bloomers and knit socks, but she just shed them in the joy of her work. Set to the task of planting, she sowed with a matchless fervor and whacked new ground clear in a disturbing contest of joy. Carefully, Father Damien kept from her all sight of shovels. Mary Kashpaw hoed and chopped, whitewashed every wall with a profligate arm, cut weeds, used a scythe with frightful intelligence, polished every pew and wooden surface with beeswax, but her favorite occupation, the work to which she brought the same passion with which she dug, the work that made her so happy that she was heard humming tunelessly and brashly to herself, was chopping wood. It became known all around that she was prodigious, as in the yard great stout piles mounted.

Each stroke was part of her devotion, all seamless, all one. She lent herself to chopping with a prayerful precision and grace, and she smiled modestly and blessed herself when she was done. She slept with her ax, filed it, kept it sharp and clean. As long as she was occupied — they soon hired her out — she attended every Mass, sang with the sisters at every funeral. She made her confession twice weekly, a silent confession that consisted of a tap on the screen and a whisper like the sigh of windblown grass. For her penance, Father Damien rarely gave her more than one Hail Mary to mouth into the clasp of her palms. How could he assign more? She committed no sins. Men were no more to her than the dust in her sleeping robes. Her life was simple. All lies fled past her. She was immaculate of envy. She grew up in no one’s shadow and cast her own in solitude. She lived in such exclusive discipline that it seemed to Agnes that the girl was preparing herself, for what, Agnes did not know until it came upon them.

INFLUENZA

1918

Only one road led in and out of the reservation. There was no question. Disease came down the whiteman’s road. Some heard it approach with slithering steps, foul and mawkish. Zozed Bizhieu met a man whose appearance arrested her. Great white patches of skin gleamed on his skull and strings of orange hair fell to his shoulders. His face was ravaged, and so thin that his teeth stuck out. He was made of spikes and sticks. Way up high, his skull bobbed, skin white as paper, mouth blood-red. His nose bled, she told Damien. His lips were a blistered purple. His eyes wept black bile and suddenly he fell dead at her feet. When she leaned over to assist him, he laughed as he melted into the earth, and the rank and rangy mutt that shivered at his side ran off, onto reservation ground, howling a deadly breath. Zozed was always seeing things, reporting, but some believed in this uncanny messenger because they’d heard rumors of the illness already.

The Spanish influenza was reported in the papers, which people now bought because six Anishinaabeg men had joined the great war of the chimookomanag. The newspapers reported that the disease was marching all over the world and working hard harvesting the young, old, fragile, and sturdy. Making no distinctions in its eager rush. People hoped that the sickness would be tired by the time it got to the reservation, but, no, when it hit, the illness struck with a young exuberance. Descended, really, on the wings of ducks, in the bones of clouds, on city wagons, and in the pockets of used clothes. It came in meat and on the skin of potatoes. It was waved off the trader’s hands, and dusted tongue to tongue with the Communion Hosts served from Father Damien’s fingers.

Father Damien’s first call was the family Destroismaisons, they of the pride in their handsome boy and intelligent girl child, the devout Destroismaisons who bore the canopy to shade the Host in the procession. This illness, which began with a teeth-rattling chill, slammed into the family and leveled them just before the first snow. Their house was a neat whitewashed cabin, dark inside, but with careful shelves built into the walls next to the stove and a carved wooden bed, store-bought, where now both children labored to breathe. On the floor, their mother lay, far gone, covered only by shawls.

The girl’s face burned brighter and brighter. She drenched the quilt with the sweat that poured out of her body, an amazing sweat that pooled in the curve of her collarbone and dripped off her earlobes in glistening beads. She incandesced into her death-flame, fiercer and brighter, until all of a sudden her lungs filled. She coughed out pans of green pus, died as soon as she began to bleed from the nose and ears. Her handsome brother died with her and then the mother. With a surprised squawk the grandmother was struck, shivered violently, and was gone from the room in less than two hours. Father Damien, turning from one to the next, whirling in a vain death dance contained in the small cabin, tried to catch the slippery tail of death before it slashed the lungs of Michel Destroismaisons.

Mary Kashpaw attempted to save the man by tying him into the bed when he raged to throw himself into the lake. Destroismaisons turned the bed over on himself and crawled with it on his back to the door, but the bed stuck and wouldn’t let him through. He survived, but only to sit alone in the silent blankness of his cabin, staring at death, staring two weeks, before he lay down and slept.

He slept forever, with the others. Around them, a deep snow fell.

The cold deepened and the illness flourished. At all hours, the desperate came calling. Mary Kashpaw broke the trail, tramped before the priest in her bear-paw snowshoes, twice the circumference of ordinary snowshoes and reinforced with moose gut and the unforgiving sinews of cow. Mary Kashpaw dragged a small barge of supplies tied to her waist and that heavy load further packed the snow so that, traveling in her wake, Agnes had an easier time of it. Still, in those fits of exhaustion she sometimes put one leaden step before the next with deep anger alone to fuel her.

God had brought her there under false pretenses, after all, aiding her with huge compassion in the flood’s aftermath, appearing in person as a man with a horn spoon, calm hands. Brought her there to then abandon her in battling uncanny death. Trudging to the homes of the stricken, Agnes wondered, where was the Trinity? Any one of them would do, she thought in exhausted fury, God the Father, God the Son, God the Son of a Bitch, God the Holy Ghost. But her prayers, said with increasing feverish despair, did not turn back the course of the disease.

The parents of six children were lost. Then in another house four children, while the parents were left alive. Father Damien brought the two devastated families together, only to have them reinfect one another. Old women and brand-new babies, new mothers, the meek, the beautiful, the ugly and the useless, all the same. Lost in hours or days. It didn’t matter. And still, Father Damien kept on, and Mary Kashpaw broke the way, and together they left only one trail.

One day, wretchedly sinking and sighing, Pauline Puyat tagged along with apples in her pockets. They were rumored to cure influenza just because some child had eaten one and gotten well, but so far their main assistance had been to perfume the dead or provide an illusory taste of sweetness to the bereaved. Father Damien was too exhausted to exclude any help whatsoever now, though it came from a hateful source. Following Mary Kashpaw in a trance, he made it to the cabin of Mashkiigikwe and two of Kashpaw’s children by Fishbone. The fire was out, the room cold, the victims hacked in a stinking corner. Dying, their cheeks were smeared with blood from their noses and they gasped, their faces a deep plum black, straining for air.

Although her heart was charred black, Agnes felt a fresh stab of desperation and threw herself against the disease. Pauline Puyat brought wood and fetched a pot of snow, then had a fire going and the water heating in an instant. The Puyat filled rags with hot grain, tied them tightly into cushions that she placed on the breasts of the sufferers. Agnes was too tired to register amazement until much later, when she reflected upon the Puyat’s actions. With the sick to attend to, Pauline was transformed. She bathed their fevers down and cleaned their hands and faces, caught their shit when they lost control, their puke of bile and live worms. Pauline quietly reassured the sufferers with low murmurs. The ugliness of death brought out of her an angel. When Mashkiigikwe opened her mouth and gasped, her neck cords straining for a breath, just a breath, Pauline was the one who thought of pounding her chest to loosen the toughened infection. Mashkiigikwe threw up a bloody gruel and then sighed, took a deep breath, slept a healing sleep.

Outside, Mary Kashpaw had cleared snow from the ground and lighted a bonfire to soften the earth, and then she automatically dug. For the first time, though, there was no use for the holes. The following summer, Father Damien would visit the very children for whom the graves were intended and watch them playing in the deep excavations, jumping in and out.

Agnes slept that night, the first time in weeks. Pauline cured Hildegarde next, nursed her back to health, a feat for which Hildegarde Anne then promised a lifetime of sponsorship. But even Pauline could do only so much, and when the sick died, no matter what their wishes, Father Damien suspected that the Puyat baptized their defenseless bodies. The holes that Mary Kashpaw had dug in the beginning were indeed filled. Two hundred and more Anishinaabeg graves. The illness plucked one after another from their grip. They saved the trader. They saved Bernadette Morrissey. They saved the Waboose family and the good Parisiens. They lost a Onesides. From every other cabin someone was taken — these were the lucky cabins. Agnes dreaded reaching a cabin with no smoke, for it would usually be inhabited by a council of the dead.

There was an end to it, as there was an end to everything.

One day, as Mary Kashpaw walked before the priest, thrashing through slough grass, the two of them aching for sleep, Agnes finally saw the one she had hoped for and cursed. They were walking due west, into cloud cover. Far ahead, Mary turned in her tracks and waited for the priest to toil closer. Behind her, the sun swelled in a dull mist. The sky was a glowing blister. Just a ray stabbed forth and pinned her in its glow. In that strange light, Agnes saw beneath the girl’s disguise. She saw that the face of her constant companion, Mary Kashpaw, was the face of the man with the horn spoon. Then she knew. Christ had gone before the priest, stamping down snow. Christ had bent low and on that broad, angry back carried Father Damien through sloughs. Covered him when he collapsed at the bedsides of the ill. Christ had fed him hot gruel from a spoon of black iron. Protected him so that he never sickened even when the dying kissed his hands or coughed their last prayers into his face. Christ was before him right now, breaking the trail. An amazed strength flowed into Agnes’s legs and she stumbled through the snow, reaching. Crying out, “Wait, wait, I am coming!” she lunged for Mary Kashpaw. But the girl watched impassively and when the priest drew near enough she turned away, continued walking in her ordinary form.

THE HAIR SHIRT

1919

When, for the fourth time that day, the young Pauline came sweeping across the dingy grass and beaten mud of the yard toward Father Damien’s cabin, Agnes thought of sneaking out the back window. Pauline was a creature of impossible contradictions. First she meddled, wheedled, pushed herself in where she wasn’t wanted, and then she made some peaceful gesture like the one with Quill, or proved herself heroic as during the epidemic, so Father Damien could not entirely condemn her. No matter, she was a continual scapular of annoyance. A hair shirt. Agnes crossed herself, once, and again for good measure, and then twice more to hold her tongue. All day in the drizzle, Pauline Puyat had left her teaching post to stubbornly pray in the birch grove, for she wanted to effect conversions. She believed that she was blocked in her vocation to work among her people. Blocked by Father Damien. Just that morning, he had said to her, “You are unsuited for life in such an active community. You can heal in desperate times, but you have no patience for teaching or for talking to children. My advice is for you to join a contemplative order!”

Pauline seethed with irritated fury. She knocked hard.

Behind the door, Agnes bit the back of her knuckles. Although Pauline was difficult, she also had her allies, for the novice had a persuasive way of speaking in a whining slur. She had, in fact, extracted a surprising amount of money from one particular and quite saintly woman of wealth. Enough to build a proper kitchen, sink a new well, plumb the interior of the convent. There were enough nuns who knew they had the young hopeful to thank for the fact that the outhouse, freezing and miserable in winter, now held rakes and hoes and wasn’t needed for low purposes. That was a major piece of work. Such a good raiser of monies was immensely rare. Even Sister Hildegarde hedged with Damien when he attempted to persuade her that Pauline Puyat’s place was elsewhere. After all, during the influenza, Pauline had saved her life.

“Father, may I have just one small word with you?”

The girl’s false humility was a stale grease Agnes could taste, but she opened the door unhappily and allowed the girl to enter.

“You’ve visited me four times today, always with exactly the same request.”

“Forgive me, but—”

Damien raised a hand.

“Yes, Father.” Again the inward gulp of amusement, the visible attempt at pursing her dry lips and rounding her starved eyes.

“Father,” said Pauline softly, “I have heard that Nanapush is still living in sin with a baptized Catholic. If you haven’t the care to let me lay siege to his soul, at least have a care for hers.”

“Aren’t you needed to supervise the play yard?” said Father Damien, again, “surely Sister Hildegarde—”

“Oh no, Father, please don’t worry!” Now Pauline lighted with an artificial jollity. Her skull’s face glowed, and she trembled, racked with zeal. “Sister Hildegarde will now be giving the children special instructions in hygiene. It is her pet project this month. And as she has them occupied, I thought I might attempt once again, to… oh, I know how tiresome you find me, but once again I would like to beg your indulgence… I need to confess.”

“This evening,” said Father Damien.

“Now,” said the Puyat in a low and stubborn voice that chilled Damien in some interior and fathomless place for which he had no guard or defense.

“All right,” he sighed, making the sign of the cross over her, “proceed.”

And so she began, avid, eager in desperation to spill. She knelt beside his desk. Although he tried to remain detached, the pitiable trembling of her hands clenched in prayer touched him. Clearly, she was in a state of grave inner agitation. In her confession, some nameless man appeared a trimmed French mustache and flat, dark lips. It was a hot close afternoon, the day it happened. He pressed on me in a blinding darkness. Crushed me to a powder and spread me across the floor. Snapped me in his beak like a wicket-boned mouse.

“Stop,” said Father Damien, repelled now by her sly excitement, “you are absolved, say no more.”

He drew back, not like he was finished with me, Father, but like a dog sensing the presence of a tasteless poison in its food. Then went on, which he should not have done.

“Peace, my child, let yourself be calm, you are not forsaken.” Her wildness shook him, her insistence on strange details, her description of her own nakedness and that of her rapist or uncle or even someone she half allowed… he could not tell for sure, and then, her face narrowing and her voice hushed, she confessed the child.

I swelled so tight, Father Damien, that I could hardly lift my arms and every breath was forced, fought for against that baby’s weight. I felt my bones give, the bowl of my hips creak wide, and between my legs there was a soft and steady burning.

“The child was born…”

Yes, taken from me, born, however you put it, there was no stopping it, no—

“Where is that child now?”

Silence.

“Where is that child?”

The silence now held, now stubborn.

Again, his blood pounding, Father Damien asked and this time she answered, hasty and alarmed at the conclusion that her silence was forcing him to draw.

Dead, Father Damien, I did not touch it. Born dead!

Agnes waved both hands in the air, lapsing, horrified as if swiping away hordes of stinging flies. Pauline began to weep now, a dry sound like the scratching of a spent record on a phonograph. Beating her breast, she begged for forgiveness. Agnes caught herself. Gasped out Father Damien’s standard absolution, but was unprepared to give, or invent for Pauline, the proper penance.

“The penance, Father, what shall be my punishment?”

A trickle of spit collected at the corner of her mouth, her eyes were red with the exhaustion of having wrestled many sleepless nights with the violence of her past. Her gums bled from her continual fasting. Her ingratiating smile was frightful to Father Damien and hoping to get rid of her he manufactured an attack of sudden kindliness.

“You take on too much for your strength, my dear. You were violated and that could not be helped. Now rise… you will say two thousand Hail Marys — no, four thousand Hail Marys, and, as well, you will—”

“Thank you, Father, yes!”

With a sudden energy Agnes lurched around the chair and in a flash she hoped would take the other by surprise, raised the woman by the elbow. She was propelling Pauline out the door, when, with a false step the girl lurched and fell against Agnes, twisting as she went, clutching at the priest’s chest. Agnes had the instinctive wit not to catch Pauline but to step precisely backward so that the girl fell full length. She landed hard enough to knock the wind out of her body and she gasped, dry, fought for air. Even after Pauline picked herself up, Agnes could almost feel the thin claws and sense the cold clutch of Pauline’s hands as they raked the air, so close, reaching for her bound breasts….

THE VICTIM SOUL

Shortly after that disturbing confession, Pauline Puyat was found in a state of collapse, naked, prostrate before the altar, covered with muck and raving, but as Hildegarde picked her up and hid the extent of her strange condition, it was some time before the full report leaked down from the convent on the hill. It was said that Pauline Puyat took upon herself an extraordinary penance. In her cell, covered in no more than a sheet, no pillow, sleeping on the bare floor, she maintained a rigorous fast and a strange concentration. Father Damien came to sit with her, and supposedly, to hear her confession or deliver the Eucharist. The moment he saw Pauline Puyat, however, he knew that he’d come into the presence of a darkness not to be assuaged by common means.

Light fell pale gray through a set of curtains pinned together at the center of the tall rectangular window. A searching blade of radiance struck through the slight gap between the pins and fell in a strict golden slant across Pauline Puyat, who refused a bed and lay upon the floor. She would not accept a single comfort, kicked off anything but one thin sheet, yet she spoke lucidly in making her wishes known, saying that she was atoning for a desperate sin and pleading to be allowed to continue her restitutional fast. When Father Damien refused her request, she clamped her lips shut. Her jaws had locked and the muscles of her throat knotted into pull cords. She spoke through her teeth with difficulty, but her words were still calm and sensible.

“Forgive me, Father, for this is what I must do.”

Her face, as she gazed upward, was womanly and open, her forehead bronzed by the seeking light. She seemed intent within, very still, as though listening for faint but vital instructions. Reaching across to draw her sheet around her shoulders, Father Damien’s hand brushed the point of her chin, alabaster white and cold. Her hands, rigid in fisted knots, were stone smooth, alarmingly bloodless and heavy, clenched around thick bandages that hid her unexplained wounds. Impossible to change because of their clawlike rigidity, the gauze had begun to exude the cloying reek of infection. Hildegarde told Father Damien that she had called for iodine and carbolic soap, water, salts to soak her hands and feet. With her gray skin and deep, black, ravaged eyes Pauline was a figure set to rest on a tomb, a grave’s image.

“It is a sin,” said Father Damien gently, “to chastise yourself too forcefully. You will receive a blanket. You will sleep upon a mat. You will drink water and light broth; later you’ll eat food.”

“Ah,” said Pauline Puyat, her eyes slowly filling with the loss of her ability to suffer, “please, Father, let me have my penance. It is everything and it is all I own.” She spoke through clenched teeth and a shut jaw, but her speech was plain enough. Father Damien felt himself soften with pity, knowing the truth of what she said was profound.

“What you confessed to me was not your fault,” he assured her.

The girl looked into Damien’s face with a grimace of sorrow, or perhaps self-hatred, for her face slowly turned golden red with a strange shame. Then the red flooded back toward her heart, and she drained to a terrific, nearly translucent, dead white.

“There is more,” she said wretchedly, and the veins in her temples jumped with the strength of her emotion.

“I will listen once you are healed,” said Father Damien. His sympathy enfolded him in spite of himself, but he determined, then and there, if she lived he would send her off the reservation, down to Fargo, down to Argus.

Her face was ratlike, her teeth stood out, her nose was a severe bone centered like a keel. She shook her head, tried to speak, but at last could not and merely closed her eyes. The shut lids sealed like a hatchling’s. She was gone into her thoughts, her prayer, whatever sustained her agony.

She was worse, said Sister Hildegarde, the next day, and so much worse the day after that she fetched Father Damien herself, though she had no way of warning him sufficiently, or preparing him for the bizarre sight that he would witness. On entering her room he was immensely struck and confused. Pauline had bent in the middle. Still more strictly rigidified, her legs were stiffened and raised, her torso also, so that she existed in a kind of permanent V shape, which the sisters had propped up with pillows and blankets, although she held it on her own. Slowly, she was bending in two. Sister Hildegarde, in her practical way, had snaked a flexible piece of rolled wet rawhide tubing down Pauline’s throat before the depth of stiffness sank into all of her limbs and froze Pauline’s voice box and throat. So it was that, although she fasted, the girl was given water and broth through the tube and was fairly well sustained. Except for the terrible rigidity, her vital signs were excellent now. As much as they could, they left her to peaceful silence.

News travels immediately, mysteriously, on the reservation. Soon it was out that Pauline was seized by spirits. She had left her body to visit in the world beyond this everyday life. Her body had turned wooden, they said, her tongue to stone. Slowly, she was lifting herself into the air, straining toward the sky world, arrowing her spirit toward the west. She was doing it for her people though she was of and not of them, though she was a betrayer and yet, too, betrayed by her raging Puyat mother. Though she was the half sister of a medicine man gravely feared and the rumored mother of a child raised by dog Lazarres, she was holy. Anybody can be holy, even a Puyat, that proved.

People drew near. People gathered. They came by car and wagon, they camped by the door to the convent house. They brought their sick ones, the mad, the dishonored. They brought their too quiet, ancient, dreaming children, their screaming new babies. They brought their old ones, farseeing through eyes cataracted over with isinglass scales. They brought their nerveless husbands, their foolish and silly teenagers, their ailments and failures, and they laid them on the steps of Pauline’s door.

Zozed Bizhieu asked Sister Hildegarde to place in Pauline’s bed a red-painted stick, which represented a request for help of a sort she wouldn’t specify. Danton Onesides asked to see her, and when turned away, begged the good Hildegarde for threads from the saint’s death blanket. She was not going to die, Sister Hildegarde told him, determined now that she would see to it herself that the girl survived, not only because that would discharge something of the debt that Hildegarde owed after the great flu, but also so that the Puyat could clean up the mess her disquieting illness was causing all through the convent. Sister Hildegarde fumed, threw up her hands. Who, did the people outside think, who took care of these holy martyrs, these self-indulgent saints? She could tell them, she knew. She struck her chest, an act for which she was immediately contrite. Still, it was true.

Linens must be bleached, scrubbed, hung on lines to dry, ironed smooth. They must be folded and set into the closets. Soon, removed from their shelves, the sheets would return to be stained, discarded, and go through the same tedious process. Food must be mashed up, pulverized, fed through the tube — invalid’s food. Pillows stuffed and restuffed. Pastes and poultices manufactured for the soothing of limbs. These cleanings and boilings required kettles, pots, spoons. And then there was the grinding of meticulously gathered herbs (and the grinder was most difficult to wash and clean). Buckets, mops, a constant correction of the floors, the state of which Hildegarde was most fierce over. The continual visitors meant someone must tend to the gate and door at all times. Not only that, but someone must keep more or less orderly track of the gifts and petitions with which the girl was now deluged.

Yes, the Puyat would live. She owed Sister Hildegarde a lot of work!

The Bizhieus brought smoked fish. The second Boy Lazarre asked something secret, whispered his request into a small, clean, empty baking powder can, quickly tapped the lid on, and gave it sternly to Sister Hildegarde to let out beside Pauline’s ear. From all corners of the reservation, now, pilgrims advanced, asking for assistance in every possible conundrum and affair. As she closed like a jackknife, more people arrived to camp. More notes and objects were brought, baskets and tobacco twists began to clutter the hall and entryway. No matter how forcefully Sister Hildegarde insisted to each visitor that Pauline could take no requests, no matter that a nurse came, pronounced on the case, and left, no matter that people kept dying or living to suffer their copious duties, onerous lives, no matter. Belief is belief. Faith is purely faith. Even when a doctor came all the way from Grand Forks, sounded Pauline’s entire body with small wooden blocks and a metal hammer, then spoke briefly to Father Damien, who nodded, but said nothing, knowing what he said would be meaningless to the people camped outdoors. No, no matter. In desperation, they made a saint. They made a saint because they had to, in those times, in that swale of loss.

8. THE CONFESSION OF MARIE

1996

Father Damien sipped coffee to clarify his mind — the stuff was burned, as always, by Mary Kashpaw. He was used to the metallic taste. Father Jude wasn’t, and his jaw dropped in shock at the first sip of what she poured. They sat at the kitchen table of the small book-stuffed house where Damien had lived since the beginning. Mary Kashpaw set out milk, spoons, packets of sugar, and she turned away in a powerful indifference that was almost contempt. Then she turned back, frowning down upon the two men. Her eyes rested appraisingly on Father Damien, assessing his strength. The glare she held softened to exasperated worry. Her cheeks flamed with distress. She pulled her fingers, but the men took no notice. Gradually, she backed away.

“Please go on,” said Father Jude, still unnerved by the presence of the great, brooding housekeeper.

Father Jude Miller leaned forward to better concentrate. He was tired, too, but his was the exhaustion of a physically active person forced to the confinement of a passive task. He yawned, shook his head to clear it, and then as Father Damien was obviously not ready to proceed, he decided to make a quick drive down to the local café to buy a cup of coffee that would not lacerate his stomach. So the first time that his downfall, his comeuppance and destiny, showed herself in the yard of Father Damien, he missed her, missed Lulu.

She descended, quite by coincidence, as soon as Jude was out of sight. Old but not old, laughing as always at the world the way she had ever since a child, she pulled Father Damien’s hand into hers and spoke teasingly.

“Mekadewikonayewinini majii ayaan’na? Hihn! Niminwendam gegahwabamayaan, in’gozis. You’re coming with me to the bingo tonight. I need your luck.”

“What luck?” Father Damien was instantly alert, pleased with his visitor. “You have all the luck you need. You have too much luck! Maybe if you lost once in a while you’d stop gambling. Besides, I’m sure you skew the odds in your favor and it’s hard for others to lose so often just to keep up with your winnings!”

“My winnings go to a very good cause, as you know.”

“I do know that,” said Father Damien, holding her hand tighter, lovingly, “and even if you were the stingiest lady in the world I would forgive you. How are your boys? How’s Bonita?”

The question, as always, elicited an extremely complex list of their doings, and an analysis of their probable future doings as well as a comprehensive survey of grandchildren and their doings and all of her pride and complicated plans. When she had finished with her report, she made a swift exit. And so it was that she, too, avoided a certain portion of her destiny.

Father Jude emerged from his car bearing a plastic lidded cup in its cup holder and a bag, already showing grease marks, containing three rounds of hot fry bread.

“You missed her, missed Lulu!” said Father Damien, as soon as Jude sat down to eat the fry bread. It was still hot, soft as butter inside. Father Jude had sprinkled a little salt on the golden crust, and he didn’t much care whom he’d missed. He just wanted to eat.

“Lulu doesn’t let me use salt,” sighed Damien, watching the other priest’s enjoyment. “She is afraid it will affect my heart.”

“She worries about you.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Damien. “I worry over her. And our sisters, too. You know that tired old joke about hearing nuns’ confessions, like getting stoned to death with popcorn? Not the case, not here. My sisters are robust women. Full of juice.”

“There have been scandals?” Father Jude asked.

Father Damien took this question very seriously. “I prefer to call such incidents,” he reflected, “profound exchanges of human love. Mary Kashpaw was one, in fact, whom love did call. She acted upon her passion. After all, we live on earth. We are created of the earth. The Ojibwe word for the human vagina is derived from the word for earth. A profound connection, don’t you think?”

“Do you condone such irregular behavior, then?” Father Jude leaned forward, wiping his lips, disguising his surprise at the old man’s casual use of a term most priests of his era entirely avoided.

“I do not condone,” said Damien. “It would be more accurate to say that I”—here he paused to choose the word—“cherish. Yes. I cherish such occurrences, or help my charges to, at least. Unless they keep them safely in their hearts, how else can they give them up? I tenderly cherish such attractions the way I look fondly upon a child’s exuberant compulsion to play. There is nothing more important, yet it is insignificant. God will still be there when the child is exhausted, eh?”

“And the attraction? The fall? The sin?”

“Cherish, as I said.”

Father Jude shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

“You have never loved?” Father Damien asked.

“In the sense I gather you imply? No,” said Jude.

“You are only half joking,” said Damien. “You find my lack of moral outrage somewhat strange.”

“Somewhat appalling,” said Father Jude. “To put it another way, I wonder whether living so far away from Fargo hasn’t diluted your principles?”

Damien looked at the younger priest as though he were a marvel. “Truly!”

Jude raised his eyebrows and smiled to dismiss his remark, but as he spoke his gaze still rested curiously on Damien.

“I don’t mean to imply that Fargo is a stronghold of virtue, it is just that certain norms of behavior are taken for granted. Right. Wrong. These are simply distinguished. Black is black and white is white.”

“The mixture is gray.”

“There are no gray areas in my philosophy,” said Father Jude.

“I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.”

“Our job is to make it less so.”

“Our job is to understand it.”

“And in understanding”—Father Jude looked severely troubled—“to excuse immoral actions?”

“Never those that hurt people.”

“Sex hurts,” said Father Jude, simply.

“Have you seen a doctor?” said Damien.

The two paused, their breathing sharpened, surprised that they had so quickly fallen into such a pleasurable dispute.

“I was not speaking from personal experience,” Father Jude affected an irritation he did not feel. He hid a slight smile. “I should have put it more directly. Intercourse outside the boundaries of marriage hurts the order of things. Creates disorder. Breaks traditions, vows, families. Creates such… problems.”

Father Damien shifted in his seat and frowned. “That is true. Anything, though, of a large nature will create problems. The more outré forms of religious experience, for instance.”

“Mystical experiences?”

“Exactly.”

“So we have come around to that.” Father Miller leaned forward and looked expectantly, with sudden openness, into Father Damien’s face.

“May I suggest,” said Father Miller, “that I set up the tape recorder?” He opened a plastic briefcase, displayed the small box hardly bigger than the palm of his hand. Father Damien peered over his glasses at the box, which Jude Miller arranged with a careful flourish. The older priest cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, and then fell silent as Father Jude pressed a button. Listening to the faint dry rasp of tape turning on a wheel, he stared into the intimate puzzle of leafless branches outside the window.

“Let’s get right down to it,” said Damien suddenly. He rubbed his hands together. Sat up alert in his chair. “What have you got? First give me the source, then the story.”

“All right.” Father Jude leaned forward, fingers in a thoughtful curl. “There was in your convent a Sister Dympna Evangelica who served with Sister Leopolda and witnessed, as she said in her testimony, a case of stigmata bestowed by Leopolda upon a young protégée or novice.”

“What?”

Father Damien started, fell back in his chair, wiped his hands across his face and then, as though to smooth away some inner hysteria, wiped again. Still, he could not contain a wild bark of disbelief.

“This postulant… named Marie?”

“Yes.”

Damien had trouble forming words around his tongue, which seemed suddenly in rage to have swollen inside his mouth. He could only whisper, “Marie, Marie, Star of the Sea! She will shine when we’ve burned off the dark corrosion.” Damien tried to contain his reaction so that he could properly explain the trauma of the event, which he knew well, having been a confessor to that very Marie. His voice suddenly cracked out, angry.

“She bore wounds all right, appropriate and cruel. But they were not created by the prayerful intercession of Leopolda!”

“What then!” Jude was caught up in the drama.

“Leopolda took a fork and stabbed the girl!”

“Impossible!”

“I have”—looking suddenly chastened, Damien pressed his hand to his lips—“just violated the secrecy of the confessional.”

“There may be an extenuating…” Father Jude ruffled his notebook, clicked his pen. “Sister Dympna says that she was there—”

“Oh Dympna”—Father Damien waved his hand in despairing disgust—“never had the brains of an egg.” His breath caught in his throat and he began to pant, sweating. A watery weakness came over him. “I have seen what I have seen,” he declared. “I have heard the truth.”

Trying not to prompt him, lest he influence the story, or again call Father Damien’s scruples about the confessional’s privacy into question, Father Miller maintained silence and kept his eyes downcast. He was rewarded by a charged burst of information, laid out in staccato.

“It was during my early years on the reservation that I heard her confession. Marie. She slammed into the confessional. Had a way of doing that. Father, forgive me for I have sinned, she said, my last confession was such and such ago. Then hesitated. I said, ‘Of course, what is it my child?’ thinking it was hard to tell me. But she was just gathering her words. She had a peculiar habit of expression. Overly mature. Maybe even bizarre. When I went there, she said, I knew the dark fish must rise.

“ ‘Went where? What fish?’ I asked.

“She continued on, putting it in colors and flavors, you know, like a mad person. Making pictures of what she saw as a monumental undertaking. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard.

“ ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said, ‘I know you’re very devout.’

“I was going up the hill with the black-robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I’d make a saint. They never had a girl from this reservation they had to pray to. But they’d have me. And I’d be dressed in pure gold.

“ ‘My dear,’ I gently said, ‘to be a saint is more than wearing pretty clothes.’ That set her off.

“You can’t tell me nothing, she raged. Now listen. She’s a bitch of Jesus Christ, she said. You’d better hear about this nun.

“ ‘Of whom do you speak?’ I asked gently. Her response was loud and brutal.

“Leopolda, she yelled at the carved screen between us.

“ ‘Leopolda!’

“I jumped up, hit my head. I suppose my sudden interest must have shocked her, for she quieted and in a low voice continued her story with an intensity that I remember to this day. Threw me in the closet with her dead black overboot, where he had taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe. She was, you see, speaking of the devil. This girl had understood before anyone, perhaps more deeply than we now can see, the true nature of Leopolda’s faith.”

“And what was that?”

Jude Miller had asked his question too soon, however, for Father Damien was still in the past, in the close embrace of the confessional.

“Marie Lazarre was cast from Bernadette Morrissey’s care into an ill-concocted family of drunks. Still, she’d turned out pious and developed a special bond with the nun in question. As a result, she was asked to come and visit the convent, to stay there as a postulant if she so chose, under the special tutelage of Leopolda. Later, in my confessional, she described the ascent up the hill. Once she entered the convent, there was apparently no special notice given to her by the other sisters. Leopolda put her straight to work, baking bread, and then there was the incident of the cup. The poor girl, all nerves, dropped a cup. When it rolled underneath the stove, she went down on the floor to get it.

“Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker. What happened next was this: Leopolda held this girl down on the floor with her foot and poured scalding water on her back, telling her not to make a move or a sound. I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep, by filling up your ear.”

Father Miller winced, shifted in his chair uncomfortably, made a slight sound of protest, but Father Damien kept talking.

“Sometime after that so-called lesson, the two were removing loaves of bread from the ovens when some sort of argument occurred in which the girl, who by now had good reason to hate and fear Leopolda, called her down, as they say here.”

“Called her down?”

“Challenged her. Bitch of Jesus Christ! Kneel and beg! Lick the floor! That was when our candidate for sainthood stabbed the girl’s hand with the fork and cracked her head with the poker, knocking her unconscious!”

Father Miller looked aghast, but also skeptical.

“Was this witnessed? Documented?”

“Unfortunately, your witness, Dympna, entered just after the blow, while Marie was unconscious. Dympna was apparently persuaded by Leopolda’s story. Our holy woman told the other sisters that she’d prayed for the girl to receive the holy stigmata as a sign of God’s love, and that the girl had swooned when that first mark appeared. Marie woke confused, but soon understood the gist of things and went along with it until she could make her way out of the convent. She returned to her home, married not long after, has been known ever since as a solid and even wise member of her community. Marie. Star of the Sea. Marie Kashpaw.”

The two men sat quietly together, the tape recorder humming between them. Jude Miller put his hand out to turn it off, but then withdrew his fingers. The windows were halfway open and the storms pulled up already, the screens down. In the gooseberry thicket just outside, a bird’s whistle sounded, piercingly sweet. The breeze shifting through the screen was thin and dry. Father Damien now reached forward and punched off the tape recorder. Relieved, exhausted, he slumped in his chair. Closed his eyes. Before Father Miller could comment in any way or question him further, the old priest sank into a sleep so profound it looked like death. Father Miller watched intently until he saw telltale movements — a tiny twitch of Father Damien’s eyelid, a slow wheezing intake of breath. He worried about the open window, but apparently the old priest liked fresh air, so he quietly covered Father Damien with a light blanket. Then Jude Miller continued to sit, watching over his elder, wishing for a cigarette, though he had quit twenty years before. He wanted to replay the tape, form queries, ask everything that needed to be asked, for the troubling story raised more questions than it answered.

An early gnat landed on the old man’s nose and swatting at it, Damien roused himself enough to quit his sleep. Father Damien frowned, annoyed when he realized he’d fallen asleep in the presence of the other priest. Standing, Father Damien waved assistance aside, and took high, tiny childlike steps into the hallway of the house of his old age. He was heading for his tiny bedroom. Just before entering, he turned to the younger priest in a crack of darkness from the doorway. He waved his fingers, beneficent, as though dispensing drops of holy oil.

Father Jude blinked. In that instant a strange thing happened. He saw, inhabiting the same cassock as the priest, an old woman. She was a sly, pleasant, contradictory-looking female of stark intelligence. He shook his head, craned forward, but no, there was Father Damien again, tottering into the comfort of his room.

The rectory was made of the same whitewashed brick and thickly slabbed on interior plaster as the convent and church. Entering, after a long walk through the grounds of the church and the cemetery, Father Miller paused — the place held the tranquil mouse-nest scent of all rectories in Jude’s experience, an odor composed of male sweat and sweet deodorant, cabbage-y cooking, Old Spice, and the faintly sour breath of sexual loneliness. Someone had thought to build the place with tall rectangular windows — these admitted at late dusk a singular golden light that rose, as though emitted by the prairie town beneath the hill, and flooded through the entire house in a wave. The gift of that radiance would quickly be followed by darkness, noise, the rev of slow truck engines circling below, and the throb of sub-woofers on the faintly moving air.

Father Jude’s room was rectangular, too, with the window at its end and southern wall. He always liked south light, and the curtainless sky-filled panes of glass pleased him. He sat on the single mattress, bounced a bit. There was no comfortable reading chair or bedside lamp in the room. Apparently, no appreciation here of the intimate pleasure of reading in a pool of lamplight. Perhaps it was considered by the resident priest an indulgence, but for Jude the nightly reading was a necessary prelude to sleep. Without an orderly transition from consciousness, he was often subject to the tedium of insomnia. When so afflicted in his own surroundings, he read himself back to sleep, or, occasionally, if he was in an appropriate place, walked out into the night.

His methods of whiling away those dreadful hours were not much different, he thought now, from the apparent routine of Father Damien. That was not surprising. He, Jude, still thought of himself as young although he had never really had a young man’s habits or inclinations. His combination of energy and reserve had originally attracted him to the priesthood. A loner, he had always felt unsuited to the company of his peers. As a priest, to his great relief, his refinement and discipline of behavior made it possible to live within the limitations of his profession. He was an excellent priest, practical and intelligent, without the restlessness that so often accompanied the vows of those who had chosen to stay with the Church through its most turbulent recent years. He wasn’t meek, but he was in his person deeply resigned to what he did. It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy.

The night before, he’d been too tired to organize himself. Now, he carefully unpacked his clothing, hung up and smoothed each sock and hankie, refolded every T-shirt into a drawer. Everything was put away before he noticed how tired he still was, how graven his exhaustion. He climbed into the bed he’d occupy until he completed this report for the diocese. Father Jude turned out the lights and rolled gratefully between the covers. He lay stiffly on his back, relaxing only very gradually, and in the oily dark he mulled over the information he’d received from Father Damien.

If it was true that his subject had struck a young novice and practiced subterfuge in regard to the deliverance of holy wounds, that invalidated her, he would expect. However, suppose these things were true and yet Christ had seen fit to reward and forgive the penitential vows of Leopolda by bestowing upon her the highest of bloody honors? The stigmata, or wounds resembling them, the hands that held the crown of thorns. Did he or any investigatory tribunal have the right to contradict such awesome signs of forgiveness? Obviously, the thing to do next was to interview the postulant. By now, she would be elderly, if she lived at all.

Marie. What was it. Kashpaw? Star of the sea. She will shine when we’ve burned off the salt.

Where did that come from? First thing next morning, he would track down this woman. Meanwhile, yawning, Father Jude shuffled mentally through files bound in pale manila. In what now he considered his hometown another odd occurrence — miracle, coincidence — documented, no less, with photographs taken by the subject herself. The face of Christ in a pane of ice, the cracks forming a gaunt visage with deep spiritual eyeholes in the skull. Shattered spikes, white and grim, a crown of frozen thorns. The photograph, reproduced in a clipping from the local newspaper and in a small pamphlet printed at the convent, had lost definition and smeared, yet the features of the face were marked clearly enough to resemble those bled into the famous Turin shroud. Those knifelike cheekbones, those pinched and painful brows. Sister Leopolda had been nearby when the cracks in the ice appeared. “The Manifestation at Argus”—title of the thin green pamphlet published by the local convent — noted her presence in the school yard. A child was the cause, or perhaps the catalyst that produced the icy features.

Everything was connected, loop upon loop. That child was, in fact, someone known to Jude in his later life. There was no doubt in his mind that some greater power was at work. Already, he’d done an interview with her as well. A bold girl, she’d smashed down face first from a slick play slide. The cracked visage of Christ appeared where she landed. The miraculous portrait had been sawed out of the ice and carefully deep frozen, only to be lost in a summer power outage.

There was, and more recently, a well-witnessed occurrence in which a local contractor had been struck into the earth by a statue of the Virgin Mary, the statue snapping its chains during unloading. Miraculously, some said, he had been spared. Due to a holy card stuck carelessly in his pocket? A portrait of the nun in question? Or due to a bed of sand that drove the man deep, stabilizing his limbs, and stopped the statue from landing upon him full force?

Father Miller tried to disconnect his thoughts, and even proceeded in a mental exercise to stack the materials he’d gathered, pat the files into a neat stack. He composed his mind to deliver his evening prayers. He usually prayed on his knees, beside the bed, or if he was cold or exhausted, tucked underneath the covers. Tonight, he folded himself comfortably and wearily on his side and mumbled, exasperated and pleading. “God,” he said, “help me out, here.” Falling away from consciousness, he worked out the bones of a plan that would take him between the reservation and Argus. The mark of the smashed face. The marks of the nails. The contractor rammed into the earth but only dizzied. And yet, what good works? What kindnesses had Leopolda performed? The ordinary markers were the stuff he sought now, the shape of his subject’s daily existence. Among the parishioners here on the reservation, he decided, he would find those she had helped. He would sit with them as long as it took, get their stories, record every nuance, every word.

MARIE KASHPAW

Though in age her flesh had tightened and roped to her bones, as though to tether itself to earth, Marie Kashpaw was still a formidable mass. Her hair, dove gray and cut into a helmet, had grown down over her eyebrows, but she refused to trim it. She gazed from beneath her bangs as under a visor, and regarded Father Jude with an indifferent acceptance. They sat on fat, mildewed, easy chairs.

“How come you’re here? What’s this for?” she asked, for she was a suspicious and brutally intelligent woman.

Father Jude told her he was gathering material about Sister Leopolda. “Leopolda!” She nodded and laughed without mirth. She popped a sourball into her mouth and smoothed her powerfully withered hands across the patterned stuff of her dress.

“What do you want?” she said again. Her eyes were round, hooded with wrinkles like a turtle’s.

Father Jude explained in more detail the testimony he was collecting. He mentioned Father Damien, and a slow smile creased her face. He left out most of what was told to him by Father Damien, all that was imparted in the intimacy of the confessional.

“Sister Leopolda Puyat?” Father Jude prompted.

“I don’t talk about her.” Marie Kashpaw gazed down at the hidden swirls and leaflike gestures in the pattern of her dress material. Slowly, heavily, she frowned. She wore nylon anklets, neatly folded down. Her wide tan shoes appeared to be bolted to the floor.

“I see,” said Father Jude. He allowed a deeper silence to cloak them. Together, they sat in the shabby sun. He smoked peacefully, wondering whether or not to tell her more. Finally he asked Marie Kashpaw, “Are you a discreet woman? Can you keep a secret?”

“No,” she said.

They lapsed once more into the voluptuous morning quiet. At last, he tried again, desperate to approach the subject.

“Why won’t you, or can’t you, speak of Leopolda?”

Marie Kashpaw looked bewildered, then annoyed, and once again drew into her stubborn shell. She refused to talk, but seemed, too, unwillingly drawn.

“Because she…” Marie shook her head, putting it all beyond her. She looked momentarily distressed, trapped. She froze.

“Because she…” Father Jude softly echoed.

But Marie Kashpaw did not take the bait. They sat. It was remarkable, he thought, how long and with no comment they could sit in the peaceable lobby. The sun blazed through the windows, now. Captive, his heart rose.

“Was she a good person, as the bishop sees it?”

Marie shrugged. He tried again.

“You are the only person who can tell us the truth about Leopolda.”

She bobbed her head, hunched and neckless. Folds of tough skin came down over her eyes, and she rested within herself. Sitting in the lobby, waiting, Father Jude was overtaken by a midmorning lethargy. He wished for a sugared sweet roll, a Danish. Raspberry! he imagined. And strong, hot coffee. He could almost taste the combination, and he could definitely see it before him in his mind’s eye, in his dream. The delicious roll began to float, drifting, a vision. He climbed into it. Started the motor. Soon he was steering toward a tiny, rocky island. He went deeper, his breath caught, ragged. He began to snore. As he did so, with reptile slowness, like the visage of an idol, Marie Kashpaw opened her eyes, which had gone a deep and throbbing brown.

AN ARGUMENT

Embarrassed, Father Jude apologized to the quiet woman for dozing off in the sunlight. She nodded, smiled tightly, and appeared to keep thinking about some closed-off and vital subject, so he thanked her and left. A white dust had risen from the ground and floated in a light band across the afternoon landscape. It was a dry spring haze. The grass on the road’s margins was still gray with the residue of road plow and drifted particles of topsoil. Father Jude made his way back uphill to his room in the rectory. Quick with frustrated energy, he lifted a set of weights he’d brought in the trunk of his car. He played back a tape made years ago by someone else, an interview with a Sister Dympna, took notes. Then he located several boxes of files and records he intended to examine for clues to the shape of his subject’s life.

As the afternoon lengthened, Father Damien met Father Jude in the yard. The older priest’s hair was slicked back with water and his eyes puffy from a nap. He regained vigor and made two rounds of the graveyard, walking with a light swiftness that surprised the younger one. And he spoke with intensity as though the movement generated mental electricity.

“A certain concatenation of events upsets me. Fixed causes. Two martyrs. One lifelong victim whose pain I shelter to this very day. And Leopolda!”

“You said that you were up thinking, remembering. There is a report here? A story?”

“Oh, yes! The question is exactly how to tease it out of the events, Father Jude. For you see, it began with the statue’s procession, an occasion of joy, and ended in a howling disaster, and I am not prepared to say I understand, even now, the causes of the effects.”

“Leopolda…”

“Yes, Father Miller, before she was Leopolda. What I mean to say is this: She was still a Puyat during this event.”

“Understood.”

“Only if you understand the depth of what being a Puyat implies.”

“Enlighten me.”

“Father Jude, each name you hear on this reservation is an unfinished history. A destiny that opens like a cone pouring out a person’s life. It took Leopolda a very long time to profess her perpetual vows, and during that time she was very difficult to control. She wore the habit and considered herself a nun, but she was a Puyat and there were difficulties from the first.”

“Saints. Difficulties. Father Damien, I am beginning to agree with you, not that my opinion matters. I am here to gather information. But about saints. When are they ever simple cases?” Jude sighed and pressed his fingers on his forehead. “They seem by nature to foster problems, surprises, at best or worst, envy. As I read”—he consulted his notes—“our Puyat-Leopolda escaped the horrors of the great influenza and even provided some nursing or at least took care of the dead — that was her job in the traditional culture and it became her task in the life of a religious. She was counted as devout in the Catholic sense and the year after her return from Argus her increasing piety and her service to the nuns was noted. In that same year, she asked one of the sisters whether she might be considered a candidate. She was then invited to stay in the convent for a time. Her blood is at least half Polish, and for the most part she was considered a métis, Indian to some slight degree, if that, for she had apparently repudiated her own past and was eagerly engrossed in taking on every aspect of the Faith. It was not long after her visit began that she presented what became her usual problem, that of excessive zeal. She was found face-down on the floor of the church on an extremely cold spring night. There was some concern that she was hypothermic. She never quite regained the circulation in her extremities, it says. There is some cross-out here, as though the writer, Sister Hildegarde Anne, was uncertain whether to include some detail.”

Waving his hand as though to take away the cross-out marks, Father Damien sighed with impatience.

“Leopolda was found that night naked and bleeding,” he said, “and she was covered with mud.”

Father Jude waited for more information, and indeed the old priest seemed to struggle in an effort to provide it — he began to speak once or twice and then fell silent, shaking his head. That was when, with a sudden flash, Father Jude intuited that the old priest was hiding information, secreting it away, and he was amazed and disturbed because he’d been certain that his informant was willing and even eager to divulge all he knew.

“You know more about that night,” said Father Jude, sternly, but his older colleague firmly shut his lips.

Frowning, irritated, Father Jude sat back in his chair. He stared at the other man and forced himself to behave with a patience he did not feel. As he watched Father Damien closely, that troubling sensation once more came upon him. It was a problem of perception. A distinct uncanny sense he could only name in one way.

“Father Damien, if you don’t mind my asking, have you got a twin?”

“I do not.”

“Never mind.” Jude shook his head to clear his vision. Ran his finger along the pages of his notes. “Our Leopolda spent some time cared for by her sisters, I am told. Apparently, she experienced what we would call a nervous breakdown, fell into the grip of hallucinations.”

“Visitations.”

“The difference being…?”

“Ah, you have hit upon the very question. The difference being very difficult, almost impossible, to discern in a person unstable and gripped by false visions as she was. She had a remarkable degree of endurance, and tolerated or even welcomed great physical and emotional pain. What she saw, she saw, whether you view her visions as pathological symptoms or as divine gifts is for you to say.”

Jude spoke dryly. “I am sure that a number of mystics would have benefited from a regimen of antidepressants. However, we would all be the poorer.”

“That is why,” continued Damien, “in the end the discussion will be, should be, made on the basis of heroic virtue. Did she exhibit heroic virtue while nursing the ill, or in her teaching, or perhaps with her sisters? Did she suffer bravely or wisely when afflicted with her illnesses? Was she a good example to her sisters, an inspiration?”

Father Damien winced, then answered himself.

“Not unless her task was to be a holy aversion, a trial, a scourge. I used to call her my hair shirt. Her very existence was an itch. Many a time I pitied her, but Father Jude, I was hard pressed not to hate her as well.”

Jude nodded, made a few notes. “Can you think of instances in which she exhibited a sacramental kindness?”

“No.”

“Come now, even Satan gives alms on occasion.”

“When it is to his advantage. That was the nature of Leopolda’s kindness. I consider that a spurious kindness.”

“Please think,” Jude said in a penetrating tone, for he really had to know whether there was something, anything, she’d done. The light fell golden and raw now, through the moving screen of twigs.

Father Damien thought, and then an odd, sad smile crossed his face.

“Quill,” he said at last. “Quill. Yes. Leopolda was the one who cured Quill’s madness. Sadly, of course, Quill died of the cure.”

“Oh, of course,” Father Jude muttered, throwing down the pen. “Died of the cure!”

“But she was sane when she died, completely clear minded!”

Father Jude picked up his pen again, tapped it on his cheek. “I wish there were one, just one thing that Leopolda did that was not of an ambiguous nature!”

“But that is just exactly what the Puyats are,” said Damien, “not one thing or the other. Contradictory. I told you that you must look at the name and the clan to assess the person, even a mixed blood like Leopolda. For she was shaped by the double nature of her mother, and who knows what else!”

Damien sighed mightily and attempted to gather his energy, puffing slowly until he straightened his chair. “Now that was how Nanapush began their history,” he went on, “I should tell you he was not entirely to be trusted where the Puyats were concerned. He had his motive for spinning a tale to his own ends — he loved to torment Pauline. And whether or not you concede how twisted she became, it was clear to me, after hearing the story again and again from Nanapush in different versions, that the Puyats were subject, as any family on the reservation, to the same great press of forces, and that their clan managed to survive at all was certainly commendable and strange. Still, I’m going to acquaint you with the story, the characters, and then you will see the stuff of which our so-called saint is made!”

With that, Father Damien rummaged in a stack of papers beside him. Eventually, with a short crow of triumph, he thrust into his colleague’s hands a tattered and stained, unevenly typed article addressed to the North Dakota State Historical Society. He muttered as he tore off and crumpled one or two rejection letters, then fondly patted the main body of the text as he handed it over.

HISTORY OF THE PUYATS BY FATHER DAMIEN MODESTE

The exploits of my legendary predecessor Father Hugo LaCombe, who passed his youthful nights in a coffin and was revered by his flock for attracting divine luck to the great and rowdy hunts undertaken for buffalo, are in the main well-known. Relying on some letters of his, which I have unearthed, as well as firsthand accounts by Mr. Nanapush, an elderly Ojibwe thoroughly knowledgeable regarding Anishinaabeg history, I would like to add to the collective picture of this region by examining the Puyat family trials. Although the history of the Puyats begins well before Father LaCombe’s time, the central astonishment of their story touches on one event to which he was a witness: a hunt.

From spring to midsummer, the Plains Ojibwe and Michif people killed the buffalo. Hard as was the killing, those deaths were easy compared with the sheer volume of labor it took to skin the beasts and butcher them, dress the meat, and preserve the extra in the form of pemmican. This long-lasting food was their primary winter and travel sustenance. The beast was deboned, cooked, pulverized, mixed with its own rendered tallow and returned to its hairless skin. The huge, fleet, brutal-willed animal was thus concentrated to a form that a woman could carry on her back. Mostly the transformed buffalo were loaded in stacked bales onto wooden Red River oxcarts that screamed and groaned as they moved across the violently flat plains.

Upon the topmost of these bales, in the partial history I now recount, there rode a young girl in whom the bitterness of seven generations of peasant French and an equal seven of enemy-harassed Ojibwe ancestors were concentrated. Her parents, the mother a crane clan girl of fretful, peaceless energy, and her father, small and arrogant with Montreal-based spleen, positively hated each other. At the same time, they could not abide the frustrations of separation. Their child, created of spilled-over complexity and given the French name Pauline according to the father’s wish, seethed in the high noon sun and considered the tedium of their slow and inevitable progress so impossible that she was almost glad, when spotting a party of Bwaanag, a source of mortal hatred, to call out her find from the top of the bale of skins.

The band of Ojibwe and French-Indian Michifs halted in alarm. All who could shoot well were armed and arranged behind cover. The Bwaanug did the same and for hours, without a shot being fired, the two enemy camps exchanged volleys of shouted insults increasing in amazed fury and filth, which of course neither side could understand as they had no language in common, but which did vastly increase the knowledge of the children and their accompanying priest. Good Father LaCombe, whose job it was to bless the hunt, found himself in the middle of an enmity so old that even his holy presence wasn’t sufficient to cause the women to contain their contempt. All he could do was to break up his candles and knead the beeswax into plugs, which he stuffed into the children’s ears and his own. Ever after, the first Pauline’s memory of what followed was mainly a soundless vision — although of course, soon as she could, she removed the beeswax plugs.

She saw at one point her enraged mother, pained to madness by the memory of her brothers’ loss to the Bwaanag, climb the bales and throw off her skirts. Pointing to her nakedness and flaunting it boldly, she screamed a challenge so foul and instantly understandable that a Bwaan rushed from cover and was nearly killed, one bullet clipping his ear half off and the other bullet shattering a wooden club that flew from his hand so that he sensibly retreated. The two sides again resorted to shouting, but it was clear, by then, that both parties were returning from successful hunting and were not only low on ammunition but more interested in supplying their home camps with meat than in taking revenge. Still, in retaliation for that bold Anishinaabekwe’s affront, a Bwaan woman of equal fury lifted her buckskins and cried a challenge in her own language and in so severe and scathing a manner that one of the men from Pauline’s camp leaped forward out of cover and was seriously wounded in the thigh. Pauline’s mother threw herself high up the bales and now other women did as well, so that the cacophony of insults exchanged became at once an earsplitting din and the men, seeing their half-naked wives frothing wild, began to think they were by contrast the more restrained and rational.

The first Pauline’s father in particular was disgusted by his wife’s display. In fact, he became at length so crazed with irritation that he raised a white flag, the symbolism of which long had been learned from the protocol of the U.S. Cavalry, and he walked unarmed to the center of the field. Being French, and of French traders, he knew enough of the Bwaan language to make himself understood. When he raised his hands, a curious silence fell. He spoke to both sides.

“We are not war parties! Hear me! We are laden with meat to survive. Both of our caravans would be wise to depart in peace. But since it is our hotheaded women who are looking to shed blood, and as we are French and Ojibwe men who always satisfy our women, let two of the women race to the death. The winner of the race, we all agree, shall have the other’s life. After this is accomplished, we will go our separate directions and meet to fight, as men and warriors, another day.”

The child heard this speech by her father with an inner sense of glee, as did the others in the camp, for all knew that Pauline’s mother was a superb and unbested runner. She had, in fact, challenged the young men who came to court her to footraces, claiming that she would not stoop to marry a man who could not beat her. She vowed she would marry the one who could. Her boast was the reason she eventually wed the unprepossessing, even ugly, deer-legged, voyageur who was her much despised husband. He had embarrassed her by winning, a bad way to start a marriage. Her swiftness had only increased since that day, as had his own. Although, at his speech, her pride rose up instantly, she experienced an inner pang that he, the father of her child, could so arrogantly put up her life. What if there were by chance a better runner among the Bwaan women? Anger beat its wing inside of her. As she walked to the race ground to take her place, she decided to lose the race. In pride before his compatriots, her man would have to offer up his life for her own. At last, and how well he deserved it, she would be rid of him!

The enemy camps, having laid down their weapons, ranged to either side of a finish mark. The Bwaan woman who was to race was short of leg but light boned. Both women wore dresses of light calico. At the starting point, they divested themselves of what might hamper them — the Bwaan woman wore a long bone breastplate, a clapperless cowbell, a cradle board into which a fat infant was bound. Both women put down their skinning knives; over the razor-edged slender blades of steel their eyes met briefly in opaque agreement. They turned away. Pauline’s mother carefully lifted strand after strand of trader’s beads over her head — those beads, from Africa and Venice, Bohemia and Quechee, Vermont, she put into her daughter’s hands. She unbuckled a wide belt of bull leather studded with brass, but did not remove from her ears the shining cones dripping small tinklers of German silver, so that, when the women began to run, her mother’s swift progress began with light music that silenced in the smooth wind of her movement.

Running, that first Pauline’s mother felt a tremendous ease and freedom. The earth purred underneath her makizinan that day. She reached the turn a bit before her desperate opponent, picked up the stick she was to take with one swift movement, and in returning found it very hard to force herself to lose.

When she did, Pauline, though treated by her mother with no kindness, heard as if from outside herself an animal howl that tore her chest. The incredible noise ripped her breath out by the roots. Her lungs shut. She fell upon her mother in a haze of yellow spots and clutched her dress so tightly that her fingers pressed through the soft weave and her knuckles ground against her mother’s thighs. It was, then, more the weight of his treasured daughter’s horror than love for his merciless wife or even male pride that caused Pauline’s father to step forward just as the Bwaan woman raised her skinning knife, and to offer, as his wife had known he would, to substitute his own life for hers.

The Bwaan woman drew back, her eyes roamed over the man with the pelt on his chin and the child, equally ugly, who so obviously belonged to him. She wanted very much to kill this woman of the Ojibwe because of her own losses in the immemorial blood feud between their tribes, and because she had sensed, in running beside her, that the woman held back her power and could easily have beaten her. Such an ignominy scorched her stone roaster’s heart. But then, as the child’s grief turned with even more violence upon her father, whom, to be quite frank about it, the girl preferred, the Bwaan woman, recalling the pain of losing her own father at the age of this child, in a nighttime raid by Ojibwe, decided instantly that if she could balance this girl’s grief with her own, like a stick on her finger, she would be solved of her need for revenge.

“Washtay,” she said in her language. She stood aside to let the other woman rise.

A gift for clever thought, a certain talent for talking, a swiftness with the language, became a Puyat trait inherited from this quick Frenchman who then spoke to save his life. He spoke clearly, as though suddenly struck with his idea.

“Of course, if any of you big-bellied Bwaan men can beat me in a running race, then each of you can murder half of me. The woman can have my left side to cut my heart out, and eat it, too, if there’s anything left — after all, my wife has sharpened her teeth on it for years. The man can have my right side because wiinag swings there, long and heavy. When I run, I’m forced to tie it up or it will strike my thigh and bruise me. But today, since this may be the last race I’ll run, I’ll let it gallop free!”

By the time he finished speaking the two sides were laughing and there was no question that the race would occur. The only problem the Bwaanug had was in choosing a runner. There were two, and equally matched. One was a powerful bull-chested hunter with legs that bulged with fabulous muscles, and the other was an ikwe-inini, a woman-man called a winkte by the Bwaanag, a graceful sly boy who sighed, poised with grave nuance, combed his hair, and peered into the tortoiseshell hand mirror that hung around his neck by a rawhide thong. The wife of the hunter refused to let her valued husband risk his life in such a ridiculous game, and she yelled, browbeat, pulled her knife on him herself, while the others were lost in a debate. Was the winkte a man or a woman for the purposes of this race?

Some of the Ojibwe, who judged his catlike stance too threatening, rejected him as a male runner on account of his female spirit. Others were wary of the scowling hunter and argued that as the winkte would run with legs that grew down along either side of a penis as unmistakable as his opponent’s, he was enough of a male to suit the terms. The hunter’s wife finally won, delivering to her husband such a blow with the butt of his own rifle that he fell senseless and gagging. The winkte narrowed eyes rimmed with smoky black, shrugged off a heavy dress of fine-tanned deerhide, and stood, astonishingly pure and lovely, in nothing but a white woman’s lace-trimmed pantalets. At the signal, then, both commenced to race.

They tested each other, pulling a step ahead and dropping a step behind, speeding and slowing to throw the other off pace, and found themselves equally matched. It would be a race of wit as well as strength, then. When to spend the ultimate energy and when to conserve? Draw ahead to the last reserve of strength, in order to discourage the other? Or save some for the final kick? The clever Montrealer decided by the time he grasped the stick at halfway that he’d tag a pace behind and wheeze to confuse his opponent and then in his last lengths, sign of the cross, kiss of God, he’d fly past, surprising the Bwaan, and show him the heels of his feet. This would have worked more easily had not his opponent, whose job it was as a woman to study men and whose immediacy of manhood gave him an uncanny understanding, read the mind of the Frenchman and slowed to conserve his own ability to finish. They both knew, then, that their strategies came down to a hot finale and they each determined to blister straight through their lungs and guts to cross the line ahead and live.

When it came right down to the end, though, the Frenchman had the stronger kick and the winkte, losing by a toe, swiped his dress neatly from the grass and simply kept running, across the broad plains, into the hills. Those who wished to start after him were detained now by Father LaCombe, who, though slow to understand the outcome of the wager and the sequence of events, launched forth a God-inspired tirade that cowed the Michifs and brought them to their Catholic senses. As a result, they did not chase the fleeing Bwaan but grudgingly agreed with the priest’s diplomatic statement that the race had been an exact tie. No blood should be spilled.

Yet the Bwaan woman would have satisfaction for her relatives. Lunging forward with one arrowing blur of movement, she slipped her skinning knife beneath the ribs of the Frenchman, Pauline’s father, and drew a sickening arc so that he found, quite suddenly, he was kneeling in prayer, his intestines slowly popping into his hands. And then his daughter was before him trying gently to stuff them back in their exact mysterious intricate folds, but failing even as he crumpled. Leaning sideways, he spilled about himself. Dying, he looked into his daughter’s face and said to her in the clarity of last vision that she must kill her mother.

It was imperishable, the command of the father imposed upon the daughter. And no less the will she had to carry it out. Her intention was forged in the heat of grief and tempered in its freezing aftermath. Though young, the girl now harbored a blade of certainty that waited calmly in her for its chance. Pauline’s mother knew. That is why, one day, with no warning and no word but a filthy cry, she dragged the girl to the shit pile and forced her snarling child face-down and said in a deadly voice, “This is where you’ll be if ever you go against me.”

A mistake, on the mother’s part, to challenge one so like herself.

Ever after, the stink of waste reminded the girl. Her mother pushed Pauline into the fire, next, and so that, too, became an unforgettable piece of the promise. The burns of hot coals on her skin were markers of her duty. As was the soup her mother would not feed her — a bitter absence in her stomach. And the sticks of wood that broke against her legs and over her back. The air that tore open her chest each time she breathed with the broken rib, and bloody snow. The only thing her mother let her eat one winter when the meat was scarce was the bloody snow beneath the death of the animal or its butchering.

Yet the girl survived on that. She grew fast on the blows that didn’t land and even faster on the ones that did. She flourished in twisted energy and grew taller than her father and meaner than her mother until one day, as her mother lay weakened by fever in a brush lean-to, on the trapline, the daughter brought a horn of foul boiling stew of bark and diseased rabbit and a mole that an owl must have dropped. Although her mother clawed at her, she held the woman’s mouth open and poured the boiling stuff straight down her gullet so that her throat was seared, her mouth severely blistered, and all she could do was gasp, in her agonized delirium, for three days, the name Pauline.

That girl sat as far as possible from her mother, by the fire, surrounded by warm blankets and skins. With satisfaction, she watched the woman who bore her shake and chatter her teeth like a turtle rattle and weep as the fever alternately scorched and froze her. Recovering, the woman lost one side of her face. The nerves destroyed by inner heat, her flesh sagged in a bizarre leer that made her suddenly frightening to men so that, though she could still run, there was no one to catch her.

At the same time Pauline, who had inherited none of her mother’s grace and all of her father’s squat, exaggerated pop-eyed vigor, suddenly became irresistible to men. She was courted famously by love flute. She tried her lovers out across the tent, while her mother burned in dark nothingness. Men brought Pauline shells, miigis, a dress of red calico that reflected fire. They offered her trade silver cut and stamped in the shapes of owls, turtles, otters twining, bears, and horned frogs. They brought her meat so that she never went hungry. A necklace of brass beads appeared, hung beside her door by a night visitor. A very good kettle. Cakes of maple sugar. She wanted for nothing. Men sought her, although they were befuddled by their fascination. Was it her slim long waist, tight in the red calico? Maybe it was the way she looked so boldly at a man, then shyly away. It was not her face, or maybe it was, for her childhood ugliness had become something else: a ferocity, a sexual charm partaking of no sweetness, a look that registered and gloated over everything about a man. A hunger.

The young girl’s appetite became a famishment and then a ravenous emptiness that she found men, for very short amounts of time, were capable of solving. Still, even though she had her pick of them, she was restless. The terrible fact was this: In creating the emptiness, the mother disallowed her the means to fill her void. Pauline could not love or be loved. She had been robbed of her capacity either to give or receive anything so profoundly good.

Her mother’s face sagged until her tongue froze. Her brain locked. She finally died, removing the burden of her doom from Pauline. Freed, the girl married four times. With every marriage she experienced the beginning as a wicked and promising intensity that grew unbearable and then subsided into indifference. She bore her first child, a boy called Shesheeb, very early in life. Upon him, she raggedly doted. Twenty years after that first child, she bore a daughter. Her children were very different: the boy fathered by a full-blood and the girl by a Polish aristocrat visiting the wilds of Canada. The name of the latter was unpronounceable to Pauline, plus he was no more than a strange encounter during one dry northern summer. She forgot him and named the daughter after herself. Pauline Puyat, once again.

That child, born in her mother’s age and raised in her purified bitterness, was the Pauline Puyat who became Sister Leopolda and sponsored, we do not know how, such things as miracles. I relate what I know of this history in order to explain the slow formation of certain seductive poisons in the personality that both slow and require severe judgment. This killing hatred between mother and daughter was passed down and did not die when the last Pauline became a nun. As Sister Leopolda she was known for her harsh and fearsome ways. And her father, the Polish man with the title and the golden epaulets, who went back to his lands with marvelous paintings and strange stories, who was he? What unknown capacities, what secret Old World cruelties, were thereby tangled into her simmering blood?

If you know about the buffalo hunts, you perhaps know that the one I describe, now many generations past, was one of the last. Directly after that hunt, in fact, before which Father LaCombe made a great act of contrition and the whirlwind destruction, lasting twenty minutes, left twelve hundred animals dead, the rest of the herd did not bolt away but behaved in a chilling fashion.

As many witnesses told it, the surviving buffalo milled at the outskirts of the carnage, not grazing but watching with an insane intensity, as one by one, swiftly and painstakingly, each carcass was dismantled. Even through the night, the buffalo stayed, and were seen by the uneasy hunters and their families the next dawn to have remained standing quietly as though mourning their young and their dead, all their relatives that lay before them more or less unjointed, detongued, legless, headless, skinned. At noon the flies descended. The buzzing was horrendous. The sky went black. It was then, at the sun’s zenith, the light shredded by scarves of moving black insects, that the buffalo began to make a sound.

It was a sound never heard before; no buffalo had ever made this sound. No one knew what the sound meant, except that one old toughened hunter sucked his breath in when he heard it, and as the sound increased he attempted not to cry out. Tears ran over his cheeks and down his throat, anyway, wetting his shoulders, for the sound gathered power until everyone was lost in the immensity. That sound was heard once and never to be heard again, that sound made the body ache, the mind pinch shut. An unmistakable and violent grief, it was as though the earth itself was sobbing. One cow, then a bull, charged the carcasses. Then there was another sight to add to the sound never heard before. Situated on a slight rise, the camp of hunters watched in mystery as the entire herd, which still numbered thousands, began to move. Slightly at first, then more violently, the buffalo proceeded to trample, gore, even bite their dead, to crush their brothers’ bones into the ground with their stone hooves, to toss into the air chunks of murdered flesh, and even, soon, to run down their own calves. The whole time they uttered a sound so terrible that the people were struck to the core and could never speak of what they saw for a long time afterward.

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”

* * *

Father Damien sighed and for a while the two priests were lost in a meditative silence, then he spoke softly to Father Jude. “What does that tell you about Pauline? About her mother? About the great pain of the end of things that lives in every family, here on the reservation, in some form or another? What does that tell you about our so-called saint? Pauline was, of course, the warped result of all that twisted her mother. She was what came next, beyond the end of things. She was the residue of what occurred when some of our grief-mad people trampled their children. Yes, Leopolda was the hope and she was the poison. And the history of the Puyats is the history of the end of things. It is bound up in despair and the red beasts’ lust for self-slaughter, an act the chimookomanag call suicide, which our people rarely practiced until now.”