The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

9. THE ROSARY

1919–1920

Late that summer the body of a man was found in the woods. Father Damien was sent for. Already, it was known that the dead man was the vanished Napoleon Morrissey. With that identity in mind and knowing the length of time he had been missing, Agnes was at least in some measure prepared. She had by then seen life from start to finish and was familiar with death’s peculiarities.

Father Damien arrived in the hot, green, earth-smelling woods and approached the circle of men, who parted for him, hands or sleeves held to their faces. There, in a child’s play spot, surrounded by tufts of goldenrod and beds of blue asters, the body sprawled. Someone had laid a potato sack over it for modesty, but the poor nakedness was really the least obscene thing about the tableau. A gaping mouth, inhabited by tiny, busy creatures, crow-plucked eyes, hands clutched up about the neck. Father Damien excused himself and threw up, casually and efficiently, behind a tree, then returned with a handkerchief held to his lips. The men waited for him, accustomed by now to the priest’s combination of delicacy and shrewd toughness.

Steadier, he bent to the piteous human scraps, brushed a scraping of dirt from the throat, stared at the sight until it lost some of its horror and became a puzzle. Questions occurred, a great many questions. Of course, to begin with, the cause of death. Damien observed the stretched, fixed features, still apparent even after the summer’s heat — an effort to speak or, more likely, to gasp, to take air? And the hands to the throat. The man had surely choked, or been choked. If the latter, not by someone in a face-to-face death struggle, hands on windpipe, but something else.

“Was there a rope,” Damien asked of the men surrounding the body. “Did you find anything, a noose, twine, leathers, something that might have been used to strangle this man?”

There was no answer. As though thinking as one, they abruptly left the priest and fanned evenly through the woods. The undergrowth was thick and tangled with wild grape and raspberry, springy brambles, a summer’s growth of oak seedlings. The men stamped out a carefully widening circle. As they searched, Damien continued to take a meticulous inventory of the features of the body that might provide further information. The eyes — wide open — before they had been plucked? The feet, close together, had the body been dragged? The ankles bound? Alcohol. Any way of telling whether Napoleon was drunk at the time? Had there been a struggle? Was this a fight typical of drunks, and if so, with whom did he drink? Was there anyone missing from the reservation, a companion who’d perhaps run off in horror of what had happened?

“Neshke,” said George Aisance. In his hand a long rope of beads, a twine of knots and black prayer markers, a rosary.

Damien accepted the beads and tried to coil them around his fist. That was when he realized that this particular rosary was different from all others — it was strung on something stiffer, which kept an elegant shape. It was wire, some sort of wire, and then the barbs pricked his palm and he realized what kind. The crucifix of the rosary went cold in his hands.

He wasn’t of a sufficiently certain mind to say anything yet, but there were marks, yes, there were, a necklace of deep pits decayed in small dents around the dead man’s neck. After he bid George and the other men to leave, to find a sledge to transport the body back to town, he measured the rosary beads in his hands. Gently, as though he was fitting to a woman’s throat a string of pearls, he compared a decade, ten beads and a larger bead, barbs between, a set of mysteries that exactly fit the wounds.

That night, in the trembling radiance of candles, Agnes laid the rosary out before her on the covers of the bed and then sat next to it, looking at it, imagining just how it had been shaped. A pair of pliers, certainly, to untwist the wire. The beads were about a half inch in diameter as on a rope rosary, and they had accommodated — either naturally or by being enlarged — the wire and the barbs between. For the rosary had been cleverly planned to utilize the spun steel thorns, perhaps to prick a finger between each decade or perhaps… Here Agnes picked up the rosary dangling stiff by the crucifix, swept it over her shoulder so it caught in the flap of the overcoat that she still wore. She frowned at herself and disentangled it — a flagellant’s whip. It would have left, she thought, gingerly gripping it now, the hands of whomever used it to choke a grown man a bloody mess.

THE TEMPLE WHIPPING

Napoleon’s funeral set things going, created divisions that would last for years, during which a complex transfer of power would occur on the reservation. Land would pass from the hands of Napoleon’s sister, Bernadette, to the son of Margaret Kashpaw and from there into Kashpaw hands. That’s where it started — in the church before a crude pine box. Of course, Father Damien knew by now that the Kashpaws and Pillagers avoided the Morrissey and Lazarre camp. It had been his fruitless work to try to bring together the factions. What happened at the funeral made him give up the notion, forever, and accept that he dealt with a set of clan differences, complicated by loss, land, and money, that would never heal. These differences would go on, in fact, through time and come to define the politics of the place he loved.

Margaret Kashpaw, shrewd and sour, kicked the misery to life.

Some said that Margaret should not have shown her face at the funeral, given that the man who chased after her was the holdout Nanapush. She had the nerve to show up in bright clothing, and wore the garish red hat that made some call her Old Lady Cardinal and others mutter that it was a pointed mark of disrespect. You never wore that color near the dead, as it confused their spirits, attracted them back to the living. But apparently that did not bother Margaret. Margaret only said that she came because it was her duty as a member of the tribe and parish. Her words were met with scorn, right at the doorway.

“So you came to gloat.” Bernadette greeted her with ugly irony. What she actually said in Ojibwemowin was that Margaret had come to make herself fat on the sorrows of her enemies. Then she added that Margaret already was quite fat enough and should go home.

“Go fuck the old longhair in your dead husband’s blankets,” she advised, again in Ojibwemowin, a phrase lost on Father Damien, who was standing near to greet those who’d come to pay their final respects. He did catch the word blankets, waabooyaanan, and using his pocked mental lexicon he made the association between blankets and honoring gifts. Thinking Margaret had been uncharacteristically generous, he at once clasped Margaret’s hand and began with a nervous passion to thank her. Caught between the sudden insult and the copious gratitude, Margaret rocked back. Just for an instant, though. She quickly discarded the priest’s clumsy praise and prepared a barrage of killing wit, which she was unable to deliver. A crush of sorrowing Morrisseys now swept protectively around Bernadette, and simultaneously pinned Margaret Kashpaw in the center of the back pew, so that she had to scramble over the top of the bench to gain her freedom.

This small woman, though of some age, could move with strength and economy. Before anyone could knock her down, Margaret Kashpaw wove through the mourners. Quick as a weasel, she popped up right before Bernadette. As she moved, her mind was working, so that by the time she confronted the Morrissey she had discarded her crude witticisms in favor of a bitingly sweet form of address.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, in your pitiful condition. I loved your brother as my own brother. You should remember how he came to chop wood for me when my own husband was out on the trapline. And don’t you recall”—Margaret spoke with brilliant inspiration, lies jumping to her lips—“how your brother so generously gave up his horses and bought my dead husband’s team for a good price after he was killed?”

Of course, Bernadette now recalled her brother bragging how he’d cheated the widows and taken advantage of the fact that, as Kashpaw’s death was the result of his team’s panic, nobody in the family felt right with the beasts. They traded them to Napoleon so cheaply that he couldn’t stop talking about his bargain.

“Ishte, Bernadette, your brother was a good man,” said Margaret, sopping away fake tears. “He was so good to your niece-girl, the one who dug the dirt. Even, he took in that skinny Puyat who now wears the black gown. Oh yai, he used to bring that virgin to that old shack on Kashpaw land where he—”

Father Damien now freed himself of other hands and again clasped Margaret’s, giving her his most profound attention, which worked out perfectly, for all Margaret had wanted to do was lay the foundation of suspicion for Bernadette to stand on, and shade her eyes, and look this way and that. Which she did, thinking surely no one else knew what evil Napoleon did to the Kashpaw girl? And the Puyat? And even if someone knew, at least that Puyat was alone, wasn’t she, no family members around to… but no, and here Bernadette’s mouth gaped open. Perhaps there were people on the reservation who knew about Napoleon’s crime. She’d sent Marie to the Lazarres to avoid a repetition. Maybe there were relatives she hadn’t considered, vengeful ones. He was dead, wasn’t he? Dead by the hand of someone strong and capable. Although she mourned him for the blood he was, Bernadette had no illusions about the character of her dead brother.

He had taken advantage of her too. Recalling this, quite suddenly, Bernadette’s face went dark with unshed emotion. She suddenly shook off the maudlin comfort of her family and strode to the front pew, where she brooded with great intensity on what he really was. What he really did. What he left her with. She brooded so hard and cracked her big knuckles so loudly that the other members of her family feared that she was disoriented by grief. But no, her thoughts were properly directed by Margaret’s truth. That was the problem.

All through the painful service that Father Damien conducted, her oblivious mutters sounded. Napoleon had tried to cheat her of her own land and left her nothing but a spalted horse and his clothing, the acrid smell of himself in the cloth. She’d burn them now. He’d brought loose women to the house and drank with them. He drank anyway, alone, and sometimes… ah, she pushed away the pictures, glad to the bone that he was dead. Maybe she would stand up and kick his coffin. Maybe she would rage at heaven. No longer could she hold it in! She leaped up suddenly, but men were ready. They held her back, from joining her brother in death, they thought, but in reality she wanted to rip his pickled body from the box.

That she went strange in her behavior after talking to Margaret was not lost on her relatives.

“It’s her,” cried one, totally disrupting Father Damien’s attempt to forge ahead with the service. “That damn Margaret Kashpaw put a powder on her!”

The whole church of Lazarres and Morrisseys and those on their side now turned to look upon Margaret, who was perhaps the only woman living anywhere, in all the Anishinaabeg territory now chopped into states and provinces, who could glare back with such authority. More than all of them put together. Her peaked red cap stood up, erect. Her eyes blazed and her bearing was of the old ogitchidaa-ikwe stance, too powerful to resist. For such a small, sharp woman, her voice carried. It rolled out of her. She put one hand up before she spoke and turned to each direction.

“We will see it coming soon,” she cried, her voice echoing in drama, “more deaths out in the woods. The trees strangled the Morrissey because he spoke of selling them all for timber and getting rid of our land!”

In the confused silence that greeted this preposterous statement, she walked out, leaving behind her a massed political war council of those determined not only to cut a deal with the lumber people but also, now, to avenge their martyr, and others scratching their heads and saying, the trees? The trees? Bernadette, pinned to the pew by the excitement of her rage, now sobbed and ground her teeth and begged to be carried out of the church. It was most unlike her, this impulsive weeping, this charging forward. Bony and elbowing, her arms slashed the air. As she was in fact a powerful character by reason of her influence upon the government agent, her agitation acted as a catalyst to further uproar.

Father Damien, now fearing they might burn down his church in their frenzy, patrolled inside nervously, then outside. What else could he do? This was a test. Agnes stopped, put her hands on her hips, rallied her wits and her strength. Was her priest to be driven from his own church? She rocked on her heels. Listened to the mass of would-be mourners argue and shout. She clenched and unclenched her fists, and at last threw her power into the voice and demeanor of Father Damien. Strode back inside.

At first, the muscled backs and shoving arms and jutting chins of the arguers barred him, but he persevered until he gained the altar. Gathering up his courage, he suddenly vaulted up onto the coffin, which sat on a sturdy table. He stood there with fists on his hips, at which point the mourners shut up and gaped at him in mass reproach.

“Bekaayan,” he ordered them. “Bizindamoog! You think I am disrespectful to stand full square upon the dead? No different than what you are doing! Be gone! Get out! This is a place of the Lord!”

Father Damien then had the glad luck to spy a strong whip coiled on the front pew. Bounding to the floor, he grabbed it and then commenced wielding it all around, right and left, so that the shamed mourners drew back and scattered. Stumbled through the door, and left. Father Damien emptied the place, and then stood panting near the holy water font, a bowl on a log, and cut the air in the sign of the cross.

Scrawny Mr. Bizhieu crept back in and begged Father Damien to return his whip. His rage leaped high and Father Damien launched it at Bizhieu like a lance.

“Miigwetch,” said the whip’s owner in admiration.

Soon it would be told all through the reservation and the land how the young priest drove false worshipers straight from God’s holy presence with a scourge just like the adventurous Jesus whipped the zhooniya men in the temple. And further, the story embellished, how those touched by the whip itself were saved and could not help creeping back to the church with confessions, while others were cured of goiters, sore eyes, rheumatism. And the whip itself was proudly displayed by the Bizhieus. Only Father Damien felt shame at his loss of temper, and resolved to be pragmatic from then on.

He would conduct two separate Masses for the enemies, so that they would never meet and defile the holy presence with their disputes.

BERNADETTE

After Bernadette came to her wits, she realized that she could do a lot more for her side of things than agreeing with Margaret. Even now, she was the one who made calculations on each parcel of land, the one who figured for the land company and government too, and for the lumbering operation co-owned by John James Mauser. She was the one who accidentally, by virtue only of her skill with small numbers, suddenly acquired an undeserved power over the fates of her neighbors and tribespeople. A half-blood, she called herself French and despised the old ones. She was mirthless and ruthless, and she decided that she would use her brother’s death to cast suspicion on the one whose mind no money would affect.

“Nanapush,” she told all who would listen. “He and those Pillagers killed my brother because he wanted to sign!” She thrust out her skinny neck. “The backwards ones, the holdouts. They threw his poor body in the bush and went on with their ceremonies!”

Once she said it the first time, her theory was repeated to every listener. Napoleon was killed, horridly and thoroughly, by the full-blood blanket Indians, she called them, who couldn’t understand that the money offered for the land and lumber came around once and once only. She asserted that, as a horse trader, Napoleon Morrissey had known a good deal. In no time, she had quite a number convinced that it was useless to do anything but go forward, live forward, take the money in their hands, and find a new place to put their hearts and their feet.

NECTOR KASHPAW

The tension ran so high that Father Damien was relieved he’d had the foresight to conduct two separate Holy Masses for the rancorous families. Their arguments split the reservation, and from then on they would contend for control of everything from jelly recipes and secrets of hide tanning to land and political say-so. The Morrissey and Lazarre camp, aligned with the company owned by Palmer Turcot and John James Mauser, took the early Mass. The Masses were widely spaced apart so that there would be no overlap, no meeting of the enemies in the innocence of the churchyard. Kashpaws, including Nanapush and those in sympathy with Pillagers, came walking to the late Mass. At first, there was complaint from the Morrisseys when Nector Kashpaw returned from government school and served at their Mass, too, but he was still a boy so they forgot about it.

That was a mistake.

For Nector Kashpaw would be the one who would count who was there and who wasn’t, the one who would make himself small and very quiet, the one who would eventually hold the power of the pen over Bernadette.

PENMANSHIP

As great towers are by the underpinnings weakened and overthrown, so the seeming insignificance of Nector was the key to the eventual downfall of the Morrisseys. Nobody knew of or saw the quick intelligence at work behind the holy-boy shutter of his face. No one thought to wonder what he learned at the hands of the nuns or from Father Damien. All the time that he was not trapping, hunting, attempting to dig and plant in accordance with the government wishes, and all the time that he was missing from the camps of his elders and the company of the medicine people and their wisdom, Nector was learning to read zhaaganaashimowin and to write the language of the conquering officials and the land companies in the beautifully flowing and elegant script that Sister Hildegarde Anne taught with painstaking love from two books — Merrill’s Modern Penmanship and the classic Graphic System of Practical Penmanship were her bibles.

It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life. That and hygiene — but though the hygiene just had to be adequate, the writing had to be exquisite. So she worked with her readiest pupil, Nector, until, using a pencil kept pin-sharp, then graduating to a precious, borrowed pen, he could form letters that rivaled the illustrations in the penmanship books. Soon his writing approached even Sister Hildegarde’s own for purity and consistency. His words were in their execution indisputably grander, firmer, and more controlled than the written words of Bernadette Morrissey, who corresponded with the government.

During this time, and while he was getting his growth, other extreme events occurred. The Lazarres and Morrisseys became still more bold and insulting to those who did not agree with their views. Earlier they had gone so far as to kidnap, threaten, and even shave the head of Nector’s mother, Margaret. The revenges that followed were distinct to the Pillagers. Fleur killed with fear, Nanapush used piano wire, Margaret flayed her enemies to nothing with the bitter blade of her tongue.

Nector got even by the use of penmanship.

After he returned from government school, he positioned himself carefully by pretending to be neutral. His bland, blinking, new-grown handsomeness caught the eye of Bernadette, who hired him — though that was a fancy word for a job that paid in grease, potatoes, and an occasional dime. He was to assist her in putting into operation an order from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. That order was this: the administrator at each agency was to mend, classify, and flat-file all of the old files. In this case, the files dated back to well before the birth of Nanapush.

Bernadette thought she could trust young Nector Kashpaw because he’d been exposed to the withering light of the government school. She thought he couldn’t hurt a system so snarled that she herself couldn’t account for where land or inheritance papers went and what happened to commodities ordered from various crooks. She was tired of the stacks of mail to answer, of the loss of landholdings personal to clans other than her own, tired of trying to account for these losses in words that she couldn’t invent fast enough to please the Chief of Methods Division. In Nector, so bright and obedient a boy, she thought she had a malleable, sensible son who understood that the time of the old traditions was accomplished and over, a boy who wished a clean sweep and progressive future, if he wished anything at all yet, for his people. Not that Bernadette Morrissey, cow hips jutting, face long and exhausted, eyes weak from doing money sums, had a vision. She didn’t. She only wanted what was most comfortable. What was secure.

Nector could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood held a vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. But he didn’t say these things, because they were useless in the first place and would give him away in the next. He said nothing except to lament, with her, the former practice of folding papers and the improper classification of files and the confusing change of names and locations, superintendencies and jurisdictions over various families of Ojibwe Indians.

Nector let Bernadette natter on, directing him to accomplish fair copies of documents. Soon, he learned to use — and here the story was given an unexpected twist — the black typing machine labeled Chicago. He began to love typing and that, plus the way he could sign what he typed, put him over the top. He was now preferred by the commissioner to Bernadette because he could manufacture documents of a more official-looking nature.

He practiced at night.

By frail kerosene light he laboriously struck the grown-up keys, each letter circled by a ring of metal, until his typing was of a consistent quality and speed. Papers moldering in the bottoms of desk drawers, ragged and unfiled or filed by the system that undid those whom Bernadette wished to thwart, Nector typed from her writing and restored. He had done a great many of these old transactions, and he had a great many more to go, when he made the following important decision: he destroyed the originals.

He was now in charge of history, which suited him just fine, and he was only a boy.

NECTOR

In the midst of all that revenge and suspicion — in addition to which, he was fooling with the only thing worth having, land and land ownership — Nector thought he’d best be very careful. Therefore, he never worked past dark and made his way home by alternating routes and unpredictable bushwhacking. And he never went drinking unless with a group of cousins, never alone. In fact, he tried not to be alone if he could help it, which is what got him in trouble after all.

Johnny Onesides was one of his cousins. He was a calm, uncomplicated sort who didn’t say much. But the few words he did say made him eloquent compared with his brother, Clay, who didn’t speak at all except on very special occasions. These two were staunch friends of Nector’s, along with a third cousin, called Rockhead, for reasons that would become apparent, and a friend of that cousin named Makoons. These five stuck together for good times as well as protection.

One still day, when Nector left the agency, they were waiting outside in Makoons’s uncle’s Model T Ford touring car, which for some reason Makoons was allowed to drive for the afternoon. This exciting privilege moved them all with expectation. They wanted to drive by girls and impress them, and other people as well, with the splendor of their conveyance. So once they crammed Nector in, they started off.

The thing they soon found was that while they’d imagined crowds of people around the trader’s and the agency building and the church, it was a very quiet afternoon and nobody at all was out. Therefore, they had to hunt around to find admirers, and they did find one or two people to impress — but Mrs. Bizhieu was impressed with anything, and Father Damien, whom they encountered on a genial afternoon walk, gave no more than a distracted wave of his hand. Finding even those two took some doing and used up gas. So on their fourth time through town they paused the car just outside the door of the trader’s. They got out. Nector bought the others each a cold, refrigerated grape pop. There was, in the act of tipping those bottles to their lips and baring their throats and then wiping their mouths manfully on their sleeves, and emitting a sound of relief and pleasure, a great chance for self-display — if only, again, there was someone to appreciate their pop drinking, but there wasn’t. The dusty road, the dust on the lower leaves and branches of the trees, a tired bird, the trader himself half asleep, this was all a most unsatisfactory audience.

Rockhead now suggested that they take the car up around Matchimanito Lake, but Makoons was uneasy with the idea. The road that lumber had carved to one side, in hopes of getting all the way around the lake, was rough and uncertain. Still, there was a certain beach where young people liked to go, and there at least they had a good chance of getting themselves admired. In the end, between vanity and good sense, there was no contest. They started up the car, jumped in, and took off.

Twice on the way there they had to jump out, heave and strain, push the car from potholes. Makoons drove nervously and wanted to turn back, but was unable to find a place wide enough on the narrow track. So he proceeded with ever more trepidation in his uncle’s precious car. The road closed over them. And then opened suddenly. Displayed the lake. There, to the boys’ glory, sat a knot of people on the shore. These people had heard the auto’s tortured approach and now waited and watched expectantly.

It took only a lurch or two forward to ascertain they were Lazarres. And only a lurch backward to get completely stuck.

“What the hell do we do now?” asked Johnny Onesides.

“We can each take two,” said Rockhead, who was counting the number of Lazarres now advancing toward them. “Or three.”

“Some are girls,” said Makoons, straining for a sign of hope.

“They’re worse than the men,” said Nector. He wished he hadn’t come along. All the filing and typing hadn’t done much for his strength, not like farm work, and he was the youngest of this bunch. He wondered if he’d be killed, or just beaten until his brain didn’t work anymore and he walked around drooling like Paguk, the young fighter who’d gone down to the Cities a god and come back stupid. While he was busy worrying about this and even seeing himself lurching down the reservation roads, and even feeling sorry for this vision that he had of himself, the Lazarres approached and then surrounded the car.

There was Eugene and his brother the Half-twin, there was Mercy Lazarre, grinning with her eyes on fire — she was anything but like her name — there was Fred and there was Virgil, both solid and muscular with mean red eyes, and there was Adik, known as the brains of the group, and several cousins perhaps from the plains or prairie or maybe from hell itself, whom the boys had never seen before but who were sharing a big jug of wine and pretending to fish while they snagged their own relatives.

“This is good,” said Adik. “We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad you could make it to the party.”

“Miigwetch,” Makoons croaked. If the Lazarres beat him up, he was afraid they might then do something really bad to his uncle’s car.

“I wanna take that good-looking one in the bush first,” said Mercy, nicking her boulder of a chin at Nector, who grinned weakly.

“Show me no Mercy,” he said, which made everybody laugh, but the laughter was not reassuring, and Adik soon stopped it.

“We don’t find it funny when a Kashpaw mocks our women.”

“Well,” said Nector with complete sincerity, “I’m sorry then. I didn’t mean anything.”

“That’s good, cousin.”

There was a chilled pause, and then — it was like some malevolent force simply reached down and plucked them altogether in a ragged pile from the vehicle and set sheer chaos into motion: beating, growling, punching, kicking, yelling, the enemies fought. Nector and his cousins were tough and labored valiantly to throw off the Lazarres, but there were too many and the conclusion was foregone — soon each was pinned to the ground, held in check by at least two Lazarres as Adik decided what they would do.

His idea came to him in a flash that made the other Lazarres gasp at the genius of it. No wonder people listened to him! Howah! Their agreement was unanimous. It was decided. The Lazarres would stage an accident with the car belonging to Makoons’s uncle — the car run deep into the lake and the boys drowned in their seats. That way, they would escape the suspicion of the Indian police and Father Damien, who helped them out.

“Ooh, my cousin, what a wonderful plan!” cooed Mercy. “But how shall we hold them in their seats?”

“We’ll tie them with ropes,” said Adik.

“We don’t have no ropes,” she said.

“Then we’ll use some goddamn vines,” he went on. “You go search them out right now.”

So Mercy left and for a while they heard her rummaging and tramping and swearing as she looked for rope substitutes. Finally, she came back, but the vines she found were much too stiff to act ropelike — they would not tie.

“That’s okay,” Adik said, “forget about the ropes. We’ll hit them on the head and knock them out.”

“Or you could use the rope underneath the back seat of Makoons’s uncle’s car,” suggested the silent one, Clay.

Nector and the others were so shocked to hear him speak — they’d practically forgotten what his voice sounded like — that they didn’t react to the meaning of his words at all. And in fact, Nector was just as glad not to be hit on the head — he pictured poor Paguk — so unlike the others he didn’t say a word to admonish his cousin but tried to keep his wits about him. That’s what Nanapush said saved his life on tough occasions. Not succumbing to panic. So he tried not to, but his breath tightened in his chest and he saw blurred death lights when the Lazarres pushed him into the car’s front seat and then tied his hands to the handle of the door. They tied Makoons to the steering wheel and the ones in the back seat they roped together with elaborate knots and fixed the ends of the ropes to the base of the seats.

“Mi’iw,” said Adik, dusting his hands proudly, “do you have any last words?”

Again, it surprised them very much, but it was Clay who spoke. After all, this was a special occasion.

“Every one of you Lazarres will rot in a hell of your own making” was his pronouncement, which Nector would have thought very eloquent were the car not already moving. Laughing at the curse, the Lazarres were pushing the car, rolling it down to the lake. Nector twisted and tugged — his hands were well tied, the knots were good. He admitted that, he would always admit that, he had no reason not to admit that: Lazarres could make tight knots. And he could feel the breeze on his face, the last air he would breathe, and next to him Makoons was saying his prayers as a good Catholic, and Rockhead was crying a little, Johnny Onesides was swearing but Clay was again silent.

They rolled into the water. It made a swishing sound around the tires and for a moment the car was afloat, then it sank and the water came boiling up through the floor around their knees. The Lazarres excitedly pushed it deeper. But as it settled it was suddenly harder to push. They nudged it along. The water crept up Nector’s waist, then up his chest, and he gulped air with rockets of fear going off, and then the water surged to just under his chin and the car bucked to a halt, stuck. Nector looked around and saw his friends were all just in about the same position, straining more or less, but mouths safely out of the water. No matter how hard the Lazarres pushed, the wheels wouldn’t budge an inch farther.

Adik then said, “We’re gonna have to drown the dogs by hand.” The rest must have agreed, but either there was some argument about how to do it or who got to drown whom, or maybe they just wanted to take a break, for the Lazarres gathered on shore behind them and now had a smoke and drank from a bottle. Nector could smell the fragrance of their tobacco drifting down over the water. The waves came in underneath his chin but lapped up onto his face. He couldn’t help imagining how they would be found. Once they were drowned, their dead faces would bob up once again and stare sightless across the waves. At the same time he imagined this, he couldn’t help despising the Lazarres for believing the five boys tied in a car were going to look like an accident. As he was struggling with these thoughts, and wishing he could see his mother once again, and as he also thought how good life would be without this dreadful end coming upon him, he suddenly felt busy fingers working on the knots his hands were still trying vainly to undo. He pulled eagerly — the hands held his still and then skillfully freed him. Clay, he recalled now, was very good with ropes as a result of being tied up often by his big brothers. Clay surfaced on the other side, freed Makoons from the steering wheel. Johnny and Rockhead wiggled their hands at him. They weren’t yet swimming so as not to arouse the Lazarres’ suspicions, but as soon as Makoons was free they took off their shoes and hell for leather started kicking for the island.

The Lazarres could tie good knots, but they weren’t skilled swimmers, except for Adik. He came blasting down the bank when he saw them escaping and he dived in and began swimming right after. The cousins were fast, but Adik came on like a steamboat, and as they passed over the deepest, darkest part of Matchimanito he was only feet away. That’s when Rockhead gasped, “You guys keep on. I’ll take care of him.” And he turned, treading water, as Adik lunged forward.

Rockhead’s one fighting skill was renowned, and when they’d attacked, the Lazarres had taken care not to let him exercise it. The biggest Lazarre had grabbed him around the neck and immobilized his head, while two others worked on the rest of him. Now, Rockhead’s serene stone-hard skull was all Adik saw, and the last thing he saw, as the two came face-to-face. For when Rockhead cracked him with his one effective weapon, Adik’s eyes rolled straight up to heaven. All the air went out of him and he sank straight down to the cold, bottomless, airless, black bottom of the lake, where nothing lived but a horned being and some colorless fish.

So it was another Lazarre who came out of that encounter missing, an outcome that added to the fury of the clan and deepened their thirst for revenge, which they slaked on whiskey for some time.

As for Nector and his cousins, they rested a short time, only on the edge of the island, for it was well-known that spirits lived there. And then they swam on, more slowly, and reached the other side of the shore. From there, it was a long way back to the road and Nector, only, was unafraid of that side of Matchimanito. He couldn’t persuade them by any means to go near Fleur’s cabin, though they did allow him to lead them and blundered in the dark toward the place where Nanapush kept his shack when he wasn’t living with Margaret. That’s where they stayed overnight. That’s where they told their story first.

Nanapush was a most interested audience. When they had finished, he lighted his pipe and leaned back to smoke and think.

At last he said, “Makoons will suffer when his uncle finds out.”

Makoons groaned out loud. Ever since it was clear they would live, he’d been faced with the prospect of telling his uncle that his car was in the lake. More than once, the anticipation of his uncle’s wrath and disappointment had caused Makoons such anguish that he almost wished the water had come six inches higher. But then, of course, his friends would have had to die too, which Makoons counted as unfair — especially since they believed the uncle freely allowed his nephew to borrow the precious auto when really Makoons had taken advantage of his uncle’s absence at a funeral and sneaked the car out for a spin.

As though reading his mind, Nanapush asked just exactly why his uncle had allowed his nephew the use of such a prize possession, at which point Makoons admitted the truth. Nanapush brightened then, his thoughts clicked into place.

“Ah, my boy, this is good news! And tell me, did anyone witness you boys driving around the reservation to show off this car?”

At this, they well could answer that only Zozed Bizhieu…

“Who is unreliable,” said Nanapush.

… and Father Damien…

“Who is oblivious,” crowed Nanapush.

… had seen them riding in the Model T touring car.

Then Nanapush put both hands out and gestured with his pipe.

“Young ones,” he said, “I am supposed to be old and wise. So I can’t tell you what I would do. All I can say is nobody saw you take the car, nobody saw you drive the car, and nothing would have happened had you not encountered the Lazarres. And as you lived, I don’t see why you boys shouldn’t end up heroes instead of punished for a Lazarre crime. Now, once again, who took the car?”

Makoons’s mouth dropped open, puzzled, and he was ready to say, “Well I did, you know that!” Nector hushed him.

“No, cousin,” he gently said, patting Makoons on the shoulder, “think harder. Wasn’t Adik Lazarre at the wheel when you entered your uncle’s yard, and didn’t you round us all up to go and chase him, and didn’t he”—now Nector gestured at Johnny Onesides—“didn’t he head for Matchimanito and then, as we came rushing after the Lazarres, looking for revenge and to take back your uncle’s car, didn’t they overpower us, tie us in the car’s seats, and nearly drown us as it plowed into the lake?”

The boys paused only slightly before every one of them agreed that it was so, and then Nanapush sat back, very satisfied, and finished his smoke.

10. THE GHOST MUSIC

1913–1919

Agnes’s fingers ached. They moved ceaselessly in patterns that raged up and down the desk and table. The ghostly language that her hands spoke sharpened her longing. Perhaps, she thought, she had been deaf at one time and learned to speak in signs. The utterances of her fingers were complex — whole speeches, whole poems, whole books. She began to think that they knew something she did not. Sometimes she watched her hands, as from far away. Arched, veined with somber blue, the fingers delicate but square tipped, tapping. They tapped wherever they landed, struck the surface of table, desk, basin, paper, with forceful rococo skill. At last, though exhausted, to distract herself and to give her hands a ready focus, Agnes began the task of sorting and organizing the packets of correspondence, the papers and documents, the scrapped plans of Father Hugo.

The other priest had not the thrill for organization that she had developed since her affliction of memory. Before the shooting, as far as she could tell, Agnes was apt to file bills by stuffing them in lard cans. After, and without her shadowy Berndt, Agnes, and then Father Damien, gained a passion for setting small things into a rigid order. Perhaps it was a way of compensating for the loss of events. Perhaps it was a way of gaining back the person she was, or inventing this new one.

At any rate, Agnes tackled Father Hugo’s piles with a singular desperation close to happiness. She vowed to finish an incomplete Ojibwe grammar and dictionary. She found church plans of a fascinating nature. She found old bills of lading and a letter from a disappointed woman. She found pitiful mementos of unknown moments — buttons, flags, a dead watch. One day she was pleased to find a crumpled set of sketches and plans for a printed letter, one that Hugo hoped to deliver to a list of subscribers in the Fargo diocese and beyond.

Father Damien called the letter Notes from the Mission at Little No Horse. In it, he described the piteous effects of the most recent illness. The ravages of hunger. The moral effect of land loss and the deep thirst he had already experienced among the people — a thirst for the spiritual drink, curiosity, a hunger for the food of the heart. He did not describe Kashpaw, or the difficulty regarding the question whether to pare down the number of his wives. He did not speak of Agnes’s own bitter guilt over trying to enforce such a thing, or the pitiable events after Quill went mad, nor did he repeat the jokes of Nanapush. Father Damien strongly expressed his belief that certain hungers could be assuaged and souls brought to Christ through the consolatory application of money.

Father Hugo had compiled a list of names and addresses. There were four hundred. Father Damien gave to himself the task of copying two letters each night after peace fell, and sending them as a packet at the end of the week. When they were all dispatched, Agnes began each night to direct the letters in her prayers. She asked intercession with each letter, prayed to her personal guardian, whom she believed she remembered as St. Cecilia. She imagined Father Damien’s words in the hands of others, begged for a spark touched to a generous fire. Her fingers itched and stung.

Some money arrived, a dollar here and there for which she was profoundly grateful. Then a short deluge of junk. Bales of clothing were unloaded from an army truck — moth-chewed gray blankets. Jackets and pants of drab wool. The entire reservation took on a military air. One thousand cream cans arrived, a windfall. They were used as chairs, storage, canoe floats, anchors when filled with sand, and even by some of the more ambitious farmers, cream. Dozens of yardsticks. Harpoons and lobster traps, though the sea was half a continent away. Finally, a battered green-black upright piano arrived, painted and then scratched down to the white of the wood.

The thing sat before the church. It was floridly carved. Bunches of grapes decorated the sounding board. The feet were claws. Was it a lion or an arbor? Even the metaphor is mixed, thought Agnes with amused interest. The instrument had seen rain, warping humidity, and the sands of a scouring wind. Its keys were black as bad teeth. She touched the keyboard curiously and raised a tone, questing and off key. To Sister Hildegarde, the donation was spectacular.

“The carving, such workmanship!” The nun ran her fingers over the balled grapes, the flowing vines and leaves. Unloaded from a dray cart, the instrument seemed to crouch. Halfway into the church, it rested heavily on the threshold.

“Take it back!” cried Agnes all of a sudden, shocking herself.

A reasonless emotion resembling panic gripped her. She felt too large for her skin, the priest’s collar tightened around her throat, and her hands began to move with their own life. She tried severely to check their motion by winding them in Father Damien’s cassock.

“Absolutely not!” Sister Hildegarde thought Father Damien was perhaps too diffident to accept such a generous gift. She began to lecture him on having the humility to accept what God sent. As she launched into an attack on his pride, Father Damien regained some measure of control and stopped her, raising his freed hands in surrender.

“All right!” He lowered the curved and recessed keyboard lid and then, with a key that fit within one of the clawed feet, locked the lid. All at once, Agnes felt more secure, although she could not imagine why and shook her head quizzically to clear it as she walked away. It was as though the keyboard itself were a giant set of teeth. As though the instrument were capable of devouring her!

Sister Hildegarde took charge and applied herself to cozening three heavyset parishioners to move the awful wooden creature. She brought them tea and thick chunks of lard on bread. Flattered them into setting the groaning weight here, no there, Entschuldigt, back to the first again. She agonized over the exact placement and hoped that Father Damien would commission a statue, at last a real statue for the church at Little No Horse. Such a thing would need a place of honor near the piano, where it could be seen and adored.

PRAYER

Four times a day — on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed — Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed. He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction — those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.

LULU’S BAPTISM

Father Damien baptized a bear and the baby in the woods on the wrong side of Matchimanito, and all because of Margaret Kashpaw. She sent his altar boy, Nector, to fetch him one day. Father Damien went along eagerly, swinging his arms through the bush that seemed to close instantly behind them. Very quickly, Father Damien grew disoriented and then lost. When at last they got near enough to the lake, a slim track that petered out and resumed and buried itself again, Nector pointed where Father Damien should go, then vanished. Agnes stood bereft for a moment, uncertain, then plunged on.

Keeping to the way was exhausting, but soon she could see, as long as she stayed near the shore, the outline of Fleur’s cabin. Resting, she took off the pack in order to check the contents and make certain she had included, in haste, all that was needed. She had just removed the vial of holy water when a gunshot sounded from the vicinity of the cabin. Startled, she splashed herself, then crossed herself at the sound of violent crashing, snapping, muttered grunting. In moments, the source of noise was before her, though lightly screened. And then the bear ripped aside the leaves.

Bear and priest gaped at each other in astounded dismay. The bear blinked its weak eyes, its intelligent nostrils rigid and glistening with inquiry. Agnes behaved by perfect instinct. As the holy water was immediately to hand, she dipped her fingers in and made the sign of the cross, giving the bear a tiny splash. Flinching as though shot, the bear jumped away and was gone. The bush closed over. Agnes was left to whack her way forward until she came to the cabin, at last, and stood panting in the clearing.

“Piindigen, Father!”

Margaret Kashpaw rushed out of the cabin and grabbed him so he spun with a jerk and was dragged to the doorway, into which she disappeared, tiptoeing back out with a baby in her arms. Stealthily, she asked Father Damien to baptize the infant.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have. It went against his very grain, he later thought, to baptize in secret, but when he saw Fleur’s newborn baby something happened to him — or to Agnes, what did it matter? The tender damage was done. Barely one day old, Lulu was the first newly born child he’d held in all his life. His other baptisms had been months or more usually years, often many years, old. Calm, deliberate, focused, serene, this new being stared at him with eyes that still knew the face of unbeing. In the long drinking gaze that grew between them, Agnes experienced a protective adoration that shook her to the bone.

“May I hold her?” Father Damien’s voice was hoarse.

Margaret gave the baby over, transferring the frail, floppy head and tight limbs, the exquisite pinch of buttocks and updrawn red knees. Agnes felt immediately natural holding her, as though her tiny goodness set off a charm in her brain. Father Damien laughed, delighted, baptized her with a slow enchantment and only reluctantly gave her back to Margaret. Agnes was still absorbed in the primal sweetness of the experience when Nanapush decided to walk back with the priest, and Father Damien was still lost in marveling when he returned to his own cabin and withdrew, from his desk, the certificate traditionally written out and kept for each new member of the parish. It was perhaps the imprint of the tiny body against his own, the connection that still lingered, a dreaminess, that caused him when he signed the certificate to add his own name, twice, mistakenly and along with Nanapush, as both priest and father.

Father Damien began to visit more often once the baby was born, for in the child’s presence, Agnes could temporarily forget the burden of half-realized memory and the load of suspicion that she carried through her days. Lulu was a touchy, lively charmer, precocious and fearless, curious and sincere. She was easy to please; anyone could rock her to sleep in her tikinagan of ash and cedar, the covering intricately beaded with flowers and heavy vines. Watching her drowsy lids fall, her delicate lip quiver with surrender, Agnes’s heart lifted. She was overcome with strange contentment, not maternal so much as fully human. During those visits she became a connected being.

Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. Nanapush of course, as teacher and friend, was the first she knew well intellectually. But Fleur, too, accepted the priest fondly. The moments when Fleur’s rare smile burst out were stunning pockets of light, and Agnes looked for them and courted them with an eagerness she hoped was not too obvious. Margaret, kindhearted and sour-tongued, loved Father Damien in spite of herself — he felt it in her grumpy embrace. He was always surprised when she showed anything at all besides the dour scorn her family inspired. Their love for him, in return, pained him and soothed him. He was thrilled and touched with sadness, he was hungry, and he was practical. He was lonely; he was a priest.

COLLATERAL

John James Mauser appeared, not in person but in the persons of others — in the local commissioner and the tax collector general. Payment-due notices arrived, which nobody understood. In the fine print, it said collateral would gladly be taken. Collateral wasn’t birch-bark baskets or buckets of just picked berries. It wasn’t a side of venison, a pack of furs, maple sugar, wild rice, dried currants, tanned hide, or anything else that by hook, crook, luck, or grueling work or desperate hoarding anyone was able to get. Collateral was land.

Sister Hildegarde had seen it coming, but she and Father Damien had been battling the spirit of disease, and then, absorbed in raising their church, they’d lost track of land acquisitions and foreclosures. They’d left off filling in the map whose boundaries changed drastically day to day. Father Damien’s despair had robbed him of awareness, too, so it was with a tremendous sense of self-castigating helplessness that they both, in stymied dumb surprise, regarded the papers in the hands of Nanapush, papers that transferred the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and to Nanapush himself into the hands of the lumber company.

As he read the notice, a stricken rage boiled up in Damien. It was partly guilt — while paralyzed by an interior misery he had failed to protect his people, his family. The paper crumpled in his hands, he was so furious he imagined the flame of his thoughts might scorch it. His fingers clenched and he said in a small and wretched voice, “I will write to the bishop.” It was not entirely too late. By raiding the church account, Father Damien was able to raise enough to keep Nanapush’s family from utter disaster. Still, the best of their land was lost.

Father Damien’s letters flowed everywhere. He wrote to the governor of North Dakota, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to John James Mauser, to the Grand Forks, Fargo, and Bismarck newspapers. He wrote the President of the United States and to county officials on every level. He wrote to Bernadette Morrissey and to the sick former land agent, Jewett Parker Tatro. He wrote to the state senators and representatives and to an organization called Friends of the Indians. He was determined to restore that land, but once it was gone, it was gone forever from Anishinaabeg hands. He didn’t know that, and as his pen devoured page after page, the Turcot Company and Mauser made roads into the woods. As Damien feverishly plotted, petitioned a tough lawyer, and planned strategies, the crews went in to take the trees and the trees were taken. Some chimookomanag did not come out, it’s true, or last much longer than the stealing of Pillager spirits and disruption of their ghosts. Some did not survive, but enough of them lived to ship the great oaks east, to Minneapolis, where they would line the impressive foyer of Mauser’s house.

FLEUR

Walking home, after the shock of finding out wore off, she began shaking. She stopped in the center of the road, whirled in a circle, her shawl cutting the air. She was filled with rattles, with clicking bones, with small ticking husks and vibrations of bees. Her vision snuffed out, she whipped along blindly through undergrowth until she came to the end of the lake. She stayed there long into the night.

The waves came in film over film, for the night was very calm and the water barely moved. Her land would be taken and the trees cut down and sold. She had exactly two dollars in an old snuff can, and she needed one hundred and ninety-eight more. She opened her mouth and the night bees burst out, swarmed over the rough surface of the lake, roared in a black cloud toward the spirit island. The anger built up again. She waited. This time she smashed a rock down on another rock until she split the rock in jagged stripes. The rage was deep in her spirit. This man who took everything had put it there. He was faceless and voiceless as a jibay, he was a ghost tormentor, shielded from her sight.

If only I could get to him, she thought, but I am nothing. She pondered her thin old green dress, worn makazinan, her faded red blanket-shawl mended and worn through and mended again. She opened her hands, turned them over, and looked at them — Pillager hands, big and spidery, rough from setting and hauling in nets. Clever hands, fingers she could murder with, or smooth away a knot of pain in old Margaret’s shoulders, or swipe a sand of sleep gently from the eye of her little girl. Yes, these hands were clever. Hands like this, she thought, shaking them curiously, would know or imagine everything there was to know about a man. On her face there appeared the glint of a smile — yes, she was nothing. But nothing can go anywhere. Nothing can do things. People don’t see nothing, but nothing sees them. She put her hands on her hips, threw her shoulders back, and glared at the sky. It was a wild night, full of black clouds and rolling wind. For a long while she stood on shore, watching the shapes of things. Slowly, in a sky that reflected her mind, directions appeared.

She removed the bones of her parents from the earth, washed them, and wrapped them in red cloth. Then she fed them a dish of manoomin and berries. She laid a pipeful of asemaa in the red cloth for them to smoke. Then she loaded the bundles in a small cart. If things happened as she foresaw, she would need them to come along with her and support her in all that she did. For what she contemplated was a strange thing. It had come to her as the shape of something, not all at once, but by suggestion. She would find the ghost man, the thief, and be nothing around him. She would watch him, learn everything about him, and from the knowledge ascertain just how she could destroy him and restore her land.

He was rich, that she knew. The rich aren’t difficult to find, she thought, they live in big wika-iganan.

“Aaniin ezhichigeyan, n’mama?”

Lulu had crept up behind her mother and peeked into the red cloth. Fleur showed her what she was doing. Lulu poked at the bones and her mother took her hands carefully away. A frantic laughter, a feeling of painful hilarity seized Fleur, and she grabbed Lulu, swung her around and then put her down and darted off. They raced wildly up and down the lake shore, pulling at each other’s clothes, throwing weeds. When they fell to the ground, Fleur’s heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird trying to leave her chest. She grabbed Lulu and crushed the girl close. Although she was quick as an otter and usually squirmed away from being held and ducked from her mother’s embrace, this time Lulu breathed out one long laugh and then fell asleep with her fingers gripping the cloth of her mother’s blouse. Fleur sat on the shore for a long time with her daughter’s weight heavy against her and the water rolling in, and rolling in, and without pause rolling into the shore.

11. THE FIRST VISIT

1920–1922

Agnes slumped at the table in her cabin. Felled with an autumn fever, she had spent a week tossing in bed. To cure her weak dizziness, now, she was drinking a foul, but she hoped nutritious, soup prepared by Mary Kashpaw. There was cabbage in it, she noted, translucent shreds of onions, the neck of a chicken. She closed her eyes to take a sip. The sisters were wary of Mary Kashpaw; except for Hildegarde, they all believed she was dangerous and still advised the priest to be careful lest she attack. Agnes knew that she was endangered only by the girl’s cooking, and she usually sent her out while she ate so that her reactions should not trouble Mary Kashpaw. Agnes had done just that and Mary Kashpaw was out in the yard, then, when the dog walked right in through the open window. A rangy thing, coal black and huge, he stood on the small table, front paw in the soup bowl. Agnes untucked the napkin from below her chin, and swatted at the dog.

“Get!” she weakly cried, and then, through the glowing spots of a half-fainting weakness, she heard it answer.

“Get?” The dog twisted the word sarcastically. “Get what, get where?”

Stricken with a sick wonder, Agnes tried to bolt from the room. The soup was terrible, but capable of such an effect?

“You look surprised to see me,” said the dog. “As you’ll soon find, I serve a greater master than yours. You’ve seen him at a distance, and you’ll soon see him close.”

“What do you want?” Agnes gasped the words out and then her mind cleared. Some prank-pulling member of her parish was using ventriloquism. Who? Narrowing her eyes, she spun around, but saw nothing. The dog opened his dog mouth and spoke again.

“I want Lulu! Where does she live?”

The dog explained that he was sent for the girl, Lulu, who was marked for the taking. But he couldn’t find her on the reservation. Where was her family hiding her? Agnes jumped up, reeling, so angered that she hardly knew what words passed her lips. The strangeness of the scene palled before the idea of danger to Lulu.

“What could you possibly want with her?” she accused. “She is the only child of a family who has lost everything!”

“All the more valuable to me!” said the dog.

“You cannot have her.” Agnes’s voice was firm as she could muster, given the fainting languor of her illness. She groped for the crucifix chained around her neck, but her fingers seemed thick as wooden pegs, clumsy, and the dog noticed with a sly glance.

“I hear you’re a gambler. I’ll strike a bargain with you,” he insinuated.

“A bargain…” Agnes fell back into her chair, and though sweating and breathless she couldn’t help marvel. The joke was clever. Or was this what the mad saw, the fevered? The dog was here and he seemed perfectly real, not only that, but he knew of Agnes’s passion. Although she came onto this reservation never having placed a bet, thrown the dice or the bones, she had since found gambling was a compelling way to raise money, for she was unusually lucky, and also she took great pleasure in her small winnings. She knew that she was being tempted by the gambit, tempted to wager even as her lips formed the words.

“Name your offer…”

“My offer is this,” the dog said. “I will spare Lulu if you come with me instead.”

A frozen wind blew through the room and Agnes shivered, couldn’t speak. Soon there would be a punch line. Someone would pop around the corner, laughing at the hoax played on the good priest. For the benefit of whomever was listening to the ridiculous transaction, Agnes thought aloud.

“A priest puts the welfare of his flock above all else, for they are entrusted to him by the author of the world, and so even in this lonely and unspeakable moment, my duty is clear!”

Agnes waited for a hoot of laughter, none came.

“I will trade places with the child, with Lulu Nanapush,” she declared, “but you must not take me until I am good and ready!”

Now it was time for the applause. Silence. Agnes calmly lifted the dog’s paw from the soup bowl. It seemed real enough. She glanced away from the flames of the dog’s eyes. Frowning, she regarded the grained wood of the poor log table. When would the instigator of this farce show? And who would play so perverse a joke? Not even Nanapush.

“It is done,” the dog conceded just before he loped off, “your lifetime is doubled. But there is more. Your insolence moves me. I have decided to send you a temptation.”

It would come by mail, but not until the autumn rains soaked the walls of the cabin and drained the sky of heat.

Agnes put her hands to her cheeks. She was still dangerously fevered. Perhaps, after all, the dog was no prank but a vision produced by the illness. The resinous scent of burnt pitch lingered in the room, and she could not help remember the figure she’d seen on the horizon at the time of Kashpaw’s death — the gaunt spirit with the flapping coat, the dog trotting beside, its breath rising, foul steam.

At the thought, Agnes regretted her stubbornness, for what if the creature was real? She got the worst of the bargain. How could she know that she wasn’t meant to die that very night? She was young, and in a few more years eternity in hell could well stretch before her. On the other hand, she thought, once she’d calmed her breathing and lay down again, perhaps her natural life span was more like eighty years, in which case there was what seemed a huge amount of time in which to think of a way to win herself back from the black dog’s company.

Dwelling on that more cheerful idea, Agnes staggered around the room for exercise, then returned to bed, leaving the full bowl of soup, into which the devil’s foot had plunged.

That night, careful as always not to waste a drop or a morsel, Mary Kashpaw dumped the contents of Father Damien’s devil’s-paw bowl back into the soup pot and brought it over to the convent, where it was reboiled and served up to the nuns. The soup deranged their sleep. What terrible torments the sisters suffered! What a night of temptations! What lurid and arresting dreams! Poor Father Damien, who dragged himself to the church to hear confessions the next morning, was assaulted by a swimming sea of details. The sisters recounted their actions explicitly, and he became such a seething repository of voluptuous nightmares that he found it impossible to accomplish his duties. Weaker than ever, disturbed in mind, he was forced to cancel Holy Mass. As he was hurrying toward the solace of his tiny cabin behind the church, Sister Dympna came toward him from the opposite direction.

“Father,” she gasped in a voice of shamed panic, “I have been visited in the flesh!”

“You are absolved!” Damien cried out, and he practically blessed her on the run. Then he shut his door. Alone, he ran to the corner of his room and wrote feverishly, madly, until he had relieved his mind of the burden of an entire convent full of dreams.

Eternal Father,

The people to whom I have carried the faith believe there is a spirit behind or informing all that exists on earth. In dreams, they tell me, these spirits communicate with them. I thought it a harmless and empty fancy until I myself was visited.

Gracious Father, head of the church, the spiritual descendant of the one who has walked on water, what should I do?

I fear I may be losing my mind.

Modeste

As soon as she was well, Agnes went to the postal window at the trader’s store and bought the stamps necessary to ship her letter across the sea. As she slowly licked the stamps and pressed them onto the envelope, idly tasting the faintly medicinal glue, the loneliness that so often visited her since the bewildering deaths by influenza sank through her bones. It was a black marrow. Ice. Since those days, prayer had not helped. The intimacy and the special favor shown her in the very beginning, at the river, at the first communion she’d performed, was withdrawn. She endured, instead of that warm broth of rescuing love, a skeletal deadness that surely the dog had sensed. Perhaps, she thought now, smoothing the envelope, Christ was still busy helping admit or reject the dead millions, that harvest fattened by the Great War and by disease. There was probably a lot of paperwork to the admission process. Imagining Christ an overworked bureaucrat amused her. But she wondered whether such thoughts were a marker of her cynicism, and an invitation to the test of her commitment, which was presented in the next moment in the form of a different letter.

“There is something here for you,” said the wife of the trader, who handled the mail. She gave Father Damien a letter from the bishop, return address the cathedral in Fargo. Light-headed from the walk, Agnes put the letter in her pocket and forgot about it until, that night, the envelope crinkled in the folds of her cassock.

Dear Father Damien,

I am sending an assistant to work with you, not because you will need his help, though I am certain you will benefit from his presence, but because I would like you to train him.

He will stay with you and learn all that you can teach him.

Yours in Christ,

Bishop DuPre

Agnes dropped the piece of paper and stood mute and numb, staring straight before her at the dark, wet, log walls. For a week, nearly, the skies had opened every day. There was no let-up. Between drenching bursts a slow, cold drizzle descended. And now this letter from the bishop, a stunning threat.

Live with her? Quite impossible.

She wrote back.

I am in no need of assistance, and furthermore, there is no place for a young priest to live. As it is, my quarters are inadequate, not that I mean to complain. But to add another is impossible!

Impossible! Her brain locked on the word and was comforted by the lilt of it. Impossible. She refused in fact to consider or even remember the letter from the bishop, until one day the assistant simply, with no warning and no one to accompany him, arrived.

Father Gregory Wekkle walked up the hill quite alone, apparently having come in much the same way Agnes had originally. As she was striding across the crisp new dusting of snow on the church grounds, she saw him waiting at the door of her cabin, a small rounded suitcase and a wooden toolbox at his feet. Father Wekkle was of medium height and form, but gave the impression of being a bigger man, animated by a complex and slightly awkward energy. He moved eagerly, and had an open and friendly look about him, a disarming lack of polish or priestly grace. His hair was brown as a monk’s robe, his eyes a muddy Irish hazel. His smile was a great flash of light. Agnes sighed. There was a sweetness to the man she couldn’t have expected, a quality of taking pleasure in his own being. She decided that he had to be harmless. She underestimated, as she often did with men, his intelligence. Already, she imagined his developing into the kindly, rotund sort of priest who dispenses easy penances and excellent reassurances. What did he need from her?

She grasped his hand anyway, and shook it — a hard-palmed warm workman’s hand. She looked down at his box of tools and then the heat from his heavy palm flowed up her arm into her heart. Surprised, she took the jolt of his goodness almost painfully and tried to control the sudden flood of happiness that filled her with terror.

“Come in. Let’s set things up. Let’s make you comfortable, Father…?”

“Wekkle. Gregory Wekkle.”

Agnes mustered the stern and kindly formality of Father Damien, and nodded him through the door. His presence startled her into an objective look at her house, and the clutter of it suddenly dismayed her. There were books everywhere. Books she had begged for in her newsletter, intending to set up a library. People from surrounding parishes now gave her books, tried to sell books to her, laid them on the church doorstep. Father Damien had become known for his avidity and was the first one people thought of when a book, any book, became useless. Thus she had a stack of the last century’s Godey’s Lady’s Books, as well as Lutheran hymnals, but also treasures. Thomas Aquinas in an endless indestructible leather-bound edition with Italian marbled endpapers and a gold-embossed title on the spine. A complete set of Dickens.

The two proceeded to make way through stacks of books into the tiny cabin. Out of the stacks of books, they made separate rooms. They stacked the books two by two, then crosswise, like bricks, into a wall. Then Father Wekkle was given a bedstead by Sister Hildegarde and the two priests placed it on the other side of the wall. They used blanket dividers, hung them from the beams. As they worked, they spoke, though Agnes tried to remain cool. Father Gregory Wekkle was young, but not as young as Agnes had expected, not that she had expected. They were the same age, a peril, as she’d have his questions. Fortunately, Agnes had memorized information from the newsletters sent to Little No Horse by the original Father Damien’s seminary. She was able to speak very generally of other priests they might know in common. To her relief, Father Gregory did not pursue their histories except as a polite gesture. He was much more interested in the present, and in learning from Father Damien all that he could before taking up a reservation post — he knew not where, not yet.

He was pleasant, he was congenial, he was both shrewder and more innocent than she saw at first. Already, that night, drifting into sleep behind her woolen blanket curtain, Agnes prayed that something would call Father Wekkle away immediately, that he leave precipitously, anything but risk again that jolt of pleasure in the immediacy of his presence.

The first deep snow isolated the reservation from the rest of the world and sank the cabin in a swirl of white drifts. The roads were blocked until the horse-drawn sledges would pack down the snow, or until the plow tore laboriously through the high snow pack down to the train station in Hoopdance. Still, there were rounds to be made. Communion to bring to the sick and the very old. Children to teach their catechism. Nanapush had taught Father Damien how to make bear paw snowshoe frames and lace them with moose guts and sinew. Now Agnes was teaching Gregory Wekkle.

“Make the fire extremely hot,” she said.

He’d brought logs in to feed the stove, and he stuffed its belly with dried birch until the iron glowed pulsing red. She had already split the ash and now she showed him how to heat it and bend it into a circle. In a pail by her foot, she’d covered fresh moose guts with water. Slowly, she smoothed each one clean between her fingers, forming a pile of moose-chewed water lilies on the table.

“Some people eat this,” she told Gregory. “It’s like salad with a dressing of moose digestive juices.”

“Unknown, as yet, in the fine St. Paul restaurants.”

Agnes laughed and asked him when was the last time he ate in a fine St. Paul restaurant.

“Before I came here, my parents had a farewell party.”

“Do you miss your family?” Agnes strung a loop of intestine between the sides of the hoop, fastening it tight.

“I do,” said Gregory. “They’re coming up to visit in the spring.”

Agnes’s heart jumped and sank at the same time. Would he stay here that long? It was too long. It was not long enough. The heat from the overfed stove rose in her cheeks. “No!” she roughly said, grasping the new priest’s wrists to help him bend the wood properly. “You do it like this.” A mistake. Close, she smelled the wood heat on his skin, the washed soapy scent of his neck, the scorched wool upon which he must have used a too hot iron, and sweat. A faint, low, clean, and intensely sexual workman’s sweat. Agnes felt herself leaning into the air around him.

“Damn,” said Gregory in a low voice as the heated wood popped from his hands. He laughed in derision at himself and crossed the room to retrieve the piece of half-bent wood. He lingered on the cool side of the cabin, and breathed deeply, disturbed at his own physical reaction to the proximity of Father Damien.

*

They traveled to the deep bush on those snowshoes, brought communion to Zozed Bizhieu and her troublesome daughter, visited Nanapush. When they traveled, they carried blanket rolls tied onto their shoulders, and a pack of bread, dried meat, raisins. Gregory Wekkle brought a flask, always, of his favorite whiskey, for he didn’t see anything wrong with a drop now and then. And although Agnes observed there were a good many nows, and a huge number of thens, she nonetheless drank with him a drop, or two, or maybe more than that. It became very pleasant while out on their visits to stop on the way back, build a fire, sit there with the whiskey and the bannock and the raisins, until it was time to go back to the parish cabin.

“Father Damien,” said Gregory one night, as they laughed over some clumsiness, “why don’t we stay out here?”

“I believe we’d worry Sister Hildegarde” was Damien’s answer, and he quickly dumped snow on the fire. As they tramped the miles back, Agnes felt a sting of wishful desire. Nanapush had taught her how to build a brush shelter to conserve the heat of the fire, and the night was warm and starry. The whiskey gave her the temporary illusion of gliding power. She was on the verge of stopping there, making a new camp, and she even paused, turned, and opened her mouth to speak.

There was Father Wekkle, struggling behind her with a hopeful, bearish serenity. After he barged forward, he would stop, breath on his fingers, arrange his scarf, shrug, and surge forward again. He worked his way along in a comical intensity, and Agnes felt her heart squeeze at his endearing earnestness and cheer. Often, even in his snowshoes, he managed to break through the crust of snow. He had a start-stop kind of steadiness about him and kept on lunging forward. She saw the white flash of his teeth when he grinned at her, and she turned back onto the path, mumbling to herself, Be sensible!

So they returned, propped their snowshoes against the sides of the cabin, rekindled the fire that Mary Kashpaw had banked and left, and rolled into their beds. For a while she slept, but then, waking in the dark, a fury of discomfort seized Agnes, as though her skin was being stung with red-hot needles. She prickled all over, and she prayed for help in wrestling with her thoughts. By dawn, most of them were subdued.

Most, not all.

She had to touch him. There was no help for it. There was a faint, sweet, brown to Father Wekkle’s skin, a fading suntan, almost golden. His hands were broad, sensitive, well-padded, with wide, spreading, generous thumbs. He was good with a hammer, and one of his most winsome qualities was his sunny energy for carpentry work. He cleaned and oiled and sharpened the contents of his tool chest every few days. Agnes struggled for a while longer, angry and despairing of her need just to touch him by accident, just once! Be sensible, she told herself whenever her thoughts lighted on his hair, brown and wavy, growing out of its cut in swirls.

She was sensible until the night the books fell.

There were times she woke too early, and so as not to wake Father Wekkle, she read the spines of her side of the double wall of books stacked between them. Among others, she had given herself the Russians, all of George Eliot, her beloved Aquinas, Augustine, St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, and a two-volume set of the lives of the saints. This last was to atone for the other volumes, only four, of Colette — though, after all, François Mauriac had said that her voluptuousness led the soul to God. She had covered those books in butcher paper and changed the titles to Latin. She also kept the strange assortment of donated books to read through and decide upon — accounts of personal voyages were popular among them, as well as outdated medicinal or fashion advice. Mauriac was on Agnes’s side and also Proust, William James, and others she was confident of displaying. Stendhal, Hugo, and all of the Greeks were stacked on Wekkle’s side. Plus the histories of states and provinces and the mesmerizing horrors of a collection of Jesuit relations, which had once belonged to Father Hugo.

She knew the wall of books by each title. After the lantern was out, at night, she put out her hand and traced the stamped letters on the spines and the embossed ridges. Some of her newer books were very plainly bound, but she loved to run her fingers over them, too. Their heavily woven cloth covers were of a texture pleasingly dry and soft to her touch. Even when she was exhausted, each night she brushed the books between her bed and Father Wekkle’s, and she held her palm upon them until the books warmed to her touch. It seemed to her, listening to the other priest’s calm breath, that the books between them were a third, sympathetic, entity. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged. Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinements, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. Hers was merely what it was, and her aches over it as well, but in all of the books that composed the wall between the two priests, and in all of the stories she’d ever read, she never had come across the exact example of what she contemplated doing to Father Wekkle. Nor could she imagine his reacting to her touch with anything but mystery and horror. Therefore, she took her hand away from the wall.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Father Wekkle was a sleeper who thrashed. He slept in a moleskin robe that his mother had sewn for him and insisted he wear up north in the bitter wild. Every night he put it on with mixed gratitude and embarrassment. As he was sensitive to the cold, its warmth made him thankful. At the same time, as his mother could not bear plain things and had sewn it with a ruffle, he made very certain that no other human ever saw him in it. As he slept, he warmed, and as he got warmer, he flailed in the moleskin gown and kicked away his covers, tossed and muttered. Also, he dreamed, and his dreams were always action masterpieces. All he’d left undone or half done during the day, he’d finish. More than that, he’d start new projects or he’d make parish visits, leaping high in his snowshoes and skating, even flying, to the rescue of those stranded from the presence of the Host. All that he imagined, he acted out and he had, many times, awakened Agnes. He’d also kicked or struck the book wall, making it lean so perilously that it sometimes had to be rebuilt by Father Damien, who could not help remember Agnes’s convent days as Cecilia and the careful construction of the birdbath containing only the brickworks word, Fleisch, and now again the wall she made containing thousands, perhaps millions of words, and still in her mind only that one word.

The moleskin robe stuck to Father Wekkle when he sweated, twisting around his hips so that he sometimes dreamed erotically. He had, in fact, that night, been the victim of a most intense and mysterious veiled female whose lips, only, were revealed by a small, round hole in the cloth. Her lips moved, mouthing the words Be sensible, words that require the most seductive motions of the lips. The advice aroused him and he lunged for her impatiently and in his sudden movement toppled the books.

In the stillness of the night, they were a skidding avalanche. One struck Agnes full in the face and she started awake, heart pounding. Groping around herself in panic, she touched him. His hand grasped hers. They didn’t move. The collapse of books had also torn down the blanket divider, so the moon-pale light from the window on Gregory’s side of the cabin washed across their beds. Raggedly breathing, hearts quickened, blinking, hands touching, they poised. If either had simply withdrawn a hand they would have laughed, rebuilt the wall of books. But they continued, in their staged paralysis, to search each other’s dim-lighted faces. Both were desperate for clues — what was to happen? At the same moment, both imperceptibly leaned forward. Brightness from the full moon rested evenly upon their hair, but their faces were in shadow so that, as Gregory tipped his chin questingly forward into that final space, he felt that he ducked into a cave. Once he entered that half sphere of shadow, he was lost. She was lost. They lay down together among the scattered books. Into Gregory’s mind, there surged the awful and appalling joy of knowing he was one of those whom the Church darkly warned against, the ones who lay with men as with women. The sin he would commit would be equal to the sin of murder, one of those sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.

In Agnes’s mind, a willing despair to be discovered. Her nipples burned against the cloth and her body slipped its boundaries of skin. Darkness sifted through her and she rose toward him, light, powerful, and calm. Gregory touched her breast through the night shift, and in a dreamlike reversal of who he feared he was, he held her like a raft in a torrent. They spoke now, their whispers incoherent. They undressed each other slowly, with formal innocence, shocked into foolishness at the pleasure of each discovery. Gregory had no experience at all of a woman’s nakedness, and the final sight of her, strong and unbound, washed in silver, astonished him so that he could merely sit with her for a time and touch her as one might a fabulous animal before suddenly, at her gesture, he spread her thighs open and entered the shadow between.

In surprise, once they began to move, they sighed in relief and smiled, delighted and aghast, to find themselves utterly safe and at peace. That was the strange and unexpected component of their passion — how safe, how ordinary, how blessedly normal it felt. For the next few days they lived in a daze, but nothing changed. In their work they were more zealous, more dutiful. They drove themselves harder than before. Secure in the night, they took no chances in the day and were remote but friendly with each other. Weeks accumulated in which neither spoke of what was happening. Only, in the depth of the night, with the window curtained, they made love with a charged tenderness that left them faint and weeping. Before falling asleep, they set things straight and returned to either side of their wall of books. Each whispered good night to the spines, the massed pages, then lay still underneath the heavy patched wool of the quilts of army blankets.

The snow melted into the earth and they walked now, through mud and swollen mashkiig, to bring communion to the laid-up devout, to instruct for various sacraments. Returning one cold spring day, they paused to rest on the soft old winter-dusty grass. They sat down silently. Gregory tore off a piece of the bannock given to them, and Agnes accepted the bread from his hands and ate. The massed reeds in the slough were a scorched and radiant yellow. The sun shot down from a half-gray sky, picking out the birch with a fierce light.

“I belong to you,” said Gregory to Agnes. “I love you.”

When she said the same to him, the bread went dry on their tongues and they felt spreading from those words a branching fury of impossible difficulty.

BERNADETTE’S CONFESSION

As Father Damien hustled across the yard to hear confessions, he saw that the nuns had frozen their pump again and were using Mary Kashpaw as their beast of burden. He watched her as he walked, saw her stagger as she rounded the corner to the back door of the convent, a great pole laid across her shoulders, two buckets hanging down from either end. He made a note to stop the sisters from overusing the girl’s strength, and passed at once into the church. There were a few parishioners hunched in contemplation near the jerry-built box of boards and blankets in which he heard confessions. He sat in the middle box, on a small cushioned stool, and bent to the muslin shadow. A discreet cough. The sinner spoke.

“What is it when you know of a sin and do nothing?”

“That is a sin of silence.”

“So it is a sin.”

“Yes.”

“Then I must confess it,” said the woman unwillingly.

In a few sentences, then, the woman whose voice was familiar to Damien — it was Bernadette’s — confirmed the truth of what he had long ago suspected of Napoleon Morrissey. He heard the rest of her confession in a numb, unfused state of tension. He absolved Bernadette, heard the other confessions. Once they were all finished, he continued to sit in the little booth, in his lap the soft, old, battered breviary that had belonged to Father Hugo. At last, he believed he knew the murderer of Napoleon Morrissey, and he pitied and loved the killer — his own Mary Kashpaw. According to Bernadette, Napoleon Morrissey had forced himself on Mary Kashpaw, most probably raping her. It followed in his mind that Mary Kashpaw had the strength to have strangled Napoleon with the cunningly wrought necklace of thorns. As for her hands, they were tough as leather mitts, scarred, and roped with calluses. If the barbed-wire rosary tore her palms, it was impossible to tell anymore. And yet, why would Mary Kashpaw construct such a dark-spirited artifact?

Agnes put her fingertips to her eyes, kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She thought of Mary Kashpaw digging, digging, and her heart went hollow. Yet she was so tired that she could feel only a pale, exhausted pity for the angry confusion of that violated girl. Perhaps too much feeling had withered her heart and now it was a frail, paper husk. Whirling with frustration, she jumped from the confessional and walked back to the cabin. There, she began to work, cleaning with a mad zeal similar to Mary Kashpaw’s. She shoveled ashes out of the stove, then fetched a pot of blacking and painted it, opening the doors to let the spring air carry off the sharp odor of the paint. She worked on her papers until between her hands she snapped a pen. Then she cleaned up the spilled ink, dusted her books. Muttering and on the verge of weeping, she suddenly flung herself onto the bed. In a moment, she fell into a well of thick unconsciousness.

She was still asleep when Father Wekkle and Mary Kashpaw returned from a wood-hauling trip. Mary stamped down the snow for him too, broke the trail. Sometimes he teased her, called her Mary Stamper, and the big girl flushed, although whether she liked it or was embarrassed by the name there was no telling. While Father Wekkle went back to the church to set it all to rights and lock it for the night, Mary Kashpaw quietly drew near to Father Damien. For a long moment, she looked down at him with solemn watchfulness. Then she pulled a rough blanket from the back of a chair, shook out the folds, and secured it around the sleeping priest’s body with awkward, firm, tucks. Lastly, she plucked loose the laces of Father Damien’s boots and stealthily eased them off and then stripped the socks from the priest’s long, narrow, tender white feet. She set the boots beside the bed, hung the socks over each toe. She tucked the end of the blanket over the vulnerable feet, and then blew out the candle before she walked out to sleep upon the broken bales of hay, within the questions of the owls and the tremble of mice, and behind the barred door of the shed.

THE CLOUD

“How many ways are we damned?” said Agnes into the black air.

Gregory pushed his hands over her face, smoothing her features up into a smile he could feel with his fingers. Then he stretched full length alongside of her and tucked her close to him. His throat pinched shut with raw sadness, and he could not answer. He had started to become a priest when he was only nine years old. He had never questioned or doubted his vocation, and he had never been tempted beyond the usual ways boys are tempted, by thoughts and dreams. But it was as though he’d saved his whole life so far for this one outrageous test. What happened with Agnes was as direct a piece of knowledge as when he knew his calling. There was no way to question its truth, and veracity was for Gregory Wekkle the essence of his soul. One particular volume from the stack between the two priests had fallen into his hands one night and Gregory, though not a violently greedy reader like Agnes, read it again and again. The book was a mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing. In it, the author had said that to know God one must first know oneself. One will know God in oneself. Gregory knew himself and knew his love for Agnes was a good love, filled with tenderness and light. He tortured himself in his prayers to find evil in his actions, but knew only harmony and righteous peace. Nothing, none of this, fit doctrine.

“How many ways are we damned?” asked Agnes, again.

“Every way possible, I imagine,” said Gregory lightly, though his heart was squeezing shut. “Have you counted?”

“Let me,” said Agnes. After a moment, she put up her hand and gravely ticked off her fingers the types of sins she taught children in catechism. “We have sinned mortally of course, although our sin is so grave there isn’t an exact definition for it.”

Gregory shook his head. Willfully drowsy with a kind of lazy despair, he mumbled as if by rote, “I’ve done this with the full consent of my will, and clear knowledge of the act.”

“The wages are eternal punishment,” said Agnes. They held each other closer and he breathed along the curve of her collarbone.

“We’ve sinned against the Holy Ghost,” he whispered. “I feel deliberate resistance to the known truth because, Agnes, I know the truth. It is in me and it tells me to love.”

Agnes silently stroked his hair, smoothed her hands along his temples and down his jaw. This truth was hers, too, the kernel at the center of all she did in the blackest night was an unwilled simplicity. Her desire was one with a kind regard that felt both sinless and irresistible.

“We’ve sinned by omission,” she said, thinking of it. “We’ve sinned by silence, since we’re responsible for giving each other up to the authorities, reporting. We haven’t committed the sin of Sodom.”

“That’s something.” Gregory could not help imagining the act, all of a sudden, but the whole catalog now struck him as ridiculous. “We haven’t committed murder, buggered each other, or oppressed the poor.”

“Sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.”

“We’ve done Actual Sin, Formal Sin, Habitual Sin.”

Gregory kissed her forehead and cupped his broad hand around her face. The way the curve of her face fit into his hand took away his breath for a moment, and then he took a painful gulp of air and laughed.

“I hope Dante was right about hell,” he said. “I don’t think I would mind so much whirling in that dark wind with you forever.”

“Cut off from God.”

“If we are cut off from God by sinning,” he said, low, “why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud?”

THE LETTER

In the lucid green blush of early summer, Agnes wrote the letter. Not until autumn could Father Damien bear to mail it.

Reverend Bishop,

I have instructed the good Father Wekkle to the limits of which I am capable. He is an honorable priest and devoted to his calling. Please make your assignment of his new post known to him as quickly as possible.

She had to write the letter so that, when he received the one that would arrive in reply, the sight of him reading it wouldn’t kill her. It didn’t come by return post. Not for many weeks. But when it did, she knew. The envelope had no weight. It was only a paper rectangle set into her hand with such a light touch, nothing. Yet when she bore it to the cabin the paper was so heavy that it drove her to her knees. Her legs went out from under her. Mute, she handed it up to him and then sat like a stunned child on the floor until he raised her up and, very kindly now, said to her, “Agnes, why won’t you say it? It is so simple to me. Why can’t you say it? We must leave. We have to leave together. We’ll go north, go west, be a couple married legally and happily. We’ll have children, a life. Why can’t you say it? Why won’t you?”

Agnes shook her head, dumb with shock. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she was nerveless, bereft.

“Say it,” he pleaded. But she could only look at him. Already he seemed smaller and farther away. An hour, two hours passed in which he talked himself hoarse to persuade her, and only then, at the last, could she even say the word no. That word inflamed him, set him beside himself and he argued with the two letters. They argued long into the night, not loudly, but with such fervor that Mary Kashpaw knocked on the cabin door and when Agnes opened it, said nothing. Just stood there eyeing Father Wekkle with a look of baleful intelligence.

“Izhah,” said Agnes, her tongue finding these words easily, “mino nibaan, n’dawnis.”

Only with great reluctance did Mary Kashpaw move away.

Deep in the night Agnes found another way to say it. “I cannot leave who I am.”

In wild hopelessness Gregory now blurted the thing they’d said between them with physical eloquence only.

“You are a woman.”

The word seemed large in the dark cabin, its vowels voluptuous and thick with the burden of secret life. Both were silent but the word hung between them like a great flesh doll. They closed their eyes and the word spread open between them, hot and red. Gregory sank his head into his hands and tasted the word and there was nothing like its exalted spice. He wanted her in his mouth. But then she spoke, and said, “I am a priest.”

The four words rang down Gregory’s spine, and then, at last, between wanting and despairing of her, anger surged up with a force that weakened him, sent a cold shiver through his gut. Rage shook in his voice.

“Agnes,” he grabbed her shoulders, his voice rose and cracked and fell, “a woman cannot be a priest.”

“I am a priest,” said Agnes calmly, again. She had left the body they shared and for this moment she existed only in a spirit sad with knowledge that could remove his hands. “This is what I do. Without it, if I couldn’t say the Mass…” She held her hands out, tough with work and empty. Nothing.

“You’re sacrilege,” said Gregory, his voice beyond all hope. It was the worst word he could summon, and he knew it, but he wanted her so much he’d even shame her into coming with him. “Sacrilege!” he cried again, more hesitantly, almost plaintive.

Agnes stepped backward, as if to let the word fall at her feet.

“No,” she said, looking at him with her heart tearing, helpless against the simplest truth. “I am nothing but a priest.”

AGNES’S PASSION

Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn’t shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn’t stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.

He sent her letters. She sent them back. He sent them again. She burned them. What else was she to do?

Awful questions appeared in Agnes’s mind. Am I right? Can I bear this? Have I invented my God? Is God my yearning? Is my yearning God? She fell asleep with questions thrumming and woke with more blaring. She chewed questions over with her breakfast food, salted her dinner with the day’s uncertainties. She prayed over the questions until it hurt to think, until her brain felt too tight in her skull. She then craved silence. Into her lover’s absence crept compulsion. She thought obsessively of shedding the priest’s clothes and donning a frilly hat, a gown of figured lilac, a flowered wash dress with buttons of mother-of-pearl. Imagined walking to the parish of Gregory Wekkle, for some reason eating ice cream with him. And then they would leave and find a new place where he could tenderly stroke the hungry expanse of skin that covered the body that housed two beings. Father Damien’s thoughts nagged, Agnes’s temptations stung. Or maybe it was the other way around. Sometimes at night her body moved as if over the waves of a dark lake and she woke wet with tears and burning heavily between her legs.

Talk to me! Talk to me! She angrily prayed to the Christ who’d saved her from the river, to the God who’d brought her here, to the Holy Ghost who had sustained her through the great influenza and yet betrayed her by allowing the dog to visit her and to set before her Gregory. Since the damage was done, she prayed to see her damage again.

Mary Kashpaw sat stonily through this at the entrance to the cabin, snapping beans, glaring at the white dust rising off the far roads. If only, thought Agnes, she could again see the divine in Mary Kashpaw, maybe that would help. But the girl hardened and retreated. Each Mass that Father Damien said was duller than the next, and he dreaded genuflecting before the crucifix — a stamped piece of brass, two strips of tin, and the suffering Christ, a contorted lie.

Fountain of Hope,

I find to my distress that I suffer from an inner complaint before which all my skills and strategies fail. I cannot name what it is, exactly, I can only say at times it feels like something so wholly other to the ground of my being that I’ve entertained the fear that I may be possessed.

I tell you this in childish trust. No doubt, were the leaders of my diocese to learn of my condition, I would be yanked from my post straight into a sanatorium. Kept quiet under lock and key. Father, not only am I certain that would do no good, but I also cannot, must not, will not, desert my people here.

Many of the Indians (they call themselves the Anishinaabeg, the Spontaneous or Original People) have come to depend upon me. There is really no one else I feel can take my place, no one so committed to their well-being or engrossed in their faith — I am becoming one with them so as to better lead them into the great Corpus Christi. And the closer I draw, the more of their pain do I feel.

Still, what eats me is something composed of my own weaknesses and sins, I am sure.

Have you any spiritual anodyne or comfort, any small practice that might assist in my travail? Good Father, I cannot sleep…

Not quite of the body, yet not entirely of the soul, pain closed like a trap on Agnes and held her tight. Some nights it was a magnetic vest drawing blood to swell tightly just under her skin. Agnes wanted to burst from the cassock in a bloody shower! Other nights a shirt of razors slit and raked her and left no mark. Her womanness crouched dark within her — clawed, rebellious, sharp of tooth.

No amount of calm pleading moved the steady anguish. Some nights, she tried to slide the pain off her body like the husk of a spent and sleeping lover. She tried to breathe calmly and evenly to loosen the pain by degrees, but it stayed clapped on.

A mourning dove called from a tree, a small oak in the graveyard behind the cabin. The vowels of its inquiry floated to Agnes one eternal dusk and she went into herself to strike a hopeful bargain. What do you want of me? she asked. But her pain had no needs, so there was nothing to offer or trade. She attempted with the deepest resolve to ignore it, but its grip on her chest intensified and she felt the iron seizing to her ribs. She wondered if she could scare it out. She sat up, gathered her breath, began screaming. There was no one to hear, the cabin was chinked so tight and the nuns asleep, calm at a safe distance. So night after night, she screamed in the darkness. Huge jagged rips of sound tore out of her but the pain was not impressed.

Only Mary Kashpaw, curled in the rough bench bed of the sleigh, stared into the great dark and listened.

Agnes woke with tiny veins broken in her eyelids. She tried again the next night. Again, the next. Finally after nearly a week of sleeplessness, beyond all weariness, agitated to the death, she rose in the dark, lighted a candle, and walked out of the cabin. She let herself into the school infirmary to search for some remedy. Without acknowledging her mission openly, she knew that she wanted the means either to cure the pain or to put herself to sleep forever.

With the brass key marked from her ring of keys, she opened the door and then lighted a lantern. She unlocked the white wall cupboard that Hildegarde bartered for with the government office, who contracted for these items to be sent every year. They had little use for them without a doctor. There, on the shelves, was an array of possible anodynes and comforts.

Agnes examined the bottles carefully. Tartar emetic in a green paste. Perhaps she could puke it out? Strychnine sulfate, a carefully sealed black jar — there was her last resort. Atropine in an innocent clear flask. Digitalin, tiny pills. Ginger and ergot. Belladonna with its own eyedropper. She shook the bottle and the clear stuff turned cloudy with promise. She tucked it into her pocket. What was this? Glycyrrhiza. Pure carbolic. Boracic powder, which she thought was for the eyes. Cocaine hydrochlorate, ¹/₆ grain, twenty-five tubes of etched glass with red rubber stoppers at the ends. She took ten. Benzoic acid. Charcoal in a blue jar. Compound of gentian in a square bottle with a long wax-sealed neck. Myrrh and nux vomica, in identical rusting tins. Clove tincture of opium. Agnes sighed, frowned. Only one bottle and so obvious it would be missed. Still, she took it. Pepsin for the stomach. Oil of Ethereal Male Fern. Quinine. Cod liver oil. Sulphate of morphia set far back in the cabinet and very dusty. Four ¹/₈-ounce bottles of clear deep-brown amber glass. She took them also and shut the case.

FATHER DAMIEN’S SLEEP

For one delirious month, the anguish was survivable. It was Sister Hildegarde, of course, who dispatched herself to the priest’s cabin when he did not show up for morning Mass. She knocked, she prayed, she knocked again, prayed some more. After a while she went to the window, peered through, and saw that Father Damien was sleeping. Or was he dead? Crossing her breast, she entered the cabin. Drew near to the priest apologetically, put her hand to his lips and was satisfied. Yes, sleeping! But what a deep sleep. Likely, the good priest was ill or exhausted beyond illness, and Hildegarde took pity. She tucked the robe just underneath the chin of the priest and was turning to go when a great moon-black shadow fell across her.

Mary Kashpaw did not acknowledge the presence of the nun, but fixed her attention on her priest. Across her powerful features, as she stepped into the cabin, there stole an unlikely expression of protective gentleness. It was a look that certainly had not been seen before on her person by Hildegarde. The girl bent over her priest, and with huge compassion she brushed her fingers on the old buffalo robe she’d dragged from a trunk to warm Father Damien. Then she sank to the floor beside the bed, composed herself, and refused to leave. Mary Kashpaw stayed day and night with the priest from then on, keeping watch. She lighted his glass kerosene lamp and kept it going.

For although he appeared to be lying inert in one body, heavily sleeping underneath the burly brown robe, Father Damien was, in truth, wandering mightily through heaven and earth. He was exploring worlds inhabited by both Ojibwe and Catholic. And had Mary Kashpaw not kept that beacon going, he might, in his long and rambling journey, have become confused or even got lost. For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.

DAMIEN’S INNER TRAVELS

Mary Kashpaw watched how his hands pierced the air, always moving. Fingers rippling on the covers, he smiled, humming endless, complicated, unrepeatable music that went on all night and made Mary Kashpaw sigh with radiant emotion.

All the while that the priest was traveling, she stayed at the side of his bed, first crouched on the floor and then, a great womanly boulder, on a chair that she had made of peeled logs hacked to planks. Motionless, rapt as an ice fisherman, she watched. Gazing into Father Damien’s shuttered face, she hummed or rocked slightly on the uneven boards. From time to time, as though she were burning off a bit of surplus energy, she shuddered all over. Then she bit her lip and leaned to peer closer as if gazing into a deep pool ruffled on the surface by a stray breeze. Sometimes she left off staring at his face and frowned heartily at the wall, as if maps of Father Damien’s current whereabouts were posted there. Eyes closed, she traced the imaginary paths, the roads of rivers. At last she came to wonder why she saw no whiskers and recorded no beard growth on his chin.

Other white men had them, these whiskers, and in truth she was curious to see them sprout. On Damien, none showed. On the third day of his sleep, Mary Kashpaw put her hand out and, with one finger, lightly stroked his chin. She drew her finger back and continued to sit, thoughtfully, staring like someone who has glimpsed the shade and outline of a larger picture.

Every morning after that she heated a kettle of water, readied the mug of shaving soap, dipped in the brush, stropped the razor, and was seen, ostentatiously, to be putting these things aside just as Sister Hildegarde arrived.

The practical Sister Hildegarde was in fact pleased to see how carefully Mary Kashpaw cared for Damien, and she tried to say so in signs, for she never did quite accept that, although Mary Kashpaw refused to speak, she understood everything around her perfectly. Hildegarde nodded at the carefully damped or blazing fire in the tiny metal drum of the stove. Gestured approvingly at the shine on the windows and the urgent cleanliness of Mary Kashpaw’s floor. The big girl scrubbed with an artificial madness of intention. The floor smoothed and the wood settled underneath her punishing hands.

Watching her zeal, one day, Hildegarde was sobered to observe a mechanical strength, as though her body were able to operate without the direct guidance of her mind. Bending before Mary Kashpaw, the nun passed her hand rapidly before the girl’s eyes and sure enough, she got no reaction. Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance. So, she thought, scrubbing floors! As well as who knows what! Hildegarde had seen her eat, too, with just this sort of blank fixity. These were actions Mary Kashpaw did in her sleep.

SLEEPERS

The sleepers traveled deep into the country of uncanny truth. Mary Kashpaw scrubbed floors in her sleep while, on the low bed above her, through dense thickets Father Damien plunged onward. He soon became thoroughly and miserably lost. Having strayed off the dream path leading to the house of his friend, Nanapush, he made the mistake of continuing — after all, dusk was nearly on him and he didn’t want to spend the night in the woods, even though it was a dream woods. That, however, is exactly what happened. Damien sat against a tree, drunk with exhaustion. After a short period of electrified panic, he felt a dim fuzz stealing over his brain.

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed. And so it went from there, a series of dreams, tunnels of brilliance snaking and tangling into the low hill, then out, then farther back — through unknown swamps and broad lake fields high with sweeping reeds and farther yet into the great many islanded lakes with their powerful, secret rock paintings. Impossible to say how many dreams within the dream before he met the one who followed him in to guide him back: Mary Kashpaw.

It was good she found the priest. For if Damien had dreamed himself much farther into that overgrown country how could he ever have returned? Who is to say this isn’t exactly how, one morning, people wake up mad? They have simply dreamed themselves down too many paths and at each turn or pause, as they attempt to travel back, they are swept up in the poignancy of being. Except it is another dream that they unknowingly inhabit.

THE SACRAMENT

Father Damien walked through the woods in a state of pleasant resignation, his satchel full of strychnine. For a while he pretended to wander in a meaningless attempt to lose himself, so that he could die with no bother to anyone else, but he had to admit finally that he was on his way to Nanapush. Well, why not? Why not say good-bye to the person who had been most kind to him and most understanding of all Anishinaabeg. Besides, out of a sense of pride and rightness he had inherited from his predecessor, he hadn’t told Nanapush of what he suffered. The way Damien understood it, he was to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around. Still, when he entered the familiar yard that afternoon, heart full, the pleasure and kindness in Nanapush’s face somewhat eased his certainty. In that moment of relaxation, he showed Nanapush the poison and admitted he had come into the woods to die.

Nanapush gently took the bottles from Damien’s hands. Miserable with relief at his admission, Damien dragged himself to the side of the yard, lay down in a patch of grass, on a blanket, and fell into a sudden and childlike sleep that lasted for most of the afternoon. He came swimming to consciousness and was vaguely aware that there were several men working in the yard, then he passed out again. When he came to the second time, the world was dark and Nanapush was sitting next to him with his pipe lighted, blowing the smoke over Father Damien in a faint and fragrant drift.

Father Damien sat up, embarrassed at himself. As though he’d upset some inner water level, tears filled his eyes. He looked at the ground, his hands trembling.

“We put up a sweat lodge for you,” said Nanapush. The glow of a huge, steady fire lighted his features. Nanapush took the priest’s hand, then, and led him to the entrance of a small, domed hut, gestured for him to crawl inside. He did, entering on all fours. Then Nanapush himself followed and crouched next to Damien. “Give me your robe,” he said, and Father Damien removed his heavy cassock, but kept on the light black shift he wore beneath. The shadowy presences of men surrounded him and he could see their faces by the light of the glowing rocks that soon were brought in a pitchfork and lowered into the pit at the very center.

Every so often, someone would make a little joke. Otherwise, they were calm with expectation.

“This is our church,” said Nanapush.

Hunched in the pole hut and sitting upon bare tamped ground, Agnes at first smiled wanly at the irony. But once the flap was closed and the darkness was complete, once the glowing rocks were splashed with water, then sprinkled with sharp medicines that gave off a healing smoke, once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that Nanapush had spoken truthfully and without double wit, and that this was indeed her friend’s true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagle’s nest of the sweat lodge over them.

Straining to make sense of the rapid prayers, her Ojibwemowin at the level of penetration at which words made sense a beat or two beats after she heard them and puzzled out the meaning, Agnes surrendered. According to Church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake God’s worship in so alien a place. Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? It wasn’t as though she made a choice to do it — Agnes simply found herself comforted.

That night, stretched out in blankets beside the fire that had heated the stones, Agnes lay peacefully alert. For the first time since the pain had gripped her, she felt a deliciousness of honest sleep close down. Not weariness or exhaustion, those things Father Damien strove toward in his work to try to outwit the grip of insomnia, but the luxuriant stretching of an utterly relaxed spirit.

After returning from despair, Father Damien loved not only the people but also the very thingness of the world. He became very fond of his stove — a squat little black Reliance with fat, curved legs. The stove reminded Agnes of a cheerful old woman who had given her bread as a child, and raw carrots, when she’d been hungry and there was nothing to eat at home. The old woman had pulled the carrots from the ground and held them under the spout of her pump until the dirt flowed off and they glistened. Then the old woman, whose fat legs ran straight down from her knees into her shoes, sat Agnes on a stump in her yard.

The gold secret tang of sweet marigolds was on the woman’s hands. She had put the bread in Agnes’s lap, soft and fresh, and the carrots, and a clear glass shaker of salt. Kindly, she’d left her to eat. Agnes could still taste the crisp juice of the carrots, the buttery interior whiteness of the bread, the salt bringing them together on her tongue, when she looked at the stove.

Thus was her salvation composed of the very great and very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. The bread of life. The gold orange of washed carrots and the taste of salt.

12. THE AUDIENCE

1922

Just behind the log church, a long, flat slab of rock rose abruptly at a steep angle into a craggy cliff. Father Hugo’s dream had been to build upon that floor and against that rock. Now Agnes continued to work the idea into reality. The vision absorbed her, it was nothing she’d ever done before. She took measurements, observed the fall of the sun, used a level and compass and pencil to sketch. She lighted a lantern, spread out her papers on the table, and drew long into the night, planning, driven by a sudden and engulfing force of practicality. She fell into it as a way of not thinking about Gregory, and then the idea took on its own life. Soon she could fully imagine the church — it was a most absorbing vision.

A church with the floor of stone and the altar built against the stone. There would be two stoves, both set directly upon the floor of rock. Every morning in winter those fires would be kindled, and then the warmth would flow into the rock and toast the feet of worshipers. The stone behind the altar would be carved and polished bit by bit; she could see it, a most incredible grotto, an attraction that people would come to see from miles away. And of course, the useless but somewhat decorative piano.

All that Fathers Hugo and then Damien intended came to pass, very slowly, but it was within the working out of that small destiny that Agnes realized how even careful plans cannot accommodate or foresee all the tricks of creation. The church planned in October mud, mulled over during the winter blizzards, plotted in icy April, raised in early May, was enough shelter in mid-June for Sister Hildegarde to move the piano inside. It stood to one side of the altar. As soon as the sides of the new church were framed and the roof on tight, the Superior wanted to test the acoustics. She wanted to hear the notes bounce off the spars, walls, ceiling, stones. Not that she could play. No one played. Sister Hildegarde had sent away to Fargo for instructional books, but Father Damien pretended to have lost the key to the shut keyboard.

A nameless and disturbing energy about the piano haunted Agnes. She felt uncomfortable whenever she chanced to be alone with it and she found, then, that she always kept an eye on the piano, as though it were alive and waiting for her to turn her back. Why? So that it could flip up its keyboard protector? Laugh? Agnes wondered at herself. Did she really believe the instrument would move forward, gnashing its poor, stained, ivory keys?

She stood in the entrance to the new church one afternoon, regarding the placement of the piano with an uneasy, critical eye. Later, she was sure it was the long summer light, the full golden quality of afternoon light that wakened her hands and set them moving about more restlessly than they had for some time. She thought of Gregory’s hands, then put the thought away. The key to the keyboard was hidden in the piano’s odd claw foot. An aperture behind a toe. Suddenly, Agnes bent and removed the key. She then opened the keyboard. All of a sudden there it was, the notes spread out before her in the slant light of afternoon, the discolored ivories of the sad keys gaping at her, the breath of the thing sighing out like an animal.

There was a small brown bench Sister Hildegarde had found and placed before the creature. Agnes sat, adjusted the distance, and watched the keys carefully. Nothing happened. There was nothing to be afraid of, after all, except that her hands sprang out of her sleeves. Then they jumped off her lap like claws and crashed down in an astonishing chord. She clutched her hands to her chest. The sound reverberated. With a soft and, she feared, insane longing, her hands crept forward again. This time, quite movingly, they brushed the keys in the secret contradictory melody that opens the Pathetique. Her hands moved on and on. She crouched over the keyboard in amazed concentration and played, or allowed herself to be played by, the music that had racked her inside and struggled for release. This was how it was with her gifts. God had taken the music away for a time to bring her closer, then returned it when removing the last sexual love she would ever have. Even in the astonished flood of her discovery, she knew that this sudden solace was presented to help her through her loss. As her hands assembled and disassembled their patterns of old harmony and counterharmony, the mystery of their motions became entirely sensible. She understood the intricate purpose of a language she had guessed in the dark and even practiced on the body of Gregory. Music poured out in a rational waterfall.

Time passed, or no time passed. Absorbed in the rush of knowing, Agnes felt eyes watching. Perhaps children, she thought, unable in her awed greed to quit. Or one of the sisters, or an Ojibwe curious or gripped by longing. She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.

The rhapsody woke them, Debussy drew them forth, Chopin made them listen, and Schubert put them back to sleep. It was luck that Agnes was alone that day, for the nuns, except for Hildegarde, screamed for the hoe whenever they saw a serpent and killed it on the spot. The occurrence explained, anyway, the reason that so many snakes did appear in their garden — the rock beneath the church sheltered their ancient nest.

There were at least a hundred. More. Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth bacarolle, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks. Their heads were slightly raised off the floor and if they weren’t actually listening to the notes, they were positively fixed on the music. They were suspended, somehow, by whatever means were available to their senses.

Agnes continued to play. Once, during the music, Sister Hildegarde came near, she heard her enter. Though tough, the nun emitted a stifled gagging hiccup and fled. Not long after, Mary Kashpaw came, unafraid, and worshiped as though with her kind. A crowd collected murmuring outside the church door. Growing weary, Agnes at last hit upon the Kinderscenen from Schubert and finally, playing “Sleep” repetitively and with all the kindness of a good parent, she succeeded in driving the snakes, the ginebigoog, back to their beds.

GINEBIGOOG

The news of Father Damien’s suddenly revealed musical ability caused an excited curiosity. People came in shy numbers to listen. For one month he played concerts instead of delivering sermons. When they felt the music, the snakes still flickered to the edges of the main floor of the church, even with the full congregation. As for Nanapush, when he heard about the snakes, he became intent with interest and told Father Damien that this was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart. After the snakes, Damien was gratified to find that he was consulted more often and trusted with intimate knowledge. Perhaps he was considered to have acquired a very powerful guardian spirit, or perhaps it was the piano. A grand wave of baptisms followed in the wake of his music, people of all ages, some new.

Agnes loved smelling the milky-sweet and faintly sour new babies. She rocked them in their carefully made cradle boards, their tikinaganan. She talked to the babies, pitching her voice low and pretending to have no wish for a child of her own. But she could feel them in her arms, their tensile dependence, and sometimes a wish stabbed. After baptisms, she played music with an extra sweet load of yearning, and was consoled by the sounds and challenges that rose beneath her hands. She accepted, now, the great gift of the music as a substitute for all she had lost. Still, one question sometimes nagged. Had the devil in its original tempter’s form returned her art, or had God? And furthermore, what did it matter?

THE PIANO

Once the memory of the music unknit in troubled and ecstatic skeins from her hands, Agnes remembered. In recalling, she wept for her drowned Caramacchione, played now only by fish, and the strange cruel river that had utterly changed her life. With the outline of new memories, interior bits of the puzzle emerged. Fortunately, there appeared in these new visions a windfall. As she regained more of the past, she recalled the source of the money she’d wakened long ago to find in the lining of Agnes’s jacket. She’d deposited that money in a bank in Fargo, under a false name. Cecilia Fleisch, she remembered it.

She wrote down the sum and the secret number under which it was deposited, and then decided how to use it. Perhaps in this decision Agnes ignored certain moral implications. The money was, in fact, stolen. But hadn’t Agnes suffered and hadn’t Father Damien? And would the anticipated use of the money constitute a form of justice? For Agnes must have a piano — not just any piano. A real piano.

Perhaps, truly, Father Damien could have bought food or medicines, blankets, pots, necessities of all sorts, seeds and seed grain. Perhaps he could have purchased a bell with a far more pleasing toll than the hollow clang of the one bought by the diocese for Little No Horse. Certainly, he could have purchased comforts and warmth for the sisters, who routinely suffered deep chills, or the old people, who were in great need, but he didn’t. Not as Damien. Not as Agnes. Not as priest and not as woman, not as confessor and not as the magnet of souls, consoler, professor of the faith. When it came right down to it, she acted as an artist.

TIME

Once Nanapush began talking, nothing stopped the spill of his words. The day receded and darkness broadened. At dusk, the wind picked up and cold poked mercilessly through the chinking of the cabin. The two wrapped themselves in quilts and continued to talk. The talk broadened, deepened. Went back and forth in time and then stopped time. The talk grew huge, of death and radiance, then shrunk and narrowed to the making of soup. The talk was of madness, the stars, sin, and death. The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who took out a small bound notebook and recorded words and sentences.

In common, they now had the love of music, though their definition of what composed music was dissimilar.

“When you hear Chopin,” Father Damien asserted, “you find yourself traveling into your childhood, then past that, into a time before you were born, when you were nothing, when the only truths you knew were sounds.”

“Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don’t sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman.”

“This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can’t think. You become flooded in the heart.”

“Powerful. Powerful. This Chopin,” asked Nanapush, “does he have a drum?”

“No,” said Damien, “he uses a piano.”

“That great box in your church,” said Nanapush. “How is this thing made?”

Father Damien opened his mouth to say it was constructed of wood, precious woods, but in his mind there formed the image of Agnes’s Caramacchione settled in the bed of the river, unmoved by the rush of water over its keys, and instead he said, “Time.” As soon as he said it, he knew that it was true.

“Time. Chopin’s piano was made of time. What is time in Ojibwemowin?” asked Damien.

Nanapush misunderstood then, and did not give the word but deeply considered the nature of the thing he was asked to name. When he spoke his thoughts aloud, his voice was slow and contemplative.

“We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time.”

“What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.”

“Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.”

Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

“A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.”

“Into the water?” asked Damien.

“No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time.”

Father Damien waited for Nanapush to explain, but after he’d lighted his pipe and smoked it for a while, he said only, “Let’s find something to eat.”

Agnes brushed the rich ebony rectangles, the black keys of the extraordinary piano on which she’d spent the bulk of the stolen money. A grand, exquisite and important, not a Caramacchione, but a new Steinway. The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim.

Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal. They were part of the art of Father Damien’s Mass, as were the vestments — an extraordinarily ornate and meticulously worked chasuble in green, for hope, a less ornate one in passion red. A plain silken stole embroidered only with a cross, but in gold, and a maniple to match. His alb and cincture had been Father Hugo’s, and he accepted from Sister Hildegarde a rough amice that he donned with great devotion and seriousness at every Mass. It was his symbolic helmet and he wore it to repel the assaults of the devil. Rotten mutt! Better yet, he commissioned Margaret to add beadwork anywhere that it would fit on the vestments. She covered every bit she could — each robe weighed upon him like a shield, like armor.

Agnes bought deep blue paint for the ceiling of the church, as well as metallic gold, a special gilding from Chicago. That was the only paint that would do for the stars she envisioned upon that blue. And last, with the spurt of money left at the bottom of the pile, the money which had nearly fallen from Agnes’s fingers clumsy with terror, she bought urtext music, stacks of it from foreign publishers — Masses, choral pieces, sensuous rhapsodies and pieces beyond her capabilities, as well as Easy Pieces for Small Fingers, for she had determined to teach. She also commissioned a statue from a maker of religious artifacts up north, bought it sight unseen.

THE MADONNA OF THE SERPENTS

There lived in Winnipeg an old mangeur de lard who had put down his paddle and taken up the tools of a wood-carver and a statue painter. He made cigar store Indians and mannequin shapes, shop signs, and carousel horses, but statues of a religious nature were his specialty. For those, he used a secret recipe of plaster. He had in his workshop special molded blanks for Joseph, the Blessed Mary, Baby Jesus and adult Jesus, for Saints Anne and Theresa, for Saint Francis, and a few others especially popular in the region. These raw white forms spoke to him sometimes, especially when he worked late into the night. The shadows, he claimed, moving in the light of flames, often inspired him. One particular night he began to work on a special blank and found that he couldn’t stop. This statue, commissioned by a church just south, he’d determined to finish as soon as possible in order to finance a lengthy drunk he anticipated commencing, soon, to celebrate the proud fact that, at age seventy-five, he was to be yet again a father. Though he’d bought the woman’s favors, she was inexperienced enough to have gotten pregnant. She would have to marry him now!

He thought about her as he worked on the plaster in the flicker of candles. Yes, she was fat and her chin ran into her neck in a way that made him think of a snapping turtle. Her nose was a bulb. Her teeth were all crooked. She was a good person, though, and her eyes were very beautiful, sad and kind. Extremely beautiful! He thought of her eyes. What good were they in a face so cunningly wrought to inspire a man to wince and look away?

Those eyes made him happy. They nearly brought tears to his own eyes.

“A son,” he prayed. If the boy inherited her features, he would at least be a man, though just why that should make such a difference he couldn’t say. He worked carefully, carving folds into the gown, the robe. He took special care with the snake she crushed, refined the moon, painted the scallops of her toenails a delicate pink. He worked out the proportion of the face and then refined the features and the hands, so complicated that he just curled the fingers up and thought, Be done with it. Yawning, he touched paint to the masterpiece and just before dawn tumbled into his rough rope bed.

The next morning, when he squinted at her in the light, he saw that he had made her ugly. Just the same as his bride-to-be, however, her eyes were both kind and extremely alive. He would have taken up his chisel, he could have removed the paint, he could have changed her. Somehow, all that next day, just when he was about to get started, every time, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared at her, shaking his head.

“Forgive me, Saint Joseph,” he said out loud, at last. “I like her this way. There are advantages, see? I’ve lived, and in my life I have had many women. I would not choose a beautiful wife ever again, oh no, I would choose for myself a pair of kind eyes over the most magnificent breasts. Difficile! But Saint Joseph, you poor God-fucked cuckold, if you’d chosen a woman nobody envied you for, you would have had many children of your own. You would have died a happy man surrounded by his own children, just as I will.”

With that, the old voyageur put his tools down, patted the Virgin’s rump, and began to whistle as he constructed a shipping case to send her straight down to Little No Horse.

On a pure fall day the statue arrived, packed in golden straw inside a wooden crate built around it, perhaps not so much to protect as to contain the features. The nailed, heavy crate was pulled along in a wagon. Father Damien and the sisters and the wagon driver wrestled the crate off the bed of the wagon, prized open the boards that protected the statue, pulled down the wads and sheaves of golden straw, and at last brushed the dust off the features of her face. They kept brushing, for as soon as her eyes and nose and lips came clear, she startled, she fascinated, she elicited some repugnance, she evoked sorrow in one heart and derision in the next and in still others peace and loving quiet, so that she needed to be touched to be believed and for many hours stood outside the doorway of the church.

“Send her back” was Sister Hildegarde’s immediate judgment, but Father Damien disagreed, much as Hildegarde had regarding the piano. The other sisters mainly disagreed, too, saying that the Virgin’s eyes were remarkable.

“The carver had a strange talent,” Damien pronounced, “and his vision was of this face. Who is to say among all creation God should choose only a beautiful human mother for His son?”

“I suppose there is a lesson in this.” Hildegarde’s voice was a bit sour. She narrowed her eyes at the statue, suspicious. The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.

THE SERMON TO THE SNAKES

“What is the whole of our existence,” said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, “but the sound of an appalling love?”

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given — children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps — we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes — those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends…”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

13. THE RECOGNITION

1923

Surely it was delirium, thought Agnes, looking at the peaceful scene of twirling popple leaves and new-growth maple. Beside her sat Nanapush. He wore the huge plaid wool jacket Margaret had brought home from the sisters, and his hair, long and gray, was pulled back and tied with a reed. I was not really visited by the terrible dog, thought Agnes, nor did I nearly poison myself out of love and then despair. Her terrible abyss of mind seemed impossible now.

“Do you believe in the devil?” Agnes abruptly asked her friend.

Before he spoke, Nanapush gazed keenly at Father Damien through his little, round, wire eyeglasses. He tilted his head, considering. Damien lighted a cigarette, put it in his hand. Nanapush thanked the priest, his mouth pursed.

“Not yours,” he decided.

Father Damien waited for more.

“We have our own devils,” Nanapush said piercingly, all at once. “And our devils are not all bad. Ours are sometimes capable of showing pity, that is, if you can think of the right thing to say.”

“What, then, would be the right thing to say if you met up with a devil?” Damien leaned forward intently, eager.

“You would have to be clever about it,” said Nanapush.

“Say, for instance,” Damien decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

Nanapush leaned toward him, thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot out of my soup bowl!’ ”

Father Damien frowned, doubtfully. “And then?”

“If it took its foot out, you would know it had understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

Nanapush settled back into his chair.

“It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”

“Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark!”

“I don’t understand…”

“In order to confuse it.”

“I see. I would pretend to be a dog…”

“You already have a collar around your neck,” Nanapush pointed out.

Father Damien didn’t tell his friend about the conversation he’d had with the spirit, or about the sacrifice that he had made for Lulu, or about the painful temptation that followed. Instead, he took out the chessboard, an occupation that currently absorbed the two, and the playing of which they owed to a priest of a past century, Father Jolicoeur.

That young and largely unhistoricized eighteenth-century Jesuit had carried with him, into the unknown, a chessboard. He used it as an excellent means both to convince the natives of the superiority of a Catholic god who could design so perplexing and glorious an entertainment, and as a comfort to himself. Though he was uncertain whether his native guide and companion had the capacity to play such a game, he nevertheless made an attempt to teach the rudiments. Jolicoeur’s foundation belief in the innate superiority of himself was shattered when, to his amazement, in the space of just nineteen minutes the Indian trounced him in a match. Father Jolicoeur played again, hoping to recover his pride, but was the more severely beaten, causing him to put away his arrogance.

The fever for chess shook the Indians with the likeness of another epidemic, and they simply re-created the board and pieces to their own ability and began playing among themselves, often for deathly stakes. Long after Father Jolicoeur’s bones were cracked by wolves and cleaned by ravens in some lost corner of the wilderness, another lone adventurer, believing himself the first to gain a path into the uncharted glory of the west, was astounded when he accepted an invitation to a chief’s lodge only to be confronted with a chessboard properly laid out on a deerskin and his opponent waiting in eager anticipation of a violent game of wits. Of course, the stakes being, as they usually were, life or death, the trader wisely opted to pretend total ignorance of the game and used his evil queen, potent spirits, to bribe his way out of an encounter. It saved him then, but he was never the same in the estimation of the chess-playing Indians, for they did not count him a true man and took their peltries and tanned deerskins and bales of dried fish elsewhere, to another trader, who had learned the confounding game at his mother’s knee.

Father Damien now set the board up carefully on the level stump before Nanapush, the wooden pieces comforting to the touch, the ritual of putting them into order a small pleasure. Nanapush laid down his pipe, his hands careful among the pieces. Choosing white in the toss, he opened with a hopeful gambit that did not fool Damien. The afternoon was golden, the mosquitoes bearable in a light breeze. The sounds of birds accompanied their thoughts. Some time went by with little but the motion of their hands, and then Nanapush suddenly spoke.

“What are you?” he said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his bishop’s trajectory.

“A priest,” said Father Damien.

“A man priest or a woman priest?”

Agnes’s hand froze, pinching the knight, and her mental processes collapsed. A hollow roaring noise began around her, swirling, a confusion of sounds. Her mouth opened but no word emerged and slowly, very slowly, she drew back from the table and raised her eyes to Nanapush, who was simply looking at the priest as though that was not the one question in the world that would most upset Father Damien. The priest’s terror and confusion immediately registered on the older man, who leaned forward, frowning with perhaps too calculated a concern. Agnes still couldn’t answer, though now some little choking noises emerged. She tried to right herself, pretending she was heartily surprised at such a question but taking it as a joke. Agnes tried to laugh, but a spasm of sorrow cut the laugh in two. She found, maddeningly, that her eyes were spilling over with tears.

“I am a priest,” she whispered, hoarsely, fierce.

“Why,” said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn’t answered, to put the question to rest, “are you pretending to be a man priest?”

So then it was out between them, and the fact of it out in the open was tremendous. The tedious balloon, pressing inside of Agnes day after day so tightly, now floated out of her mouth, up into the air. She was instantly lighter, so light that when she took in a breath she felt she would lift from her chair.

“We used to talk of it, Kashpaw and myself,” Nanapush went on, “but when we noticed that you never mentioned it, we spoke of this to no one else.”

“So it is that obvious?”

Nanapush shrugged. “Nobody else ever said anything. But still, it is a question maybe just in my mind why you would do this, hide yourself in a man’s clothes. Are you a female Wishkob? My old friend thought so at first, assumed you went and became a four-legged to please another man, but that’s not true. Inside that robe, you are definitely a woman.”

Later, she understood it was the simple recognition, that level and practical regard that moved her to weep with relief. Nanapush was sorry, very sorry to make the priest cry, but he said anyway, abruptly, “Your move.”

Agnes moved her piece in a blur. Nanapush moved again in short order, and it was up to Agnes, who paused, moved her piece miserably, and answered her friend’s question all at once, trying not to cry for the relief of talking, trying to behave with a clarity and goodness that she did not know or feel. Nanapush, of course, waited to make his next observation until Agnes finally returned to the game and was deep in thought over her next move.

“So you’re not a woman-acting man, you’re a man-acting woman. We don’t get so many of those lately. Between us, Margaret and me, we couldn’t think of more than a couple.”

Something struck Agnes, then, and she realized that this moment, so shattering to her, wasn’t of like importance to Nanapush. In fact, she began to suspect, as she surveyed the chessboard between them and saw the balance tipped suddenly in her opponent’s favor, that Nanapush had brought it up on purpose to unnerve and distract her. The next move, in which Nanapush made an unexpectedly suave play and removed the bishop she protected for so long, convinced her. She looked sharply at the man to whom her defenses had fallen.

“Ginitum,” said Nanapush with relish.

The old man had used the subject in a sly bid to undermine his opponent’s concentration. And it had worked. There was at last no way to recover from the lapse and Father Damien let go now of piece after piece under the driving craftiness of Nanapush’s strategy.

“I’m losing,” Agnes muttered. “You tricked me, old man.”

“Me!” said Nanapush. “You’ve been tricking everybody! Still, that is what your spirits instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to require such a sacrifice.”

“Yes,” said Agnes, “my spirits are very strong, very demanding, very annoying.”

Nanapush nodded in sympathy.

“Check,” the old man said.

Infallible Eminence,

My hand is a human hand. My heart a human heart. My feet walk the earth to which our bones return. Directed by His voice, His hand, by the prompting and guidance of His spirit, what else was I to do?

14. LULU

1996

Rain, time, Emeraude, silence, fried onions. Their first meeting was an explosion of the ordinary and the vast unknowable, the pure and the underhanded, all Lulu. Father Jude sat in the cave of an old-fashioned brown recliner and Damien dozed in the deep crevice of a sagging purple couch covered with star quilts and pillows. Their unfinished plates of onion-slathered fried liver cooled on a coffee table set carefully with napkins and shakers of salt and pepper. In the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw alchemized her unspeakable coffee. They were digesting their early suppers, waiting for a new burst of energy to go on in their work, when the crackle of slow tires on gravel announced a visitor.

Later, Father Jude was to recall details that he didn’t know he’d noticed. He took in more than he admitted to his conscious mind, like a man under hypnosis. He recalled that the woman, who seemed only six or maybe eight years older than he was, entered the house, and sparked pleasure and lighted affection in Father Damien when she knelt beside the chair. She crouched gracefully, laid her hands upon Damien’s arm, and whispered to him in Ojibwe until the old man’s eyes opened and he came awake smiling in her laughing hug. It was an enviable hug, Father Jude thought later, a long, loving, unabashed embrace that tipped back the old man’s face and closed his eyes like a doll’s eyes, stretched his grin as far as it could stretch.

“Father, forgive me,” she said with mock penitence, “my last visit was one week ago. Who’s this?”

“This is Father Jude, my interlocuter.” Damien held her hand in his, unwilling to let go, and nodded at his companion. She released Damien and took Jude in, then, took him in. He felt it. Her drenched black eyes rubbed him all over with a curious heat. She absorbed him with her eyes and then, as though waiting for him to say something, fixed her gaze upon his mouth. Her gaze had a physical effect. As though he’d bitten into a hot pepper, his lips tingled and he broke into a light, fresh sweat. Embarrassed, he went remote and greeted her with a cool and abrupt manner, which did not in the least diminish her keen examination of his face.

“So you’re Jude, I heard about you. You’d better be giving the old man here lots of rest.”

She drew up a chair, sat, gave Damien’s hand a squeeze, all without taking her eyes off Jude’s face for a second. She stared into his eyes. Unsettling. He looked away, looked back, but she was still staring. He blinked and in that heartbeat, that instant, he was caught. And it was so easy. He was blinded and the sun wasn’t in his face. Heard nothing and yet the breeze as she entered the room was level and sweet, stirring the mild faces of the violet pansies that she’d bought to set early into the dirt around the trees by the door. Oblivious to taste, he gulped coffee from the cup set into his hand by Mary Kashpaw.

“Oooh,” said Lulu, setting hers down with no other comment. She excused herself and spoke to Father Damien in rapid, floating Ojibwe, which he answered in the same after a thoughtful pause. It was all right with Father Jude to sit there ignored. It gave him a chance, after all, to attend to himself and to try to decide what had happened to him, just now, right here, when he’d taken leave of sense and time. A mild stroke? He put his hands on his chest. Ticker going strong. Checked his pulse. Not much higher than after running six miles. The light breeze dried the sweat off his throat and he wiped his forehead with a plaid hankie, which suddenly seemed all the wrong plaid. What was happening? It all felt wrong, the scene, the season, how his trousers bit across the small of his back, how his breathing was uneven. It all felt wrong and then, just as suddenly, it all seemed right again.

She spoke, smiling into his face.

“Father Jude, do you know any stories?”

“Not really,” he stumbled, “I mean, I know stories but they’re all true things that happened.”

She was oblivious to his discomfort.

“That doesn’t matter. You’re drafted.”

“For what?”

“You’ll visit my little class. It’s a culture class. I mostly teach traditional dance, but every so often we study the foreign element — in this case, you.”

She smiled at him again, and her face opened like a flower. The wrinkles around her eyes were beautifully aligned; the sweeping uncontainable amusement brimmed up in her and spilled. He had the odd sensation that petals drifted in the air between them, petals of a fragrant and papery citrus velvet. Then the wind whipped them off and she was all business.

“Tomorrow at two o’clock in the fourth-grade classroom at the school. Be there!”

She raised her brows slightly and parted her lips. Distinctly, he heard the sound of her purring. She was wearing a simple white dress.

It took him a week to put the words with the feelings and, then, it came clear to him because of a dream. Inside it — as at the school, where she wore her jingle dress of red and silver — Lulu stood with her lynx eyes and face of a hungry cat and her fan held rigid and upright like a weapon, like a shield. As she turned to him with an imperious and practical grace, he thought, So this is what it’s like to fall in love.

There were times, many times Father Jude had admired women, but it had been his fate, his fortune, certainly his luck, never to have fallen in love. He was unprepared. He thought he had tested his commitment, his faith, certainly his vow. He was secure in his relationship with God. If so, why had the Almighty waited until now, until he was at his lowest, out of his element, away from his familiar terrain, to set this enigma before him, this magnet of hope, this slip of intrigue, this woman?

“Because God has a very dark sense of humor,” said Father Damien. He was not referring to the frightening disorganization of Father Jude Miller’s new and untested emotions, but to the erratic tumble of ants scurrying to rebuild a nest disarranged by their feet. Both men were sitting outside the door of the house. The tough pansies were planted, and nodded at the borders of the walk like the faces of spoiled babies. “Every so often, as though for His awful amusement, we are overturned. The desperate methods we use to right ourselves must seem hilarious.”

Father Miller emphatically agreed. He had been awake all night thinking of Lulu’s ankle, picturing the curved bone. He said nothing.

“That was my situation with the rosary,” said Father Damien. “I knew it had been used to strangle Napoleon and Napoleon was in the ground.”

“What about the police?”

Father Damien laughed. “That would have been Edgar Pukwan Junior, reliable only on the rare occasion he wasn’t drinking. He was drinking when we found Napoleon.”

“So the investigation, or whatever you want to call it, was left to you.”

“Such as it was, yes. But although it was important, it wasn’t the central locus of my thoughts. It was peripheral to the political situation on that piece of homeland. To tell you the truth, I first believed that the killing of Napoleon was done for the precise reason Bernadette assigned to it — to shut up a prime opponent. I even suspected Nanapush. And then I found out…” As though suddenly disconcerted at having spoken too much, Father Damien gulped down the rest of his words. Throughout his interviews, he’d carefully sidestepped certain facts that would have disqualified Leopolda, for at the same time they would have pointed toward the truth of his identity. Now Damien had trouble keeping it all straight. What he’d told, secrets he couldn’t tell.

“Father Miller, have we got to go on? Don’t you have enough evidence by now, enough proof that this Pauline Puyat who became Leopolda is not, was not, could not be a saint. Why, she sent the black dog!”

Father Jude breathed in, breathed out. He was exhausted, unbent, he really did not want to hear another word about the ghost dog, the hallucination, delirium tremens, most probably. Before he could reject the argument, Damien proceeded.

“And that was the least of it…. In concrete terms, yes, proven and concise, let me list the faults that most assuredly block her beatification. Primarily, Leopolda skewered the young postulant Marie.”

“Still open to debate.”

“All right then, the horses. Witness the horses! By raising their terror, she got two Kashpaws killed and is also responsible for the consequent madness of their daughter, Mary Kashpaw. You’ve tasted her coffee!”

Jude didn’t capitalize on the reference to the vile stuff in his ceramic mug, but weighed what the old priest proposed very cautiously in his mind before he spoke.

“Does the eventual outcome neutralize the circumstance? The peaceable conversion of Quill? The lifelong devotion of her daughter to the fixtures of the church? The runaway was unplanned, an accident, Father Damien. It wasn’t as though she deliberately set out to spook the beasts.”

“Of course she did! You’re indefensibly naïve,” Father Damien observed, sitting back in his chair. “Willfully ignorant. That’s dangerous.”

“So is sitting back too far. You’ll fall,” said Father Jude dryly. Damien righted himself with some difficulty.

“I repeat, she spooked the horses with the specific intent to cause a runaway.”

The younger priest waved his hands. “All right, fine, suppose I even give you that! Even so, what bearing does it have on her eventual consideration—”

“Why, character, Father Jade. Spooking horses to cause a dangerous runaway is hardly a mark of heroic virtue.”

“No, you are right. However, since we have established that her purpose was also to rescue the consecrated Host, and even, perhaps, that was her primary, maybe only purpose, her sin once again is the overzealousness of one who burns with the Holy Spirit.”

“Oh, she burned, all right,” said Father Damien. “She was a regular spiritual arsonist.”

Father Jude couldn’t help but smile, and the old priest took advantage of his momentary diversion.

“The whole convent suffered. These are hardworking women and when one of the sisterhood is incapacitated for whatever reason, an extra burden falls upon the community. Even if that reason is, say, a visitation from God — say God is having an intimate and passionate spiritual interaction with someone who must strictly attend to it — the circumstances into which the other women are put… to say the least, difficult! The others had to take on her chores and duties, not to mention wait on her hand and foot. Things were hard to hold together, quite as if the greater work of the church was sabotaged by one member’s… well, I’ll say it, piggish involvement with God.”

“And when did this all take place?”

“She had countless episodes, or bouts, or visitations. Whatever you want to call them, they were sicknesses that confined her to bed. Of course, in her later years she received many petitioners. It was known as her bed of intercession and her suffering was considered a form of physical prayer. She referred to herself as a sacrificial victim.”

“A victim soul.”

“Exactly. She regarded herself as one chosen to sacrifice her health, her happiness, after the example of Christ crucified, for the advantage of the Church and the general good of her people.”

“Whom — and this is important, Father Damien — would you say that she loved? She loved her people?”

Father Damien shook his head. “The love of a mixed blood for what is darkest communion in her nature, both the comfort and the downfall, source of pain and expiation, a complicated love. She loved her people but she had no patience with them. You’ve heard of Louis Riel, a métis who went to the gallows for his convictions on the political rights of his mixed-blood people. She, too, went to the gallows in an effort to free her people from what she saw as spiritual bondage. Their gods had not, in recent times, served the Ojibwe well. Of course, gods are not required to be consistent — in fact, gods aren’t required to be anything at all. There are no requirements for gods,” said Father Damien a little wistfully.

“And you,” Father Jude asked curiously, “do you believe as Sister Leopolda believed?”

“That conversion would bring about redemption?” Father Damien seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Oh no, I believe we were wrong!”

Father Jude stopped the recorder, folded his arms, gathered himself. Although he had, on some level, expected what he heard, yet to have it out in the open demanded some response from him.

“If you think that, how could you go on?” he asked.

“Well, of course, at first I didn’t think we were wrong. Everything seemed clear. It was only after the epidemic that I knew. There was no doubt…” He trailed off. “By then I was so knit into the fabric of the damage that to pull myself out would have left a great rift, a hole that would have been filled by… well, others perhaps less in sympathy. I’ll name no names. And I believe even now that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy, Father Jude. That’s why I stayed.”

Father Jude took this in with a certain degree of sympathy: to not believe in what one did, but to persevere out of duty to the practical desperation of the situation — in a way it was no less than a quiet heroism. Or idiocy, was his next thought. And then he felt a pang of irritated pity. What a waste to live your life without the assurance of faith. No sooner had he thought this than admiration for the old priest gripped him once again. Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love. Sacrifice had been his rule. He’d put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need.

Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith? Father Jude had been sent here to gather knowledge, but the more he learned, the more he thought, the less certainty he grasped. And too, his fundamental self-assurance was put in jeopardy by this bewildering attraction to a woman whose presence he ached for. Idiocy indeed! Lulu. Before her name rang twice in his mind, he was already putting away his notes and preparing to go and find her. By way of simply getting near to her, he would ask her to talk to him. He would question her about the woman, Fleur, who so preoccupied the old priest’s memory. He’d sit across from her, inching closer, fiddling with his tape recorder, hoping she could not intuit his yearning fascination and confused hope.

15. LULU’S PASSION

What I never forgot, what I’ll always remember, was my mother stroking the soles of my feet. She woke me gently that morning. I hated her for it later. She was tender, yet she knew just exactly what she was doing. The only way I could keep from despair was to hate my mother’s rough hand, the sinewy palm, hard as rawhide, the fingers of steel, grace, and lies. A mother’s hand should not be like that, Father Jude. A mother’s hand should never lie to a child.

We put thick slices of cold bannock in our pockets and started out. “Aaniindi gi-izhamin ina?” I asked. My mother just frowned, and when she did that, I never prodded her for more. She wasn’t the kind of mama you could beg things from, Fleur. The trees were deep and just beginning to sigh in the first breath of the day. Oh, I love that, Father Jude, have you ever seen the leaves click together and break up the sun in circles? My mother put tobacco beside the trail, and still said nothing to me. But I had my freedom in that moment and didn’t care.

“Maybe she couldn’t,” Nanapush told me later, “maybe her heart was too full, maybe she hurt too, did you ever think about that?”

“Of course I did,” was my answer. “But she was my mother, she could have chosen differently. Grandfather! Fleur had the choice of saving me, her daughter, or having her revenge.”

She chose revenge.

I choose to hate her for it.

That was the day it started.

She took me by the hand when the path was broad, I dropped behind when it narrowed. I liked walking behind so I could watch my mother’s makazin heels as she stepped down and the hem, so even and careful. I watched the movement of her old majigoode as it flopped ever so lightly against her moving calves. I remember that dress like it was before me now — a print skirt of old greenish purple, deep and muddy with tiny cream-colored flowers that glimmered from the dusk of a slough.

The day was warm. Late summer, Manominike-giizis, when the Anishinaabeg knock the wild rice. Our Pillager’s own lake, Matchimanito, was too cold and blue-black to grow rice and nobody even liked to fish it that much. We always offered tobacco for the fish. Once, in a fish stomach, my mother found a person’s thumb. She kept it in her medicine bundle along with the heart of that fish. There were all sorts of things in her medicine that I did not approach, but to walk behind her was to forget for a moment who she was from the front — the forbidding woman with the medicine. From behind, she was someone who didn’t know what kind of face I was making or how, mockingly, I copied the headlong force of my mother’s stride.

Arrogance, she had that. I never did, though some mistook it for my joy.

Now I could hear the sound of other people as we came through the woods, but as we crossed the clearing into town, I was surprised to see so many children. We continued forward, and it looked as though we would join the others. A crowd of so many was strange in the first place, but as we got closer, I was covered with an itchy blanket of feeling. I reached out for my mother’s hand and knew — that was it. The children weren’t running. They weren’t loudly playing, racing, teasing, apart from their parents. The children were clutching their mothers’ hands just like I did now. They were silent, close to their parents, bits of their mothers’ skirt squeezed tight, standing pressed against their fathers’ legs.

Around the front of the crowd, I now saw four big audoomobiig, as Grandpa Nanapush called them, waasamoowidaabaanag, the wagons that moved by themselves. The first one, audoomobii, was the white word. There were four of these big cars and they were drawn up together in a line. Next to each, there was a man with a piece of paper clamped onto a piece of wood. He was writing down the name of each family and each child. As soon as he wrote down the name — as if with his marks he somehow suddenly possessed the spirit of the child — abruptly the child climbed into the auto and was swallowed into the dark as into the body of a fish. I saw the children looking out through the windows, sad, vague, and indistinct as though gazing from underwater.

No! I tried to get my mother’s attention. Let’s go home, I said, I want to go home. But my mother was staring at the people with the boards and the paper, and at the other Anishinaabeg gathered around them. Her face was neutral and heavy. A sickness of fear seized me. I tugged and pulled my mother’s hand as if to bring it to life, but her hand was stiff, and cold, like the paw of a trapped, dead animal. And then she dragged me forward.

I had never cried before that day, not really, unless you counted my bawling as a tiny baby and that one time I froze my feet. My mother had always picked me up, given me what I wanted, rocked me, never let me weep. And why did she teach me all this tenderness, this love, if she then threw me in a pit? For that is what the school would be, and better if she slapped me from the first and taught me to be hard. Now, I cried. For the first time, I cried. In this squeezed mass of children, I was a birch-bark scrap. I was floating downstream in a roiling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping. Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out of my eyes. The motor, like a throbbing strange drum, bore us off the reservation, in the direction that the birds went, zhaawanong. My mother told me to pray to that spirit, talk to that aadizokaan, but my throat was filling, filling. I was going down and a sick blackness overcame my vision, until, all of a sudden, this boy next to me nudged my arm, just a rude little push, the best he could do and still be a boy.

I dared to look, and it was Nector. Neshke, he said. In his fist he held a piece of lint-rubbed hard black licorice from his pocket. Licorice in the shape of a little curved pipe. He said take it and I took it; then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a licorice pipe just like the one he gave me. He turned his over and tapped out the imaginary old tobacco, then filled and pretended to light his little black licorice pipe. His movements were exactly that of a old man, of Nanapush. He gestured. I took my pipe, tapped it out the same way, and as I did so my tears stopped. I swaggered, clenched my pipe between my teeth. Nector pretended to have trouble lighting a match, and I started laughing. By this time I had my pipe going and I was smoking it, like Margaret, with a little squint in my eyes. Me and Nector Kashpaw were looking at each other, both laughing, blowing pretend smoke from our little black pipes.

I would grow to love that boy. I would get into trouble because of that boy. He would get into much worse trouble because of me. On the bus ride down, going south like the wild geese, we sat close, smelling the alien stink of burning gas, and each other, unwashed, washed, in fear. We ate food I would come to know — the strange, delicate, delicious cheese sandwiches on white flour bread and the toad-skin pickles, sweet and crunchy, fished from a huge gray crockery jar, and the fat olives with the pits. I had never eaten these big fleshy green seeds. Tears filled my eyes at the taste of them. I started to cry in earnest, unstoppable, because of the evil taste of this thing they called olive.

Nector turned to another boy and I was alone. Once I was alone it continued, the crying, for which I had no shame or remedy. It was a simple weeping in which the tears came up and flowered over. It wasn’t painful and it wasn’t unpleasant, this crying, it just was. It just was and it just was, I said once I became an adult woman known for never shedding tears. No, I never cried, not in love or in childbirth, not at death and not over any particular want or loss or piece of bad fortune. My tears had simply run out on that ride down to the school. That’s when I came to know that to be left, sent off, abandoned, was not of the moment, but a black ditch to the side of the road of your life, a sudden washout, a pothole that went down to China.

That’s what the kids did when they saw the globe of the world and put their fingers on either side and the teacher told them theoretically it is possible to dig to China. They started a big hole behind the girls’ dorm, in the sandy spot where water flushed down off the tall roof, out of the square metal drainpipe. They used their tin cups to dig. They got the hole down and then said, Let’s throw Lulu in! Then the matron came out ringing the big brass handbell and hollering little kids, little kids, and they all jumped away like rabbits and I was left in that hole.

It was cool, it was autumn by then, but I was wearing a jacket and the hole was warm. I was out of the wind. After I realized the others were not coming back, I tried once to pull myself out. But the top of the hole was crumbly and the collapse of sand scared me. So I dusted myself and sat, knees drawn to my chest, in the bottom of the hole.

Now I was glad for the ugly, big, brown-plaid wool skirt they gave me. Too long, it covered my ankles when I curled up tight. And the jacket was good, too, with its big raw wood buttons. It was quilted on the inside with a smooth fabric that felt slippery, but warm when I held myself close. I held my arms by the elbows and looked up from the bottom of the hole. Soon it got dark, then it was night. Maybe some of the big girls balled up their coats and put them in my bed so the matron would be fooled, so they would not get in trouble for throwing me down the hole. I was not afraid. I didn’t care. That’s how I survived, by not caring. I tucked my head into my collar like a bird, and went to sleep.

Then woke because the moon had stopped right above me. It was caught on the peaked corner of the dormitory roof and it was nearly full.

“Aaniin, nokomis,” I said and I felt the kindness of the moon shine down on me as I went back to sleep.

That was the first night.

That day was the first day.

I heard them running, yelling, herded off to the dining hall. Then I heard them from farther off calling again. Their sounds faded and the sounds of morning were above me. I had to pee. But I didn’t and then I forgot because I heard the buses. My heart thumped with shock. Then regret sliced me. I realized that I was missing a trip that the whole school was taking. It was a trip given to the children by a lady — a very big, doll-haired, red-cheeked lady with red fingernails and pointed red lips who spoke to us in the classroom — a trip to a circus. I knew all about the circus. Nanapush had once seen the circus. Ever after he had loved to describe its wonders. There was an animal called the anamibiigokoosh, the underwater pig. There was a horse with a long neck, genwaabiigigwed, which I had seen on the alphabet. The giraffe. There was a striped horse and little peoplelike creatures who constantly searched one another for lice. Nanapush had seen great brown panthers jump through circles of flame, and watched a woman launch through the air like a flying squirrel. Down in the hole, I went into a low grief. I had a black dejection, I would say when grown up, of my worst feelings. And it would mean I was again lost in my spirit, the way I’d felt in the bottom of the hole knowing I’d miss the circus, which was worse, much worse than wondering if I would ever get out.

My feet went numb from their old freezing, and my legs prickled. I danced up and down in the hole until I felt all warm again. That was how I made the time go, when my legs numbed. Or I sang. “Our Country” and other songs that I had just learned in school. Nanapush’s love songs and hunting songs. Songs that went with my mother’s name. My own songs. Then songs I’d made up for my dolls. Each of my dolls had their own names and songs. I knew every little thing about my dolls and their lives and I felt stricken all over again because I didn’t know where my dolls were now. Had my mother kept them? Did Nanapush have them? I missed my dolls more than I could allow myself, ever, to miss my mother. The sun passed over, briefly flinging down a pour of radiance, and then moving on.

The buses returned very late in the evening and the children were sent straight into the dorm. All of a sudden I heard a voice. “Lulu!” A cloud on a stick dropped into my lap. I was so shocked I couldn’t move. I touched the thing — pale, raspberry scented, sticky sweet, a balled-up spiderweb. I touched my fingers to my tongue, then I ate the stuff. After I ate every bit of it, a strange buzzing started just behind my eyes, as though my brain were a hive of bees. My thoughts kept flying in and out, impossible to catch. I danced, my feet moving in a quick floating flat-footed skip, and I sang a song to keep myself company and then curled up when I was warm.

I slept, woke. The moon was caught in a mist of secret spiderwebs, of circus floss, cottony and quick to vanish. The moon blazed at me, as though it were thirsty too.

“Ingitizima,” I softly said, words I had heard in prayers, I am pitiful.

“You are pitiful,” I heard in answer. “I am sorry for you.”

There was someone in the hole with me.

That someone turned out to be a spirit who kept me company from then on out. There were those who wondered at me, all through my life, starting when I stayed at the school and refused my mother, who came back rich. People thought Lulu Lamartine was heartless as a cat. And like a cat, too, in my mind’s limber strength and survival toughness. People thought I was too bold. Many resented how I had no fear, not enough to cause me any sensible concern for what people thought. I just did what I pleased. Married men and left them. Had my babies and brought them up. Raised my own money through my thrifty profit. Showed my breasts rude and shockingly. Wore my skirts tight and my heels tall. Wore makeup paint. True, I had land. True, I was clever leasing it. True, I was even more clever in the use to which I put my talents with men. But it was that spirit who taught me that to laugh or to cry was all the same, and who gave me the strength to spit pain in the face and love the world in joy. I sat with that spirit, who would never leave me. And the spirit said, Look around you and if you think all there is to see is a rotten hole, look again and see the color and the beauty and the constant life of the earth. I stayed two nights and two days in the hole before a big girl broke free of the line and sneaked out back to pull me out.

That big girl was a Pentecost. Rose Pentecost. Named as a family by a priest in the last century who tired of translating and just added feast days to the roll of names that year.

I got into the line with the other children and walked in to the morning meal. No dirt was on my face and no dirt was in my hair. I was neat and clean. My eyes were clear. I never told on the big girls, for which I was then a hero. None of the matrons ever knew. So even then, I did not get in trouble.

But later. Trouble? I ate trouble. I was trouble.

Being trouble started when they told me that I was not going home for the summer. Staying there, with the matrons, at school. At first I tipped sideways, as though the words pushed me over. Not going home was as much a shock as coming there in the first place. Not seeing my mother, my grandpa and grandma, the Yellowboy girls and the Anongs and again my mother — especially my mother, because in the beginning my skin ached for my mother’s touch and my ears kept straining. I hadn’t decided to hate her yet. And not that my mother exactly said, I’ll be back to get you, but I knew she would. When they told me I would not be going home, I staggered in a red zigzag and then sat by the bridal wreath bush outside the school office, there on the grass.

It was out-of-bounds to sit there, it was an offense. That’s why I did. I sat there for a while and then slowly edged myself into the shadows of the thousands of tiny leaves. Through the shadows, then, and farther back, until I was in the curved space between the bush and the wall of the building. A clean space completely hidden, a place where I could look into the crossed and baffled twigs, the timid green leaves, the sprays of white flowers, the petals, clouds of frail dots.

The idea first came to me when I boarded the school bus to visit the local school where we would do our yearly goodwill performance. I danced shawl and traditional. Rose Pentecost performed “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language. I had got stuck on Rose after Rose came and got me. I learned “The Lord’s Prayer” in trade sign language, because Rose Pentecost always got so much applause. I thought I would like to have that, and to stand up there alone and silent, only my hands moving, my hand and arm making the upward spiral, so graceful, to indicate the spirit. I was thinking about that, and at the same time walking up the school bus steps when I dropped the little fan that I carried, on loan from our dance advisor. The fan flicked under the bus, blown by wind, and I lay flat on my stomach to get it. That was when I happened to look sideways and up, under the school bus, and noticed the little shelf.

The thin, black, metal shelf hung down from the body of the engine to support three exhaust pipes. It was just the right size for a child, an intriguing little place. I scrambled backward with the fan, a beautiful and cunning fan made of a prairie chicken tail. I caught up with the other dancers and I did my dance piece, but all the time that I danced, I was busy thinking something I could not define, something that had to do with the shelf and pipes underneath the bus.

It was easy for me. When they loaded the buses two weeks later for the summer trip home, I slipped around back. I rolled into the shadow of the undercarriage, crawled under the body of the engine, onto the shelf with the pipes, and spread myself out flat on my stomach. I grasped hold of the brackets like handles, as though I were on a sled. Only I couldn’t steer, of course. I would go where we were bound to go, flat and straight over the road until we stopped at Little No Horse, home.

Bubbles of excitement welled up in me as all around the motor came to life and as with slow grandeur the bus began to move. The shelf was more perilous than it looked. As the bus gathered speed I found I had to hold tightly to the brackets. Still, using one arm and then the other, I could rest. And the gas-smelling air was flushed out behind the bus so I wasn’t breathing it. I had worried about that, my only worry brought on by Rose’s declaring that gasoline was squeezed from dead bodies and you’d die if you breathed it. The air was fresh, then, still with a raw spring bite, and cold. My teeth chattered at first but then the pipe under me, the middle pipe, grew warm. It ran straight down the center of me, warming me, burning me, although that would be in the end a complete surprise.

All through my life, to the mystery of my devoutest lovers, I have borne that central scorch mark — a thin stripe of gold lighter than my skin, a line evenly dividing me, running between my breasts and vanishing between my legs. And that surprised me, for although the pipe did indeed grow uncomfortably hot, it did not seem to burn me, certainly not to the point where it would leave a mark. Perhaps the cold air that kept on flowing all around me cooled my awareness, or perhaps it was the fear. One hour, then two hours, passed. When they stopped to fuel up, I wrung my agonized hands and arms. Got the blood moving. With the pavement a sweeping blur just inches beneath me, and the certain knowledge that if I let go or fell asleep I would die, I managed to stay awake. But that was the hardest thing of all. My brain wanted to go to sleep. The heavy movement was soothing, the vast unintelligible roar, the workings of the metal bowels.

At my birth, a bear had visited. I came from the lake. Nobody knew who my father was or nobody would tell. I am the last of the last of the Pillagers, Lulu, so how could I not go home?

At the next stop, I was able to rest. All I did was breathe hard and stare into myself, rubbing my arms. The other children were eating their cheese sandwiches. I was so keen with hunger that I could smell them in a park beside the gravel parking lot, having a picnic. I was in a blur of pain and sleepiness, and I wanted to be with them — just a child munching on a sandwich, bound home. To comfort myself I imagined Margaret and Nanapush. My eyes closed. When I opened them, I was staring into the startled face of the bus driver, checking the tires, who thought at first that I was dead.

They sent me back.

I sat in the sheriff’s office for hours, wrapped in a blanket, while Mr. Eaglestaff drove from the school to fetch me. He was the school’s head janitor, and he really didn’t care what I did. That was one good break. They issued me the longest, ugliest worst dress on earth — the punishment dress — a solid block of green reaching to my ankles, shapeless and embarrassing. Then I went to work scrubbing the sidewalks that led around the campus. Down on my knees, I washed section after section of concrete. Day after day that summer, I scrubbed the cement in watery circles. Kneeling above, staring into the swirls, I sometimes saw the face of my mother in the evaporating water. When I did, I scrubbed harder, twice as hard, erasing her.

One day as I paused there on my knees, brush in my hands, I looked up at the sky. I had the sense, though there were no clouds, that something bigger than a cloud passed over and through me, a huge thing that trailed a terrible breath-stopping sorrow. There was no one to disturb me. The campus was entirely still. I didn’t cry, of course, in spite of the pain. It was at that moment that my love for my mother left me, simply flowed out of me like a heavy cloud. Useless. Then gone. I stood up. I was so much lighter without this useless love. And this scrubbing was tiring. I marched back to the matron and said, You don’t have to punish me anymore because I learnt my lesson and I won’t run away again.

Mrs. Houle was matroning and she herself was partly Indian so she had pity. “Let’s burn up that damn green dress,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed with pleasure as she rummaged through the school clothes until she found one of black-and-white check so smart it looked like a town girl would wear it. I put it on, brushed out my hair down my back, and started work first on “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language and then the Twenty-third Psalm. I beaded my own makazinan and they gave me a dress of fawnskin as soft as the softest fabric. I wore an eagle feather and an underskirt and I got to go everywhere with Rose for those next few years. Us two perfectly synchronized our movements and really looked good in a spotlight.

One day, my mother arrived wearing eye paint and lipstick, white woman’s clothes: a small blue hat, a suit with blue stripes, a square black handbag, leather shoes that matched. She was there to retrieve me, who would not be retrieved. She disappeared into the school building. Walked to the office door. The principal, looking at her and the car she drove, parked right outside his window, sent a little girl to fetch me immediately.

Since I behaved both the best and the worst of anyone else, I didn’t know whether I was in for a prize or for punishment when I was called to the office. Nobody told me. But the woman in the office wore those clothes and had that high, white-woman attitude. Maybe my mother was a charitable person, like the lady who sent us to the circus. I had no warning at all of my mother’s presence, except the scent of smoked moosehide, just a faint and elusive whiff in the corridor, which made me pause, and then I was in the principal’s office. He beamed as he readied himself to witness a tenderhearted reunion.

Which did not take place.

The minute I saw my mother, or rather, absorbed her, took in the hat, the shoes, the tightly fitted beautiful suit, too exquisite to be worn, really, that perfect and that simple, that achingly sharp cut, the minute I took in the scent of smoked moosehide under Paris perfume, the tiny swatch of veiling that hung down off her hat, the immaculate, casual handbag and gloves, and again the shoes, tight calfskin and buttoned to one side, a blue to match the blue in the thinnest stripes of the suit, the minute I saw all of this and saw that the face beneath the hat was indeed my mother’s face I took it all in and spat it out.

“She ain’t my mother,” I said, flat as bannock.

I whirled and ran away down to the spot at the powerhouse where the steam pipes blasted exhausted moist air down into the ground. The grass stayed green all year-round there. I sat tight for about an hour before I thought, What are they going to do about it? If they believed me, and did not send me back with my mother, I’d proved my point, and if they did send me back with her I’d proved my point, too. Either way, I had done what I had to do. So I went back to the dorm and got together with my friends for kitchen duty and I didn’t say a word about my mother’s visit.

Nor would I, when my mother came again and again, meeting with the principal and meeting with me. Alone in the room together, I could feel my mother’s strength pull upon me like a sucking wind. I could feel my clothes flutter. Flaps of yearning prayer cloth. Strings of hair tugged and twined from my braids and snaked into the space between us. I could barely breathe. I took in my mother’s air. I couldn’t look at her. I had to focus all the hatred inside me upon my mother’s feet, slim in their fancy heeled shoes, in order to keep any sense of myself at all. I had to call on my spirit, the one who came from the earth, to strengthen me whenever I had to meet my mother’s gaze.

She ain’t my mother.

You ain’t my mother.

I allowed myself four words, exactly four and those only. As long as I stuck with them, I was safe enough. Six visits into the year, the principal took the paperwork and shoved it at Fleur.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. “Whatever the reason for her denying it, she is indeed your daughter. You may withdraw her.”

Now he was talking about me like a library book.

I closed myself tight as a book then.

“No.” My mother’s voice. “I won’t take her unless she wants to go. I won’t force her, she’s too much like me. Daga,” she said for the thousandth time, in a voice of great longing, “daga, n’dawnis, ombe. Gizhawenimin. Izhadaa.”

I felt the pull very strong then, it almost pulled me over, and I knew if she had just taken my hand I would have gone with her then. But she couldn’t, and I righted myself, walked out of the room. Outside, alone in the hallway, I fell on my knees as if shot. Then I picked myself up.

So it was, always, with me after that. You can go up to a certain point with me and I with you, giving, giving, but then the line might snap. My loving goes very deep unless you cross that boundary, do to me what I will not tolerate. I am not an all-forgiving person, not Lulu. Even when Nanapush and then Father Damien went to work on me shortly after, in regard to my mother, they had no success. The line had snapped. I had no interest. Even if I love you, the way I am, Father Jude, if you hurt me, I’ll turn cold on you. Turn away like a cat.