The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

16. FATHER DAMIEN

1921–1933

Word by word, I trudge closer, stumbling through the underbrush of sound and meaning. Agnes bit the end of her scarred fountain pen, switched back to English, As I understand the place of the noun in the Ojibwe mind, it is unprejudiced by gender distinctions. That is some relief. Yet there occurs something more mysterious. Alive or dead. Each thing is either animate or inanimate, which would at first seem remarkably simple and sensible, for in the western mind the quality of aliveness or deadness seems easy to discern. Not so. For the Anishinaabeg, the quality of animation from within, or harboring spirit, is not limited to animals and plants. Stones, asiniig, are animate, and kettles, akikoog, alive as well. In the sweat lodge, red-hot stones glowed with a power upon which she’d once gazed full on and scorched her eyeballs. For a day or two, everything she saw was surrounded by a halo of warm frost. Amid the protocols of language, there is room for individual preference, too. Some old men believe their pants are animate. Nanapush had sometimes chastised his baggy trousers.

Perhaps it is fortunate after all, she wrote, that Ojibwemowin is a language lean in objects. That leaves its bewildering wealth to reside in the storm of verbs and verb forms, which, heaven help us, require the literal extension of divine assistance for the novice speaker to comprehend.

Agnes set aside her carefully kept pen. Most often she cleaned it with a toothpick and alcohol before retiring it, but tonight she was agitated with thoughts and sensations. The little cabin was too small a container. Outside, the strong cold air of Gashkadino-giizis, the freezing moon, lay still as iron on the ground. The reservation was suspended in its grip, snowless and icily tranquil. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars. She took up her pen once more and composed, instead of the rest of her article, a letter.

My Lord Bishop,

I am writing to inquire, on rather a long shot, whether you have any knowledge of a woman in your diocese who is widely rumored to have moved to Minneapolis. Although she is a woman yet adhering to the non-Catholic ways of her people, she has been in close contact with members of our mission here at Little No Horse. Fleur Pillager is her name. Perhaps one of your mission priests, someone running a charitable clothing dispensary for the indigent or perhaps providing free bread and soup, has knowledge of her whereabouts.

If so, we would be most glad for the information, as I am anxious to tell her news of her daughter.

Father Damien Modeste

Soon there arrived an answer.

Dear Father Damien Modeste,

It was with great interest I received your letter, and I am happy to report to you that I do have knowledge of a woman by the (former) name of Fleur Pillager. She is, however, anything but in want of either bread or soup. I myself performed a marriage ceremony between this woman of our soil’s natal blood, and a prominent member of our community (whose marriage was annulled on grounds of the wife’s insanity resulting in lack of consummation). Having entered the Mount Curve Avenue household as a domestic, Mrs. John James Mauser is currently presiding over household affairs at that same address and she is received, not without some ironic curiosity, in the highest society here. She is known for her good works among the people of her background in Minneapolis, who roam the streets.

I hope this information serves your purpose and helps you in your quest.

Every month or so, after his first letter, Father Damien wrote to Fleur, or, it would be more accurate to say, he cast a letter to the winds in her direction. She could not read the letters but must finally have got someone to translate them for her. At long length, a package of red cloth arrived with her Mount Curve return address embossed on the box. Gorgeous red cloth. Brocade. Obviously meant for a priestly robe. No writing to accompany it, and only, as the years went on, that one package. Similarly, Margaret and Nanapush received goods Fleur shipped: blankets, a great cast-iron stove with blue enamel doors, crates of oranges, a fat doll with golden hair and eyes that shut, bags of hard candy, more cloth, tobacco. And money. She certainly had money. Still, they heard nothing from her, no word, not even when Nector borrowed Father Damien’s fountain pen and paper and wrote her to say that Lulu was home.

All they heard of Fleur was from newspaper clippings sent by city relatives. Fleur ate with so-and-so. Visited so-and-so. Motored to Wayzata. Motored to the banks of the St. Croix River. Picnicked. Vacationed. Bore a child. All they saw of her were three or four printed photographs, her figure slim and unrecognizably dressed, a round hat shading her face. Her hair was long again, held up in a chignon in one photograph. In another, she wore a slender, white, scandalous, gravity-defying gown. Next to her, and everyone puzzled about him, her husband stood. He was dressed to match her — formal, complete — every detail of his getup observable and described in print too, right down to the cuff links. Gold nuggets. John James Mauser had invested in the Black Hills gold that Custer coveted and died in an attempt to secure. His face was taut, strained, soulful. Even in that grainy society-page photograph, it was quite clear that Fleur’s husband was different from the jowled and coarse-whiskered bankers in whose company he smoked. Of course, he had to be in order to fall in love with such a dangerous woman. The photograph had caught him midglance. He looked sideways at her. She was poised in the white gown, standing before a dance floor as though she’d alighted and folded her feathers. She gazed upon the array of St. Paul society with an eagle’s unconscious ferocity. Her husband’s look held something any man anywhere could understand, or any woman, or for that matter any priest.

He would kill for her, thought Agnes, the poor man suffers a wrenching passion. When she witnessed the insanity of love, Agnes made upon her breast the sign of the cross, the emblem to her of protection and pity. Thoughts of Gregory or Berndt were usually acceptable features of her history now, yet there were other times, in her dreams, when old feelings assailed her with a sudden and crippling sickness of emotion.

The moon vanished and retrieved itself. Vanished again. In those years, a great want descended upon the nation, and the Ojibwe were no longer the only vagrant and hollow-eyed beggars on the plains. There were others. Farmers. Those who had stolen and plowed the earth were upended by the earth, buried in dust. Yet in the scrap of reservation, the lake remained, the woods, the poor cabins with no more than a streak of grease to wipe across the bread. Winter did in the old people and the young died of rotted lungs. Most people forgot about Fleur, or gave her up to the city. But of course there came a day, it was inevitable, when Fleur finished with the man in the beautiful tuxedo, and returned.

Spring brought her to the reservation in a tumult of wild birdsong. Agnes sensed it the way an animal knows low pressure in its bones. There was a spring storm approaching. A dark cloud. Behind it, a full and aching, female, swollen, hungry moon. Sure enough, it was Fleur. Not only that, but as though to present an opposing force, Pauline Puyat was sent back as well from Argus and the exhausted community where she had finally professed her permanent vows and become Sister Leopolda.

Father Damien kept to his breviary, tried to attend to his daily office and his predictable rounds. But he could feel the wary energy of people at Mass. Fleur’s return, and the Puyat’s, were the subject of tense whispers. In the watery weight of air and the burgeoning light, people talked.

FLEUR’S CHILDREN

At first, no one thought that the boy Fleur brought back to the reservation could possibly be her son. He was so white, so soft, so strange. But then, said the old women, in the land of the chimookomanag she’d probably forgotten all the things that a pregnant Anishinaabekwe must do — for instance, never to roll over in her sleep. Had she twisted the boy up inside of her somehow? And when it was born, did the men of the father’s chimookoman dodem make loud noises to frighten off evil and give the boy courage? It did not appear so, nor did the women think Fleur had kept him long enough in the tikinagan — not that there was anything visibly crooked about him. Yet he did not look straight, either, so perhaps the crookedness came from the inside. Had she remembered to rub him with bear grease? with goose oil? to bathe him in strong cedar tea? Had she sung the old songs to him before and after he was born and had she done the right thing and introduced him to the drum? They doubted it. Some even came and whispered to Father Damien. It was the flesh of the boy — too pale and soft, like risen dough, that upset them. And the eyes. Sometimes blue, sometimes black. As if his whole being could not make up its mind, which gave them the answer, at last, to what was wrong.

They had seen it before in a child whose indis was lost, or even worse, thrown away. Maybe by a nurse in the chimookoman hospital. Maybe the father, who did not keep Anishinaabe ways. For the boy seemed both clever and foolish, huge and weak. Had Fleur dried the boy’s birth cord in tobacco, then wrapped it in sage, and sewn it into a bag made of fine skin? If not, the boy would be hunting for it ever after. And he did appear to be looking too hard at everything, the people thought, maybe searching, but with such a quiet oddness that it truly seemed to them he must have lost the center of himself. Anyway, who knew if she was ever a good mother, seeing her own daughter would not speak to her anymore? Fleur didn’t treat her son with affection, never set her hand upon his hair, never even told his name to anyone. Perhaps he didn’t have one. Nameless, then, the boy trundled after her, begging, always, for sweets. More sweets. They called him Sweets for a time, and then someone looked into his eyes. That name was dropped.

Of course, from the newspaper record, his origin was known. Here was the son she had borne with John James Mauser. This was the son of the ravenous man in the tuxedo suit, the one who had stolen her land. The truth came clear. Upon that Mauser, it appeared she had taken her revenge, an idea. This son she brought home was the visible form of that revenge. So was he, or was he not, human? Was he then not something concocted of a bad form of medicine, or at the least, her purpose gone wrong?

The mother and son went back to their land and camped there, even though it was a place nobody liked to go. She put on men’s overalls and tied her hair back, bought an ax and a few other tools, then the two started building out by the ruined shores of Matchimanito. Some said she returned her parents’ bones to the ground. Dodem markers soon appeared, thrust upside down into softened earth. If so, there were still more reasons to avoid the place. More ghosts. A reunion of the dead.

As for the great trees, over which Fleur’s force was narrowed, then stilled, they were gone forever. But although the son and mother could not bring back the trees which, quarter sawn and polished with beeswax, composed the stylish foyer of the grand house Mauser built on a tranquil ridge in Minneapolis, the peace of which Fleur destroyed, there were other trees. Fresh green saplings had grown in Fleur’s absence. Kind trees, popple trees, flourished on her land, enough for her to construct a neat cabin of poles and mud. Once she was living in her new popple-pole house, she sought out her daughter Lulu once again. But in her adamant refusal of her mother, the girl would not change.

As soon as he knew Fleur was there and settled in her cabin, Father Damien walked out to Matchimanito. The old ladies constructed invisible webs of signs of crosses when they saw Fleur passing near, but Father Damien felt simple eagerness to see her, friend of his first years, and he walked the grown-over paths eagerly. That first visit, as though she’d taken on some city ways, Fleur was surprisingly talkative. It was only once he’d gone that Father Damien realized she’d told him nothing. City ways again. After that, she grew increasingly quiet and the boy, tanned and suddenly fond of daily fishing and hunting, stomped in and out of the house in silent concentration. Father Damien found the quietness of Fleur reassuring, not threatening or even mysterious. Often, they sat in silence and considered that period of absence of talk a good visit.

Fleur was usually waiting when Father Damien arrived, for he had never learned to walk with any degree of discretion. Sticks snapped beneath his heels and he cheerfully blundered this way and that, making a zigzag harvest of berries or mushrooms along the way. He always showed up with something: once a tremendous fluted oyster bracket, tender and fluttering, pulled off a tree; another time a dead bird of a brilliant and iridescent blue so intense the color caused tears to start into his eyes.

As he gave the bird to Fleur, he was surprised to experience the sudden sensation that he was traveling swiftly through the air. The blue of its feathers seemed to span the spectrum of emotion. Fleur regarded the bird with her usual calm, though her eyes grew uncommonly gentle. He brought her hazelnuts, ears of fresh corn, old army blankets and heavy coats to piece into quilts. He brought her strings of cut-glass beads, sewing needles, tins of good tobacco. Fleur accepted these offerings with an artless pleasure. They were little enough, thought Father Damien, considering that he couldn’t help her to obtain Lulu. The girl, now a young woman, was stubborn as a rock.

That day, Fleur took her beading out and worked in the sun while Father Damien worried the concept of a word, jotting notes on a tiny pad of paper, asking her for confirmation. Suddenly, he stopped what he was doing and looked at her, watched her as though from far away, thought about her life and their connection. She had a fierce intelligence and nothing slipped by her, so he accepted that she’d known his secret from the beginning, and it hadn’t mattered. Not because she was so tolerant, but because certain details of other people’s personhood were not worth her notice. She simply didn’t care. Nor did she care about other things people usually found essential. The good opinion of friends and family were useless — she had none and lived with a son whose character would not have relieved loneliness. Or loneliness itself — if she ever did experience such a thing, and Damien was quite sure that she did not — she made no mention of it, even where Lulu was concerned. She never said she missed her daughter, she never asked where Lulu was, she did not even say Lulu’s name. And yet, there was no doubt she loved Lulu and yearned after her, for he knew that many times Fleur had tried to see her.

Before Father Damien left, she set a pair of beadworked makazinan into his hands. They were lined with the softest rabbit fur, the uppers were of a beautiful smoked hide. The flowers were worked of the finest grade of beads and flawlessly put together — except for the tiny black bead on the edge, the spirit mistake done on purpose so as to allow any bad spirits that may have been trapped in the foolishly arrogant perfection of the work itself a chance to escape. There was no question for whom these makazinan were intended, and Damien took them with a heavyhearted smile.

The gift was evidence of the bewilderment in Fleur’s mind, the confusion. She did not understand the reflected substance of her own revenge in her daughter. It was up to Father Damien to try to explain. But what can be explained when the stone meets the stone, when the earth mixes, when water flows into water? You are alike, he wanted to say, alike in your stubbornness. One will not ask forgiveness and the other will not forgive. What use is that? You sent Lulu to the government school and Lulu will never forget.

“The best thing to do is ask Nanapush to talk to your daughter, ask him to lay it out plainly. That is the only way.”

Fleur raised her eyes to Damien in a moment of unusual openness, and he gazed into their reflecting depth with an ease that he’d never known. Her sharply cut eyelids, so fine and enigmatic, were only enhanced by the dark upward sweep of two lines that had appeared in her age. Her skin was still perfect, taut, of a gold so deep it seemed the tawny cover of a fabulous metal. And her straight nose, the nostrils so artfully flared, and the charged symmetry of her mouth, all were unchanged. If anything, deepened. Her beauty had ceased to intimidate Father Damien, though some had forgotten and were awed by it all over. When she’d first appeared on reservation ground, wearing her immaculate and tailored white suit, she’d been taken for a film star or singer strangely dropped from the new movie screen in Hoopdance. Now, clearly, the suit, hat, and heels stored carefully away, the makeup washed off, the fancy car she’d arrived in sold, here was Fleur again — her fate to chase one thing to lose another. She had regained her land, but lost her daughter.

And the son, what of the son, Damien wondered.

“He will stay with me,” Fleur said.

But Damien could tell already that the boy would not.

LULU’S CANARY YELLOW

It was Agnes’s practice to try to control her irritations, to monitor her horror of certain dishes made by Mary Kashpaw — the strangely acidic pea soup, the leather venison, the weird maltish cake and soapy oatmeal. But sometimes she couldn’t help exclaiming over the strangeness of the food, or recooking it herself. At those times, Mary Kashpaw glowered and stomped off, yet she herself did not partake of the loving and sometimes nearly lethal feasts that she prepared for Father Damien. Sister Hildegarde’s picayune frugalities also upset Agnes. Why must she remember to collect old scraps of soap in a sock? As for socks, would the priest ever have a new pair, smooth, without the bumps and ridges of impatient darning? And then, there were more serious, heart-sinking times she believed that the black dog’s bargain was real. At those times, she could not help her pettiness from surfacing. Not only was Lulu’s practiced avoidance of her mother tiresome, but Agnes couldn’t help wishing that, as long as she had sacrificed her soul and was facing eternity in hell, Lulu would behave with a modicum of thoughtful decency.

It’s not that I’m a prude, thought Agnes, I can’t have changed that much, it’s just that Lulu is so careless with her charm, so bold. Can any good come of it? True enough, Lulu became a noticeably sensual young woman. She curled her hair with a permanent wave. She laughed with an irresistible intensity of mirth, shot jokes at people, tempted, and rejected. Returning from an off-reservation town, where she had paid a white woman to poison her hair, as the old ladies said, she was the talk in the church vestibule. People hushed when she entered, her curls tightly wound, glossy, rippling along the side of her head. After Mass, she was the centerpiece of a crowd of women who poked at the spirals, wondered, pinched their noses at the chemical smell. She wore face paint, too, and carried a little brown pocketbook. Her shoes were shocking. Toeless, heels like railroad spikes. Her shoes caused men to lick their lips and women to marvel at the odd, sharp tracks she left.

Her transformation presented Agnes with a small clutch of embarrassing resentments. Seeing the young woman’s tight-skirted sashay, she brooded on the distinct possibility of her soul’s entrapment all in order to save the very thing Lulu seemed intent on tarnishing. At last, she vowed to have a talk with Lulu.

“Bring her to the back of the church right after Mass tomorrow,” Father Damien directed Margaret one day.

The next morning, having fortified himself with Saint Augustine, who in his youth had stolen pears, who had gone to fleshpots of Carthage, Father Damien sat in back of the church, waiting. These last few pews, empty and quiet in the morning, were where Father Damien had many a long discussion with troubled members of the church. Saint Augustine, Nanabozho, whoever can hear me, give me a little help now, he prayed. The saint would have condemned the young girl’s self-display, and the notorious Nanabozho would have taken advantage of it. Such were Damien’s sources. His bedrock now was aggregate. The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books. Still, he was determined to help guide Lulu Nanapush. It was his duty to her mother, not to mention his old friend.

Just as he composed his purpose, Lulu entered and disarranged it. She wore a blouse of canary yellow that dazzled the eye. Her shoes had pieces cut from the sides and heels, and her skirt, though an appropriate length, was immodestly snug. She jingled a little memento bracelet on her wrist as she sat down beside Father Damien in the pew. Excitedly, she greeted him. He could feel immediately such a mild and innocent warmth that he was tempted to hug her as though she were a child. But she was most emphatically a woman, and lovely, so smiling and fresh that Father Damien’s irritations melted. Even with her lips stained the glossy purple of wild plums, she looked completely without guile. Father Damien took her hand and held her painted fingertips in his own.

“You have dipped your nails in the blood of the damned,” he sighed, hoping she could not tell that he admired the color.

“It’s called Happiness.”

From time to time, little things of this sort still pricked through the long years of Damien’s subterfuge. Even in his age, he was charmed by pure harmless feminine vanity. He knew immediately that she spoke of the color of the polish. He took hold of himself.

“Lulu, my child, that is only a label on a pot of lacquer. Happiness is more complex, as you know.”

Lulu nodded. The smile dropped abruptly off her face, and Father Damien now learned that this young woman he had known mainly as a child had inherited her mother’s lack of compromise, Margaret’s sharp sight, Nanapush’s unbiased curiosity, and perhaps his own natural sympathy.

“You are happy, I think,” Lulu said simply. “Without someone else.”

Her earnestness demanded that he truly consider an answer, not give her some pat ecclesiastic’s line. He put her fingers down gently and held his folded hands to his lips, as though praying.

“I have loved,” he said softly, “and yet the happiness of love is not the only thing. It is not even the most important thing. It is momentary, ungraspable, impermanent as the paint on your fingers, though I suppose the stuff is advertised as long-lasting.”

“Oh yes,” said Lulu, smiling sunnily again. “I think that I already know something about myself… it’s very sad.” She made an unconsciously flirtatious mockery of sorrow. “I am very bored with men. I get tired of them quickly. For a short time, I am insane, I can’t stop thinking about one or the other. And then, all of a sudden, I don’t want them around me. Just when I decide that I wish to do without him, any him, that one becomes most attached, Father Damien, and won’t leave!”

The color of her blouse, Father Damien thought, that blithe yellow, was the outward manifestation of the careless cheer and stubborn sensuousness of Lulu’s character. He immediately foresaw, indeed, exactly what came to pass in Lulu’s life. A series of passionate but inconclusive liaisons. Fatherless pregnancies. Children without support. He did not envision the number — eight sons, one daughter. Had he done so, he might have collapsed right there before her. Alarmed at what she told him, he turned practical. He had learned one truth in his work — there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.

“You need a profession,” he decided. “One that will support you here, for it appears you do not want to move to the Cities. And if you are as bored with men as you say, you will not marry one for long, no matter what the Church advises. You need an honorable profession,” he repeated. “What will it be?”

Partly as a consequence of Damien’s pragmatic approach, Lulu became a self-sufficient woman. Father Damien helped her from the beginning, so she didn’t falter. She survived the fires in her heart by using all of the skills she had developed — sewing, which she’d learned at the government boarding school, as well as knitting and beading, the making of gauntlets and makazinan, and feather bustles. She created quilts, dolls, vests, shirts. Sold eggs, bartered chickens, even horse-traded on occasion. As she could add and subtract quickly in her head, she left her children with a friend and worked for the trader’s market. A few pennies here, a dollar there. She leased out some land. Kept a cow and shot her own deer, dressed it efficiently just like her mother. Taught her boys to hunt, work in the fields, pick rags, bead and sew as well as she could. It was in fact a surprise she had any time for men at all. Where did she fit them in? people wondered. The old hens and dried-up roosters gossiped in the sun.

A short time with men went a long way with Lulu. She liked the thrill of not-having, became impatient with their daily presence, as she’d confessed. One hour here on the way to work, another well after dark in her private room, the boys arranged in the rest of the house on roll-aways and sound asleep. She collected and she discarded, she used and she tossed. So Father Damien’s weak attempt at counseling her succeeded only insofar as he was able to help her support the one real true romance of her life — her children, to whom she was devoted.

Father Damien’s talk with Lulu did yield one other good, perhaps, for Lulu was never herself scourged by the evils of drink. It was a subject they discussed, though Father Damien was not sure at the time how he had come out of their small debate.

He asked her, point-blank, if she imbibed. He spoke suddenly, and rather forcefully, hoping to catch her by surprise. She did look startled by his penetrating tone.

“Why, yes.” Half-ashamed, she glanced down at the wood grain of the pew.

“You mustn’t.”

“Why not?” She raised her graceful head, looked Father Damien in the eye with her bold and gleaming gaze. “Christ changed water into wine in Cana, at the wedding. He could have changed it into water or milk, something else. Is a taste of wine so bad, Father? You drink it every day…”

Father Damien opened his mouth to answer, but she went on.

“I’m not like some, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t drink any more wine than you yourself at the Eucharist. No more than a swallow, now and then a glass.”

Father Damien looked at her chastisingly. Still, she had a point.

“You cause talk,” the priest said softly to her. “You would sadden my friend, old Nanapush.”

“That’s what you think.”

She laughed, her voice a rushing sound of snow-melted water, of summer leaves in high wind. Her eyes sparked with a sweetly wicked glance.

“Nanapush hardly ever touches the bottle, it is true, but he gave me the money to buy these shoes. Remember when I was little, how I almost froze my feet off in a blizzard? He saved my feet with old-time medicine, and he likes me to show off the good work he did.”

She lifted her foot a little, rotated her ankle, wiggled her toes, in light stockings, through the open wedge.

“I suppose that I can’t argue,” said the priest grumpily. “I’m only thinking of your soul.”

Father Damien was thinking of his own soul, that was the truth of it. He resented anew the indifference she showed to her salvation, manufactured though it might be behind the scenes.

Lulu cast her eyes down. Her lashes were long and feathery. Realizing that she probably had no intention of taking his advice, Damien turned away from Lulu. Frustrated, intrigued, helpless with love for this young woman, he gazed steadfastly at Our Lady of the Serpents, whose hands were outstretched even as she balanced on a writhing snake and a slivered moon.

“Pray to her.” He pointed to the statue, but his voice was hoarse and a little desperate with the sympathy he felt for Lulu.

Those who clucked over Lulu were also fond of sighting the actual devil. One visit spawned others; there were periodic rashes of hysterical reports, each more creative than the next. The devil entered and possessed the body of a cow, which gave pitch-black milk. A hairball was found in that same barn. It contained a jagged tooth. The cow was heard, later, mumbling a curse. Every so often, the black dog made his rounds, barring the path of Mrs. Pentecost and her daughter as they walked to Holy Mass. A man in elegant dress sauntered through the woods, seducing women on the paths to church.

These eager visions broke Agnes’s patience. Ridiculous! Was she mad? Fevered? Overwrought? She examined the memory of the conversation with the dog who’d interrupted her meal, and wished she knew. Each night Agnes looked into the sky, for it comforted her to see the dancing of the northern lights, the spirits of the departed. Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed — the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.

Agnes also continued, every so often, to wake feverish and panicked. Where was God in all of this? Where was justice? Why did the devil reportedly put on flesh and walk among the people, while God remained silent, producing only the false miracles of Sister Leopolda, never deigning to speak again to Agnes personally, no matter how deep the darkness in which she waited?

One picture salvaged the dubious bargain. One scene from Lulu’s life.

1945

Lulu’s house was small, an old-fashioned pole and mud cabin with a tamped dirt floor. It had been Nanapush’s once, and Lulu had taken it over once she left the Morrissey whose child she was large with now. She lived on the money from the wild, mean chickens she raised. They scratched and complained in the yard, flew toward Agnes with menacing cries. She shooed them off, laughing, as she once had her own dominickers. Lulu’s older son hauled water up from the tiny lake behind the house. Then, though he could hardly lift an ax, he began to split wood.

“Go on in,” he pointed to the cabin. “My little brother’s in there.”

Agnes pushed open the door and there, before her, spinning in the dark air, the baby hovered. She stood motionless, astonished, gazing into the child’s brown eyes as the pecking chickens rushed in around his feet. The baby laughed at Agnes and held out his small, padded hands. His pale robe glowed, his face was all excited pleasure. Gently, Agnes touched him, found the harness that fit cunningly around his chest, fashioned from scraps of old leather. The child was attached by the harness to a rope that in turn was threaded through an iron ring set into the roof. The rope ran through the hook and down to a knothole in the door. When the door was opened, the child rose into the air, out of reach of the fierce, sharp-beaked chickens. When the chickens were thrown out and the door was closed, he played safely on the ground, tethered away from the hot stove.

Agnes swung the child. He laughed, kicked the air, touched his hands. She felt a rush of lightness. Peace. Her heart trembled and beat low. The glowing robe, the way the child hovered — an angel. She believed in the essential angelic nature of that tiny boy, even though the baby grew up and went to prison, even though Lulu saw so many sorrows, and even though Agnes continued to wake in the night overpowered by spiritual dryness. Often, when she suffered from an aridity of faith, one of her comforts was to hold fast to the picture of that laughing, swooping child.

LEOPOLDA’S LAST CONFESSION

Abruptly, without knocking, Sister Leopolda entered Father Damien’s cabin. “Sister Hildegarde Anne says that I must have your permission to wear a potato sack.”

Father Damien glared at her, disturbed, and consented with a flap of his hand. He did what he could to avoid the nun, and still she continued to creep up on him in his refuge. Her presence disturbed his equilibrium, forced a wary and combative stance he disliked maintaining. Even now, he suspected her visit contained some challenge and he went back to his work hoping to discourage her. But Sister Leopolda did not leave. Instead, she knelt with a creaking flourish and abruptly stated that she required absolution.

“Visit me in the confessional, as your sisters do.”

“Father, I cannot,” she said impatiently.

“Sister, you must.”

Father Damien stared at his desktop, toyed with his pen. Had she finally gotten around to it? Was she, at last, ready for this confession he had long avoided? He knew that Sister Leopolda waited to explain the meaning of the scars in her palms. He had seen those long ago. He didn’t want to hear their cause, any detail of it. What earthly good was it, now, and why thrust her ancient guilt his way? Because she could not bear it? Unlikely, after all these years. More probably, she wanted to force some knowledge upon him. To plague him with a morbid responsibility. For he did know. He stole a glance at those palms, and the spurs of the tinkered rosary raked into his mind. It had not been Mary Kashpaw, after all, who killed Napoleon. Beyond that, Father Damien wanted to hear nothing. Desperate not to receive her story, he turned away. He wanted to bless her and be done with it. But he had vowed that he would carry out his priestly duties to the very letter, so he set his forehead in the cup of his hands and gestured for her to speak, at which point, after an audibly muttered inner struggle, Leopolda began, with a bitter and oily enthusiasm.

I am told in my dreams I must atone for what I did and what you know I did, though at first I didn’t know it was him, for when I seized him and forced myself upon him, grew around him like the earth around a root, held him still, I believed he was the devil!

“Go on,” muttered Damien.

I strung the noose around his neck and counted each bead in my fingers as I tightened the link. The joyful and the sorrowful mysteries, Father Damien, and him pounding and thrashing under me and taking his good time choking so I went dizzy with the effort of holding him. God held those beads along with me, his strength the grip of lions. My fingers closed like hasps of iron, locked on the rosary, and wrenched and twisted the beads close about his neck until his face darkened and he lunged away. I hung on while he bucked and gagged and finally fell, his long tongue dragging down my thigh.

Father Damien squeezed out a low croak, waited, gathered all of his wits, and finally spoke to her softly. “You confess to the murder of Napoleon Morrissey.”

“I confess to strangling the devil in the shape of the man!”

Father Damien set his face harder in his hands, felt a fuzz of sleep overtaking his brain, a protective shield of drowsiness. He tried, though his thoughts were listless, to imagine what he should do with the nun kneeling to one side of him. His first duty was quite clear.

“You must offer yourself to the authorities. Your penance is to appear before the law.”

“Ah,” said Leopolda quite readily. “That I cannot do.”

“Explain please?” Damien’s head was heavy and his hands felt thick and cold. He spoke gently, buying time, wearily perturbed that he and not the sheriff should have this question set so baldly before him.

“If I am locked up for my crime, I will not be able to pursue my work among my people. I cannot serve God as well in jail.”

“You must go there anyway,” said Damien.

“That I cannot do,” the nun replied with sly regret.

Father Damien’s head began to pound with a loud pain.

“Do you sincerely repent of what you did?”

Sister Leopolda did not answer. Instead, she began to rock in agitation, and she laughed that low secret and uncanny jeer he’d first heard the day he said his first Mass on Little No Horse.

“I know,” she hissed. “You are considering how you can turn me in yourself. I wish to be absolved, and you will take my sin away! I know what you are. And if you banish me or write to the bishop, Sister Damien, I will write to him too.”

Slowly, with nightmarish calm, the priest turned toward the nun and regarded the starved and shrunken lips, caved cheeks, the monkeylike bared teeth. There was a ready poison in her deep-set eyes. She seemed very far away, to exist almost in another dimension from his own. How had she become this frightful creature? By what means? Had the murder, no matter how justified, worked on her over all these years like an inner caustic, burning away all human joy? The nun was such an awful spectacle of fascination that what she said, though threatening enough, failed to excite any degree of concern in the priest. He listened in a frozen trance.

“You love writing to the Pope,” she spat. “Well, I can write too. I have beautiful handwriting. I can write to the bishop.”

The nun pointed to her eyes, set a sharp bony finger on each cheekbone.

“You have the voice of a priest, true, but these eyes are not fooled! You are mannish, unwomanly, yet your poor neck is scrawny. Too chicken skinny for a man’s neck. It is obvious to me you wrap your chest. Apparent that you haven’t a man’s equipment, though that is useless anyway upon a priest. I am not as stupid as the others. I have waited outside your window after the ox, Mary Kashpaw, is snoring in the ironing shack. I’ve seen you undress.”

Momentarily, the words struck deep and Agnes went a furious red, embarrassed at the thought of Sister Leopolda peeping in. Her face bloomed hot, and she had to keep herself from patting her cheeks. But she rallied her dignity and decided that her only hope was to remain firmly within the boundaries of the deception.

“You flatter yourself.” With an actor’s skill, Agnes pretended to struggle with a manly ego. Craftily, she assumed an air of tragic dignity. “You are not as perceptive as you might imagine. True, I am not Herculean, but I am all the same a man. If you do not believe I was ordained and sealed as a priest and bound by the duties of my calling, why have you come to ask me for a priest’s absolution? What good would it do your soul to obtain the empty blessing of an impostor?”

The nun shrank back, narrowing her eyes until they were two dashes of black rage in her mask-pale face. Father Damien’s voice strengthened. He stood up in a sudden outrage manufactured to hide the shaking of his knees.

“Leave me! You’ll get no absolution here, murderess. Not until you turn yourself in to the tribal police!”

She crept away. As soon as she was able to bolt the door behind Sister Leopolda, Agnes collapsed into her chair. She made her mind up immediately to purchase a thicker gauge of material for her curtains and never to let the moonlight fall through.

Eternal Father,

The bond sin creates between the absolver and the confessing sinner — I have no guidance as to its nature or its quality. Having recently learned that the perpetrator of a pardonless crime is a member of my sisterly flock, I am left with the responsibility to contain the strangeness — this knowledge is a form of violence. I exist with this forlorn sense of horror. Forlorn because it is my solo cup. None may drink it for me, none may spill it from my grasp.

Except you.

Modeste

The next day, Damien unhooked from its nail deep in his closet the rosary found by George Aisance. He carried the rosary over to the convent. Knowing that Leopolda had responsibility for cooking that day, he went to the kitchen. He held out the rosary, hoping to drop it into her hands, to get rid of the dirt of the confession and the tired old killing. It felt as though he were carrying drops of bad blood — acid, lethal, black. He was chagrined not to find Leopolda. Disappointed to the bone, Damien took the rosary back into his cabin and replaced it on the nail. He knew he would not have the impetus to get rid of it again.

So Agnes could not jettison the poisonous ring of stones. And the threat of exposure nagged her. She could not bear the prospect of Damien’s uncovering. The word happiness, a nail color, poked at her now. For Agnes realized that her happiness was composed of a thousand ordinary satisfactions built up over a life lived according to what might seem to others modest and monotonous routines. As a priest, as a man, after the long penitential years and the challenges of her own temperament, she was at ease. As Father Damien, she had blessed unions, baptized, anointed, and absolved friends in the parish. In turn, Father Damien had been converted by the good Nanapush. He now practiced a mixture of faiths, kept the pipe, translated hymns or brought in the drum, and had placed in the nave of his church a statue of the Virgin — solid, dark, kind eyed, hideous, and gentle. He was welcome where no other white man was allowed. It was apparent, to the people, that the priest was in the service of the spirit of goodness, wherever that might evidence itself. Were he exposed, were he known to have fooled, deceived, and hidden his most fundamental nature, all would be lost. Married couples Father Damien had joined would be sundered. Babies unbaptized and exposed to the dark powers. Deaths unblessed and sins again weighing on the poor sinners. And, if in spite of her own fears, Sister Leopolda should expose him and cause him to leave, there would surely be no one who would listen to the sins of the Anishinaabeg and forgive them — at least not as a mirthless trained puppet of the dogma, but in the spirit of the ridiculous and wise Nanabozho. Anxious, unnerved, Father Damien played his music, begging for the mercy of sleep. Or he wrote, late into the night, feverish, cramped letters and reports.

Your Holiness, etc.

According to your faithless servant Voltaire, Louis XIV and de Brinvilliers went to confession as soon as they had committed a great crime. They confessed frequently, he said, “as a gourmand takes medicine to increase his appetite.” I ask you, in light of such cynicism, would it be improper to suggest that a murderer’s confession sometimes serves as a salt to the food of evil? And I have also read that Pope Gregory XV, in his papal bull of 30 August 1622, ordered confessions to be revealed in certain cases. Would the situation I have described in my most recent reports qualify as a “certain” case? I await, as always in the darkness, your answer.

Modeste

17. MIST AND MARY KASHPAW

1940

No one stays long on the reservation without somehow coming by a name. Since Fleur would not say it and nobody dared ask the boy with the dead eyes himself, he was named by invisible consensus. Awun, he was called, the Mist, for he was silent as mist and set apart from others, always, by his impenetrable Pillager ways. He hired out on farms surrounding the reservation. When he bulked out and thickened, Awun lost his nimble touch, but retained a fixity of unknown purpose. Awun was either very simple or so deep and devious that his mask could not be penetrated. What was he? From a childhood in a stone-floored mansion to a youth in a poor, pole cabin by a lake, and his mother would tell him nothing. Did she love him? Was he more than the child of Fleur’s revenge and restoration? He was a Pillager, he was Awun, so of course he became something other than a function of her will. He became will itself, unpurposed, set loose on the world, and looking as all great weak things do for a stronger counterpart.

Brooding on the trick of his identity, Awun worked his way through farm after farm, splitting wood, cords and cords of it, toward the first woman who could match him stroke for stroke. Still, Mary Kashpaw might never have come within his range, his span, but for the sisters. And so perhaps blame for all that happened should be placed where proper: at the nuns’ square toes. For it was Sister Dympna who raised the request for Awun to haul wood from the Kashpaw family’s lot for Mary Kashpaw to cut. In her restlessness the woman had already chopped too many birch trees near the convent and the sisters now feared for their apple orchard.

One morning in slow July, the son of the wealthiest man in Minneapolis threw on his shirt of a worn blue so vaporous it embodied his name, ate his kettle of oatmeal, and hauled a wagon load of wood into the churchyard. When he had finished unloading the wood, he then stood behind the church in lilac shadow. The thin shade reached only to his waist. No trees near the wood lot were tall enough to conceal him. His hair was the brown of winter grass, turned back in wind, his shirt’s whitened threads were the blue of his washed-pale eyes. His face bore the complex gloom of his German father leaded over with the Pillagers’ old, frightful calm. He stared at Father Damien, his hands buckled around the chains, and one after another he began to drag the logs across the road into the bare yard just planted with young trifling oaks. Across that piece of ungrassed dirt, Mary Kashpaw waited, eager to reduce them to stove lengths.

Awun did not notice her at first, busy as he was with the hauling. He fitted the great leather glove of his hand around the chains and pulled as Father Damien supervised and joked and speculated about why the nuns wanted all the wood so deep into summer. Even as he set the logs to ground, Mary Kashpaw took up her eager ax. Once she began to work, the regular strokes fell with such a precise rhythm that the sounds did not at first intrude upon the men’s conversation. Only when she stopped to sharpen the edge of her blade with slow strokes of a file did Awun notice the ring of silence. His glance searched, and stuck.

Mary Kashpaw wore a man’s shirt with the sleeves ripped out. Her arms were bare — hard and roped as the turned legs on a table. Her long skirt hung crooked and her great, solid feet were planted with monumental firmness below the hem. She had used a grapevine to tie her heavy black hair away from her face. From beneath a notched leaf, she regarded the two men with the indifference of all powerful creatures. Then, the blade honed to her satisfaction, she turned with a light motion, rose on the balls of her feet, brought down the ax, and split the length with a natural blow.

Agnes noticed, with some suspicion, that the great draft-horse Pillager, this Awun, took a jagged breath when the blow landed. Next, his eyes lost focus and drifted like the mist of his name. But the young man was no more than a giant boy and Mary Kashpaw, though innocent, a fully grown and mature woman. It took more — a strangled cry from Awun, a hot breath, obvious panic — to inform Agnes. She turned a close eye on the situation, now suspicious. Awun’s eyes followed the inflection of muscles in Mary Kashpaw’s arms and shoulders as she continued her work, and now, to Agnes there was no doubt. She sighed, knocked her chin lightly with a fist, and tried to divert Awun in conversation. But the young man’s verbs exploded like the caps off bottles. Go! Stay! His voice was hoarse with bewildered agitation. He wouldn’t leave and would not be argued by the priest into a cup of coffee, or shamed into leaving. Awun preferred to stand in the fragrance of wood chips, waiting for Mary Kashpaw to finish her work.

When at last she paused to lean for a moment on her ax, Awun walked over to her, mumbling, stood before her with his great hands revolving a crumpled hat against his chest. Although she gave no sign of awareness, she did not drive him off. Perhaps, as he was so much younger, he seemed harmless, beneath her notice. Awun was all the more taken with her unconcern. Being so large and grim, he had never found a woman at ease with him before. The fact that Mary Kashpaw did not notice him with surprise or suspicion charmed his heart. When she left him there, alone, he still did not move and stood waiting as the light went out of the day.

She walked straight past Awun on her way to the convent kitchen, but paused at the door and shrugged hugely, in distress. Some sense of his interest at last pierced the armor of her self-concentration. As though she’d passed a source of intense heat, the marks where the wagon nails were drawn from her flesh burned.

She entered the dim cooking space. Carefully, she washed her great face in water already darkened from the cleaning of potatoes. The silky brown water gave back a face so calm it seemed at once dead and ecstatic. She kneaded bread with rounded thumps, her arms dusted with flour, and then she set out plates for the nun’s table. At her own place, in the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw ate quickly, surreptitiously, as much as she could manage, and then she poured boiling water over the big kettles and began to scrub. It was dark by the time she left the pots drying on six meat hooks, and darker in the shack where she slept, sitting up in the sleigh. Most nights, she would have paced in the mosquito-haunted yard before settling, breathing cooler, fresher air and whittling twigs to whistles. Tonight she laid her ax beneath the seat and barred the double doors.

THE MIST

Mary Kashpaw did not pray aloud, but every night gazed upward into the dark of the lathe-and-tar-paper roof with a fixity that slowly became sleep. As always, once she dropped off she slept heavily, profoundly, and very loudly. Sinking immediately into her dreams, she groaned and spoke aloud as if, drugged unconscious, all the unspoken words of the day suddenly flew from her relaxed mind. Awun’s name was not among them, not that he could distinguish anyway, though he listened hard from his place, in the corner of the shack, where he’d crawled, crouched, and covered himself with bales of scorched ironing.

THE RIVER OF GRASS

The grass was long that year and slippery from rain. That is why it was possible for the Pillager boy, once he’d carefully unbarred the double door from inside, to harness himself to the sleigh that carried the sleeping Mary Kashpaw, and to tow it across the yard and along the margin of the road. This was before reservation lands were entirely fenced. He found it a simple matter to continue along the grass paths that led through the woods from slough to slough.

In a clearing where he paused, sword grass tall and iron black, Mary Kashpaw finally woke.

Awun jolted forward down an incline and his bounds gathered. Mary Kashpaw found herself traveling over grass, as in a dream, in a sleigh pulled along by a man with hair white in the moonlight. She looked to either side at the ghost arch of pale birch and the press of adamantine oak beyond. She breathed the slough’s low reek, the sweet grass, gulped again the summer rose air, and saw the laboring back of the man who pulled her, powerful as a draft horse, over ground, through the bending reeds, deeper into the tangle of the world.

And all of a sudden her amazed cry, her thoughts, the cast of her mind, her heart, as she lifted the ax.

AWUN AND MARY

When she carelessly regarded him from under the picture-puzzle leaf of a bloodroot plant, then turned, lifted on the balled muscles of her monumental feet, and split a stove length down the center with one dropping swift blow, Awun was lost to Mary Kashpaw. She seemed, to him, to connect the heaven of her leafy-haloed head to the earth in which her blade buried to the top of the shank. He didn’t know, of course, her history or how she had been stolen many years before, as a girl with a basket of roses, by horses muscled like himself. So when he took her from the shed in the sleigh, it was with an oaken innocence in which he could not hear the screams of panic or the branch surging through Kashpaw’s breast. Mary Kashpaw, of course, felt the thunder of fear and heard the shouting from all sides, just as she had as a child, only this time, unlike her father, she managed to cut the lines.

So it happened, many years later in the green of summer once more, Mary Kashpaw managed to sever the lines that her father’s hatchet had only scraped across. And once she did and Awun kept moving, walking, out into the sloughs and woods and farms that would gather to towns and disperse, like a spill of child’s marbles here and there across the plains, she too was set free.

An hour passed, during which she brooded on the sleigh bench. A world of consideration passed through her mind. She pictured Father Damien, though she had no words for an attachment so complete it was like breathing in and breathing out. Her heart stabbed and her brain hurt at the prospect of leaving the priest. She felt a great dullness, an iron heaviness settle into her limbs, and she decided she would remain still forever. So she sat in the sigh of slough grass, the resonance of searching owls. And then there was a curious pull. Was it the moon, or were the lines not really cut, but invisible? Was she still attached? Tugged behind as the Pillager walked? A thrill of anxiety gripped her, an anger to be with him, suddenly, coupled with despair at leaving the priest. Fear leaped in her and then a sensation of painful joy.

Mary Kashpaw jumped out of her cradling sleigh, took her bearings, and loped after Awun. She chased him down, came at him from behind in the dim moon’s surcease. He turned around in a weak wonder and she pushed at him like a boy in play. He pushed her back. She pushed him again, but this time the push was in quality slightly different, a leading give to her arms, perhaps on the far edge of barely coy. Awun took her broad shoulders under his broad hands, and then the two peered into each other’s steady eyes. Found there a mutual wariness, a nervous calm.

The ease of two equally matched beings came over them and they walked together into the night groaning, frog-quick dark. There, they began work on a tiny baby boy who would one day in their future drop from Mary’s body like a plum, and she hold him, hardly knowing what he was, so infinitesimal and severe and demanding. She would care for him until he was taken from her and she went mad, or perhaps she went mad and he was taken from her because of it. Who knows, who can set this straight? The weaving of this great woman was so crooked to begin with that no one would wonder when, ten years later, brain shocked and bearing the nerve deadness of confinement, she came walking back from the disastrous marriage with empty arms to care, as she always had, for Father Damien.

18. LE MOOZ or THE LAST YEAR OF NANAPUSH

1941–1942

By the time Nanapush and Margaret shacked up for good in the deep bush, they had lived so hard and long it seemed they must be ready for quiet. Over the years, they’d starved and grieved, seen prodigious loss, endured theft by the agents of the government and chimookomanag farmers as well as betrayal by their own people. They were tired for sure. At last, they should have courted simple comfort. A harmless mate. Companionship and sleep. But times did not go smoothly. Peace eluded them. For Nanapush and Margaret found a surprising heat in their hearts. Fierce and sudden, it sometimes eclipsed both age and anger with tenderness. Then, they made love with an amazed greed and purity that astounded them. At the same time, it was apt to burn out of control.

When this happened, they fought. Stinging flames of words blistered their tongues. Silence was worse. Beneath its slow-burning weight, their black looks singed. After a few days their minds shriveled into dead coals. Some speechless nights, they lay together like logs turned completely to ash. They were almost afraid to move, lest they sift into flakes and disintegrate. It was a young love set blazing in bodies aged and overused, and sometimes it cracked them like too much fire in an old tin stove.

To survive their marriage, they developed many strategies. For instance, they rarely collaborated on any task. Each hunted, trapped, and fished alone. They could not agree even on so little a thing as how and where to set a net. The gun, which belonged to Nanapush, was never clean when it was needed. Traps rusted. It was up to Margaret to scour the rifle barrel, smoke the steel jaws. Setting snares together was impossible, for in truth they snared themselves time and again in rude opinions and mockery over where a rabbit might jump or how to set the loop. Their avoidance hardened them in their individual ways, and so when Margaret beached the tough old boat and jumped ashore desperate for help, there was no chance of agreement.

Margaret sometimes added little Frenchisms to her Ojibwemowin just the way the fancy sounding wives of the French voyageurs added, like a dash of spice, random le’s and la’s. So when she jumped ashore screaming of le mooz, Nanapush woke, irritated, quick reproof on his lips, as he was always pleased to find some tiny fault with his beloved.

“Le mooz! Le mooz!” she shouted into his face. She grabbed him by the shirt so violently that he could hear the flimsy threads part.

“Boonishin!” He tried to struggle from her grip, but Margaret rapidly explained to him that she had seen a moose start off, swimming across the lake and here were their winter’s provisions, easy! With this moose meat dried and stored, they would survive the clutch of starving windigoog in fine style. “Think of the stew! Get up, old man!” She screamed in fretful incoherence now, grabbed the gun, and dragged Nanapush to the boat, forcing him in before he even properly prepared himself mentally to hunt moose.

Nanapush pushed off with his paddle, sulking. Besides their natural inclination to disagree, it was always the case that if one of them was particularly intrigued and eager about some idea, the other was sure to feel the opposite way just to polarize the situation. Contradictions abounded between them. If Nanapush asked his wiiw for maple syrup with his meat, she gave him wild onion. If Margaret relished a certain color of cloth, Nanapush declared that he could not look upon that blue, or red — it made him mean and dizzy. When it came to sleeping on the fancy spring bed that Margaret had bought with this year’s bark money, Nanapush adored the bounce and she was stingy with it so as not to use it up. Sometimes he sat on the bed and joggled up and down when she was gone, just to spite her. For her part, once her husband began craftily to ask for wild onion, she figured he’d developed a taste for it and so bargained for a small jar of maple syrup, thus beginning the obvious next stage of their contradictoriness, which was that each asked the opposite of what they really wanted and so got what they wanted. It was confusing to Father Damien, but to the two of them it brought serene harmony. So when Margaret displayed such extreme determination in the matter of the moose that morning, Nanapush was feeling particularly lazy, but he also decided to believe she really meant the opposite of what she cried out, and so he dawdled with his paddle and tried to tell her a joke or two. She was, however, in dead earnest.

“Paddle! Paddle for all you’re worth!” she yelled.

“Break your backs, boys, or break wind!” Nanapush mocked her. Over the summer, as it wasn’t the proper time for telling Ojibwe aadizokaanag, Father Damien and Nector had taken turns telling the tale of the vast infernal white fish and the maddened chief who gave chase all through the upper and lower regions of the earth.

“Gitimishk!” Margaret nearly choked in frustration, for the moose had changed direction and they were not closing in quickly enough for her liking.

“Aye, aye, Ahabikwe,” shouted Nanapush, lighting his pipe as she vented her fury at him in deep strokes of her paddle. If the truth be told, he was delighted with her anger, for when she lost control like this during the day she often, also, lost control once the sun went down, and he was already anticipating their pleasure.

“Use that paddle or my legs are shut to you, lazy fool!” she growled.

At that, he went to work, and they quickly drew alongside the moose. Margaret steadied herself, threw a loop of strong rope around its wide, spreading antlers, and then secured the rope fast to the front of the boat, which was something of an odd canoe, having a flat, tough, wood bottom, a good ricing boat but not all that easy to steer.

“Now,” she ordered Nanapush, “now, take up the gun and shoot! Shoot!”

But Nanapush did not. He had killed a moose that way once before in his life, and he had nothing to prove. On the other hand, his namesake, Nanabozho, had failed in the old moose-killing story, which began much in the same way as the event Nanapush found himself living out. He decided to tempt fate by tempting the story, for such was his arrogance that he was certain he could manage better than his namesake. He would not kill the moose quite yet. He hefted the gun and made certain it was loaded, and then enjoyed the free ride they were receiving from the hardworking moose.

“Let’s turn him around, my adorable pigeon,” he cried to his lady. “Let him tow us back home. I’ll shoot him once he reaches the shallow water just before our cabin.”

Margaret could not help but agree that this particular plan arrived at by her lazy husband was a good one, and so, by using more rope and hauling on first one antler and then another with all of their strength, they proceeded to turn their beast and head him in the right direction. Nanapush sat back smoking his pipe and relaxed once they were pointed homeward. The sun was out and the air was cool, fresh. All seemed right between the two of them now. Margaret admonished him about the tangle of fishing tackle all around his seat, and there was affection in her voice.

“You’ll poke yourself,” she said lovingly, “you fool.” At that moment, the meat pulling them right up to their doorstep, she did not really even care to pursue her husband’s idiocy. “I’ll fry the rump steaks tonight with a little maple syrup over them,” she said, her mouth watering. “Old man, you’re gonna eat good! Oooh”—she almost cried with appreciation—“our moose is so fat!”

“He’s a fine moose,” Nanapush agreed passionately. “You’ve got an eye, Mindimooyenh. He’s a juicy one, our moose!”

“I’ll roast his ribs, cook the fat with our beans, and keep his brains in a bucket to tan that big hide! Oooh, ishte, my husband, the old men are going to envy the makazinan that I will sew for you.”

“Beautiful wife!” Nanapush was overcome. “Precious sweetheart!”

They looked at each other with a kindling ardor.

As they were so gazing upon one another, holding the rare moment of mutual agreeableness, the hooves of the moose struck the first sandbar near shore, and Margaret cried out for her husband to lift the gun and shoot.

“Not quite yet, my beloved,” said Nanapush confidently, “he can drag us nearer yet!”

“Watch out! Shoot now!”

The moose indeed approached the shallows, but Nanapush planned in his pride to shoot the animal just as he began to pull them from the water, thereby making their task of dressing and hauling mere child’s play. He got the moose in his sights and then waited as the animal gained purchase. The old man’s feet, annoyingly, tangled in the fishing tackle he had been too lazy to put away, and he jigged attempting to kick it aside.

“Margaret, duck!” he cried. Just as the moose lunged onto land he let blast, completely missing and totally terrifying the moose, which gave a hopping skip that seemed impossible for a thing so huge and veered straight up the bank. Margaret, reaching back to tear the gun from her husband’s hands, was bucked completely out of the boat and said later that if only her stubborn no-good man hadn’t insisted on holding on to the gun she could have landed, aimed, and killed them both, as she then wished to do most intensely. Instead, as the moose tore off with the boat still securely tied by three ropes to his antlers, she was left behind screaming for the fool to jump. But he did not and within moments, the rampaging moose, with the boat bounding behind, disappeared into the woods.

“My man is stubborn, anyway,” she said, dusting off her skirt, checking to make sure that she was still together in a piece, nothing broken or cut. “He will surely kill that moose!” She spoke in wishful confidence, but inside she felt stuffed with a combination of such anxiety and rage that she did not know what to do — to try to rescue Nanapush or to chop him into pieces with the hatchet that she found herself sharpening as she listened for the second report of his gun.

Bloof!

Yes. There it was. Good thing he didn’t jump out, she muttered. She began to tramp, with her carrying straps and an extra sharp knife, in the direction of the noise.

In fact, that Nanapush did not jump out was not due to his great stubbornness or bravery. When the moose jolted the boat up the lake shore, the tackle that already wound around his leg flew beneath his seat as he bounced upward and three of his finest fishing hooks stuck deep into his buttocks as he landed, fastening him tight. He screeched in pain, further horrifying the animal, and struggled, driving the hooks in still deeper, until he could only hold on to the edge of the boat with one hand, gasping in agony, as with the other he attempted to raise the gun to his shoulder and kill the moose.

All the time, of course, the moose was wildly running. Pursued by this strange, heavy, screeching, banging, booming thing, it fled in dull terror through bush and slough. It ran and continued to run. Those who saw Nanapush, as he passed all up and down the reservation, stood a moment in fascinated shock and rubbed their eyes, then went to fetch others, so that soon the predicament of Nanapush was known and reported everywhere. By then, the moose had attained a smooth loping trot, however, and passed with swift ease through farmsteads and pastures, the boat flying up and then disappearing down behind. Many stopped what they were doing to gape and yell.

Mr. Onesides saw it and said that his attention was attracted by a blast from the gun of Nanapush and that he saw the moose stop still in its tracks a moment, as though struck by a sudden thought. As there was nothing to aim at for Nanapush but the rump of the huge animal, he had indeed stung its hindquarters. But other than providing it an unpleasant sensation, all Nanapush succeeded in doing was further convincing the moose that he’d best flee, which he did suddenly, so that the boat jumped high in the air and cracked down as the moose sped forward, again, raising a groan from Nanapush that Onesides would always remember for the flat depth of its despair. Still, although he ran for his rifle, he was too late to shoot the moose and free poor Nanapush.

One day passed. In his moose-drawn fishing boat, Nanapush toured every part of the reservation that he’d ever hunted, and saw everyone he’d ever known, and then went to places he hadn’t visited since childhood. At one point, a family digging cattail roots were stunned to see the boat, the moose towing it across a smaller slough, and a man slumped over inside, for by now poor Nanapush had given up and surrendered to the pain which, at least, he said later, he shared with his beast of the shot rump. He’d already tried to leave the best part of his butt on the canoe bench, but no matter how he tried he couldn’t tear himself free, so he had given up and went to sleep as he always did in times of stress, hoping that he’d wake up with an idea of how to end his tortured ride.

He did have a notion. He lifted the gun and this time tried to shoot the rope, which, being a target nowhere near the size of the moose’s great hairy, heaving cheeks, he missed, again stinging the moose who, as he told it later, soon commenced shooting back at him, the moose pellets zinging to the right and left as the moose began again to run, heading now for the very most remote parts of the reservation, where poor Nanapush was convinced he surely would die. He began to talk to the moose as they strode along — the words jounced out of him.

“Niiji!” he cried, “my brother, slow down!”

The animal flicked back an ear to catch the sound of the thing’s voice, but kept on covering ground.

“I will kill no more!” declared Nanapush. “I now throw away my gun!” And he cast it aside after kissing the barrel and noting well his surroundings. As though it sensed and felt only contempt for the man’s hypocrisy, the moose snorted and kept moving.

“I apologize to you,” cried Nanapush, “and to all of the moose I ever killed and to the spirit of the moose and the boss of the moose and to every moose that has lived or will ever live in the future.”

As though slightly placated, now, the moose slowed to a walk and Nanapush was able, finally, to snatch a few berries from the bushes they passed, to scoop up a mouthful of water from the slough, and to sleep, though by moonlight the moose still browsed and walked, toward some goal, thought Nanapush, delirious with exhaustion and pain, perhaps the next world. Perhaps this moose was sent by the all-clever creator to fetch Nanapush along to the spirit life in this novel way. Just as he was imagining such a thing, the first light showed and by that ever strengthening radiance he saw that his moose indeed had a direction and intention and that object was a female moose of an uncommonly robust size, just ahead, peering over her shoulder in a way apparently bewitching to male moose, for Nanapush’s animal uttered a squeal of bullish intensity that was recognizable to Nanapush as pure lust.

Nanapush now wished he had aimed for the huge swinging balls of the moose and he wept with exasperation.

“Should I be subjected to this? This too? In addition to all that I have suffered?” And Nanapush cursed the moose, cursed himself, cursed the fishhooks, cursed the person who so carefully and sturdily constructed the boat that would not fall apart, and as he cursed he spoke in English, as there are no true swear words in Ojibwemowin, and so it was Nanapush and not the devil whom Zozed Bizhieu heard passing by her remote cabin at first light, shouting all manner of unspeakable and innovative imprecations, and it was Nanapush, furthermore, who was heard howling in the deep slough grass, howling though more dead at this point than alive, at the outrageous acts he was forced to witness there, before his nose, as the boat tipped up and his bull moose in the extremity of his passion loved the female moose with ponderous mountings and thrilling thrusts that swung Nanapush from side to side but did not succeed in dislodging him from the terrible grip of the fishhooks. No, that was not to happen. Nanapush was bound to suffer for one more day before the satisfied moose toppled over to snore and members of the rescue party Margaret had raised crept up and shot the animal stone dead in its sleep.

The moose, Margaret found, for she had followed with her meat hatchet, had lost a distressing amount of fat and its meat was now stringy from the long flight and sour with a combination of fear and spent sex, so that in butchering it she winced and moaned, traveled far in her raging thoughts, imagined sore revenges she would exact upon her husband.

In the meantime, Father Damien, who had followed his friend as best he could in the parish touring car, was able to assist those who emerged from the bush. He drove Nanapush, raving, to Sister Hildegarde who was adept at extracting fishhooks. At the school infirmary, Sister Hildegarde was not upset to see the bare buttocks of Nanapush sticking straight up in the air. She swabbed the area with iodine and tested the strength of her pliers. With great relief for his friend and a certain amount of pity, Father Damien tried to make him smile. “Don’t be ashamed of your display. Even the Virgin Mary had two asses, one to sit upon and the other ass that bore her to Egypt.”

Nanapush only nodded gloomily and gritted his teeth as Sister Hildegarde pushed the hook with the pliers until the barbed tip broke through his tough skin, then clipped the barb off and pulled out the rest of the hook.

“Is there any chance,” he weakly croaked once the operation was accomplished, “that this will affect my manhood?”

“Unfortunately not,” said Hildegarde.

The lovemaking skills of Nanapush, whole or damaged, were to remain untested until after his death. For Margaret took a long time punishing her husband. She ignored him, she browbeat him, but worst of all, she cooked for him.

It was the winter of instructional beans, for every time Margaret boiled up a pot of rock-hard pellets drawn from the fifty-pound sack of beans that were their only sustenance beside the sour strings of meat, she reminded Nanapush of each brainless turning point last fall at which he should have killed the moose but did not.

“And my,” she sneered then, “wasn’t its meat both tender and sweet before you ran it to rags?”

She never boiled the beans quite soft enough, either, for she could will her own body to process the toughest sinew with no trouble. Nanapush, however, suffered digestive torments of a nature that soon became destructive to his health and ruined their nightly rest entirely, for that was when the great explosive winds would gather in his body. His boogidiwinan, which had always been manly, but yet meek enough to remain under his control, overwhelmed the power of his ojiid, and there was nothing he could do but surrender to their whims and force. At least it was a form of revenge on Margaret, he thought, exhausted, near dawn. But at the same time, he worried that she would leave him. Already, she made him sleep on a pile of skins near the door so as not to pollute her flowered mattress.

“My precious one,” he sometimes begged, “can you not spare me? Boil the beans a while longer, and the moose, as well. Have pity!”

She only raised her brow and her glare was a slice of knifelike light. Maybe she was angriest because she’d softened toward him during that moose ride across the lake, and now she was determined to punish him for her uncharacteristic lapse into tenderness. At any rate, one night she boiled the beans only long enough to soften their skins and threw in a chunk of moose that was coated with a green mold she claimed was medicinal, but which tied poor Nanapush’s guts in knots.

“Eat up, old man.” She banged the plate down before him. He saw she was implacable, and then he thought back to the way he had got around the impasse of the maple syrup before, and resolved to do exactly the opposite of what he felt. And so, resigned to sacrifice this night to pain, desperate, he proceeded to loudly enjoy the beans.

“They are excellent, niwiiw, crunchy and fine! Minopogwud!” He wolfed them down, eager as a boy, and tore at the moldy moose as though presented with the finest morsels. “Howah! I’ve never eaten such a fine dish!” He rubbed his belly and smiled in false satisfaction. “Nindebisinii, my pretty fawn, oh, how well I’ll sleep.” He rolled up in his blankets by the door, then, and waited for the gas pains to tear him apart.

They did come. That night was phenomenal. Margaret was sure that the cans of grease rattled on the windowsill, and she saw a glowing stench rise around her husband but chose to plug her ears with wax and turn to the wall, poking an airhole for herself in the mud between the logs, and so she fell asleep not knowing that the symphony of sounds that disarranged papers and blew out the door by morning were her husband’s last utterances.

Yes, he was dead. She found when she went to shake him awake the next morning that he was utterly lifeless. She gave a shriek then, of abysmal loss, and began to weep with sudden horror at the depth of her unforgiving nature. She kissed his face all over, patted his hands and hair. He did not look as though death had taken him, no, he looked oddly well. Although it would seem that a death of this sort would shrivel him like a spent sack and leave him wrinkled and limp, he was shut tight and swollen, his mouth a firm line and his eyes squeezed shut as though holding something in. And he was stiff as a horn where she used to love him. There was some mistake! Perhaps, thought Margaret, wild in her grief, he was only deeply asleep and she could love him back awake.

She climbed aboard and commenced to ride him until she herself collapsed, exhausted and weeping, on his still breast. It was no use. His manliness still stood straight up and although she could swear the grim smile had deepened on his face, there were no other signs of life — no breath, not the faintest heartbeat could be detected. Margaret fell beside him, senseless, and was found there disheveled and out cold, so that at first Father Damien thought the two had committed a double suicide, as some old people did those hard winters. But Margaret was soon roused. The cabin was aired out. Father Damien, ravaged with the loss, held his old friend Nanapush’s hand all day and allowed his own tears to flow, soaking his black gown.

And so it was. The wake and the funeral were conducted in the old way. Margaret prepared his body. She cleaned him, wrapped him in her best quilt. As there was no disguising his bone-tough shkendeban, she let it stand there proudly and she decided not to be ashamed of her old man’s prowess. She laid him on the bed that was her pride, and bitterly regretted how she’d forced him to sleep on the floor in the cold wind by the door.

Everyone showed up that night, bringing food and even a bit of wine, but Margaret wanted nothing of their comfort. Sorrow bit deep into her lungs and the pain radiated out like the shooting rays of a star. She lost her breath. A dizzy veil fell over her. She wanted most of all to express to her husband the terrible depth of the love she felt but had been too stubborn, too stingy, or, she now saw, afraid to show him while he lived. She had deprived him of such pleasure: that great horn in his pants, she knew guiltily, was there because she had denied him physical satisfaction ever since the boat ride behind the moose.

“Nimanendam. If only he’d come back to me, I’d make him a happy man.” She blew her nose on a big white dishcloth and bowed her head. Whom would she scold? Whom would she punish? Whom deny? Who would suffer for Margaret Kashpaw now? What was she to do? She dropped her face into her hands and wept with uncharacteristic abandon. The whole crowd of Nanapush’s friends and loved ones, packed into the house, lifted a toast to the old man and made a salute. At last, Father Damien spoke, and his speech was so eloquent and funny that in moments the whole room was bathed in tears and sobs.

It was at that moment, in the depth of their sorrow, just at the hour when they felt the loss of Nanapush most keenly, that a great explosion occurred, a rip of sound. A vicious cloud of stink sent mourners gasping for air. As soon as the fresh winter cold rolled into the house, however, everyone returned. Nanapush sat straight up, still wrapped in Margaret’s best quilt.

“I just couldn’t hold it in anymore,” he said, embarrassed to find such an assembly of people around him. He proceeded, then, to drink a cup of the mourner’s wine. He was unwrapped. He stretched his arms. The wine made him voluble.

“Friends,” he said, “how it fills my heart to see you here. I did, indeed, visit the spirit world and there I greeted my old companion, Kashpaw. I saw my former wives, now married to other men. Quill was there, and is now beading me a pair of makazinan to wear when I travel there for good. Friends, do not fear. On the other side of life there is plenty of food and no government agents.”

Nanapush then rose from the bed and walked among the people, tendering greetings and messages from their dead loved ones. At last, however, he came to Margaret, who sat in the corner frozen in shock at her husband’s resurrection. “Oh, how I missed my old lady!” he cried and opened his arms to her. But just as she started forward, eager at his forgiveness and acceptance, he remembered the beans, dropped his arms, and stepped back.

“No matter how I love you,” he then said, “I would rather go to the spirit world than stay here and eat your cooking!”

With that, he sank to the floor quite cold and lifeless again. He was carried to the bed and wrapped in the quilt once more, and his body was closely watched for signs of revival. Nobody yet quite believed that he was gone and it took some time — in fact, they feasted far into the night — before everyone, including poor Margaret, addled now with additional rage and shame, felt certain he was gone. Of course, just as everyone accepted the reality of his demise, Nanapush again jerked upright and his eyes flipped open.

“Oh yai!” exclaimed one of the old ladies, “he lives yet!”

And although the mourners well hid their irritation, it was inevitable that there were some who were impatient. “If you’re dead, stay dead,” someone muttered. Nobody was so heartless as to express this feeling straight out. There was just a slow but certain drifting away of people from the house and it wasn’t long, indeed, before even Father Damien left. He was thrilled to have his old friend back, but in his tactful way intuited that Margaret and Nanapush had much to mend between them and needed to be alone to do it.

Once everyone was gone, Nanapush went over to the door and put the bar down. Then he turned to his wife and spoke before she could say a word.

“I returned for one reason only, my wife. When I was gone and far away, I felt how you tried to revive me with the heat of your body. I was happy you tried to do that, my heart was full. This time when I left with harsh words on my lips about your cooking, I got a ways down the road leading to the spirit world, and I just couldn’t go any farther, my dear woman, because I wronged you. I wanted to make things smooth between us. I came back to love you good.”

And with that, between the confusion and grief, the exhaustion and bewilderment, Margaret hadn’t the wit to do anything but go to her husband and allow all of the hidden sweetness of her nature to join the fire he kindled, so that they spent, together, in her spring bed, the finest and most elegantly accomplished hours that perhaps lovers ever spent on earth. And when it was over they both fell asleep, and although only Margaret woke up, her heart was at peace.

Margaret would not have Nanapush buried in the ground, but high in a tree, the old way, as Anishinaabeg did before the priests came. A year later, his bones and the tattered quilt were put into a box and set under a grave house just at the edge of her yard. The grave house was well built, carefully painted a spanking white, and had a small window with a shelf where Margaret always left food. Sometimes, she left Nanapush a plate of ill-cooked beans because she missed his complaints, but more often she cooked his favorites, seasoned his meat with maple syrup, pampered and pitied him the way she hadn’t dared when he was alive, for fear he’d get the better of her, though she wondered why that ever mattered, now, without him, in the simple quiet of her endless life.

19. THE WATER JAR

1962

Mid-July and a windless morning. After the day began, dust would lift and hang solid in flat ribbons along the reservation boundaries, but for now the dew held down the surface of the roads. For the ladies, who had risen early, who now stood behind the long plate-glass windows of the Senior Citizens’ lounge, the air was clear enough for them to see that, for the third morning in a row, the man had come through the night and was still sitting in his car.

It was a dull green two-door Chevrolet, the kind of car that escaped most attention, but the man inside it, usually obscured by blowing dirt, could be seen clearly at this hour. Even from the shoulders up, his good looks were obvious. His face was bold and strong featured. His thick gray hair was trained to sweep back over the ears. He looked well dressed, but not until some hours later would the full effect of his dark and well-cut suit be shown. He sweltered and sweat in it all that time. The heat descended and the air was thick and punishing by noon. Breezes too faint to stir the heavy brown drapes hung by the government’s contractor occasionally filtered through the screens below the glass. Men with bad knees or weak lungs joined the ladies who might, in their privacy, have worn nothing but their baggy nylon slips. By now, the dozen or so who sat and watched had little left to say that was original. The man was simply there.

In two days no one had seen him leave the car, take a drink of anything, or eat a bite of food. He never dozed or relieved himself, by daylight anyhow. He was so silent that a bird flew in the window, hopped around and flew back out. He was so handsome that Mrs. Bluelegs looked his picture up in her collection of star magazines. He wasn’t anyone. The good looks were a distant impression, too. Up close, the tribal police said, he was surprisingly old. They stopped twice on their rounds to make sure he wasn’t dead and examine his license.

Father Gregory Wekkle. Eyes brn. Hair brn. Height 6'3". Indianapolis address. There was nothing out of order. Everything was up to date. He was not possessed of liquor or narcotics. He wasn’t wanted for any crime. When they asked what he was doing, he asked if there was any law against a guy sitting in his car. He kept his eyes on the convent, the church, but did not seem interested in those who came and went.

Someone thought it might be best to tell the sisters up the hill. However, when it came right down to it, no one wanted to interfere.

He wasn’t blocking any traffic. He wasn’t in people’s way. He wasn’t anybody’s business, and so they let him be. As the day went on and he sat without moving, he drew escalating interest from the young who roared past, raising dust, then stopped just to watch it settle on his windshield. Thicker by the hour, that dust coated the fenders and hood, his hair and the one arm crooked half out the window, thicker, heavier, until he was obscured, almost part of the landscape, and it was a shock that caused the men to crane forward and the women, finally, to open the door and file onto the sidewalk and shield their eyes against the sun when upon that third day the car’s engine roared into gear.

It was as if the road itself had moved. The ladies behind the window, deaf to the engine’s catch, pointed to the car bucking into first gear and chugging up the remainder of the hill.

From there the story came down.

Sister Mary Martin was the one who told what happened after he had parked at the convent, got out, and walked up to the door.

When he disappeared into the entry, the women outside the Senior Citizens dropped their hands from their eyes and retreated. There was nothing to see from all that distance. According to Sister Mary Martin, the man knocked on the door and she opened it wide. By then, his hair was the tan of the air and his face and clothes were drifted with the road’s same powder. He would not come in, but he would be very much obliged for some water. His voice was hoarse, his look was patient. Sister Mary Martin left him standing, went back into her kitchen, found a clean mayonnaise container, and filled it from the tap. She brought this back down the hall. The man was standing just inside the door. In exchange for the jar of water, he gave Mary Martin the contents of his pockets. Then he removed the cover of the jar, allowed himself one careful swallow, and sealed it again.

“You don’t look well,” said Mary Martin. “Please come, sit down.”

His skin was dead-white, gray around the deep-set eyes, his lips were baked and cracked. His hands shook so badly that the water in the jar rippled.

“No, thank you,” he said, backing to the door.

He pushed out into the yard with his shoulder and Mary Martin grasped his elbow and helped him to balance. The wind had risen. His hair, caked with a clay of sweat, dust, and oil, remained secure and stationary, but his dark suit flapped.

The man pointed at the low rebuilt cabin where Father Damien lived, and asked if he lived there still. When Mary Martin said yes, but that just at present he was hearing confessions, the man started off eagerly, striding in a rapid uncontrolled stagger. She stared after him in amazed concern and didn’t think to look into her hand until he had passed beneath her gaze. Not until she turned to enter the convent did she open her fingers. Then she found that she held a piece of paper money folded into a tiny square, a quarter, a penny, a sodality club button, and two car keys on a small aluminum ring.

FORGIVENESS

Even though a younger priest lived in a brand-new rectory and said the Mass every day and shared the confessional, most who practiced faithfully preferred to visit Father Damien. Something in the quality of his forgiveness really made people feel better — his human sympathy, or his divinely chosen penances. He was in demand. Therefore, Father Damien studiously kept confessional hours.

Father Damien rubbed his stiff knees until they loosened, slid to the side of the bed, climbed out, then with a careful bow entered the cassock he’d hung as always on his bedroom door. Clothed, Father Damien peered around the door, looked to both sides. He’d been ill lately and the nuns were infinitely solicitous, loving, a nuisance. He stepped out and then sped straight to the back of the church and sidled through the entry, from there to the cabinet, where he kissed his stole as he donned it. He sneaked along the wall. Panting, he fell into the priest’s box of the confessional. His head spun a bit. He took deep breaths and counted them waiting for his first customer.

A slight rustle, and Father Damien opened the screened shutter. The voice, a low rasp, was familiar. Yet this was not one of his regulars or even, as far as he could ascertain, a parishioner. He strained to understand the heavy clunk of words. Low distress in the breathing. There was a long, then longer pause after the preliminaries.

“Are you still there?” said Damien at last. His voice was gentle, for it seemed very possible that this was a sinner who had borne his guilt for years, until it ate away his resolve, at which point the poor sinner finally, belatedly, had come in to be forgiven. Damien took pity on such people. Their sins weren’t usually even terrible — just the worst in their own minds. Infidelities, usually, or shameful little thefts.

“Go ahead,” urged Damien, compassion flooding him, “you will be forgiven.”

“I…” said the petitioner, “I…” The man could not continue.

“Do not be afraid,” said Damien, but the sinner lapsed again into a miserable quiet.

“I will wait with you,” said Damien, tenderly. “I will sit with you here until you have the courage to speak.”

“I am…” Again, the sinner could not complete the sentence, but then he didn’t have to because Agnes knew. Sudden ice. Frozen, breathless, Agnes sat motionless and then she panicked. Threw her trembling hands up to her face.

“Oh God, forgive me,” she prayed silently, her heart in her throat. “This man I cannot absolve!”

GREGORY

As they regarded each other across the uncertain band of dim space just outside the confessional, a thrill of self-consciousness washed over Agnes. Father Damien was not beautiful. Agnes wanted to touch back her hair and bite her lips. The mere thought of such gestures made her cheeks flame red. Then she wanted Father Wekkle to leave, immediately, to leave her to the simple contentment she’d nurtured to replace the great drama of human love. Get out of here! Get thee behind me! she wanted to yell at him. The urge passed and she only blinked hard at the apparition. Her vision cleared and she saw that he was ill.

Not just poorly, but seriously ill. His racked, dry body told her this as soon as she was a foot away from him. As she walked him to the cabin, she noticed the dazed and careful way he stepped, like one uncertain of his tenure on the earth. She ducked her head and let him into her house. When she closed the door, and they were inches apart, pausing before they crushed together and there was no space between them, she was positive that he was dying.

Father Gregory Wekkle had continued, by slow means and over many years, to outrage his liver with hard drink, and now the cancer accomplished what he had begun. He was in a silent period of remission, he knew it, and while he had the strength he had driven straight from Indiana intending to throw himself at Agnes’s feet, but he had stopped midway up the final hill and sat there on the side of the road, sat there not quite knowing why. Afraid of many things — perhaps Father Damien was dead, or if he lived, perhaps his side of the cabin was occupied, perhaps books had filled the space, perhaps a dozen or two dozen outcomes were possible, but only one was capable of causing that dusty paralysis. Driving onto the reservation, Gregory Wekkle was struck by the recognizable ordinariness of all he saw, which caused him suddenly to fear that all he’d felt in his youth for Agnes, and all that he had suffered since, was an illusion.

For two days, he took stock of his memories and questioned the reality of each touch, each act, each recognition on his part and on hers. Finally knowing that there was no way for certain to understand what she felt, but positive he had felt what he did, and moreover, sick with thirst, he moved.

“So here I am.”

He sat in the ruins of a chair he remembered, and he allowed a sudden weakness to drain him and to ice his blood. He shivered in the awful heat and Agnes brought a blanket. Practice had perfected her masculine ease, and age had thickened her neck and waist so that the ambiguity which had once eroticized her now was a single and purposeful power that, heaven help him, he found more thrilling. She sat before him and held his hand, just as both of them had done with so many of their own ill, and merely waited.

“Is it too much to ask?” he drank in the new version of her face the way he’d drunk to forget it, with a voracious calm.

It was too much, truly, but she couldn’t say it. Agnes put her hands out and bent slowly until her forehead touched his knee. She sighed and rested it there. Holding on to his knee like a rock, she breathed in the dust he brought while he stroked her short, man’s hair. In the dark beneath his hands, in the dark of her mind, while she simply breathed and existed, she absently put out her tongue. She tasted the cloth of his pants. Tasted grit in the weave. Tasted his medicinal sweat. Tasted soap and the burnt, tarry odor of his death, and her own death, and at last the cavernous sweetness of their old lust.

Over the years, the log walls of Father Damien’s cabin had been plastered over, then Sheetrocked and Sheetrocked again, wallpapered, rewallpapered, painted and painted over, then bookshelved, so that the little house was now thickly insulated as a bear’s den. It was painted white on the inside, but contained a sweeping array of intensely colored beadwork and Ojibwe paintings. A gorgeous dress of white buckskin, fringed and set with blue-and-gold designs, hung off a hook in the wall, next to a cradle board decorated with tiny miigis shells, dreamcatchers, cutouts made of birch bark. The low tables were covered with quilled baskets and rattles, and set around with stacks of books. The shelved walls were darkened with lettered book covers and spines. The books were neatly shelved by category and then alphabetized all through the house, even in the kitchen.

From the first, Father Wekkle was comforted by the order. He weakened quickly — the trip seemed to have exhausted his temporary gift of strength, and it was clear that his remission was only a short touch of grace. For weeks, to begin with, they talked long into the night and there were even — tremendously secret, shrouded, final — nights they entered the exquisite and boundless quietude of the body. And then those nights stopped. He relapsed into the illness, and spent his days on the fold-out couch, watching birds at a feeder through a large plate-glass window cut into a small addition. From the window, he could see a bright wedge of sky and several branches of the tall pines and thicker oaks that had been striplings when he first knew Agnes.

He prayed, as he gazed into the soft wash of needles, to Saint Joseph, the keeper of the happy death. More than anything now, Father Wekkle hoped for a serene deliverance. He prayed to die before the window, in the night, peacefully and with no trouble to Agnes. But of course that did not happen.

In she came, striding big, with a tray of food. She set it down beside the couch on a little table and uncovered the simple dinner — mashed potatoes, beans, chicken, an oatmeal cookie. He regarded it dubiously, but when he ate some of it he felt better. The sky was darkening, the sun was a deep gold haze in the pines. The diffused radiance lighted the sides of trees and when the small birds popped from the bird feeders the undersides of their wings flashed red. Fire tipped the needles and then slowly bled to purple.

“Gregory,” she shook him slightly, “do you want to sleep here or walk to the bed?”

Agnes’s face glowed a deep sere on one side, and Gregory reached out to touch it. She put her hand over his hand, and held it there without smiling, looking into his eyes.

“I think I’ll stay right here,” he gently said. “For now.”

Until the air was entirely pitch-black, she sat next to the couch, on a chair. Later on, in the music of cicadas and crickets, she took a short walk around the grounds of the church, to calm herself and to release the strange collection of feelings — some noble, she supposed, some unworthy — that his presence engendered. It made her uneasy to have him here, an embarrassing outcome after all she’d wished and felt! And the difficulty wasn’t even the disease or his dying, or the years they had not been together, and how much of each other’s lives they’d missed. The difficulty was that Father Wekkle subtly condescended to her. He was unaware of it, but in all worldly situations, where they stood side by side, he treated her as somehow less. She couldn’t enunciate the facts of it, but of what she experienced she had no doubt. She wondered, Had he patronized her way back then? Had she noticed? Or had he learned this? Did she patronize women too, now that she’d made herself so thoroughly into a priest? It was never anything that others might note, but when they were together, he spoke first, took charge even when he felt most ill, took information from doctors regarding his disease and translated it for her into terms, simpler, he thought she would understand.

And there was another thing: that tone in his voice when they were alone. An indulgent tone, frankly anticipating some lesser capacity in her — whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual, she could not say. The most difficult thing was, however, something that was really not his fault. Again, when they were alone, he called her Agnes. But for so long now she had been the only one who called herself Agnes, that for him to say it made her anxious, as though he’d stripped out and revealed something much more private than that part of her anatomy but having to do with some irreducible part of herself that only she was meant to possess. That Agnes. Agate. That stone made translucent by pressure. That was absolutely hers.

Out of the mystery of one dark pine tree, an owl called as she walked along. Nimishoomis, she said, grandfather. Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls. Agnes hooted back, giving a sleepy, hollow call. There was a pause, and then with some interest the owl answered, and again Agnes asked the question, and the owl did too, and for a while they asked together into the black night. That was what it was, she thought now, to love someone else’s body in the darkness. It was to ask that same question, while knowing that the answer would not be given. The owl flew down to look at her, launching on wings feathered so softly that its flight was soundless, ghostly. It came so close she felt the wind of its movement along her neck.

There was a park near the hospital in Fargo, and after Gregory died, Agnes went there. The grass was studded with acorns and fat squirrels busied themselves in the wealth. Mothers walked by with strollers and carriages, dressed in pink, aqua, lime. There was a wading pool at some short distance, and from the bench where Agnes sat, she could hear the faint splashes and cries of children and the hysterical notes of gathered crows. The air moved over her quietly, with a city exhaustion, like a half-spent breath. Agnes really didn’t know how to feel at all — she wasn’t devastated or even terribly sad. Those feelings were for when Gregory had wrestled with pain, struggled to get free from it, to throw it off. Now that he had, there was a lightness, a numb pleasantness, a newness, to everything she did. It was while she examined this curious state of mind that a figure, approaching from across the coarse green blanket of grass, caught her eye.

A huddled shape, it lurched forward then slowly tottered back, then threw itself forward again just a pittance, as though it were fighting a great wind. As it got closer, she could see that the person was dressed fantastically in a church-basement assortment of sagging clothing, a vibrant dress over men’s plaid pants, a filmy blouse of fairy-pale floating polyester, a green man’s hat, and thick unmatched shoes. An old Indian woman. Hunched, drunk, half collapsed. The woman stumbled closer and peered at Father Damien, then put her hand out and asked for change. Her voice was ragged and her cheeks sunken. She had lost all of her visible teeth but the two sharp incisors, and her eyes were covered with a dull, scratched film, but Agnes recognized her and rose, now taller than the stooped old lady, and took the gnarled claws of her hands in hers.

“Mashkiigikwe!”

The woman reeled back a bit, suspicious, at the sound of her own name, and snatched away her arthritic paws.

“It’s me. Father Damien.”

“Could you help me out with some pocket money?”

“Mashkiigikwe,” Damien tried again.

“What are you calling me by the old name for?” said the old woman in English. “Left that one years ago. Do you have money?”

“I am the priest from Little No Horse. Father Damien. Don’t you remember me?”

Shaking her head, ruffling her fantastic costume, Mashkiigikwe started away from the priest, mumbling half under her breath, throwing her arms out in erratic little gestures.

“How did you get here? Where are your children? What’s your name now?” Damien tried again, following her along just a few steps. The woman laughed, suddenly lucid.

“Winos don’t have names, priest. Go back and save the others like you saved me.”

Then she let her lip drop and shambled off with surprising speed. Agnes sat back down on the park bench and looked at the shined black tops of her shoes. When she closed her eyes, the color of emptiness assailed her. She gazed deeper into the color of that absence and slowly, for the first time in many years, remembering those first years and Kashpaw, the round children and that woman’s strength and skill, Agnes felt tears gather behind her eyelids. Soon they would spill over, drag slowly down her cheeks. These tears horrified her, suddenly. They were tears of self-pity for the seeming waste of her own life, her own efforts.

With that thought her eyes dried and she jumped up, heart pounding, wrenched into a sudden fury. She spotted the bright dot of Mashkiigikwe, now far off, opportuning someone else, and with a swift jog Agnes powered herself down the sidewalk until she drew up behind Mashkiigikwe. She grasped the old woman’s shoulder and swiveled her roughly so they stood face-to-face.

“Here,” Father Damien said angrily, pulling what dollars and quarters he had from inside pockets, smashing them into the old, brown hands. “Here and here. Take this! Ando miniquen! I didn’t put the bottle in your mouth! I didn’t make you suck the sauce!”

The old woman’s mouth had dropped wide open in astonishment, but now she closed it to a firm line and her eyes flickered. Her face unblurred and just for a moment her features composed into the real face of Mashkiigikwe, aware, intelligent, bewildered to find herself in hell.

“Who did it then?” she asked the priest. “How did it happen? For I don’t like to be this way, and yet, Father Damien, I am.”

20. A NIGHT VISITATION

1996

Now she was old, truly old, of an age she’d never imagined. Her skin was waxen and her brain flickered, dropped things, seized others. Still, she possessed a startling vigor. There were days she did her stretches and arm whirls and went out walking and nothing hurt — not the hip gouged by the bullet so long ago, not even her toughened beanbag of a heart. And she listened to confessions with more attention and stamina than she’d ever possessed.

One such evening, walking out of the church, in the half darkness, Agnes was suddenly afflicted by an unbearable thirst. Instinctively, she bent to the font at the entrance and steadily as a parched horse pulled water from the surface into her dry throat. The blessed water was mineral stale and soothing, and she stood after a few moments, wiped her face, and went on, refreshed. Straight back to her dinner of ham and pickled beets, then an immediate swoon of profound, dreamless sleep.

Having drunk so deeply of the holy water, Agnes woke in the middle of the night. Two things were happening. She was in the throes of a sense of overwhelming blessedness — from within. And also, she needed to relieve herself. She rolled over and swung her legs out over the cold floor. Gingerly, she touched down. Stood. She walked through the dark hallway to the bathroom, and then, returning to her bed where she planned to lie still and enjoy the interesting inner effect of the blessed water, she was suddenly directed elsewhere. When, many years past, the church had acquired the loud organ with pipes running to the ceiling, the door of her cabin had been enlarged and the Steinway moved inside. She found herself standing before the instrument, serenely lustrous in the dark.

Sometimes, now, at this brittle age, she buried her hands in a cast-iron pot of wet, hot sand for ten or fifteen minutes before she played. Tonight, she had no chance to set up the hot sand, so her fingers twitched on the keys. Still, as Chopin had been kind to aging musicians and written some particularly easy preludes of great beauty, she played. The piece she loved best was meditative and slow, aching of the world’s sorrows and fugitive joys. As she played, she gradually awakened. Her fingers loosened and forgot their age. She played on. Wondered. Had she the promise, could she exact one from the black dog’s muzzle, if the thing should appear to her again, dare she ask: Was there a good piano in hell? The music soared, her hands curved around an intricate series of trills. If there were a good piano in hell, would she play this well once she got there? Her music, inaudible to all the sleeping reservation, spilled through the little house, uncurled beneath her hands like smoke. For an hour, two hours, almost three of her waning life, Agnes lived fully and intimately in a state of communion.

THE MIGHTY TEMPTER

Agnes felt it in her bones when the wind came up — a freedom in which she imagined, sleepless, springing from the narrow bed. She was sleeping very soundly, so heavily, in fact, that she lost track of the current of her life. Waking in the dark, she surprised herself. Old again! A priest! She did not move. She could not move. She wondered what had awakened her. Then she smelled under the fugitive breeze the low and maggot-quick, rich, warm, fish-gut breath of dog.

“Where are you? Show yourself!”

She tried to struggle up on one elbow, but a weight of air pinned her in the sheets. There was a panting and a lolling. A dogness surrounded her. The dog itself walked heavily up her legs and stood there in the dark, one paw on her heart and the other on the green scapular she wore under her nightshirt. Faintly, Agnes hoped. Might the scapular offer some protection? But her voice box rusted shut and bitter anxiety zipped down her windpipe.

“Get off!” She tried to say it, willed it. The visitor slouched massive on her chest, and then it spoke in a cloud of foul whispers.

“Wie geht’s? How’s my little priestette?”

Dug scraggly claws into Agnes’s frail skin and settled full length. Stretched its legs along hers. She sensed fleas shooting off her nemesis like popcorn. Felt the soft plop of the dog’s heavy balls between her knees.

“Open that black door in your chest,” rasped the dog, “I’m hungry.”

“Never!” Agnes’s brain squeaked.

“Oh,” the dog whined, “for a taste of nice fresh heart!”

A racking dryness. A hacking, lung-wrenching cough sent needle-fine pains shooting through her lungs, warning her not to move a muscle, a hair. The pinching pains radiated from each breath, from her center, like pulses of the sharp light depicted in paintings of the sacred heart. Now, at last, Agnes was horridly awake; her mouth went sandpaper dry and her esophagus shut.

“Talk to me,” said the dog, and its voice was insufferably gentle.

Agnes gritted her teeth against the longing, sharp and sudden, for she knew that her only refuge lay in categorically not giving in to the false compassion in the dog’s tone.

“Get thee behind me,” she managed to croak. “I’m not ready to go.”

“Still, I will take good care of you.” The dog settled its lanky, bony haunches. “I am very loyal.”

“You want me to die.”

“You are tired, and you want to die, too.”

“I don’t know anymore,” said Agnes, wearily. “Is there a good piano in hell?”

“The devil owns all of the finest makers of musical instruments,” the dog said. “That darkness, that blood of sorrow in the most expressive woods, where do you think that comes from?”

“Suffering,” said Agnes.

“Causing it,” said the dog.

“I want an angel, a real dog, a good dog! I’d like to have a dog to protect me,” Agnes blurted out.

“I will not let her, it, whatever, live,” said the black dog. “Just as I can kill every person you love, I will kill whatever dog you love.”

Agnes’s heart thudded to the very end of her gut and she pleaded.

“Leave me.”

“I can’t,” said the dog, wheezing with a sly and malevolent sympathy. “I am yours, and don’t think I enjoy my work! Watching over you has been infuriating, though it had its moments. I did enjoy tickling Berndt with those bullets, and Gregory with the black knives of cancer. Recall when you made love how dutifully their hearts beat under your hand — how steady and warm? I stopped them. I shut their dear eyes…”

Agnes started to tremble.

“… just as I shut the black eyes of Napoleon via the rosary in the hands, the very hands of the nun… how could you forgive those two, and others, the worst of sinners? Your forgiveness has opened many a door to me, old friend.”

It was then that Agnes was assured that her Father Damien had done the right thing in absolving all who asked forgiveness, and the realization filled her with a sudden and bouyant strength. Here it was — the reason she’d been called here in the first place. The reason she’d endured and the reason she’d been searching for. This was why she continued to live. She shut the dog out and drew strength from the massive amounts of forgiveness her priest had dispensed in his life. She saw that forgiveness as a long, slow, soaking rain he had caused to fall on the dry hearts of sinners. Father Damien had forgiven everyone, right and left, of all mistakes and shameful sins. All except for Nanapush, who had never really confessed to any sin, but had instead forgiven Damien with great kindness for wronging him and all of the people he had wanted to help, forgiven him for stealing so many souls. Nanapush!

“You were not able to silence Nanapush!” laughed Agnes. “He sneaked past your two-way road onto the road of life. He’s probably gambling day and night, eating berries without getting the shits, telling stories with old friends and enjoying his many wives. You had no power over Nanapush!”

There was a pause before the dog responded.

“Who could silence that talker?” But then a slinking insinuation. “So you did love him. Yes, I knew it. Oh, you little priestette, you loved him, you lusted after him, you kept this secret from me, didn’t you? Yes, but now I have it. I have your memory.”

“No, you do not!” Though weakening, Agnes was indignant. “You will never have my memory. Even I don’t have it all, you rotten hound. You stole it in the form of the Actor and in the person of the gun. You took my memory, and I have spent my whole life gathering it back.”

Agnes shut down, closed her eyes, imagined herself a bulwark, a wall. “Of course I loved Nanapush,” she went on, impatient. “The old man was my teacher, my confidant, my priest’s priest, my confessor, my friend. Plus, he was funny and you don’t get funny much in this life. God, how we used to laugh! Even his funeral was hilarious — I miss him. There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin.”

“That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer?”

The dog ranted — it had never liked the composer, it turned out it was jealous — but Agnes didn’t notice anymore. She fought. She gathered every memory and prayed starting from her center and radiating outward. Called every ancestor, blood and adopted. The aadizokaanag, spirits. Bent her thoughts on Nanapush. Asked for the old man’s help. Filled herself with every good that had been done to her and every caring act she’d known. Cried out for the young, strong spirit of Mashkiigikwe. For Chopin. Sucked with thin threads of air the ravishing stillness of the ghost note that lingers after each chord of Chopin’s three repudiated posthumous nocturnes. Went further, back into the folds of brain that hid and held in their recesses such memories as she had of her childhood, girlhood, lost messages. Gathered in her strongest molecules the urge to live and the strength to snap shut her knees, suddenly, clasp with viselike ardor and squeeze with Catholic ferocity the testicles of the black dog.

Death. That was its name. That’s what she dealt with and she knew it, dreaded it, hated death’s intimacy and the strange greed with which it pursued every living thing. Agnes screamed, bent her fingers into wire hangers around the mange-bald throat, locked her knees, squeezed harder, harder, harder, until the dog yelped, gave up, and disappeared.

THE WINES OF PORTRARTUS

Most High Eminence,

I remind you, we both exist in the compassionate dream of an unseen God. Please send me an answer…

“Are you that answer?”

Father Damien peered hard at Jude. Morning. Or maybe early afternoon. Father Damien spread his hands resignedly upon the tray and tilted his chin back to accept a solicitous towel pat from his visitor, the one who’d brought him his breakfast. Damien had wakened groggy, and was annoyed to have been restricted to his room by Sister Mauvis.

“I’m not entirely feeble.” Damien suddenly clawed the napkin from the younger priest’s hands.

“I know you’re not,” said Jude, “it’s just that you had a bit of oatmeal stuck to your chin.”

“There. Satisfied?”

With one sharp movement, Father Damien swiped at his chin once more and sat back in bed.

“They insist upon this, periodically.”

“Bed rest,” said Father Jude, sympathetic.

“Confinement!”

Father Jude tried to soothe the outraged and frail man before him. “I’m sure it is rather demeaning, in a way. But you see, they weren’t able to rouse you this morning.” His voice took on the chiding parental quality that vigorous, impatient people sometimes use with the elderly. “It seems that, last night, you were just a little… tipsy.” The younger priest’s voice was suddenly prim.

A cunning, soft, puzzled expression crept over Damien’s face. “Tipsy!” he mocked, his voice lilting. “Do you mean to say, drunk?”

“More or less.”

“Loaded, shkwebii, pinned to the leather, purpled, pumped, schnockered?”

Father Jude didn’t smile. He found no humor in these words, none whatsoever. Oh yes, he had seen the misery of alcohol’s effect and believed such words were not just words! His reply was stiff. “They found no sign of a bottle, but yes, you were sloshed.”

“No sign of the bottle, you say?”

“None,” said Father Jude, leaning close. “And you didn’t particularly smell like wine, or what have you. Yet last night you were distinctly intoxicated.”

“And no bottle?” Father Damien’s voice grew in intensity. He fixed Jude with a deep stare.

“None!”

“My house was searched?”

“Completely.”

“No explanation? No clue? No cause?”

“Not that your good Sister Mauvis could discover, or any of them for that matter. But you can trust me with the knowledge.” Father Jude leaned very close to Damien, smiled in conspiratorial sympathy. “Tell me, where on earth are you hiding your stash? We took the cupboards apart, the closet, the woodpile. What’s your explanation?”

“Explanation? Obvious!”

Father Jude waited.

“It is a miracle.”

Father Jude laughed at the joke, but the old priest maintained a dignified calm and lightly stabbed a leather bone of a finger at him.

“I have only to refer you to the early saint Portrartus.”

Father Jude looked indulgently blank, and Father Damien persisted stubbornly. “While tending sheep in the mountains, our Portrartus manifested a profound drunkenness in spite of the isolation of his flock. There was no tangible source of intoxicants. Like Portrartus’s, my drunkenness is not of this world.”

“Ohhhh?” Father Jude reacted with exasperated amusement.

“I do not”—here Father Damien grew intense—“require the fruit of this earth in order to experience an exaltation of the spirit. I have only to think back and consider my life. Soon, I find myself in a state of delirium, which, I understand, resembles the less rarefied behavior exhibited by—”

“Habituated winos,” Father Jude cut in, his patience lapsing.

“Last night I was also visited both by musical manifestations of the Holy Ghost and, I am sorry to say, of the devil himself.”

“These manifestations, they consisted of…?”

Father Damien put a trembling hand in the air now, and appeared much troubled.

“A stinking mutt,” he whispered, “a dangerous intelligence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Recall, when the dog plunged its foot into my bowl of soup and that soup was tasted by the sisters across this lawn. I kept the dreams of the nuns in a locked tin box. I should not like them to fall into the wrong hands, though I must admit some were novel to the point where I read them again and again—”

“You read demonic torments for your own pleasure? Should I be scandalized?” Father Jude was diverted by Damien’s ploy and, Damien could tell, his curiosity was piqued. The older priest resumed with sly ease, “I found the dreams instructive. I did not avert my eyes. To others it may seem odd that a curious and passionate being, for I do consider myself such, should have chosen a life of denial. To me, it was not at all strange, for the choice itself was made with lust. Passion over passion. Hungrier for God, I came here…”

Controlling his interest with some effort, Father Jude attempted to double back.

“And so the black dog, it was a delirious vision? Or was it possible,” said Father Jude in the most respectful and nonthreatening tone he could manage, “that for a time, you went mad?”

With an outraged jerk of his head, the older priest quashed Jude’s gesture. He folded his hands, composed himself, and shot the younger priest a shrewd glance.

“When our senses are weakened by hunger or illness, we see things and hear things that are not of this world. The question is this: Do we invent these things in the cabins of our sorry brains, or are they there always and we too comfortable to reach them or to care? At any rate, whether the answer is the former or the latter, I have no doubt, none at all. Last night’s visit has persuaded me. I saw the black dog.”

The old priest sank against the pillows, limp, folding like a window blind, but he was thinking very deeply and the thinking visibly exhausted him. His head dropped to his chest and he began to breathe deeply. Jude felt a pang of quick guilt, although not enough for him to let the old man sleep.

“Can I fetch you some water? A blanket?”

Damien shrugged off the false solicitousness. “These old bones. This old flesh. The devil will have me soon enough, cold or hot.” Damien then laughed, a dry, papery sound. “At least I know his shapes, the ones he manifests here on reservation land.”

Father Jude finished his adjustments to the tape recorder, moved it closer to Damien. He turned it on and clipped the microphone closer to the old priest’s lips, for he had lapsed into the near whisper that he used when he was exhausted or wandering.

“You believe I mean the devil… metaphorically… of course…” Father Damien nicked his head, weary, but as he spoke his voice gathered passion. “Metaphors have very little influence in this world and the devil a great deal. The black dog! What is the devil but the lack, the crying hole in the skein of thought, Father Jude, that reasoning that says, All is plain to see and yet you are deceived. I am a priest. All that I am is based upon belief. And to begin, now, after all that has passed, to think perhaps he did not speak to me as a dog and from the dog’s mouth is, quite frankly, to cast doubt upon all else…”

Father Jude switched off the tape recorder and leaned back, frustrated and shaking his head. He’d had a truly inadequate breakfast and thought now of driving to the café he’d found, the next town over, where the food was edible.

“You don’t believe me,” said Damien, after a long silence fell between them. “That’s only because he’s never paid you a visit. If he had, the question you would be forced to ask is this: If the devil can take the time to make an appearance, where’s God? Why can’t God make more of an effort?”

“God is not a politician,” said Father Jude, his voice neutral. He kept his thoughts to himself, his expression blank, and took his mind off the hot roast beef sandwich he craved. He reminded himself that his task was to record, not judge, what he heard. Still, the idea that the devil should appear in person was disappointing, an unworthy piece of superstition, a marker of Father Damien’s unreliability. He saw that Father Damien was ready to start his morning, so he left him in peace and gladly sought a meal.

After the younger priest left, Father Damien gathered his wits, his strength, and then sat up and waited for the fog in his brain to clear. He got out of bed. Teetering stiffly with hands on the back of his chair, and then taking minute steps, the old priest shuffled off through his small residence. The exchange had actually rejuvenated him a little, and he sat down at his desk and began to write with enthusiasm. “Consider the word spirit, manidoo,” he wrote, “and all of the forms in which it resides. That which we consider vermin, insects, the lowest form of life, are manidooens, little spirits, and in their designation it is possible at once to see the penetration of the great philosophy that so unites the smallest to the largest, for the great, kind intelligence, the Gizhe Manito, shares its name with the humblest creature.”

Returning later from the café where he’d eaten, thoughtfully, alone in a scarred brown booth, Father Jude frowned into the blond sky. He was well thought of in his parish, calm and good. Things had been going smoothly down in Argus. He’d had a comfortable routine figured out. And now, what an unwelcome complication, in spite of the huge honor, to be afflicted with so many new problems, uncertainties, even doubts. And how terrifying, this feeling of loving someone. Thrilling. Awful. With an explosive shake of his head, Father Jude put the thought of Lulu from his mind. Not only had he fallen desperately in love, and at this age, but he was failing at the task entrusted to him by the highest levels of Church authority.

These interviews with Damien Modeste were not going as he’d hoped. Father Damien was an extremely difficult subject. Impossible to penetrate one day, and all too transparent the next. There were gaps in the old priest’s story, missed connections, all too many loops of obfuscation. It was clear, too, that the old man regarded Jude’s presence as a disappointment. Father Damien had been hoping for an envoy directly from the Pope, and was irritated by the younger priest’s humble, local origin. Now, exhausted with their sparring, Father Jude decided that he would once again visit the person Damien had pointed out as Leopolda’s first young victim. Marie Kashpaw.

THE INTERVIEW

Marie Kashpaw liked to bake in the outdoor heat, and could sit for long hours in a lawn chair in her courtyard garden, motionless, head tipped to catch the most intense angle of the sun. She seemed lethargic, but when threatened, she could vanish with surprising swiftness. Catching the shadow of movement from Father Jude, who approached across the courtyard, she disappeared into the safe gloom of her Senior Citizens apartment, from which he was unable to rouse her by knocking.

It was clear she didn’t want to talk to him, but that didn’t matter to Jude. He had to talk to Marie Kashpaw. He had to persuade her to share her story with him. Still, he had no idea how to accomplish his mission. Sitting in the lobby, thwarted, he planned. She took the Eucharist every week, but that was from Father Damien. He could bring the sacrament to her himself, since Father Damien actually was indisposed, but, he wondered, did that put him in the highly uncomfortable position of using the Sacred Host as the lure for an ulterior purpose?

It felt wrong, but half an hour later he returned with the black leather traveling Eucharist kit, 100 percent calfskin, as official-looking as a spy toy. He knocked at the door to her apartment. Seeing who it was, she frowned, but nevertheless she allowed him to enter and stand next to her kitchen table.

“Would you like to take communion?” he asked her.

She shrugged at a chair. He sat, the case in his lap. Again, she just looked at him with those opaque eyes, and waited.

“Are you in a state of grace?” he asked.

Here, she smiled.

“Are you?” She threw her question back at him, and touched her gray forelock absently. “You shouldn’t,” she went on, “use the holy body of God as bait.”

Father Jude actually flushed.

“I know what you want.” Her voice was flat.

Now it was Father Jude’s turn to go silent. In what he now thought of longingly as his “regular life,” he was routinely in charge of every human exchange. He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease. He sighed, caught, and as he had some humility even as spoiled as he was by his authority, he set the case carefully aside on a metal tea tray, folded his hands in his lap, and said to Marie, “Yes, you read my intentions. I am sorry.”

And so she nodded. And so again the silence.

“I will tell you a few things,” she said to him at last.

So, of course it was fortunate that he happened to have carried along the tape recorder, which he now removed from within the soul-saving kit he’d brought. He set the recorder carefully between them, tested it by counting into the microphone, played it back. Now she was a little nervous. At first, as she began to speak, she stared at the tape recorder as though it were a separate consciousness. But then, as her memories collected, the picture shaped itself between them.

RED MOTHER

Marie Kashpaw

When you don’t have a mother, as I never did, you have to make one. Get yourself a piece of clay and shape in your fingers and the shape you always make will be a mother. Or press her together of mud and sticks. Sometimes a tree would do, gnarled around me. Bundles of reeds. I used a blanket rolled and bunched in the shape of her. Rags. Sometimes there was a little extra stew in the pot and I stole it and said to myself she gave it to me. Sometimes just grass, grass was all I needed. The warmth of it in the sun was her golden green smell and the soft brush of it her fingers, stroking my face.

You don’t have a mother, you make one up. That’s how I made mine and still she is standing where I made her, dark and red in the heavy woods.

What happened to me when I went up on the hill with the black-robe women is between me and my confessor, Father Damien. I came down with a broken head and a bloody palm wrapped in a pillowcase, with a raging spirit and a man who would be my husband. But that is not the story here. For I came down with an inkling inside me of what I knew. I later found that my instinct was true. There was something about that nun that drew me to hate her with a deep longing. How, you say, can that be? To long for that black scarecrow flapping for crows. She had a face like a starved rat and a taste for cruel games. But the worst thing of all was that Sister Leopolda loved me — I felt that like a blow.

It is hard to hate a person if they love you. No matter what they do. What you feel in return twists between the two feelings. Not one. Not the other. But painful.

At the time, I was kept by the Lazarres. But I was a dog to the Lazarres. So instead of going back to the Lazarres, or claiming my new husband right after the convent, I went to the woods. I aimed to live by myself in the old shack Agongos had died in the winter before. The place was deep in the birch, other side of a little pothole. Slough ducks came to land in there, turtles haunted it, muskrats made their twig-pile houses, and there was plenty to eat. I had decided just how I would support myself. Before I’d left the Lazarres, I stole two dollars, my life’s wages. I used it to buy two bottles of nameless brown-red whiskey. I knew where there was a heap of old bottles in the woods, and I polished up two empty ones. Then I added some slough water to the good stuff and made four bottles in all, plugged neatly with white strips from my nun’s pillowcase.

Those four bottles, I sold for twice the profit. I bought more whiskey. I kept on moving up. I was just a child, just a girl, but I was a bootlegger now. And I sold to the best and I sold to the worst. I bought a long steel hunting knife for when my customers got ugly. I bought a rib-skinny paint horse named Brownie, and fattened her on good sweet grass and boughten grain. I traded a stove off an old white farmer, and nails and boards to fix some shelves on my walls. Blankets. At last my winter store, a fifty-pound sack of flour, potatoes, onions, apples. I dried a load of berries for some winter sweetness, and I dug a deep pit behind my little house and lined it with slough grass. Into that pit, I set a cache of whiskey, precious bottles. Each wrapped in reeds like an offering. Then I covered it up and let the snow fall where it might. I was ready for whatever came to me, I thought. But I was not ready for the truth of my beginnings.

One day, I returned to find Sister Leopolda had come for me. She was a pillar of stark blackness praying in the yard.

“Come back,” she said. She put out her hands and they were pierced in the palms, like mine.

I let her stand there, and I stood to watch her in a dull trance. Sun turned through the yellow leaves, rippled across her one way, then rippled back. I thought lazily of all that black hate that boiled up in me back at the convent, but I could not catch hold of it. I guess it had steamed away with the water from the kettle. Nothing was left, not shame, not indifference, not even a numbness or a heaviness — although, for the first time in my whole life, I thought with interest of my whiskey. I never drank my profits before, but maybe I would start.

I left the nun standing where she was, her arms held out stiff. Maybe she would stand there all night. I went on my rounds. She was gone when I returned. I staked Brownie in the clearing, where he could stuff himself, and I fried myself a potato with deer meat, boiled up a pot of tea. Then I went outside and sat on the little stump I had put right beside my door. There was something so deep of a pain in me, Father, like the end of all things was drawing near. I didn’t think it over, I just picked up the bottle. As I drank my first whiskey, I watched the darkness collect.

It came peacefully out of the hearts of things. Bled from the leaves. The clouds sifted darkness out of them and it swirled into the air. I put my head back against the log wall, still warm, and I felt comfortable. I drank again, deeply. The stuff burned, then spread through me with a radiator comfort. Before me, as the dark was all of a piece, then, I saw my real mother rearing up. Even booze has a spirit. Yes, I said, it is the liquor who cares for me now. Alcohol is my red mother. She was fire, she was stupidity, she was light. She was all I needed. Her heart was a golden catchall of sorrows and pains. She told me that if I chose her, she’d stay by me and she used the word forever, which with her I could believe.

As I said, I was a dog to the Lazarres. I ate the scraps when there were scraps. The old dress I wore sagged off my shoulders. My shoes were hides I tied onto my feet and my coat was the blanket I slept with. Besides my own so-called family, my best customers back in those days were Morrisseys. If someone was on a long dirty bender and coming down slow, I’d bring the bottle to them on Brownie. We’d make special delivery of the booze to certain drunks like Sophie Morrissey, who was long ago, as a girl, in that house hit by the Virgin’s statue and found it almost impossible after that to manifest a drunk state, though she tried. Anyway, this Sophie returned the favor by telling me the answer to the origin of Marie Lazarre.

We were sitting on broke chairs in her stomped-over yard. Sophie, she used to be a pretty woman in her time. When she told me these things she knew, her face still showed it, even though her body was strange — big bellied and spidery soft. Her features, blurred over with drink, were mild and stupid. She had brown skin and big wild green eyes, a straight little delicate nose, a darker sprinkle of tiny freckles. Her lips were slack and puffy, but when she smiled at the cork as she pulled it out, there was still a ghost of that girl I’d heard about. Frowzy hair caught up in a bun, wrinkled hands tough from the farmwork she did when not in ruin, she slugged back a good one, then carefully corked the bottle again and looked at me, eyes watering.

“You’re a good little niece to me.”

“Miigwetch.” I thought she was grateful to me for getting her wasted, and I didn’t take that serious. I sat with her for some time in the pleasant sunlight of her blasted yard — nothing grew there. It was peopled with dogs, fur sticking every which way, dogs nursing pups and biting fleas and sleeping belly up.

“This here’s my last bottle. I got to taper down so I can go cut hay.” She grinned at me, friendlier even than before. “Geget igo, you are a good little niece.”

Once again, I nodded. I took that in, but she wouldn’t let go of it yet.

“Eyeh, your deydey, he was my uncle.”

That was like a lightning wand went down my back.

“Take a hit and tell me more,” I said, all merry like I was a drinker too. I smiled with pleasant expectation at her, as though my heart weren’t beating in my throat, as though I didn’t have that sick way-down empty craving feeling that even at that moment I understood why she turned to the liquor to fill.

“She showed early. I was just a girl at the time and these things weren’t anything to me, but her belly popped right out!”

Sophie laughed, a cackling screechy sound, not unpleasant — unless she is laughing at your mother’s little tub of a stomach that once contained a baby who was you. I just wanted to slap her face, and it was even harder to stay in control of my tongue. All my life I have fought my quick anger and I did so, then, looking at my feet in their heavy, black, men’s boots. Listening. She knew about my mom. The Puyat. All I knew about my mom was her last name and the fact that not even the Lazarres would talk about her — she was that bad, I guessed, or that dead.

“My Puyat mama,” I commented, letting it hang in the air.

She took another long drink, extending her wrist to my mom’s memory, and then she began to talk, like all drinkers seem to do, about all the wrongs accomplished against them. In this case, the wrongs were specific to my mother, so I listened closely to try and gather more information.

“She witched me! She stole my virginity!”

Sophie started laughing until she choked.

“To be a Puyat is to be a thing not of this earth. Down below it”—she spat—“down where they put together dead bones and skin and hair and raise things up — witch creatures.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I never left my hair around her. I burned it, my fingernail clips neither. I threw them on the fire. I never let her get a part of me. At night, she witched me. I know what she was doing.”

“What?”

“Working me! She tried to work me like a puppet on a string!”

Some people, they go so deep. They are like a being made of tunnels. Passageways that twist and double back and disappear. You have a foot on one path and you follow for a while, but then there is a sinkhole, bad footing, a wall. My mother, she was this kind of person, so deep and so intricate of design. Now, when I think about her, I feel my head go heavy. My brain hauls freight — all that I will never know. For it seems to me that in my life I have thought everything there was to think about my mother, the Puyat. Only then, I didn’t know her fate.

And wouldn’t have, except for Sophie.

Of course, she told me. It didn’t come out in so many words, but little by little. First I heard more about the way Sophie was enforced by the Puyat to witless behavior. As she told it, the witch drew a certain pattern in the spongy ground just beside the outhouse. Buried in Sophie’s path a rag of monthly blood. Cursed her with owl’s feathers laid underneath the mattress. My mother bit like a wolf into her dreams. She, poor Sophie, was subjected to the advances of handsome men and, although she didn’t want to, the witch forced her to give in. Sweets tempted her. Again, she could not resist, and it wasn’t her own faulty determination but the Puyat’s bad medicine that weakened her so much. Drinking, likewise. She was still being influenced.

“I don’t want to drink you!” She held the bottle out at arm’s length and spoke to the ishkodewaaboo itself. “Geget igo, you contain an awful spirit! I don’t like to take the spirit of this evil water into my person. I resist. But the Puyat has done me lasting harm. She overcomes my poor arguments, splashes the first drops on my brain!”

Obvious, I thought, false blame was getting thrown here! Yet the smoke means fire. My mother was in Sophie’s life a source of corruption, that was clear enough to me whether or not she was in herself a weak person to begin with. There was a long — a very long — silence. In that quiet of Sophie’s brooding, I remember the air. Sour reek of gone slough mud. A blue sound of birds. Berries crushed underfoot and a resinous, sweet pine scent from deeper in the woods past her house. Dry, hot, dog fur. Cheap white-lady powder from the folds of Sophie’s last clean dress.

“Yet no matter how much I drink,” Sophie said, “I never really get drunk anymore. Once I get down to this last dress, though, I know I gotta quit.”

So even Sophie had some kind of limit — her vanity did not permit her to go on into the filth of habit more than four dresses deep, which is exactly what she owned. Four dresses. In the quiet, I felt a curtain open, and then the air swept through, a breeze, a fresh stirring of low wind from the east.

“My mother…” I prompted.

“Now she acts like she’s so holy!”

That’s all she said, but from those few words I got so much. The now meant my mother was alive. The holy meant she was showing herself in some hypocritical way, going to church perhaps. First the now acted on me like the clap of a bell. While I was still letting the ringing die down the holy came in and kicked me from behind. I whirled in my thoughts. And one thing more. From the unsaid ground of the sentence there could be no doubt Sophie saw her or knew of her, which meant she must be living near. Which seemed impossible.

“Tell me who she is!”

I jumped on this immediately.

But now that she imagined herself slightly juiced, Sophie wasn’t so eager to speak to me, and she wanted something else.

“Gimme your horse.”

“No.”

“Borrow me your horse!”

“No.”

She stomped toward Brownie, so I grabbed her skirt from behind, whirled her around, and threw her in the gooseberries. I knew her mind. She wanted to ride into town or to some drinker’s house, where she could continue on until this last dress was too filthy for even her to wear. As she fell, arms outflung, I neatly plucked away the half-gone bottle from her clutch.

“Hihn! Daga, miishishin!”

“Who is she?”

“Who what?”

“My mother!”

“Why, don’t you know?” Sophie was stark sober, anyway. Perhaps she realized, for a moment, how much her answer meant in my life. Perhaps she understood and cared with some nondrunk’s understanding, but the drinker’s crafty power overcame her and she bargained for all she could get.

“That will cost the other bottle you got stuffed in your carry sack, plus a ride to Call the Day.”

We bargained back and forth. Call the Day himself was waiting for the bottle in my pack, so in the end I hoisted her up, held Brownie’s halter, and started to walk, as we’d agreed, her nursing her hope of drunkenness along now slow and easy from the back of my horse, until we reached Call the Day’s corner, where, after I had helped her down, she told me as we had agreed. She said my mother’s name:

“Leopolda, the so-called nun.”

I still remember the complete and upright stumped nature of my surprise. Sophie bawled at the house and Call the Day scurried out, a wizened young fellow afflicted with great picklish lumps on his face and neck. He gave me the money he’d raised, and I gave him the bottle. It was the last I was to sell. As he took it from me, the hand that gave it up burned, the center, the palm where I’d been stabbed by this very nun, this Leopolda, my teacher and my sponsor in the holy convent. My mother. From my hand the burning spread, flowed up my arm like a streak of blazing grease. Ringed my throat. Bloomed in my face. Spread until the whole of me flared. Then the lick of flame tweaked my brain and struck me as so funny that I laughed. I laughed until I screamed.

So that was who she was, Father Miller, this Leopolda was the Puyat who bore me in secret shame somewhere on Bernadette’s farm. It was the Morrisseys who passed me on to the Lazarres, whose dog I was until I got the power and they had to come to me begging for a drink. As I say, I quit that soon enough because I found, I got, I wanted to keep, and I did keep a man, Nector Kashpaw. I held on to him in spite of his own charms to himself and in spite of his mother. I stayed with him all his life. I married him, I buried him. I bore his children in between. And never did he know the name of my mother. And never did he know the name of my father. All he knew of me was that I was raised by Lazarres and escaped them. All he knew of me was what I let him know, and all he understood of me was that I was salt, not sugar. Salt, you’ve got to have to survive. Sugar, you can take or leave.

Oh, he had sugar too, Father Miller. Sugar by the name of Lulu. Lulu Lamartine. I see from your face that you understand about Lulu. Don’t blame yourself, don’t worry — a handsome man like you, wasted on the priesthood — you had no chance here, no chance at all.

21. THE BODY OF THE CONUNDRUM

1996

Father Damien looked even more frail the next morning than he had the day before. The smooth planes and knobs of his bones pressed out against his skin and his cheeks were sunburnt and his temples throbbing and drawn. During the night, the blood had surged to Father Damien’s heart. He sat up, dizzily, and he made the instantaneous and rough decision at last to tell everything, though it meant he was implicated in the cover-up, everything. Risk all, even the ultimate. No matter were he stripped naked and found out, yes, he must at last quash for good and ever any question of Leopolda’s consideration. He must lay out the plain and simple truth to Father Jude, who was too obtuse after all to grasp it any other way.

Haunted, strained, his eyes searched Jude’s face for questions.

“Father Jude, what if your candidate for sainthood was a murderer? Let us imagine it. I think you have.”

“No,” said Jude, shocked and then despairing at the abrupt statement. It had been quite enough to learn, the day before, that his saint was an abandoning mother. He had brought his own coffee and tried to hide his agitation now, carefully pouring out his first cup from a thermos he’d found in the rectory. Father Damien’s statement shouldn’t have rattled him. He should have understood by now that he understood nothing. Even so, he stammered. “I hadn’t, of course. Up until this moment… even now I have no idea what you’re talking about — and still, what evidence, what proof?”

“Incontrovertible,” said Damien, delivering to the younger priest a piercing glare.

“What now?” said Jude, faltering. The other priest was sly, extremely intelligent, and possessed of a hidden stamina that had foiled Father Jude’s imagination. He was truly taken off guard. Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. “What now?” he croaked again.

“We enter into the body of the conundrum,” Damien answered with some pleasure, gaining strength from the younger priest’s confusion. “We have established that there are miracles, real ones, solid evidence of good. Moral as well as physical miracles. Suppose, suppose. Suppose that in addition to her miracle working, however, your Leopolda killed a man with her bare hands? What weighs more, the death or the wonder?”

“The death,” said Jude. “Certainly. But again, where is your proof?”

Damien laughed, without mirth, without lightness. “It is part of the miracle.”

He sank into a silence so profound it seemed like death, stared at the toes of his shoes, closed his eyes. Jude Miller let the tape run on, scraping down the batteries, and was rewarded when, with a wild sleepwalking vigor, Father Damien Modeste sat up and spoke emphatically.

“I kept the barbed-wire rosary in a drawer all by itself, fittingly, and from time to time I looked at it and speculated on its use. One day, in frustration, I gripped it in my own hands and doubled it, then swung it around the post to my bed until the barbs nearly pierced my hands, went deep enough anyway to leave blue marks of bruises. Quickly, I drew diagrams of where those marks fit. Again, again, I practiced the murderer’s art, and each time I stopped I added a detail to the picture until I had a very good idea where the rips, the wounds, the marks, the damage would have occurred in the hands of the killer. The barbs were long. I believe they would have torn short seams, at least two, upwards into the curve of the palm like so…”

Here Father Damien brushed three marks up the inside of his curved old hands.

“I began to look, Father Jude, I began to observe. To my unsurprise, although many of my parishioners wore scars and marks, none were striped with the regularity of my killer. I proposed excuses and theories, became a reader of palms, made a continual nuisance of myself, let it be known that I had some peculiar medical reason for examining the inner landscape of people’s hands. Nobody matched, Father Jude, nobody matched until I took off my blinders and began to look where I had rather not — close in, right next to me, inside the shape of Christ’s body.”

The old one drew a troubled breath, disturbed even now to recall the scene. “Father Jude, I can see it clearly, the moment out of time when she opened her hands. In the beams of afternoon radiance, she implored me to allow her some penance or other. That’s when I saw that her palms bore the jagged white streaks, the raised scars, the triangular healed gashes where the barbs had cut into the flesh.”

The two men fell silent in contemplation, and then Jude remembered.

“The miracle,” he said to Father Damien, “you said that the proof was part of the miracle. What did you mean?”

A slow smile cracked Father Damien’s face, squeezed the fine wrinkles to careful sheaves. “Oh, I thought it would be apparent to you early on, my friend. I thought it was clear — the stigmata — the marks she insisted she wore as the result of the vision in which she was given Christ’s crown of thorns. Those marks were not made by thorns, but by wire barbs, of course. As for the sign and the wonder, hear this. The metal bore a bloody rust. The true miracle was this: the fast that our so-called saint soon endured, the amazing rigidity, the miraculous possession that gripped the imagination of the parish, was not the visionary trance her sisters supposed, but tetanus.”

THE MOUSE

An irritatingly persistent mouse woke Father Jude, scrabbling lightly behind the studs and plaster, gnawing with businesslike devotion on something — electrical or phone wiring — inside the thick rectory wall. At night, against the hills, the powerful yard lamps doused, the dark was so heavy that he labored in the blackness to breathe. The chore of inhaling and exhaling became so tiresome that he switched on the dim reading lamp to divert himself. In its feeble show, he sat up dizzily and banged the wall to frighten the mouse. It stopped chewing for a moment, then recommenced, which was when the thought formed.

Startled, Father Jude spoke the thought aloud.

“He knew all along!”

Scrambling out of bed to scrape through his notes, he tried to reconstruct the chain of dates and confessions, realizations and facts, that culminated in this absolute conclusion and conviction. Father Damien had known, from the first perhaps, that Pauline Puyat, later Sister Leopolda, had, with a cruelly modified rosary, strangled the farmer Napoleon Morrissey. Father Damien had known and yet kept the knowing secret to himself. He had made no move to contact the diocese hierarchy. There was no letter written to the bishop hinting obliquely of a grave crime. Father Damien had made absolutely no move either to contain or to punish Sister Leopolda. And any priest would have done as much, no matter how dear he held his vows regarding the secret nature of the confessions he heard. Something else was at work, then. Father Jude Miller cogitated. The mouse began munching another wire and a white moth fluttered into the pool of lamplight.

Cogito ergo sum. Turn it around. My heart is clear, therefore I act. I am, therefore I think. I am, therefore I speak. Guilty, therefore I’m silent. Some premise known and understood by Damien and Leopolda, basic to the argument and essential to the agreement between them. Some premise powerful enough to cause a collusion between two enemies. Some secret endgame in which both of their triumphs were thwarted, a checkmate, a stalemate, and the result was the covered-up truth of a man’s ugly death.

The conclusion was inescapable: Father Damien had also done something that he wished to hide.

And Sister Leopolda had known what that something was.

Father Jude Miller banged on the wall again. The dry, scattering scuttle of the mouse was like the random disarray of his thoughts. What, what did Father Damien do? He wanted to ask Leopolda herself, but of course the only way to do that was to appeal to her supernatural attention. Abruptly, Jude laughed, for the answer was to treat her as a saint and say his prayers, address her in the afterlife, the world beyond, only whether he should aim for heaven or hell there was no telling.

Between heaven and hell, he thought now, wearily, here I am in North Dakota. I am in love. My life as a priest is over. My vows are stripped of sweetness. They become a desert in the face of human love. All I will know from now on will be a purgatory of the senses and a suspension of possibilities. Still, he must finish his work. He would try to pray. And what if Leopolda should answer?

The next day, paging carefully through the stacks of papers, the marriage certificates, the records of death and birth, he came across a piece of paper that told him everything. Among the carefully organized papers of Father Damien’s first years — he had been a meticulous file keeper — the birth record surfaced. Jude read the hand-printed certificate over, once, twice, again and again, absorbing its claim. Then carefully he culled it from the official records and slipped it into a manila file folder all its own. Once he found the informing document, he was too disturbed to do anything else but try to absorb its implications. He went outside to walk the dusty road that led to the high school running track, where he would circle and circle in his springy shoes. It was perhaps on the third mile, though he’d lost count of laps, that startled, he again spoke a thought:

“By God, she did answer!”

FATHER JUDE’S CONFESSION

When Damien moved aside the panel of wood and bent to the screen, he knew at once that he spoke to his fellow priest — it was the keen citrus aftershave. That gave him away, though he would have known from his voice as well. He naturally chose, as he did always, to allow Father Jude his privacy, and Damien spoke as though to a stranger. The younger priest went along with this and confessed anonymously, though he, too, knew that the screen was practically transparent and his voice was familiar to his colleague. Of course, once he spoke of Lulu, all pretense was abandoned. And anyway, Father Jude could not keep the emotion from filling his talk. He had not slept more than a few hours at a time for days.

“It is actually”—his voice was low—“a form of madness. A special aspect of which is the inability of the afflicted one to see beyond the thorns of the flesh and loving spirit. I feel ludicrous, pained, hurt, drained, exalted, and sick all at once. Ludicrous because, quite obviously, at my age I should have dispensed with and put these feelings in their places. Pained because I cannot tell her. Hurt because the hurt of unattainable intimacy lies before me constantly. Drained… well, obviously all of this emotion takes its toll on the body. Yet, thrilled! I have never felt so supremely right in my emotions, not since I took my vows. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task, dear Father Damien, tremendous and foolish and human. I’m sick because I can’t eat for the beauty of it, and the anguish is beautiful too. Can I have her? No, I can’t! Can she ever be with me? Just once? Of course not, unless I leave the priesthood. I’ll do it. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Ever.”

“My dear son,” said Damien, and his heart twisted in flat-out pity.

“If I was more perfectly committed, more noble, more secure, more Christ-like, I’m sure I would be immune to her, Father.”

“No one is immune to her,” said Father Damien, quite kindly.

“There is no vaccine? No cure for the malady? I’d like a little something to ease the pain.”

“What would help?”

“Music.”

“Of course.”

“Would you play for me tomorrow?”

“I will.”

“And Father…” now there was in the sound of the younger priest’s pause something that put Damien on alert, some shift of attention and focus. It occurred to him that Jude, having admitted what he considered a great weakness, needed to extract a similar weakness from him, to put them on a more equal level. He considered tuning out and giving a huge, fake snore, but didn’t want the other man to feel he was wanting in attention to his first problem, so he quietly asked Jude to go on.

“I know your secret,” said Father Jude.

It was a wallop. Agnes’s wind left her. For a moment, she was panicked to nerveless buzzing. Then, suddenly, the air flooded into her body.

“Oh!”

“Yes, I do.”

Another pause. A yellow sheet of stars descended and Agnes thought, faintly, that she must not babble if she went unconscious. But the stars resolved to dusk air once more as Father Jude went on talking.

“I’ve already decided not to speak of it. I can’t, I won’t, though I might have before I experienced the confounding process of falling in love with Lulu Lamartine. I understand now, I actually identify to some degree with what you must have experienced. I cannot cast the first stone. Or any stone.”

“Thank you,” said Agnes, confused and unnerved.

“Don’t you want to know how I found out?”

“Yes.” Agnes’s voice was very faint.

“I found the papers,” said Jude, “while doing research on our subject. Of course, I looked up the birth certificate of Lulu, as I looked up everything about her in the church files. You didn’t bother to hide it very well.”

“Hide?”

“The birth certificate, of course. Father Damien, I know about it. You are, or would be, but of course you won’t…”

“What?”

“My father-in-law. If only… I mean, if only I could have her.”

“My dear son…”

“Yes! I saw your name on Lulu’s birth certificate. You are Lulu’s father. I know now, should have grasped before, from your words, how deeply you loved her mother, Fleur. I understand. To my great sorrow, no, joy, I truly and fervently know what it is to become undone by a woman. I shall keep your secret, as I know you’ll keep mine.”

And then, to Agnes’s astonishment, the stolid and nerveless man on the other side of the screen began to weep into his hands.

BINGO NIGHT

Father Jude was engaged in what was perhaps the greatest moral struggle over a bingo game conducted in the history of the Church. But of course, it wasn’t that alone, at all. Most things on the reservation, he was beginning to find, either connected with or came down to Lulu. Bingo was no different, especially when it concerned an invitation to accompany her to the Sweetheart Bingo Bash, with games commencing at midday and running through the night. Special prizes. Honeymoon trips. Weekend getaways in Grand Forks. Champagne suppers up in Winnipeg. A year’s worth of chocolates.

How was he supposed to define himself free of wishing now that he had a wish? How ignore the sleepless reality of the struggle in his thoughts? How configure his embarrassment? How not say a word? And accept that he was human, therefore ridiculous?

Playing bingo, she said, raising her eyebrows and sliding her eyes obliquely away, was just one of her many failings. She was sorry, but what was the harm in it after all? She never lost more than she could afford to lose or won so much that it made her act better than her friends, and if she did happen to win a lot, she spread it around with a generous hand. What was the problem, then, and did Father Jude think it was simply in the nature of gambling? If so, shouldn’t he try playing for himself and seeing how childish the game really was — just a diversion, really, like playing Monopoly, only in a vast roomful of people?

“No, I cannot go with you,” said the priest, for perhaps the tenth time.

As always, she smiled a particular smile he had come to think of as her neutral gear. She smiled that way when she was buying time. When her brain was clicking forward with a new argument.

“It’s probably better that you not go.” She said this easily, which caused his heart to catch in a stabbing and painful stitch he breathed deeply to loosen. He wanted to reach forward and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, though her hair was perfect. He wanted to lay his face against her neck, brush the curve of her throat. Instead, he pressed his fingers to his lips to contain the words that would expose his longing. Women her age were not supposed to have slim waists and smiles so joyous. And her radiant laugh! She was laughing at him, mocking his last ditch attempt at self-control.

“You want to,” she held a finger up to him. “I know. I can tell.”

Wanting was not the problem. Not going with her was the problem. In desperation, Father Jude went to ask Father Damien what he should do, and to try to elicit counsel that would shore up his resolve not to venture to the Bingo Palace, or anywhere, with Lulu.

“I’m no help,” said Father Damien, “I won’t tell you what to do. You wouldn’t listen if I did.”

“I’m not asking you to dissuade me,” said Father Jude, gathering his pride. “I suppose, anyway, it’s not a place a priest should likely venture.”

“I venture.”

“Do you go with her too?”

“Of course,” said Father Damien. “The years between us have shrunk away. Since I retired from my active role in the Church to write my reports, Lulu has been kind enough to relieve my solitude with occasional trips to the Bingo Palace. There, we sit among friends, enjoying the workings of chance as we sip on cold drinks. We listen to the gossip, the bragging over grandchildren and lamenting of the actions of grown sons and daughters. She listens and I smile. She does not judge and I need not absolve, for after all these years my forgiveness is taken for granted.”

Father Jude nodded, flexed his hands, sighed wearily. “I should just go to bed and forget about this. But I know I won’t. I’ll end up going with her and going to the devil.”

He said the last extravagantly and earned a disapproving frown from Damien. “She is good,” said the old priest, “one day you will understand this. She is goodness itself.”

Three hours passed in which he thought she’d forgotten all about him. Then she came back and asked him again, just to make sure, and she brushed against him when she did this and he said, in that instant, yes he would. He got into her car. As soon as he did so, he realized that he’d never let a woman drive him anywhere before. He should have seen it coming, then, as he rode along in the sun-struck, dark, red seat in unaccustomed passivity. He’d never been so alone with a woman, except in the anonymity of the confessional. And now that it was just the two of them in so small a space, he wanted to drive forever. And then they were at the Bingo Palace.

“I’ll stake you,” she said, purchasing a bingo package. They sat down together at a long table with ashtrays in front of a big-screen TV on a stage. Not long, and the numbers rolled off the announcer’s lips. On B-10, Father Jude’s mouth went dry. His glasses fogged on G-40, and by the time they’d cleared and he saw the possibilities his lips were buzzing, numb, and he dabbed delicately on the square O-63.

“Someone else bingoed.” She tore off the flimsy sheet of numbers and tossed it away. Then she asked him what she’d got him here to ask him, solo and in her power: “What are you doing with Father Damien?”

The implication being, What are you doing to him.

“Interviewing him,” said Father Jude.

“He looks tired.” Lulu dabbed smoothly, marking a number he’d missed. “But he also looks”—and here she stamped his paper just a bit harder—“stronger. He actually looks stronger and healthier than I’ve seen him in quite a while. So whatever you’re interviewing him about…”

“Church business.”

“Seems he likes to talk about Church business then. What kind of business?”

Somehow, the way she asked, conversationally and distractedly, as though she had a perfect right to ask and know, left him undefended. He told her. Horrified later, he couldn’t remember the exact words and all that went with them, but he did know he’d treated her like a confidante and colleague. Not just telling but discussing the implications of what was to become of whatever findings he made, and even worrying about the difficulty of establishing a literal or factual truth when there were opposing versions of Leopolda’s life and story, when the life — as opposed to the evidence of miraculous interventions — did not add up.

“Should I be telling you all of this?” he asked at one point.

“Why not?” she asked calmly.

He couldn’t think of a reason, and then he couldn’t think of anything. He was looking at her helplessly. He couldn’t look away.

“You’ve got it bad,” she said, diagnosing his fever like a compassionate doctor.

He mumbled agreement and the great burden of his feeling pressed up all around him in a buzz of noise. Saying it lifted away the burden of strangeness. Relieved, he smiled at her, and then she was staring straight into his eyes, with an easy, knowing sympathy that made his blood hum in his ears.

LEOPOLDA’S PASSION

Father Jude Miller had always loved to read about saints — the first and oldest of course somewhat apocryphal, the stories structured to end with ingenious tortures, the saints even in agony making clever retorts to butchers and emperors. As well, he loved the more contemporary saints whose lives obtained of more possibility of emulation — he marveled at their sense of sacrifice and fervor. He found himself dwelling on the symmetry of the saints’ passions, or stories, on their simplicity of line. He was having trouble with passion, from the Latin pati, to suffer, defined in the Catholic Dictionary as a written account of the sufferings and death of one who laid down his life for the faith. He was persuaded that the God he knew, at least, wanted him to write a passion, a recognition for this very complex person, Leopolda.

Besides that, he wanted to get the whole thing over with, this mission. As soon as possible, he would then leave the priesthood, immediately marry Lulu, get old with her. Wait, they were old already. They would die in each other’s arms, then. He must concentrate. He turned back to the task of describing Leopolda.

With some dismay, in the welter of files and note cards in fans and toppling stacks, Father Jude understood that to tell the story as a story was to pull a single thread, only, from the pattern of this woman’s life, leaving the rest — the beautiful and brutal tapestry of contradictions — to persist in the form of a lie.

Still, he tried.

Sister Leopolda of Little No Horse was born in extremely humble circumstances and during a time when accurate birth and death records were not kept, especially for families of wanderers among the Ojibwe, Cree, and

métis

families of the plains frontier. Although only sporadically exposed to the teachings of the Church, her piety was marked from a very young age.

Here, he stopped, shuffling through his papers for examples noted during the brief period, especially, when she had lived in Argus with relatives. She was spared during a tornado that had ripped the town apart. Though she attributed her survival to prayer and to the rigid defense of her virginity, an elderly man who, as a child in that family, had been lifted with her into the roil of air that same day, said otherwise: She used to cuff me around, slap me, scream, if that’s what you call praying. Yet there had also been stories of her fervid attendance at Holy Mass. She was unflaggingly pious. Though Father Damien remembered their first encounter in the church as disturbing, others reported a dull metallic glow surrounded her when she was lost in prayer, and the strong, resinous scent of burning pine pitch, not unpleasant, filled the air when she spoke out loud the sincere act of contrition.

She had a great deal to be contrite about, Father Jude thought, so why was she then rewarded with spiritual favors? Not his place to figure out, he told himself, and continued writing.

Many conversions took place as a result of her example of continual prayer. During what others have called her “marathon adorations,” in which she knelt for hours, sometimes whole days, eventually consecutive days, before the Blessed Host, she was in a state of ecstasy almost tangible to those who approached to touch her. Many reported that they were overwhelmed with a poignant sense of peacefulness, or that, holding a hand lightly on her shoulder, they were able to close their eyes and clearly visualize the answers to their problems and follow the progress of their prayers out the stovepipe and over the roof of the church, off the tips of the leaves, dodging the clouds and away into the sky.

Father Jude Miller put down his pen and dropped his head into his hands. True, but others had said she left a black stain like oil where her knees pressed for all of those days. During the time of her longest confinement or trance, the rigid fast that Father Damien had revealed as no visionary journey of the spirit but a dangerous case of lockjaw, he had been told, this from Dympna, that voices were heard behind the closed door of her cell. Voices arguing, low demonic growls, hideous moans. And yet when the door was opened there would be only Leopolda, bones and skin underneath the coverlet, eyes staring through the roof.

She was accepted as a novice at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Little No Horse, and there she proceeded to raise great sums of money for the improved comfort of her sisters by giving missionary talks throughout the region. During these speeches, she would often become inspired to such a degree that others were moved to extreme acts of generosity. When she did return to the convent, she was physically and mentally exhausted, but tried her best to continue her studies in Church history and catechism, and to work toward the improvement of her soul.

He had to note, somewhere, what a trial she was to others and where her piety became terrific and strange. And, too, what to say about the deadly conversion she had effected with Quill, the useless baptisms she’d wrought on the defenseless dead, not to mention her amalgam of ancient practice with Catholic tradition and the skulls she dragged for years behind the Virgin of the Serpents, dragged by way of pierced back and arms, until they pulled free, shredding her….

In an attempt to reconcile the two worlds from which Leopolda drew spiritual sustenance, the young novice mistakenly, but with a fervent heart and pure intentions, attempted to graft new branches onto the tree of Catholic tradition.

Father Jude hummed with approval for his metaphor, imagined the great rooted base of an oak spreading wide and the branches reaching hungrily toward light, one among them boldly colored, beaded entirely, and ribboned. He leaned back into the supports of his wooden chair and closed his eyes. Suddenly, he saw that he was mistaken. The picture shifted. The tree was beaded all the way down to the center of the earth and the branch of his own beliefs, the dogma and history of the Catholic Church not even a branch but a twig not strong enough for a bird to perch on, just a weak and slender shoot. He rubbed his eyes and resumed his place in Leopolda’s story.

When her efforts to meld the two cultures failed, she chose decisively for the one true church and diverted the fever in her soul to the zeal of conversion. She was assiduous in her attempts to lead her people to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity, and used whatever means were at hand to effect enlightenment. Sometimes, it is true, she overstepped the bounds that may be termed proper. These were crimes of passion for the faith, however, and as she continued in her growth she began to understand just how to channel the great zeal she felt into more effective ploys. While in Argus, North Dakota, she took her perpetual vows and then returned to Little No Horse to continue her missionary work among her own people, one of whom she had murdered—

Father Jude paused, blinked at the word, then shook himself, stared fixedly at his pen, and continued writing fiercely.

Granted, she killed out of revenge for his unwanted sexual attentions, but she actually used a sacred rosary to strangle him. Plus she bore his child and then repudiated the girl — no — lived near and tortured her! Leopolda poured boiling water from a kettle onto the girl’s back and then, in an act of shocking viciousness she brained the child with an iron poker and stabbed a hole—

He jumped out of his chair in extreme agitation and began to pace back and forth behind his desk. All this even without Lulu’s testimony, without the children Leopolda had bruised and, maybe worse, grievously humiliated in her classroom, the barbarous use she made of shame, anger, sarcasm — all poisons of the spirit, which she possessed every bit as much as the spirit’s gifts. Because of Sister Leopolda, and Lulu had laughed saying this about her teacher, she’d bathed for six weeks in Hilex water to see if her skin would bleach. Because of Leopolda, children endured memories of ear-ringing slaps, of uglier blows, of the jeering fun she made of their poverty and innocence.

So many know God who never would have! Jude argued with himself, hearing the counterargument. So many turned away from God, because the messenger was frightful. He could not write other than the truth, of course, what had he been thinking? Why this deep thirst to make a saint of this appalling woman? Perhaps the miracles were false concoctions, as many are, or they were simply phenomena unexplainable by what we know of physical science. Then again, perhaps they were true miracles. A tremor of frustration shook him. He closed his eyes and into his mind there fell again the image of the intricately beaded oak tree. He must remember to tell Damien, he thought, and allowed his thoughts to relax in a welcome diversion.

Father Damien. The old priest had fixed himself in Jude’s bland emotional landscape as the first interesting, though irritating, feature in a long while, and then of course Lulu had followed. But he wouldn’t think of her. He set his thoughts on the series of conversations he’d taped over the past few weeks. Placing Father Damien in the context of the writing he was embarked on, he realized that Damien’s story was not only fascinating in itself, but also probably revealed now for the first time to him, Father Jude.

There was Father Damien’s incredible beginning, the years of starvation and disease, the tireless love he had shown in pushing through slough and bush to give solace where he could. Damien had not shirked from physical labor, either, or the tedium of raising money for the Church or for the poor. He had learned the language of the Ojibwe and continued to translate hymns and prayers, even before Vatican II. There was a special sweetness in Father Damien’s relationships with his people. When he spoke, especially of Nanapush and Lulu, the warm humor of his love radiated out. His stories were intriguing — the salvation via Eucharistic corporealization — what to make of that? Then there were the visitation by the snakes, the voices, the continual devilish botherment and baiting of Father Damien.

For the first time, now, stirring himself to frown out the window, Jude considered that Father Damien might actually be telling the truth about the devil. Was Father Damien often in some mystical state of ecstasy? And was he telling the truth about the black dog’s temptation? If so, what more deeply generous act of the spirit than to give up his eternal reward for the life of a child? It was an act of Christ-like goodness — no, more. Jesus had suffered for three hours and then gone to his eternal reward, whereas Damien would suffer for eternity — no comparison!

Of course, and here Jude nodded as though to another person’s obvious question, Lulu was his daughter. What father would not do as much? And the fact that she was his daughter, well, that was a sin and a breaking of his vows, a scandal. But then again, Saint Augustine himself had a mistress and a son, and certainly — here Jude caught himself making an odd comparison — an act of generation should be considered with far more indulgence than an act of murder.

It occurred to him that he was, in his mind, setting the life of Damien out in a scheme next to the life of Sister Leopolda, and he wondered why until he thought, The life of sacrifice, the life of ordinary acts of daily kindness, the life of devotion, humility, and purpose. The life of Father Damien also included miracles and direct shows of God’s love, gifts of the spirit, humorous incidents as well as tragic encounters and examples of heroic virtue. Saintly, thought Jude almost idly, then caught himself in wonder.

Saintly? Father Damien? Am I writing the wrong Saint’s Passion?

He rose, the papers sliding from his desk in a sighing mass, the note cards fanning from the rubber band binders, books and notebooks toppling.

22. FATHER DAMIEN’S PASSION

1996

Time at last to end the long siege of deception that has become so intensely ordinary and is, now, almost as incredible to me as it will be to those who find me, providing I let that happen. Agnes scratched a red-tipped kitchen match on the rough side of its box. Carefully, shredding the paper, she then burned what she had written over a shallow abalone shell. The fine flakes of ash collected. She was getting rid of evidence. Even as she wrote, she burned what she wrote. That was how she knew her time was coming.

We are ever betrayed by our bodies and animal nature, she went on. There is no way around the fact that beneath these clothes I am a shocking creature, to be prodded, poked, and marveled at when dead. Defenseless, that’s how I picture it, and the prospect is so truly dreadful that I prefer to disappear. That is the word I use. To disappear means that I will be elsewhere, not just dead, although of course that is the outcome I have accepted.

The decision calmed her fears and allowed her to prepare.

In the cool days of early June, Agnes decided to put her plan into action. Now was the time. She felt abnormally fit, too strong for her age, impossibly vigorous. Now, in this false summer of existence, she would have the strength. She would go to Spirit Island on Matchimanito. The plan was simple. She would invent a travel itinerary, even purchase tickets, pretend to go someplace warm from whence she would not return. Prepare documents to support the fiction of some tragic disappearance. In the meantime, she would steal a rowboat, take aboard a decent vintage of wine, and row herself out to Spirit Island under cover of night. There, she would burn the boat in a merry bonfire, at which she would drink the wine. At some point, when she was very drunk and deliriously pleased with the whole of her existence, she’d decide, No more! She’d drown herself. Cleverly, by the use of heavy stones, she would make sure that her body was anchored to the lake bottom.

Every time she grew faint of heart, she had only to remind herself of the singular horror of posthumous discovery. The thought of being gaped at, examined, the thought of this body that had sheltered and harbored her spirit all this life, poor thing, in the hands of the curious. Agnes could not bear to imagine the silly furor.

Much better to seek the island.

Besides, maybe once she was there Fleur would talk to her. She’d gone there to be with the last of the Pillagers, her cousin Moses. Nanapush might join them with new and outrageous stories of his life after death. She imagined their bones all mixed up together, spirits arguing and laughing as in the old days. As Agnes proceeded to make preparations and to gather supplies for her successful vanishing, she was oddly cheered at the prospect, however slight, of once again meeting up with her friend. She laid the groundwork. Faked letters from a host, shipped boxes, withdrew all of her money — a surprising amount of money — from the bank. She intended to pin it against her body, under her shirt, in a Ziploc bag. A note would accompany the bills instructing any accidental finder of Damien to resink the body or bury it on the spot and consider the bag of money fair payment for the service. She thought of everything and then mailed one last, irate, good-bye-good-riddance letter.

Pope!

Perhaps we are no more than spores on the breath of God, perhaps our life is just one exhalation. One breath. If God pauses just a moment to ruminate before taking in a new breath, we see. In that calm cessation, we see. All I’ve ever wanted to do is see.

Don’t bother with a reply.

Modeste

After she wrote and sent off the letter, she found herself procrastinating, clinging to life. Small things brought tears to her eyes — the jar of wild clover honey Mary Kashpaw bought to sweeten the ever charred toast, the blue jay stamp put out by the U.S. Postal Service, the tremulous sifting of dark into the room where her piano gleamed. Her piano! Notes of the bacarolle she had played to greet the snakes. Leave these things, leave them lovingly and easily, she told herself, touching the angry bedpost where so often she had prayed. But it was not easy to leave.

The job of becoming Father Damien had allowed the budding eccentricities of Agnes to attain full flower. Thus the church that drew tourists, and her friends the snakes. Her rock-floored church, and the statue that Sister Leopolda had claimed wept quartz tears that melted in her pockets, and the slow-growing stunted oaks, the golden light, the lilacs. All these things would remain while she did not. How strange that her absence would have no effect whatsoever on the things of this world. Proving that they were not just things, she thought, proving that they were spirit surrounded by a shell of substance, just like her.

There were drums that refused to sound for any but the one who made them, and drums that got up and walked away in the night if they were neglected or felt lonely or cheated of attention. There were violins that wept for their original owners, cellos that groaned for a woman’s touch, guitars that responded only to men. Agnes thought now, with comfort, of her drowned piano. Their fates would match. She sorted her music and took her favorite pieces, thinking, I have never played the planted allées of Haydn or Brahms or even Schubert with the real devotion I gave the thick forests of Beethoven. I always went deeper into the crevasses, complicated the treatment of each note, brought up the minor and scoured the truth out of Bach.

Why could I not have lived more simply?

It would be suspicious for Father Damien not to take his music, so Agnes planned to burn it at her private good-bye party. These soft leaves of yellowed Chopin bearing her painstaking, hopeful self-notations, at least, should go with her! As for her refreshments, they were in the trunk of the car — an entire case.

On the dawn that Agnes prepared to leave, Mary Kashpaw appeared. She entered the yard so promptly that it was apparent she had been up for some time, waiting for her priest to make his move. As Agnes walked out to the car, Mary Kashpaw stood on the path in the swimming energy of the sunrise, its colors behind her. Her face was half shrouded in the blue pre-dawn light. She barred the way. Watching with a solid and hidden gravity, she extended her hand. In her palm, a book of matches.

“So you know, you understand,” said Agnes simply.

Mary Kashpaw’s face, illuminated by a sudden streak of new light, was cloudy and exhausted, her eyelids translucent, puffy, her lips bitten almost bloody. She stared blindly. Within her, like water set to boil on a stove, an emotion pressed for escape. It found her fingers, and her hands flapped abruptly as though they were two dishrags. Then her knees shook. A look of distress twisted across her features and she sank to a kneel. Slowly, she opened her embrace. With an intimate and grieving tenderness, she clasped her arms around Agnes’s knees and bent so that her broad sweep of forehead rested against her thighs. They were still for a long while, just breathing together. Agnes put her hand upon Mary Kashpaw’s great, gray head and stroked the whirlwind of hair at her crown. In its swirl, she saw the flourish of the ax, heard the runners of the sleigh traveling along the grass, saw, as she closed her eyes, how well Mary Kashpaw knew her and had kept her secret.

She took a coat from the mission store, a thing no one would recognize, a hatchet, the Ziploc bag of money, and another waterproof container of matches. Mary Kashpaw hadn’t trimmed Father Damien’s hair lately and it curled around her pate, a halo of white floss, so she brought a hairbrush. She threw in a heavy blanket, which she’d sink, and a nondescript pillow. She assembled all of these things and prepared for her trip as though for an adventure, which of course it was: death, the ultimate wilderness.

Rowing out to Spirit Island with cheese and crackers, candy bars, a bag of apples, and a case of wine, she stopped often to rest and to contemplate the easy chasing waves that rippled beside her. The wind was with her, so she corrected her drift and breathed the fire from her chest and the stinging emptiness from her muscles. The air was so pure and watery that it tasted like a tonic food. Her mind was phenomenally clear. Memories came back in waves, thoughts, passages of music, old songs Nanapush had taught her. They’d sing together once she reached the island. The trip took her most of the day, and it was dusk by the time she arrived, pulled up, and tied the boat to a tree.

The first night, all she did was start a tiny fire, curl up in the blanket, and eat crackers. Too tired even to uncork the wine, she gazed at the meek velvet tarp of the sky, the stars poking through, and she was visited in her drowsiness with a quiet intensity of happiness. Having unburdened herself of all that regarded her nemesis, she was right with the world. She had even forgiven Leopolda. The spirits of her friends, all those whom she’d loved, surrounded her. Gregory tumbling through the wall of books. His last, liquid golden stare, his hands cooling in her hands, his mouth set in an enigmatic half smile. She had parted lovingly with Mary Kashpaw and left off adequately with Father Jude. There was nothing left to torture herself over except, and this was inevitable, she didn’t want to die. And Lulu, she hated leaving her, especially in the middle of one of her flirtatious intrigues. And yet, she thought, with some hope, perhaps here on this island she would be protected from the black dog. Her soul might slip past the cur’s slimy teeth and sneak by the hell gates and pearly gates into that sweeter pasture, the heaven of the Ojibwe.

Next morning, she washed her face carefully in bits of broken sun. She took the hatchet to the boat and began to hack it apart, her arms so weak from the previous day’s exertions that she diminished it only by splinters. Bit by bit, however laboriously, she fed it to her new fire. The blaze gave off a warm friendliness that drew her to sit near. The day was cool and fresh. She ate an apple. A candy bar. At noon, she opened the first bottle of wine, toasted her surroundings, upended it, and drank to the dead.

“Make room,” she said cheerfully to the spirits in the sighing trees.

Dreamily comfortable, she planned. Her death would be simply another piece of the process, she would hardly notice it once the moment came. She’d be drunk, of course, but more than that, she’d be spiritually resigned and prepared. She would accomplish her own end as smoothly as all else. She would simply keep drinking until she got down to the last bottle and then, once she drained it, she’d put stones in her pockets and walk out where the water dropped suddenly to an unknown depth. She would open herself to the water, she would let creation fill her.

Not yet, though. Above her two eagles, a hunting pair, circled. Aloof, lethal, beautiful, they were like two gods who invented and now occasionally plucked their sustenance from the body of the world. She watched them intently, blinking into the whiteness of day. The fire sent shoots of sparks into the afternoon. She reviewed with hope the promise of slipping past the black dog into heaven, and drank, first keenly and then with numb greed, the pleasant blandness of the white Australian wine.

The end of the first bottle undid her. Complications arose. She was surprised how quickly her resolve shrank and how distinctly unpacified her thoughts and her feelings were. No matter what she’d done, no matter how many souls saved or neglected, no matter if she’d betrayed her nature as a woman or violated the vows of the long dead original Father Damien, her life was vapor, a thing of no substance, one note in the endless music, one note that faded out before the listener could catch its shape. Who was this Agnes, or this Damien, this overlay of leaves and earth? Her brain filled with a sound like the terrible jeering of sparrows in the eaves of the church. Her life was vast in its purposelessness, and yet confined to the narrow spectrum of her senses. She rocked beside the fire, her head in her hands.

The long night of the body came flooding back, her losses and stuffed desire. At her age, she was supposed to be at peace with the world, not filled with this darkling rage. The forgiveness she’d bestowed on the author of Berndt’s murder twisted in her brain like a weasel and she couldn’t subdue it. The forgiveness got out and turned its sharp teeth on her, sank to the quick in her heart a bitter thrill as she imagined the unborn children of Agnes and Berndt wrestling in the clean, straw-raising clouds of sun-glittering dust in the vast and windy barn. Agnes threw her head back, a headache spiked her temples. The pain probed open a door, a last new memory of the robbery came to her out of the dark.

Words. She heard herself as she gazed at the barrel of the Actor’s pistol. She told him that it was an old belief of her mother’s people that the soul of a murderer’s victim passes into the killer at the instant of death. “Are you prepared to bear the weight of my soul?” She had asked just this question before the gun went off, either causing the Actor to pull the trigger or ruining his aim by the hair that saved her life.

It was my soul that pressed him into the deep mud, she thought — I’ve never realized the weight of myself until now! Can I put it down? She asked this of the black sky, the stars. She no longer saw the constellations as she had before knowing them in Ojibwe, but saw the heavens as her friends defined them. Saw the otter. Saw the hole in the sky through which the creator had shot down at a blistering speed.

“Nanapush, Fleur, all of you!” She cried out to the ghosts of her friends, drunk and marveling with sorrow. “Come and sit with me.” When she poured just a bit of wine onto the ground, she felt Fleur approach, knew she sat just beyond the circle of firelight, in the rustling melt of shadows.

Reassured, she now sipped lightly, rested in a trance of increasing ease. Yes, it was time to put the weight down, the burden. The constant murmur of the pines, her beloved music, now became comprehensible to her in the same way that flows of Ojibwe language first began to make sense — a word here, a word there, a few connections, then the shape of ideas. Instead of growing duller, shutting down her senses, turning away from life, she found to her joy and consternation that she was growing keener. Her understanding was more intense, her vision wary and her hearing razor sharp. The roar and whisper of the pine needles intensified and she fell into a reverie of nostalgia.

“Just think,” she toasted history, speaking aloud to all of the invisible, assembled spirits. “Think all the way back to Agnes. If only she’d banked an hour earlier or later. If only she’d managed to fall off the moving car. If only Berndt hadn’t been going to Upsala to fix that harrow. How different my life. A farm woman with a beautiful piano.” Agnes held the bottle high and drank, deeply, to her lost Caramacchione and to her lost life as Agnes Vogel. Then she drank again to the huge life she had known at Little No Horse.

“Forgive me for drinking wine.” She asked pardon of the spirits. “I’m too weak and I’m alone. I have too many thoughts. If only the priest, the first Damien, hadn’t visited me with his doubts and stories. If only, if only. If only I’d thought to get out of the way when the river came for me. How easy my life would have been. How tedious! Thank god, I met your visionary, strange servant Nanapush!”

Agnes started to remember, and in remembering she couldn’t help laughing. In great joy at the foolishness of all design, she allowed herself to think openly and deeply of the incredible events of the last year of her old friend’s life. The even wash of black sky, clouded over and starless, fell about Agnes to muffle her closely. Whole sequences involving Nanapush bubbled up and she laughed at the awful absurdity, at the picture of her old friend dodging moose pellets, and the alert look on his face when he sat up at his own wake. Nanapush! The laughter grabbed in Agnes’s belly and she doubled over until she painfully gasped. Nanapush. The laughter cut her breath short and she took a huge wheezing gulp of air that made her snort. Aaah, it was all too unbearable. Tears squeezed out of her eyes shut tight in mirth. She’d taper off, but then the laughter spurted out and began, stronger, with a sweet, free vengeance that racked her ribs. Laughter traveled up through her feet, down her arms when she lifted her arms. It burst from her gut, unexpectedly. The laughter made her dizzy.

To clear her head, Agnes tried to lurch to her feet, thinking mirthfully, I’m going to laugh myself to death! It was then that she felt the stifled warm report of a blood vessel bursting just above her left ear. One side of the world went dark. She sank to her knees and with an amused wonder watched as slowly, with an infinite kindness, darkness covered up the other side as well. Sightless, now, she sank to earth and felt the heat of the leaping fire on her face. I am going, I am going, she thought. Underneath her and before her, a wide plain of utter emptiness opened. Trusting, yearning, she put her arms out into that emptiness. She reached as far as she could, farther than she was capable, held her hands out until at last a bigger, work-toughened hand grasped hold of hers.

With a yank, she was pulled across.

MARY KASHPAW

She paddled out to the island in a beat-up and awkward old aluminum canoe. She got out in shallow water, laced together her big rough shoes and slung them over her neck, tied the boat to a tough tree root, and waded ashore. She sat down on a powerful twist of exposed root. Methodically, very carefully, Mary Kashpaw tied the shoes back on her feet. Creaking monumentally, she stood. The island could be traversed side to side in ten minutes. Walking the rough shore might take half an hour to negotiate. The center was rock, piled rock rising in a solid cliff. Everyone knew the cave that Moses Pillager used and where his drum still lived. His cats had long ago died of boredom or devoured one another. Birds sang thick in the scuttering bushes, and a red squirrel chattered high in the lyre spread of an old white pine. Mary Kashpaw crossed a bed of soft duff, made her way over to the side of the island where the camping was easiest. There, she saw him right away and she stopped. He was no more than a fold of black cloth crumpled near the white ash circle of his fire. One arm was stretched alongside his hip and the other was bent, a pillow under his head. She knew before she understood that the stillness of his body was the immobility of earth.

She relighted his campfire, rolled him into a blanket, and laid out his limbs straight and true. She handled him gently, as though his bones were flower stalks, his skull fragile as a blown egg. She folded his arms across his waist, and then Mary Kashpaw sat beside him. Her eyes were clouded, her body stunned, her thoughts far away and tiny as a view through the wrong end of the telescope. Her heart was numb with a kind of odd embarrassment.

She felt shy now, entrusted with far too much power. Left with the choice whether to bring him back across the lake in the canoe or to bury him here on the island, she froze. She listened to the pines, paced, even considered opening a bottle of the wine at his feet although she never drank. She watched the waves, shut her eyes, fell into a drowsy suspension wherein she received what felt like an answer. She found the Ziploc bag of money and the note. It took a while to read the note, letter by letter she made it out. Of course she understood exactly what he’d expected.

She buried him in the lake.

Pulled him to the hacked rowboat and hoisted him in. Chose rocks to weigh him down, lashed them tightly into his clothes with strips of plastic taken from his stash of goods. Brought her canoe around and lined it up with the funeral boat. Towing her priest in his damaged rowboat, holes hacked in the bottom, she paddled out into the lake. She stopped where the water was of an anaerobic cleanliness, cold, black, and of an endless depth. As the sky filled with light, she watched the old heavy rowboat slowly fill and then sink. Father Damien’s slight figure, serene in its halo of white hair, lay just under the waves. As the dark water claimed him, his features blurred. His body wavered for a time between the surface and the feminine depth below.