“What is it when you know of a sin and do nothing?”
“That is a sin of silence.”
“So it is a sin.”
“Yes.”
“Then I must confess it,” said the woman unwillingly.
In a few sentences, then, the woman whose voice was familiar to Damien—it was Bernadette’s—confirmed the truth of what he had long ago suspected of Napoleon Morrissey. He heard the rest of her confession in a numb, unfused state of tension. He absolved Bernadette, heard the other confessions. Once they were all finished, he continued to sit in the little booth, in his lap the soft, old, battered breviary that had belonged to Father Hugo. At last, he believed he knew the murderer of Napoleon Morrissey, and he pitied and loved the killer—his own Mary Kashpaw. According to Bernadette, Napoleon Morrissey had forced himself on Mary Kashpaw, most probably raping her. It followed in his mind that Mary Kashpaw had the strength to have strangled Napoleon with the cunningly wrought necklace of thorns. As for her hands, they were tough as leather mitts, scarred, and roped with calluses. If the barbed-wire rosary tore her palms, it was impossible to tell anymore. And yet, why would Mary Kashpaw construct such a dark-spirited artifact?
Agnes put her fingertips to her eyes, kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She thought of Mary Kashpaw digging, digging, and her heart went hollow. Yet she was so tired that she could feel only a pale, exhausted pity for the angry confusion of that violated girl. Perhaps too much feeling had withered her heart and now it was a frail, paper husk. Whirling with frustration, she jumped from the confessional and walked back to the cabin. There, she began to work, cleaning with a mad zeal similar to Mary Kashpaw’s. She shoveled ashes out of the stove, then fetched a pot of blacking and painted it, opening the doors to let the spring air carry off the sharp odor of the paint. She worked on her papers until between her hands she snapped a pen. Then she cleaned up the spilled ink, dusted her books. Muttering and on the verge of weeping, she suddenly flung herself onto the bed. In a moment, she fell into a well of thick unconsciousness.
She was still asleep when Father Wekkle and Mary Kashpaw returned from a wood-hauling trip. Mary stamped down the snow for him too, broke the trail. Sometimes he teased her, called her Mary Stamper, and the big girl flushed, although whether she liked it or was embarrassed by the name there was no telling. While Father Wekkle went back to the church to set it all to rights and lock it for the night, Mary Kashpaw quietly drew near to Father Damien. For a long moment, she looked down at him with solemn watchfulness. Then she pulled a rough blanket from the back of a chair, shook out the folds, and secured it around the sleeping priest’s body with awkward, firm, tucks. Lastly, she plucked loose the laces of Father Damien’s boots and stealthily eased them off and then stripped the socks from the priest’s long, narrow, tender white feet. She set the boots beside the bed, hung the socks over each toe. She tucked the end of the blanket over the vulnerable feet, and then blew out the candle before she walked out to sleep upon the broken bales of hay, within the questions of the owls and the tremble of mice, and behind the barred door of the shed.
THE CLOUD
“How many ways are we damned?” said Agnes into the black air.
Gregory pushed his hands over her face, smoothing her features up into a smile he could feel with his fingers. Then he stretched full length alongside of her and tucked her close to him. His throat pinched shut with raw sadness, and he could not answer. He had started to become a priest when he was only nine years old. He had never questioned or doubted his vocation, and he had never been tempted beyond the usual ways boys are tempted, by thoughts and dreams. But it was as though he’d saved his whole life so far for this one outrageous test. What happened with Agnes was as direct a piece of knowledge as when he knew his calling. There was no way to question its truth, and veracity was for Gregory Wekkle the essence of his soul. One particular volume from the stack between the two priests had fallen into his hands one night and Gregory, though not a violently greedy reader like Agnes, read it again and again. The book was a mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing. In it, the author had said that to know God one must first know oneself. One will know God in oneself. Gregory knew himself and knew his love for Agnes was a good love, filled with tenderness and light. He tortured himself in his prayers to find evil in his actions, but knew only harmony and righteous peace. Nothing, none of this, fit doctrine.
“How many ways are we damned?” asked Agnes, again.
“Every way possible, I imagine,” said Gregory lightly, though his heart was squeezing shut. “Have you counted?”
“Let me,” said Agnes. After a moment, she put up her hand and gravely ticked off her fingers the types of sins she taught children in catechism. “We have sinned mortally of course, although our sin is so grave there isn’t an exact definition for it.”
Gregory shook his head. Willfully drowsy with a kind of lazy despair, he mumbled as if by rote, “I’ve done this with the full consent of my will, and clear knowledge of the act.”
“The wages are eternal punishment,” said Agnes. They held each other closer and he breathed along the curve of her collarbone.
“We’ve sinned against the Holy Ghost,” he whispered. “I feel deliberate resistance to the known truth because, Agnes, I know the truth. It is in me and it tells me to love.”
Agnes silently stroked his hair, smoothed her hands along his temples and down his jaw. This truth was hers, too, the kernel at the center of all she did in the blackest night was an unwilled simplicity. Her desire was one with a kind regard that felt both sinless and irresistible.
“We’ve sinned by omission,” she said, thinking of it. “We’ve sinned by silence, since we’re responsible for giving each other up to the authorities, reporting. We haven’t committed the sin of Sodom.”
“That’s something.” Gregory could not help imagining the act, all of a sudden, but the whole catalog now struck him as ridiculous. “We haven’t committed murder, buggered each other, or oppressed the poor.”
“Sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.”
“We’ve done Actual Sin, Formal Sin, Habitual Sin.”
Gregory kissed her forehead and cupped his broad hand around her face. The way the curve of her face fit into his hand took away his breath for a moment, and then he took a painful gulp of air and laughed.
“I hope Dante was right about hell,” he said. “I don’t think I would mind so much whirling in that dark wind with you forever.”
“Cut off from God.”
“If we are cut off from God by sinning,” he said, low, “why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud?”
THE LETTER
In the lucid green blush of early summer, Agnes wrote the letter. Not until autumn could Father Damien bear to mail it.
Reverend Bishop,
I have instructed the good Father Wekkle to the limits of which I am capable. He is an honorable priest and devoted to his calling. Please make your assignment of his new post known to him as quickly as possible.
She had to write the letter so that, when he received the one that would arrive in reply, the sight of him reading it wouldn’t kill her. It didn’t come by return post. Not for many weeks. But when it did, she knew. The envelope had no weight. It was only a paper rectangle set into her hand with such a light touch, nothing. Yet when she bore it to the cabin the paper was so heavy that it drove her to her knees. Her legs went out from under her. Mute, she handed it up to him and then sat like a stunned child on the floor until he raised her up and, very kindly now, said to her, “Agnes, why won’t you say it? It is so simple to me. Why can’t you say it? We must leave. We have to leave together. We’ll go north, go west, be a couple married legally and happily. We’ll have children, a life. Why can’t you say it? Why won’t you?”
Agnes shook her head, dumb with shock. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she was nerveless, bereft.
“Say it,” he pleaded. But she
could only look at him. Already he seemed smaller and farther away. An hour, two hours passed in which he talked himself hoarse to persuade her, and only then, at the last, could she even say the word no. That word inflamed him, set him beside himself and he argued with the two letters. They argued long into the night, not loudly, but with such fervor that Mary Kashpaw knocked on the cabin door and when Agnes opened it, said nothing. Just stood there eyeing Father Wekkle with a look of baleful intelligence.
“Izhah,” said Agnes, her tongue finding these words easily, “mino nibaan, n’dawnis.”
Only with great reluctance did Mary Kashpaw move away.
Deep in the night Agnes found another way to say it. “I cannot leave who I am.”
In wild hopelessness Gregory now blurted the thing they’d said between them with physical eloquence only.
“You are a woman.”
The word seemed large in the dark cabin, its vowels voluptuous and thick with the burden of secret life. Both were silent but the word hung between them like a great flesh doll. They closed their eyes and the word spread open between them, hot and red. Gregory sank his head into his hands and tasted the word and there was nothing like its exalted spice. He wanted her in his mouth. But then she spoke, and said, “I am a priest.”
The four words rang down Gregory’s spine, and then, at last, between wanting and despairing of her, anger surged up with a force that weakened him, sent a cold shiver through his gut. Rage shook in his voice.
“Agnes,” he grabbed her shoulders, his voice rose and cracked and fell, “a woman cannot be a priest.”
“I am a priest,” said Agnes calmly, again. She had left the body they shared and for this moment she existed only in a spirit sad with knowledge that could remove his hands. “This is what I do. Without it, if I couldn’t say the Mass . . .” She held her hands out, tough with work and empty. Nothing.
“You’re sacrilege,” said Gregory, his voice beyond all hope. It was the worst word he could summon, and he knew it, but he wanted her so much he’d even shame her into coming with him. “Sacrilege!” he cried again, more hesitantly, almost plaintive.
Agnes stepped backward, as if to let the word fall at her feet.
“No,” she said, looking at him with her heart tearing, helpless against the simplest truth. “I am nothing but a priest.”
AGNES’S PASSION
Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn’t shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn’t stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.
He sent her letters. She sent them back. He sent them again. She burned them. What else was she to do?
Awful questions appeared in Agnes’s mind. Am I right? Can I bear this? Have I invented my God? Is God my yearning? Is my yearning God? She fell asleep with questions thrumming and woke with more blaring. She chewed questions over with her breakfast food, salted her dinner with the day’s uncertainties. She prayed over the questions until it hurt to think, until her brain felt too tight in her skull. She then craved silence. Into her lover’s absence crept compulsion. She thought obsessively of shedding the priest’s clothes and donning a frilly hat, a gown of figured lilac, a flowered wash dress with buttons of mother-of-pearl. Imagined walking to the parish of Gregory Wekkle, for some reason eating ice cream with him. And then they would leave and find a new place where he could tenderly stroke the hungry expanse of skin that covered the body that housed two beings. Father Damien’s thoughts nagged, Agnes’s temptations stung. Or maybe it was the other way around. Sometimes at night her body moved as if over the waves of a dark lake and she woke wet with tears and burning heavily between her legs.
Talk to me! Talk to me! She angrily prayed to the Christ who’d saved her from the river, to the God who’d brought her here, to the Holy Ghost who had sustained her through the great influenza and yet betrayed her by allowing the dog to visit her and to set before her Gregory. Since the damage was done, she prayed to see her damage again.
Mary Kashpaw sat stonily through this at the entrance to the cabin, snapping beans, glaring at the white dust rising off the far roads. If only, thought Agnes, she could again see the divine in Mary Kashpaw, maybe that would help. But the girl hardened and retreated. Each Mass that Father Damien said was duller than the next, and he dreaded genuflecting before the crucifix—a stamped piece of brass, two strips of tin, and the suffering Christ, a contorted lie.
Fountain of Hope,
I find to my distress that I suffer from an inner complaint before which all my skills and strategies fail. I cannot name what it is, exactly, I can only say at times it feels like something so wholly other to the ground of my being that I’ve entertained the fear that I may be possessed.
I tell you this in childish trust. No doubt, were the leaders of my diocese to learn of my condition, I would be yanked from my post straight into a sanatorium. Kept quiet under lock and key. Father, not only am I certain that would do no good, but I also cannot, must not, will not, desert my people here.
Many of the Indians (they call themselves the Anishinaabeg, the Spontaneous or Original People) have come to depend upon me. There is really no one else I feel can take my place, no one so committed to their well-being or engrossed in their faith—I am becoming one with them so as to better lead them into the great Corpus Christi. And the closer I draw, the more of their pain do I feel.
Still, what eats me is something composed of my own weaknesses and sins, I am sure.
Have you any spiritual anodyne or comfort, any small practice that might assist in my travail? Good Father, I cannot sleep . . .
Not quite of the body, yet not entirely of the soul, pain closed like a trap on Agnes and held her tight. Some nights it was a magnetic vest drawing blood to swell tightly just under her skin. Agnes wanted to burst from the cassock in a bloody shower! Other nights a shirt of razors slit and raked her and left no mark. Her womanness crouched dark within her—clawed, rebellious, sharp of tooth.
No amount of calm pleading moved the steady anguish. Some nights, she tried to slide the pain off her body like the husk of a spent and sleeping lover. She tried to breathe calmly and evenly to loosen the pain by degrees, but it stayed clapped on.
A mourning dove called from a tree, a small oak in the graveyard behind the cabin. The vowels of its inquiry floated to Agnes one eternal dusk and she went into herself to strike a hopeful bargain. What do you want of me? she asked. But her pain had no needs, so there was nothing to offer or trade. She attempted with the deepest resolve to ignore it, but its grip on her chest intensified and she felt the iron seizing to her ribs. She wondered if she could scare it out. She sat up, gathered her breath, began screaming. There was no one to hear, the cabin was chinked so tight and the nuns asleep, calm at a safe distance. So night after night, she screamed in the darkness. Huge jagged rips of sound tore out of her but the pain was not impressed.
Only Mary Kashpaw, curled in the rough bench bed of the sleigh, stared into the great dark and listened.
Agnes woke with tiny veins broken in her eyelids. She tried again the next night. Again, the next. Finally after nearly a week of sleeplessness, beyond all weariness, agitated to the death, she rose in the dark, lighted a candle, and walked out of the cabin. She let herself into the school infirmary to search for some remedy. Without acknowledging her mission openly, she knew that she wanted the means either to cure the pain or to put herself to sleep forever.
With the brass key marked from
her ring of keys, she opened the door and then lighted a lantern. She unlocked the white wall cupboard that Hildegarde bartered for with the government office, who contracted for these items to be sent every year. They had little use for them without a doctor. There, on the shelves, was an array of possible anodynes and comforts.
Agnes examined the bottles carefully. Tartar emetic in a green paste. Perhaps she could puke it out? Strychnine sulfate, a carefully sealed black jar—there was her last resort. Atropine in an innocent clear flask. Digitalin, tiny pills. Ginger and ergot. Belladonna with its own eyedropper. She shook the bottle and the clear stuff turned cloudy with promise. She tucked it into her pocket. What was this? Glycyrrhiza. Pure carbolic. Boracic powder, which she thought was for the eyes. Cocaine hydrochlorate, 1/6 grain, twenty-five tubes of etched glass with red rubber stoppers at the ends. She took ten. Benzoic acid. Charcoal in a blue jar. Compound of gentian in a square bottle with a long wax-sealed neck. Myrrh and nux vomica, in identical rusting tins. Clove tincture of opium. Agnes sighed, frowned. Only one bottle and so obvious it would be missed. Still, she took it. Pepsin for the stomach. Oil of Ethereal Male Fern. Quinine. Cod liver oil. Sulphate of morphia set far back in the cabinet and very dusty. Four 1/8-ounce bottles of clear deep-brown amber glass. She took them also and shut the case.
FATHER DAMIEN’S SLEEP
For one delirious month, the anguish was survivable. It was Sister Hildegarde, of course, who dispatched herself to the priest’s cabin when he did not show up for morning Mass. She knocked, she prayed, she knocked again, prayed some more. After a while she went to the window, peered through, and saw that Father Damien was sleeping. Or was he dead? Crossing her breast, she entered the cabin. Drew near to the priest apologetically, put her hand to his lips and was satisfied. Yes, sleeping! But what a deep sleep. Likely, the good priest was ill or exhausted beyond illness, and Hildegarde took pity. She tucked the robe just underneath the chin of the priest and was turning to go when a great moon-black shadow fell across her.