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 protect
ive 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? Wa
s 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.