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 i
ts 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.