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Be with me, religious medals of all kinds, those suspended on silver chains, those pinned to the underwear with a safety pin, those nestling in black chest hair, those which run like tram cars on the creases between the breasts of old happy women, those that by mistake dig into the skin while love is made, those that lie abandoned with cufflinks, those that are fingered like coins and inspected for silver hallmark, those that are lost in clothes by necking fifteen-year-olds, those that are put in the mouth while thinking, those very expensive ones that only thin small girl children are permitted to wear, those hanging in a junk closet along with unknotted neckties, those that are kissed for luck, those that are torn from the neck in anger, those that are stamped, those that are engraved, those that are placed on streetcar tracks for curious alterations, those that are fastened to the felt on the roofs of taxis, be with me as I witness the ordeal of Catherine Tekakwitha.
34
– Take your fingers out of your ears, said le P. Jean Pierron, first permanent missionary at Kahnawaké. You won’t be able to hear me if you keep your fingers in your ears.
– Ha, ha, chuckled the ancient members of the village, who were too old to learn new tricks. You can lead us to water but you can’t make us drink, us old dogs and horses.
– Remove those fingers immediately!
– Dribble, dribble, went the foam and spit between toothless jaws as the old ones squatted around the priest.
The priest went back to his cabin and took out his paints, for he was a skilled artist. A few days later he emerged with his picture, a bright mandala of the torments of hell. All the damned had been portrayed as Mohawk Indians. The mocking aged Indians squatted around him, finger-eared still, as he uncovered his work. Gasps escaped from their rotting mouths.
– Now, my children, this is what awaits you. Oh, you can keep your fingers where they are. See. A demon will place round your neck a rope and drag you along. A demon will cut off your head, extract your heart, pull out your intestines, lick up your brain, drink your blood, eat your flesh, and nibble your bones. But you will be incapable of dying. Though your body be hacked to pieces it will revive again. The repeated hacking will cause intense pain and torture.
– Arghhh!
The colors of the picture were red, white, black, orange, green, yellow, and blue. In the very center was the representation of a very old Iroquois woman, bent and wrinkled. She was enclosed in her own personal frame of finely drawn skulls. Leaning over the oval skulls is a Jesuit priest who is trying to instruct her. Her arthritic fingers are stuffed in her ears. A demon twists corkscrews of fire into her ears, perhaps jamming the fingers in there forever. A demon hurls a javelin of flame at her deplorable breasts. Two demons apply a fiery two-handled saw to her crotch. A demon encourages several burning snakes to twist around her bleeding ankles. Her mouth is a burnt black hole seared in an eternal screech for attention. As Marie de l’Incarnation wrote her son, On ne peut pas les voir sans frémir.
– Arghhh!
Il a baptisé un grand nombre de personnes, writes Marie de l’Incarnation.
– That’s right, pull them right out, the priest invited them. And don’t put them back. You must never put them back again. Old as you are, you must forget forever the Telephone Dance.
– Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
– That’s better, isn’t it?
As those waxy digits were withdrawn a wall of silence was thrown up between the forest and the hearth, and the old people gathered at the priest’s hem shivered with a new kind of loneliness. They could not hear the raspberries breaking into domes, they could not smell the numberless pine needles combing out the wind, they could not remember the last moment of a trout as it lived between a flat white pebble on the streaked bed of a stream and the fast shadow of a bear claw. Like children who listen in vain to the sea in plastic sea shells they sat bewildered. Like children at the end of a long bedtime story they were suddenly thirsty.
35
Catherine’s uncle was happy to see le P. Pierron leave in 1670 for a post at the Iroquois mission on the St. Lawrence. Many of his brethren had been converted to the new faith, and many had left the village to live and worship at the new missions. The new priest, le P. Boniface, was not any less effective than his predecessor. He spoke the language. Perceiving how the Indians loved music, he formed a choir of seven-and eight-year-olds. Their pure rough voices drifted through the village like the news of a good meal, and many were lured to the little wooden chapel. In 1673 this village of less than four hundred souls witnessed the salvation of thirty of them. These were adult souls – the number does not include infant souls or moribund souls. Kryn, the chief of the Mohawks, converted and established himself as a preacher at the new mission. Of all the Iroquois, the Mohawks were the most susceptible to the new doctrines, they who had been most ferocious in their original resistance. Le P. Dablon, Superior General of the Missions of Canada, could write in 1673: La foi y a été plus constamment embrassée qu’en aucun autre pays d’Agniers. In 1674 le P. Boniface led a group of neophytes to the mission at Saint-François-Xavier. Shortly after he returned to Kahnawaké he died during a December snowfall. Le P. Jacques de Lamberville replaced him.
36
The cabins of the village were empty. It was spring. It was 1675. Somewhere Spinoza was making sunglasses. In England, Hugh Chamberlen was pulling babies out with a secret instrument, obstetrical forceps, the only man in Europe to deliver women with this revolutionary technique which had been developed by his grandfather. Marquis de Laplace was looking at the sun prior to his assumption that the sun rotated at the very beginning of existence, which he would develop in his book, Exposition du Système du Monde. The fifth reincarnation of Tsong Khapa achieved temporal supremacy: the regency of Tibet was handed to him by Mongolia, with the title Dalai Lama. There were Jesuits in Korea. A group of colonial doctors interested in anatomy but frustrated by the laws against human dissection managed to obtain “the middle-most part of an Indian executed the day before.” Thirty years before the Jews re-entered France. Twenty years before we remark the first outbreak of syphilis in Boston. Frederick William was the Great Elector. Friars of the Order of Minims, according to a regulation of 1668, should not be excommunicated if, “when about to yield to the temptations of the flesh … they prudently laid aside the monastic habit.” Corelli, the forerunner of Alessandro Scarlatti, Handel, Couperin, and J. S. Bach, was, in 1675, the third violin in the church orchestra of St. Louis of France, which was in Rome in 1675. Thus the moon of the seventeenth century waned into its last quarter. In the next century 60,000,000 Europeans would die of smallpox. F. often said: Think of the world without Bach. Think of the Hittites without Christ. To discover the truth in anything that is alien, first dispense with the indispensable in your own vision. Thank you, F. Thank you, my lover. When will I be able to see the world without you, my dear? O Death, we are your Court Angels, hospitals are your Church! My friends have died. People I know have died. O Death, why do you make Halloween out of every night? I am scared. If it’s not one thing it’s another: if I’m not constipated I’m scared. O Death, let the firecracker burns heal once more. The trees around F.’s treehouse (where I am writing this), they are dark. I can’t smell the apples. O Death, why do you do so much acting and so little talking? The cocoons are soft and creepy. I am afraid of worms with a butterfly heaven. Is Catherine a flower in the sky? Is F. an orchid? Is Edith a branch of hay? Does Death chase the cobwebs? Has Death anything to do with Pain, or is Pain working on the other side? O F., how I loved this treehouse when you lent it to me and Edith for our honeymoon!
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The cabins of Kahnawaké were empty. The fields around were filled with workers, men and women with handfuls of kernels. They were planting the corn in the spring of 1675.
– Yuh yuh, went the strains of the Corn-Planting Song.
Catherine’s uncle squeezed his fist over the heap of yellow cradled in his palm. He could feel the powers of the
seeds, their longing to be covered with earth and explode. They seemed to force his fingers open. He tipped his hand like a cup and one kernel dropped into a hole.
– Ah, he mused, in such a way did Our Female Ancestress fall from heaven into the waste of primeval waters. Some are of the opinion that various amphibious animals, such as the otter, beaver, and muskrat, noticed her fall, and hastened to break it by shoveling up earth from the mud beneath the waters.
Suddenly he stiffened. In his mind’s heart he felt the sinister presence of le P. Jacques de Lamberville. Yes, he could feel the priest as he walked through the village, more than a mile away. Catherine’s uncle released a Shadow to greet the priest.
Le P. Jacques de Lamberville paused outside Tekakwitha’s cabin. They were all in the fields, he thought, so there’s no point trying even if they let me in this time.
– La ha la ha, came a tinkle of laughter from within.
The priest wheeled around and made toward the door. The Shadow greeted him and they wrestled. The Shadow was naked and easily tripped his heavily robed opponent. The Shadow threw himself on the priest, who was struggling to extricate himself from the coils of his robe. The Shadow in his ferocity managed to entangle himself in the very same robes. The priest quickly perceived his advantage. He lay perfectly still while the Shadow suffocated in the prison of a fortunate pocket. He got up and threw the door open.
– Catherine!
– At last!
– What are you doing inside, Catherine? All of your family is in the field planting corn.
– I stubbed my toe.
– Let me look.
– No. Let it go on hurting.
– What a lovely thing to say, child.
– I’m nineteen. Everyone hates me here, but I don’t mind. My aunts kick me all the time, not that I hold anything against them. I have to carry the shit, well, someone has to do it. But, Father, they want me to fuck – but I have given my fuck away.
– Don’t be an Indian Giver.
– What should I do, Father?
– Let me have a look at that toe.
– Yes!
– I’ll have to take off your moccasin.
– Yes!
– Here?
– Yes!
– What about here?
– Yes!
– Your toes are cold, Catherine. I’ll have to rub them between my palms.
– Yes!
– Now I’ll blow them, you know, as one blows one’s fingers in the winter.
– Yes!
The priest breathed heavily on her tiny brown toes. What a lovely little cushion her big toe had. The bottoms of her five toes looked like the faces of small children sleeping tucked up under a blanket up to their chins. He started to kiss them good night.
– Tosy rosy tosy rosy.
– Yes!
He nibbled at a cushion, which felt like a rubber grape. He was kneeling as Jesus had kneeled before a naked foot. In an orderly fashion, he inserted his tongue between each toe, four thrusts, so smooth the skin between, and white! He gave his attention to each toe, mouthing it, covering it with saliva, evaporating the saliva by blowing, biting it playfully. It was a shame that four toes should always suffer from loneliness. He forced all her tiny toes into his mouth, his tongue going like a windshield wiper. Francis had done the same for lepers.
– Father!
– Libalobaglobawoganummynummy.
– Father!
– Gobblegobblegogglewoggle. Slurp.
– Baptize me!
– Although some find our reluctance excessive we Jesuits do not rush Indian adults along the path to Baptism.
– I have two feet.
– Indians are fickle. We must protect ourselves from the catastrophe of producing more apostates than Christians.
– Wiggle.
– Comme nous nous défions de l’inconstance des Iroquois, j’en ai peu baptisé hors du danger de mort.
The girl slipped her foot into the moccasin and sat on it.
– Baptize me.
– Il n’y a pas grand nombre d’adultes, parce qu’on ne des baptise qu’avec beaucoup de précautions.
Thus the argument progressed in the shadows on the long house. A mile away Uncle sank to his knees, exhausted. There would be no harvest! But he was not thinking of the kernels he had just sown, he was thinking about the life of his people. All the years, all the hunts, all the wars – it would all come to nothing. There would be no harvest! Even his soul when it ripened would not be gathered to the warm southwest, whence blows the wind which brings sunny days and the bursting corn. The world was unfinished! A deep pain seized his chest. The great wrestling match between Ioskeha, the White one, and Tawiscara, the Dark one, the eternal fight would fizzle out like two passionate lovers falling asleep in a tight embrace. There would be no harvest! Each day the village was growing smaller as more of his brethren left for the new missions. He fumbled for a small wolf he had carved of wood. In the autumn past he had placed the whittled nostrils to his own, inhaling the animal’s courage. Then he had breathed out deeply in order to spread the breath of the animal over a wide area in the forest, and so paralyze all the game in the neighborhood. When he had killed his deer that day he cut out the liver and smeared blood on the mouth of the carved wood wolf. And he prayed: Great Deer, First and Perfect Deer, ancestor of the carcass at my feet, we are hungry. Please do not seek vengeance against me for taking the life of one of your children. Uncle collapsed on the cornfield, gasping for breath. The Great Deer was dancing on his chest, crushing his ribs. They carried him back to the cabin. His niece wept when she saw his face. After a while, when they were alone, the old man spoke.
– He came in, the Black Dress?
– Yes, Father Tekakwitha.
– And you want to be baptized?
– Yes, Father Tekakwitha.
– I will allow you to on one condition: that you promise never to leave Kahnawaké.
– I promise.
– There will be no harvest, my daughter. Our heaven is dying. From every hill, a spirit cries out in pain, for it is being forgotten.
– Sleep.
– Bring me my pipe and open the door.
– What are you doing?
– I am blowing the breath of the tobacco at them, at all of them.
It was F.’s theory that White America has been punished by lung cancer for having destroyed the Red Man and stolen his pleasures.
– Try to forgive them, Father Tekakwitha.
– I can’t.
As he blew the smoke weakly at the open door Uncle told himself the story he had heard as a little boy, how Kuloskap had abandoned the world because of the evil in it. He made a great feast to say goodbye, then he paddled off in his great canoe. Now he lives in a splendid long house, making arrows. When the cabin is filled with them he will make war on all mankind.
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Is All The World A Prayer To Some Star? Are All The Years Of The World A Catalogue Of The Events Of Some Holiday? Do All Things Happen At Once? Is There A Needle In The Haystack? Do We Perform In The Twilight Before A Vast Theater Of Empty Stone Benches? Do We Hold Hands With Our Grandfathers? Are They Warm And Royal, The Rags Of Death? Are All The People Living At This Very Second Fingerprinted? Is Beauty The Pulley? How Are The Dead Received In The Expanding Army? Is It True That There Are No Wallflowers At The Dance? May I Suck Cunts For My Gift? May I Love The Forms Of Girls Instead Of Licking Labels? May I Die A Little At The Uncovering Of Unfamiliar Breasts? May I Raise A Path Of Goosepimples With My Tongue? May I Hug My Friend Instead Of Working? Are Sailors Naturally Religious? May I Squeeze A Golden-Haired Thigh Between My Legs And Feel Blood Flowing And Hear The Holy Tick Of The Fainting Clock? May I See If Someone Is Alive By Gobbling His Come? Could It Be Recorded In The Books Of Some Law That Shit Is Kosher? Is There A Difference In Dreaming Geometry And Bizarre Sex Positions? Is The Epileptic Always Graceful? Is There Such A Thing As Waste? Is It Wonderful To Think About An Eighte
en-Year-Old Girl Wearing Tight Jelly Underwear? Does Love Visit Me When I Pump Myself? O God, There Is A Scream, All The Systems Are Screaming. I Am Locked In A Fur Store But I Believe You Want To Steal Me. Does Gabriel Trip A Burglar Alarm? Why Was I Sewn Into Bed With The Nymphomaniac? Am I As Easy To Pluck As A Spear Of Grass? Can I Be Torn Away From The Roulette Wheel? By How Many Billion Cables Is The Zeppelin Secured? O God, I Love So Many Things It Will Need Years To Take Them Away One By One. I Adore Thy Details. Why Have You Let Me See The Bare Ankle Tonight In The Treehouse? Why Did You Vouchsafe Unto Me A Minute Flash Of Desire? May I Unfasten My Loneliness And Collide Once Again With A Beautiful Greedy Body? May I Fall Asleep After A Soft Happy Kiss? May I Have A Dog For A Pet? May I Teach Myself To Be Handsome? May I Pray At All?