KASHPAW’S VISION, QUILL’S PEACE
The men laid Quill and Kashpaw out together side by side in the long fine grass underneath a deep-grown oak tree. After her rescue, their child was allowed near to hold their hands and would not be moved from them even in her pain. So the three at least possessed the comfort of one another’s presence. In that time, Quill, at peace though her back was severely broken, spoke to her daughter and to Kashpaw, who answered, though the branch that pierced him made his voice pinched and strange. Though the helpers and gapers who approached muttered at the helpless horror of it, they listened. For Quill and Kashpaw were able to talk. In talking, they gave reason for those present to think that in this extremity the eyes of Kashpaw saw into the near future of his people, while the heart of Quill saw far into the past.
The two of them prophesied while they were dying. Quill was rational and spoke in a sincere attempt to right wrongs stubbornly fixed between reservation factions. For his part, Kashpaw first saw a spirit approach, and it was one he knew well, and had spoken with, and feared. Nanapush was called to sit with his old friend and sing him into the next world.
“N’tawnis,” whispered Kashpaw, “he approaches. I see him.”
“Who, my friend?” Nanapush spoke lightly, though his heart was bursting in his breast. Each breath he took stabbed him with pity and yet he smiled gently so as to ease along his brother-cousin.
“That tall spirit wearing the black hat. My brother, it is he himself, the one who comes to warn me of disease.”
“Where is he going, this spirit?” asked Nanapush.
“Coming toward us. Coming here,” Kashpaw gasped. “Ah! He will take me first, then he will return for many others.”
“This is sad news,” said Nanapush, in truth, terrified. “I will give you a smoke.” With that, he lighted his sacred pipe and the two shared the fragrant tobacco. A slender curl of it crept out of the hole the stick made in Kashpaw’s lower breast and Nanapush nearly cried out, seeing it.
“Give niwiiw a smoke, too,” said Kashpaw, jabbing his lip sideways to indicate Quill, and Nanapush brought the pipe to her side—in fact, he then sat between them, passing the pipe to each, hearing as they spoke.
“Our daughter will dig our grave for us and then she will keep on digging,” said Kashpaw. “She will dig graves for two hundred Anishinaabeg who will die of this sickness that approaches from the east.”
“It comes from the east, you say,” said Nanapush.
Father Damien, kneeling beside him in a miserable state of despair, praying with his whole being, looked to the east and then passed a trembling hand over his eyes. Silhouetted against the horizon, a gaunt and precipitous walker wavered toward them. There was a dot at its side, a dog, a companion. Who saw what? This thing was too tall to be human.
It was gone when he blinked.
“If we lighted great bonfires or dug ditches full of water or allowed no visitors—” said Nanapush.
“No use, my friend, it is borne on the wind,” Kashpaw answered.
“And you . . .” Quill whispered to Father Damien, who was still kneeling beside them, far gone in stunned confusion at the mystery. “How . . .”
“I stumbled,” said the priest wretchedly. “I beg your pardon, I tripped on the beauty of the day.”
“And now we must die for it,” said Kashpaw, his voice accepting and almost marveling at the strangeness. “Not you, but the Puyat, she is the cause. Life is leaking out of us now, priest. All because of the Puyat.”
Pauline Puyat then, with an audacity that spoke both the boundless arrogance and violent compassion of her nature, approached them. With no leave, she knelt beside the sufferers. Freed of the skulls, her back torn, and in a state of pain herself, she stared nakedly into their faces. Her eyes were molten and her face calm with an immense and soothing pity. Wordlessly she dipped a cloth into a bowl of water that she held and allowed a trickle, just the right amount, to pass Quill’s lips and then Kashpaw’s. She murmured as she bathed their temples, their brows, their chins, their eyelids, and when she was finished with Quill, the madwoman’s eyes fixed on the Puyat’s face and they exchanged, Father Damien saw it, a look of tenderness and sweetness that would have astounded him then if everything was not already so far beyond acceptance or belief. Quill’s face cleared. Her eyes focused. She smiled with pleasure to feel a sudden and poignant sanity, and she squeezed her daughter’s hand. The gentle firmness of her touch calmed the big girl’s agony. When Quill spoke, it was with the old voice, the soft and compelling tones she had used before the onset of her affliction.
“Hear me,” she said. “Come near, for I have something important to say to you all, here on the reservation.”
A silence enfolded all, and many knelt to listen.
“Lazarres and Pillagers should eat from the same kettle,” Quill said, “join together for strength against the truer threat which is not each other but the damn chimooks robbing every straw from the fields and stealing even the lice from our heads and the tongues from our mouths and the shit from between our butts and the little sense we got left in us after the liquor. Stay together, you families, don’t let the land and money divide you!”
Her prophecy was right to the mark, said many, and they went away repeating it—that is, until they saw an enemy Pillager or Morrissey, Kashpaw or Lazarre.
Astounded with joy to hear the sensible quality of his wife’s words, Kashpaw gasped, moving the core of wood in his chest a fraction, which completely killed him.
The girl fell senseless, then, still holding her mother’s hand. Quill, mercifully, was soon too far gone to notice her husband’s absence on the ground beside her, or see the animal anguish of her child. She merely closed her eyes, drifted, came to no shore, drifted farther, until she was somewhere new.
QUILL’S DAUGHTER
Even the nuns were heard to say that Christ took such pity on the girl’s suffering, so like his own, that she should never have the cause to weep again. She grew phenomenally, put on weight and bulked up like her father, Kashpaw. And she toughened. During the next, desperate, winnowing winter she avoided every illness, even though she went without mittens or shoes. She would flourish while other girls coughed tubercular blood, increase her strength and quickness until she could wrestle down any boy. The trick of her quiet would help her hide from trouble, too, for after the accident, she seldom spoke.
Quill had a cousin named Bernadette Morrissey, a bony and bleak-spirited woman who took in children to help work the land she kept with her brother, Napoleon. Immediately after Quill’s death, Bernadette requested of Sister Hildegarde that the girl live with her. Bernadette took the daughter of Quill home, but soon reported that she regretted her charitable impulse. The big girl apparently turned violent. Unexpected rages shook her like freak storms. Once, she struck Bernadette, and worse, Napoleon seemed to tap some vice in her. If the big man came within arms’ reach, she set upon him with claws and teeth. The family soon called the priest to their allotment, where he experienced a fearsome sight.
Mary Kashpaw had left off attempting to destroy her caretakers, and instead took out her frustrations on their land. On the day of Father Damien’s visit, she was moving earth with a careening fury. She had already raised mounds of dirt and created a confusion of deep and irregular holes and ditches through the yard and woods. She could not be stopped. Not even a grown man like Napoleon dared step within reach of her shovel, and no word from any woman or girl pierced the intensity of her concentration. She hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. It looked as though she was determined to dig until she dropped to her death.
For a time, Father Damien watched. It was a dry spring day and the crust of the earth was waking and softening. He thought perhaps the girl would hit frost but apparently the dirt was warmed as far down as she cared to dig. A shuddering fear ran through him as he recalled Kashpaw’s vision. Was his daughter digging those two hundred Anishinaabeg graves? The holes were the shape not only of graves, but worse
, of many interconnected and searching graves.
Since it was useless to remonstrate with her or ask questions, Father Damien took up a shovel. Alongside the huge mad child, where no one would go, he then began to dig. One shovelful after another, careful ones, a heap of dirt to the side. It was not an unpleasant task. In fact, he found, there was much in it immediately that calmed and soothed. Before the girl even recognized or took the slightest notice of the priest, then, Father Damien was digging along in a state of agreeable oneness with his work.
After a while, Mary Kashpaw did notice. She didn’t stop, but she did turn to regard the priest as her arms rhythmically swung. A spasm, not a smile, crossed her face, a wave of nerves, and then she more powerfully relaxed into the current of her labor and dug, unceasingly, with renewed strength. Dug to the east for a time, then casually reversed and carved a long pan into the ground heading west. At random moments, she quit her trajectory. Inspired by some other spot, she crossed to the place and sank her shovel. A northerly foray twisted like an eel and then veered counterclockwise until she’d swung directly south. And through the day, through the long afternoon, hands bound with rags on the handle of the shovel, Agnes dug, too.
The desolation of the great child shook Agnes to the core. The girl reminded her of herself. There was no doubt about it. Grief has its own rules and power. Agnes sat with Mary at the table by the stove, where the girl wolfed down huge chunks of bread sopping with gravy-grease. Eyes glazed, Mary Kashpaw gave herself over to eating, chewed with grand solemnity. Her massive jaws crushed and pulverized the food, and she seemed to have no other purpose or interest.
“Your mama and your deydey are not in the ground anymore,” said Father Damien in a firm voice, hoping to stop the digging. “They have been taken up into the sky.”
Mary Kashpaw frowned, lowered her face like a bull, and walked out the door. It was a fair day. The sky over them was massive and blue with random clouds. Perhaps, thought Agnes, Mary would catch a glimpse of their faces or invent the imprint of their smiles in the vapor. Perhaps she would experience some comfort, but no. Mary Kashpaw raised her eyes and gazed with fixed gravity upward, upward, scanned the brilliance and then turned her gaze onto Father Damien.
“You can’t see them,” he tried to insist, “but they are up there. They love you.”
She looked at him with pity and scorn.
“There is something,” Father Damien tried to explain to Hildegarde, “profound about her suffering. And she is most intelligent. I’m afraid she can’t be kept at the government school, and an asylum would destroy her.”
“Yes, Father,” said Hildegarde perfunctorily, as she did when he became, to her mind, either too fanciful or too tender of heart.
“I have an idea about the uncle, as well. Her hatred of the man is abnormally intense.”
“She’s mad,” said Hildegarde flatly.
The nun’s stubborn pragmatism annoyed Agnes, but at the same time she could not quite wrestle the proper evidence to life. Why had grief given this particular task to Mary Kashpaw? Perhaps the girl was looking for something buried, maybe the way a dog hides a bone and forgets exactly where. Maybe she’d needed this object, too well hidden. Later, her plan began to take on a cosmic shape. Agnes tried to think of the excavations as a design with some strategy. If birds viewed it from above, what would they see? She took the large view but saw only a tangle of upsettingly random desecrations of the spring undergrowth—it made no sense. And by that lack of law it made no sense, either, to place upon the girl’s actions any rational construction. She was digging. The purpose must be poetic, thought Agnes. Perhaps only poetry could explain it, and Father Damien was a priest.
In fact, the answer would come slow and only by degrees over days, until it was entirely explained in a dream: she herself was digging when she uncovered a dream Kashpaw and a dream Quill who rose, brushed off their clothing, and complained of the coldness of the earth. Fetch my daughter, Quill said to Agnes, for the man hurts her. Agnes woke knowing that Napoleon had done something terrible to the girl. Now Mary Kashpaw was looking for her parents for protection, and to soothe her. Agnes also realized that Kashpaw and Quill held Father Damien responsible.
The next morning, Agnes went to visit. Mary Kashpaw’s ravaged stare struck her as more than a look—it was a passageway between this reality and the next. The Kashpaw girl had entered a dark peace from which she would never be disturbed. She sat on a solid mental ledge and frowned passively upon the world, a great brooding child who was too well traveled a visitor in the dream world and the land of the dead. The only place for Mary Kashpaw was the convent itself, or at least the grounds of the church—she didn’t like to sleep indoors. The girl must come to live near Father Damien.
At his insistence, Bernadette drove the girl to the convent, where she was to live for the rest of her life. When Mary Kashpaw got down from the wagon seat upon which, curiously, she seemed much at home, untroubled by the frightful events that drove her into silence, Agnes felt a curious twist. Her theory of rescue was upended by an acute intuition. The girl’s presence was all of a sudden reassuring. As Agnes approached and took the girl’s hand she understood, with a positive prescience, that Mary Kashpaw had come to shield her and heal her—how, there was no saying.
Mary Kashpaw ate more than all of the nuns put together, but when food was scarce she gathered her own, and then some. She was discovered chewing wild tonic of fresh dandelion spears from the borders to the nun’s path and munching green apples; sometimes she made herself a stew of gopher and acorns, stolen eggs from the nests of finches and doves, wild currants, cattail root; she gnawed a gum of spruce and occasionally, for the nuns, snared a rabbit or mesmerized a grouse in the weedy graveyard. If all else failed, she brought them a meat she called “ground meat,” already skinned and boned, so it was quite some time before they realized it was named for its habitation—it was snake. She could always catch bullheads and frogs. She knew well just how to survive. With her mother’s slim height and her father’s powerful build, she grew into an arresting presence, though she seemed content to turn her back upon the world.
Summers, she slept in the shack where the sleigh was kept, made a bed on the hard seat and curled up like a babe. In winter, she made a pallet on the convent floor behind the kitchen stove. Her prayers were constant, a mutter just under her breath. Surely, her piety found favor in God’s eyes. The sisters envied her simplicity a little and grudged her the loaf of bread she ate each meal. She had no shame—hooked her skirt between her legs, fastened it in her belt like a great wide diaper when she wanted freedom of movement. Her thighs were rock hard and golden. The nuns made trousers for her, underwear, modest bloomers and knit socks, but she just shed them in the joy of her work. Set to the task of planting, she sowed with a matchless fervor and whacked new ground clear in a disturbing contest of joy. Carefully, Father Damien kept from her all sight of shovels. Mary Kashpaw hoed and chopped, whitewashed every wall with a profligate arm, cut weeds, used a scythe with frightful intelligence, polished every pew and wooden surface with beeswax, but her favorite occupation, the work to which she brought the same passion with which she dug, the work that made her so happy that she was heard humming tunelessly and brashly to herself, was chopping wood. It became known all around that she was prodigious, as in the yard great stout piles mounted.
Each stroke was part of her devotion, all seamless, all one. She lent herself to chopping with a prayerful precision and grace, and she smiled modestly and blessed herself when she was done. She slept with her ax, filed it, kept it sharp and clean. As long as she was occupied—they soon hired her out—she attended every Mass, sang with the sisters at every funeral. She made her confession twice weekly, a silent confession that consisted of a tap on the screen and a whisper like the sigh of windblown grass. For her penance, Father Damien rarely gave her more than one Hail Mary to mouth into the clasp of her palms. How could he assign more? She committed no sins. Men were no more to her th
an the dust in her sleeping robes. Her life was simple. All lies fled past her. She was immaculate of envy. She grew up in no one’s shadow and cast her own in solitude. She lived in such exclusive discipline that it seemed to Agnes that the girl was preparing herself, for what, Agnes did not know until it came upon them.
INFLUENZA
1918
Only one road led in and out of the reservation. There was no question. Disease came down the whiteman’s road. Some heard it approach with slithering steps, foul and mawkish. Zozed Bizhieu met a man whose appearance arrested her. Great white patches of skin gleamed on his skull and strings of orange hair fell to his shoulders. His face was ravaged, and so thin that his teeth stuck out. He was made of spikes and sticks. Way up high, his skull bobbed, skin white as paper, mouth blood-red. His nose bled, she told Damien. His lips were a blistered purple. His eyes wept black bile and suddenly he fell dead at her feet. When she leaned over to assist him, he laughed as he melted into the earth, and the rank and rangy mutt that shivered at his side ran off, onto reservation ground, howling a deadly breath. Zozed was always seeing things, reporting, but some believed in this uncanny messenger because they’d heard rumors of the illness already.
The Spanish influenza was reported in the papers, which people now bought because six Anishinaabeg men had joined the great war of the chimookomanag. The newspapers reported that the disease was marching all over the world and working hard harvesting the young, old, fragile, and sturdy. Making no distinctions in its eager rush. People hoped that the sickness would be tired by the time it got to the reservation, but, no, when it hit, the illness struck with a young exuberance. Descended, really, on the wings of ducks, in the bones of clouds, on city wagons, and in the pockets of used clothes. It came in meat and on the skin of potatoes. It was waved off the trader’s hands, and dusted tongue to tongue with the Communion Hosts served from Father Damien’s fingers.