Father Damien’s first call was the family Destroismaisons, they of the pride in their handsome boy and intelligent girl child, the devout Destroismaisons who bore the canopy to shade the Host in the procession. This illness, which began with a teeth-rattling chill, slammed into the family and leveled them just before the first snow. Their house was a neat whitewashed cabin, dark inside, but with careful shelves built into the walls next to the stove and a carved wooden bed, store-bought, where now both children labored to breathe. On the floor, their mother lay, far gone, covered only by shawls.
The girl’s face burned brighter and brighter. She drenched the quilt with the sweat that poured out of her body, an amazing sweat that pooled in the curve of her collarbone and dripped off her earlobes in glistening beads. She incandesced into her death-flame, fiercer and brighter, until all of a sudden her lungs filled. She coughed out pans of green pus, died as soon as she began to bleed from the nose and ears. Her handsome brother died with her and then the mother. With a surprised squawk the grandmother was struck, shivered violently, and was gone from the room in less than two hours. Father Damien, turning from one to the next, whirling in a vain death dance contained in the small cabin, tried to catch the slippery tail of death before it slashed the lungs of Michel Destroismaisons.
Mary Kashpaw attempted to save the man by tying him into the bed when he raged to throw himself into the lake. Destroismaisons turned the bed over on himself and crawled with it on his back to the door, but the bed stuck and wouldn’t let him through. He survived, but only to sit alone in the silent blankness of his cabin, staring at death, staring two weeks, before he lay down and slept.
He slept forever, with the others. Around them, a deep snow fell.
The cold deepened and the illness flourished. At all hours, the desperate came calling. Mary Kashpaw broke the trail, tramped before the priest in her bear-paw snowshoes, twice the circumference of ordinary snowshoes and reinforced with moose gut and the unforgiving sinews of cow. Mary Kashpaw dragged a small barge of supplies tied to her waist and that heavy load further packed the snow so that, traveling in her wake, Agnes had an easier time of it. Still, in those fits of exhaustion she sometimes put one leaden step before the next with deep anger alone to fuel her.
God had brought her there under false pretenses, after all, aiding her with huge compassion in the flood’s aftermath, appearing in person as a man with a horn spoon, calm hands. Brought her there to then abandon her in battling uncanny death. Trudging to the homes of the stricken, Agnes wondered, where was the Trinity? Any one of them would do, she thought in exhausted fury, God the Father, God the Son, God the Son of a Bitch, God the Holy Ghost. But her prayers, said with increasing feverish despair, did not turn back the course of the disease.
The parents of six children were lost. Then in another house four children, while the parents were left alive. Father Damien brought the two devastated families together, only to have them reinfect one another. Old women and brand-new babies, new mothers, the meek, the beautiful, the ugly and the useless, all the same. Lost in hours or days. It didn’t matter. And still, Father Damien kept on, and Mary Kashpaw broke the way, and together they left only one trail.
One day, wretchedly sinking and sighing, Pauline Puyat tagged along with apples in her pockets. They were rumored to cure influenza just because some child had eaten one and gotten well, but so far their main assistance had been to perfume the dead or provide an illusory taste of sweetness to the bereaved. Father Damien was too exhausted to exclude any help whatsoever now, though it came from a hateful source. Following Mary Kashpaw in a trance, he made it to the cabin of Mashkiigikwe and two of Kashpaw’s children by Fishbone. The fire was out, the room cold, the victims hacked in a stinking corner. Dying, their cheeks were smeared with blood from their noses and they gasped, their faces a deep plum black, straining for air.
Although her heart was charred black, Agnes felt a fresh stab of desperation and threw herself against the disease. Pauline Puyat brought wood and fetched a pot of snow, then had a fire going and the water heating in an instant. The Puyat filled rags with hot grain, tied them tightly into cushions that she placed on the breasts of the sufferers. Agnes was too tired to register amazement until much later, when she reflected upon the Puyat’s actions. With the sick to attend to, Pauline was transformed. She bathed their fevers down and cleaned their hands and faces, caught their shit when they lost control, their puke of bile and live worms. Pauline quietly reassured the sufferers with low murmurs. The ugliness of death brought out of her an angel. When Mashkiigikwe opened her mouth and gasped, her neck cords straining for a breath, just a breath, Pauline was the one who thought of pounding her chest to loosen the toughened infection. Mashkiigikwe threw up a bloody gruel and then sighed, took a deep breath, slept a healing sleep.
Outside, Mary Kashpaw had cleared snow from the ground and lighted a bonfire to soften the earth, and then she automatically dug. For the first time, though, there was no use for the holes. The following summer, Father Damien would visit the very children for whom the graves were intended and watch them playing in the deep excavations, jumping in and out.
Agnes slept that night, the first time in weeks. Pauline cured Hildegarde next, nursed her back to health, a feat for which Hildegarde Anne then promised a lifetime of sponsorship. But even Pauline could do only so much, and when the sick died, no matter what their wishes, Father Damien suspected that the Puyat baptized their defenseless bodies. The holes that Mary Kashpaw had dug in the beginning were indeed filled. Two hundred and more Anishinaabeg graves. The illness plucked one after another from their grip. They saved the trader. They saved Bernadette Morrissey. They saved the Waboose family and the good Parisiens. They lost a Onesides. From every other cabin someone was taken—these were the lucky cabins. Agnes dreaded reaching a cabin with no smoke, for it would usually be inhabited by a council of the dead.
There was an end to it, as there was an end to everything.
One day, as Mary Kashpaw walked before the priest, thrashing through slough grass, the two of them aching for sleep, Agnes finally saw the one she had hoped for and cursed. They were walking due west, into cloud cover. Far ahead, Mary turned in her tracks and waited for the priest to toil closer. Behind her, the sun swelled in a dull mist. The sky was a glowing blister. Just a ray stabbed forth and pinned her in its glow. In that strange light, Agnes saw beneath the girl’s disguise. She saw that the face of her constant companion, Mary Kashpaw, was the face of the man with the horn spoon. Then she knew. Christ had gone before the priest, stamping down snow. Christ had bent low and on that broad, angry back carried Father Damien through sloughs. Covered him when he collapsed at the bedsides of the ill. Christ had fed him hot gruel from a spoon of black iron. Protected him so that he never sickened even when the dying kissed his hands or coughed their last prayers into his face. Christ was before him right now, breaking the trail. An amazed strength flowed into Agnes’s legs and she stumbled through the snow, reaching. Crying out, “Wait, wait, I am coming!” she lunged for Mary Kashpaw. But the girl watched impassively and when the priest drew near enough she turned away, continued walking in her ordinary form.
THE HAIR SHIRT
1919
When, for the fourth time that day, the young Pauline came sweeping across the dingy grass and beaten mud of the yard toward Father Damien’s cabin, Agnes thought of sneaking out the back window. Pauline was a creature of impossible contradictions. First she meddled, wheedled, pushed herself in where she wasn’t wanted, and then she made some peaceful gesture like the one with Quill, or proved herself heroic as during the epidemic, so Father Damien could not entirely condemn her. No matter, she was a continual scapular of annoyance. A hair shirt. Agnes crossed herself, once, and again for good measure, and then twice more to hold her tongue. All day in the drizzle, Pauline Puyat had left her teaching post to stubbornly pray in the birch grove, for she wanted to effect conversions. She believed that she was blocked in her vocation to w
ork among her people. Blocked by Father Damien. Just that morning, he had said to her, “You are unsuited for life in such an active community. You can heal in desperate times, but you have no patience for teaching or for talking to children. My advice is for you to join a contemplative order!”
Pauline seethed with irritated fury. She knocked hard.
Behind the door, Agnes bit the back of her knuckles. Although Pauline was difficult, she also had her allies, for the novice had a persuasive way of speaking in a whining slur. She had, in fact, extracted a surprising amount of money from one particular and quite saintly woman of wealth. Enough to build a proper kitchen, sink a new well, plumb the interior of the convent. There were enough nuns who knew they had the young hopeful to thank for the fact that the outhouse, freezing and miserable in winter, now held rakes and hoes and wasn’t needed for low purposes. That was a major piece of work. Such a good raiser of monies was immensely rare. Even Sister Hildegarde hedged with Damien when he attempted to persuade her that Pauline Puyat’s place was elsewhere. After all, during the influenza, Pauline had saved her life.
“Father, may I have just one small word with you?”
The girl’s false humility was a stale grease Agnes could taste, but she opened the door unhappily and allowed the girl to enter.
“You’ve visited me four times today, always with exactly the same request.”
“Forgive me, but—”
Damien raised a hand.
“Yes, Father.” Again the inward gulp of amusement, the visible attempt at pursing her dry lips and rounding her starved eyes.
“Father,” said Pauline softly, “I have heard that Nanapush is still living in sin with a baptized Catholic. If you haven’t the care to let me lay siege to his soul, at least have a care for hers.”
“Aren’t you needed to supervise the play yard?” said Father Damien, again, “surely Sister Hildegarde—”
“Oh no, Father, please don’t worry!” Now Pauline lighted with an artificial jollity. Her skull’s face glowed, and she trembled, racked with zeal. “Sister Hildegarde will now be giving the children special instructions in hygiene. It is her pet project this month. And as she has them occupied, I thought I might attempt once again, to . . . oh, I know how tiresome you find me, but once again I would like to beg your indulgence . . . I need to confess.”
“This evening,” said Father Damien.
“Now,” said the Puyat in a low and stubborn voice that chilled Damien in some interior and fathomless place for which he had no guard or defense.
“All right,” he sighed, making the sign of the cross over her, “proceed.”
And so she began, avid, eager in desperation to spill. She knelt beside his desk. Although he tried to remain detached, the pitiable trembling of her hands clenched in prayer touched him. Clearly, she was in a state of grave inner agitation. In her confession, some nameless man appeared a trimmed French mustache and flat, dark lips. It was a hot close afternoon, the day it happened. He pressed on me in a blinding darkness. Crushed me to a powder and spread me across the floor. Snapped me in his beak like a wicket-boned mouse.
“Stop,” said Father Damien, repelled now by her sly excitement, “you are absolved, say no more.”
He drew back, not like he was finished with me, Father, but like a dog sensing the presence of a tasteless poison in its food. Then went on, which he should not have done.
“Peace, my child, let yourself be calm, you are not forsaken.” Her wildness shook him, her insistence on strange details, her description of her own nakedness and that of her rapist or uncle or even someone she half allowed . . . he could not tell for sure, and then, her face narrowing and her voice hushed, she confessed the child.
I swelled so tight, Father Damien, that I could hardly lift my arms and every breath was forced, fought for against that baby’s weight. I felt my bones give, the bowl of my hips creak wide, and between my legs there was a soft and steady burning.
“The child was born . . .”
Yes, taken from me, born, however you put it, there was no stopping it, no—
“Where is that child now?”
Silence.
“Where is that child?”
The silence now held, now stubborn.
Again, his blood pounding, Father Damien asked and this time she answered, hasty and alarmed at the conclusion that her silence was forcing him to draw.
Dead, Father Damien, I did not touch it. Born dead!
Agnes waved both hands in the air, lapsing, horrified as if swiping away hordes of stinging flies. Pauline began to weep now, a dry sound like the scratching of a spent record on a phonograph. Beating her breast, she begged for forgiveness. Agnes caught herself. Gasped out Father Damien’s standard absolution, but was unprepared to give, or invent for Pauline, the proper penance.
“The penance, Father, what shall be my punishment?”
A trickle of spit collected at the corner of her mouth, her eyes were red with the exhaustion of having wrestled many sleepless nights with the violence of her past. Her gums bled from her continual fasting. Her ingratiating smile was frightful to Father Damien and hoping to get rid of her he manufactured an attack of sudden kindliness.
“You take on too much for your strength, my dear. You were violated and that could not be helped. Now rise . . . you will say two thousand Hail Marys—no, four thousand Hail Marys, and, as well, you will—”
“Thank you, Father, yes!”
With a sudden energy Agnes lurched around the chair and in a flash she hoped would take the other by surprise, raised the woman by the elbow. She was propelling Pauline out the door, when, with a false step the girl lurched and fell against Agnes, twisting as she went, clutching at the priest’s chest. Agnes had the instinctive wit not to catch Pauline but to step precisely backward so that the girl fell full length. She landed hard enough to knock the wind out of her body and she gasped, dry, fought for air. Even after Pauline picked herself up, Agnes could almost feel the thin claws and sense the cold clutch of Pauline’s hands as they raked the air, so close, reaching for her bound breasts. . . .
THE VICTIM SOUL
Shortly after that disturbing confession, Pauline Puyat was found in a state of collapse, naked, prostrate before the altar, covered with muck and raving, but as Hildegarde picked her up and hid the extent of her strange condition, it was some time before the full report leaked down from the convent on the hill. It was said that Pauline Puyat took upon herself an extraordinary penance. In her cell, covered in no more than a sheet, no pillow, sleeping on the bare floor, she maintained a rigorous fast and a strange concentration. Father Damien came to sit with her, and supposedly, to hear her confession or deliver the Eucharist. The moment he saw Pauline Puyat, however, he knew that he’d come into the presence of a darkness not to be assuaged by common means.
Light fell pale gray through a set of curtains pinned together at the center of the tall rectangular window. A searching blade of radiance struck through the slight gap between the pins and fell in a strict golden slant across Pauline Puyat, who refused a bed and lay upon the floor. She would not accept a single comfort, kicked off anything but one thin sheet, yet she spoke lucidly in making her wishes known, saying that she was atoning for a desperate sin and pleading to be allowed to continue her restitutional fast. When Father Damien refused her request, she clamped her lips shut. Her jaws had locked and the muscles of her throat knotted into pull cords. She spoke through her teeth with difficulty, but her words were still calm and sensible.
“Forgive me, Father, for this is what I must do.”
Her face, as she gazed upward, was womanly and open, her forehead bronzed by the seeking light. She seemed intent within, very still, as though listening for faint but vital instructions. Reaching across to draw her sheet around her shoulders, Father Damien’s hand brushed the point of her chin, alabaster white and cold. Her hands, rigid in fisted knots, were stone smooth, alarmingly bloodless and heavy, clenched around thick bandages that
hid her unexplained wounds. Impossible to change because of their clawlike rigidity, the gauze had begun to exude the cloying reek of infection. Hildegarde told Father Damien that she had called for iodine and carbolic soap, water, salts to soak her hands and feet. With her gray skin and deep, black, ravaged eyes Pauline was a figure set to rest on a tomb, a grave’s image.
“It is a sin,” said Father Damien gently, “to chastise yourself too forcefully. You will receive a blanket. You will sleep upon a mat. You will drink water and light broth; later you’ll eat food.”
“Ah,” said Pauline Puyat, her eyes slowly filling with the loss of her ability to suffer, “please, Father, let me have my penance. It is everything and it is all I own.” She spoke through clenched teeth and a shut jaw, but her speech was plain enough. Father Damien felt himself soften with pity, knowing the truth of what she said was profound.
“What you confessed to me was not your fault,” he assured her.
The girl looked into Damien’s face with a grimace of sorrow, or perhaps self-hatred, for her face slowly turned golden red with a strange shame. Then the red flooded back toward her heart, and she drained to a terrific, nearly translucent, dead white.
“There is more,” she said wretchedly, and the veins in her temples jumped with the strength of her emotion.
“I will listen once you are healed,” said Father Damien. His sympathy enfolded him in spite of himself, but he determined, then and there, if she lived he would send her off the reservation, down to Fargo, down to Argus.