Dear Father Damien,
I am sending an assistant to work with you, not because you will need his help, though I am certain you will benefit from his presence, but because I would like you to train him.
He will stay with you and learn all that you can teach him.
Yours in Christ,
Bishop DuPre
Agnes dropped the piece of paper and stood mute and numb, staring straight before her at the dark, wet, log walls. For a week, nearly, the skies had opened every day. There was no let-up. Between drenching bursts a slow, cold drizzle descended. And now this letter from the bishop, a stunning threat.
Live with her? Quite impossible.
She wrote back.
I am in no need of assistance, and furthermore, there is no place for a young priest to live. As it is, my quarters are inadequate, not that I mean to complain. But to add another is impossible!
Impossible! Her brain locked on the word and was comforted by the lilt of it. Impossible. She refused in fact to consider or even remember the letter from the bishop, until one day the assistant simply, with no warning and no one to accompany him, arrived.
Father Gregory Wekkle walked up the hill quite alone, apparently having come in much the same way Agnes had originally. As she was striding across the crisp new dusting of snow on the church grounds, she saw him waiting at the door of her cabin, a small rounded suitcase and a wooden toolbox at his feet. Father Wekkle was of medium height and form, but gave the impression of being a bigger man, animated by a complex and slightly awkward energy. He moved eagerly, and had an open and friendly look about him, a disarming lack of polish or priestly grace. His hair was brown as a monk’s robe, his eyes a muddy Irish hazel. His smile was a great flash of light. Agnes sighed. There was a sweetness to the man she couldn’t have expected, a quality of taking pleasure in his own being. She decided that he had to be harmless. She underestimated, as she often did with men, his intelligence. Already, she imagined his developing into the kindly, rotund sort of priest who dispenses easy penances and excellent reassurances. What did he need from her?
She grasped his hand anyway, and shook it—a hard-palmed warm workman’s hand. She looked down at his box of tools and then the heat from his heavy palm flowed up her arm into her heart. Surprised, she took the jolt of his goodness almost painfully and tried to control the sudden flood of happiness that filled her with terror.
“Come in. Let’s set things up. Let’s make you comfortable, Father . . . ?”
“Wekkle. Gregory Wekkle.”
Agnes mustered the stern and kindly formality of Father Damien, and nodded him through the door. His presence startled her into an objective look at her house, and the clutter of it suddenly dismayed her. There were books everywhere. Books she had begged for in her newsletter, intending to set up a library. People from surrounding parishes now gave her books, tried to sell books to her, laid them on the church doorstep. Father Damien had become known for his avidity and was the first one people thought of when a book, any book, became useless. Thus she had a stack of the last century’s Godey’s Lady’s Books, as well as Lutheran hymnals, but also treasures. Thomas Aquinas in an endless indestructible leather-bound edition with Italian marbled endpapers and a gold-embossed title on the spine. A complete set of Dickens.
The two proceeded to make way through stacks of books into the tiny cabin. Out of the stacks of books, they made separate rooms. They stacked the books two by two, then crosswise, like bricks, into a wall. Then Father Wekkle was given a bedstead by Sister Hildegarde and the two priests placed it on the other side of the wall. They used blanket dividers, hung them from the beams. As they worked, they spoke, though Agnes tried to remain cool. Father Gregory Wekkle was young, but not as young as Agnes had expected, not that she had expected. They were the same age, a peril, as she’d have his questions. Fortunately, Agnes had memorized information from the newsletters sent to Little No Horse by the original Father Damien’s seminary. She was able to speak very generally of other priests they might know in common. To her relief, Father Gregory did not pursue their histories except as a polite gesture. He was much more interested in the present, and in learning from Father Damien all that he could before taking up a reservation post—he knew not where, not yet.
He was pleasant, he was congenial, he was both shrewder and more innocent than she saw at first. Already, that night, drifting into sleep behind her woolen blanket curtain, Agnes prayed that something would call Father Wekkle away immediately, that he leave precipitously, anything but risk again that jolt of pleasure in the immediacy of his presence.
The first deep snow isolated the reservation from the rest of the world and sank the cabin in a swirl of white drifts. The roads were blocked until the horse-drawn sledges would pack down the snow, or until the plow tore laboriously through the high snow pack down to the train station in Hoopdance. Still, there were rounds to be made. Communion to bring to the sick and the very old. Children to teach their catechism. Nanapush had taught Father Damien how to make bear paw snowshoe frames and lace them with moose guts and sinew. Now Agnes was teaching Gregory Wekkle.
“Make the fire extremely hot,” she said.
He’d brought logs in to feed the stove, and he stuffed its belly with dried birch until the iron glowed pulsing red. She had already split the ash and now she showed him how to heat it and bend it into a circle. In a pail by her foot, she’d covered fresh moose guts with water. Slowly, she smoothed each one clean between her fingers, forming a pile of moose-chewed water lilies on the table.
“Some people eat this,” she told Gregory. “It’s like salad with a dressing of moose digestive juices.”
“Unknown, as yet, in the fine St. Paul restaurants.”
Agnes laughed and asked him when was the last time he ate in a fine St. Paul restaurant.
“Before I came here, my parents had a farewell party.”
“Do you miss your family?” Agnes strung a loop of intestine between the sides of the hoop, fastening it tight.
“I do,” said Gregory. “They’re coming up to visit in the spring.”
Agnes’s heart jumped and sank at the same time. Would he stay here that long? It was too long. It was not long enough. The heat from the overfed stove rose in her cheeks. “No!” she roughly said, grasping the new priest’s wrists to help him bend the wood properly. “You do it like this.” A mistake. Close, she smelled the wood heat on his skin, the washed soapy scent of his neck, the scorched wool upon which he must have used a too hot iron, and sweat. A faint, low, clean, and intensely sexual workman’s sweat. Agnes felt herself leaning into the air around him.
“Damn,” said Gregory in a low voice as the heated wood popped from his hands. He laughed in derision at himself and crossed the room to retrieve the piece of half-bent wood. He lingered on the cool side of the cabin, and breathed deeply, disturbed at his own physical reaction to the proximity of Father Damien.
*
They traveled to the deep bush on those snowshoes, brought communion to Zozed Bizhieu and her troublesome daughter, visited Nanapush. When they traveled, they carried blanket rolls tied onto their shoulders, and a pack of bread, dried meat, raisins. Gregory Wekkle brought a flask, always, of his favorite whiskey, for he didn’t see anything wrong with a drop now and then. And although Agnes observed there were a good many nows, and a huge number of thens, she nonetheless drank with him a drop, or two, or maybe more than that. It became very pleasant while out on their visits to stop on the way back, build a fire, sit there with the whiskey and the bannock and the raisins, until it was time to go back to the parish cabin.
“Father Damien,” said Gregory one night, as they laughed over some clumsiness, “why don’t we stay out here?”
“I believe we’d worry Sister Hildegarde” was Damien’s answer, and he quickly dumped snow on the fire. As they tramped the miles back, Agnes felt a sting of wishful desire. Nanapush had taught her how to build a brush shelter to conserve the heat of the fire, and
the night was warm and starry. The whiskey gave her the temporary illusion of gliding power. She was on the verge of stopping there, making a new camp, and she even paused, turned, and opened her mouth to speak.
There was Father Wekkle, struggling behind her with a hopeful, bearish serenity. After he barged forward, he would stop, breath on his fingers, arrange his scarf, shrug, and surge forward again. He worked his way along in a comical intensity, and Agnes felt her heart squeeze at his endearing earnestness and cheer. Often, even in his snowshoes, he managed to break through the crust of snow. He had a start-stop kind of steadiness about him and kept on lunging forward. She saw the white flash of his teeth when he grinned at her, and she turned back onto the path, mumbling to herself, Be sensible!
So they returned, propped their snowshoes against the sides of the cabin, rekindled the fire that Mary Kashpaw had banked and left, and rolled into their beds. For a while she slept, but then, waking in the dark, a fury of discomfort seized Agnes, as though her skin was being stung with red-hot needles. She prickled all over, and she prayed for help in wrestling with her thoughts. By dawn, most of them were subdued.
Most, not all.
She had to touch him. There was no help for it. There was a faint, sweet, brown to Father Wekkle’s skin, a fading suntan, almost golden. His hands were broad, sensitive, well-padded, with wide, spreading, generous thumbs. He was good with a hammer, and one of his most winsome qualities was his sunny energy for carpentry work. He cleaned and oiled and sharpened the contents of his tool chest every few days. Agnes struggled for a while longer, angry and despairing of her need just to touch him by accident, just once! Be sensible, she told herself whenever her thoughts lighted on his hair, brown and wavy, growing out of its cut in swirls.
She was sensible until the night the books fell.
There were times she woke too early, and so as not to wake Father Wekkle, she read the spines of her side of the double wall of books stacked between them. Among others, she had given herself the Russians, all of George Eliot, her beloved Aquinas, Augustine, St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle, and a two-volume set of the lives of the saints. This last was to atone for the other volumes, only four, of Colette—though, after all, François Mauriac had said that her voluptuousness led the soul to God. She had covered those books in butcher paper and changed the titles to Latin. She also kept the strange assortment of donated books to read through and decide upon—accounts of personal voyages were popular among them, as well as outdated medicinal or fashion advice. Mauriac was on Agnes’s side and also Proust, William James, and others she was confident of displaying. Stendhal, Hugo, and all of the Greeks were stacked on Wekkle’s side. Plus the histories of states and provinces and the mesmerizing horrors of a collection of Jesuit relations, which had once belonged to Father Hugo.
She knew the wall of books by each title. After the lantern was out, at night, she put out her hand and traced the stamped letters on the spines and the embossed ridges. Some of her newer books were very plainly bound, but she loved to run her fingers over them, too. Their heavily woven cloth covers were of a texture pleasingly dry and soft to her touch. Even when she was exhausted, each night she brushed the books between her bed and Father Wekkle’s, and she held her palm upon them until the books warmed to her touch. It seemed to her, listening to the other priest’s calm breath, that the books between them were a third, sympathetic, entity. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged. Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinements, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. Hers was merely what it was, and her aches over it as well, but in all of the books that composed the wall between the two priests, and in all of the stories she’d ever read, she never had come across the exact example of what she contemplated doing to Father Wekkle. Nor could she imagine his reacting to her touch with anything but mystery and horror. Therefore, she took her hand away from the wall.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, Father Wekkle was a sleeper who thrashed. He slept in a moleskin robe that his mother had sewn for him and insisted he wear up north in the bitter wild. Every night he put it on with mixed gratitude and embarrassment. As he was sensitive to the cold, its warmth made him thankful. At the same time, as his mother could not bear plain things and had sewn it with a ruffle, he made very certain that no other human ever saw him in it. As he slept, he warmed, and as he got warmer, he flailed in the moleskin gown and kicked away his covers, tossed and muttered. Also, he dreamed, and his dreams were always action masterpieces. All he’d left undone or half done during the day, he’d finish. More than that, he’d start new projects or he’d make parish visits, leaping high in his snowshoes and skating, even flying, to the rescue of those stranded from the presence of the Host. All that he imagined, he acted out and he had, many times, awakened Agnes. He’d also kicked or struck the book wall, making it lean so perilously that it sometimes had to be rebuilt by Father Damien, who could not help remember Agnes’s convent days as Cecilia and the careful construction of the birdbath containing only the brickworks word, Fleisch, and now again the wall she made containing thousands, perhaps millions of words, and still in her mind only that one word.
The moleskin robe stuck to Father Wekkle when he sweated, twisting around his hips so that he sometimes dreamed erotically. He had, in fact, that night, been the victim of a most intense and mysterious veiled female whose lips, only, were revealed by a small, round hole in the cloth. Her lips moved, mouthing the words Be sensible, words that require the most seductive motions of the lips. The advice aroused him and he lunged for her impatiently and in his sudden movement toppled the books.
In the stillness of the night, they were a skidding avalanche. One struck Agnes full in the face and she started awake, heart pounding. Groping around herself in panic, she touched him. His hand grasped hers. They didn’t move. The collapse of books had also torn down the blanket divider, so the moon-pale light from the window on Gregory’s side of the cabin washed across their beds. Raggedly breathing, hearts quickened, blinking, hands touching, they poised. If either had simply withdrawn a hand they would have laughed, rebuilt the wall of books. But they continued, in their staged paralysis, to search each other’s dim-lighted faces. Both were desperate for clues—what was to happen? At the same moment, both imperceptibly leaned forward. Brightness from the full moon rested evenly upon their hair, but their faces were in shadow so that, as Gregory tipped his chin questingly forward into that final space, he felt that he ducked into a cave. Once he entered that half sphere of shadow, he was lost. She was lost. They lay down together among the scattered books. Into Gregory’s mind, there surged the awful and appalling joy of knowing he was one of those whom the Church darkly warned against, the ones who lay with men as with women. The sin he would commit would be equal to the sin of murder, one of those sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.
In Agnes’s mind, a willing despair to be discovered. Her nipples burned against the cloth and her body slipped its boundaries of skin. Darkness sifted through her and she rose toward him, light, powerful, and calm. Gregory touched her breast through the night shift, and in a dreamlike reversal of who he feared he was, he held her like a raft in a torrent. They spoke now, their whispers incoherent. They undressed each other slowly, with formal innocence, shocked into foolishness at the pleasure of each discovery. Gregory had no experience at all of a woman’s nakedness, and the final sight of her, strong and unbound, washed in silver, astonished him so that he could merely sit with her for a time and touch her as one might a fabulous animal before suddenly, at her gesture, he spread her thighs open and entered the shadow between.
In surprise, once they began to move, they sighed in relief and smiled, delighted and aghast, to find themselves utterly safe and at peace. That was the strange and unexpected component of their passion—how safe, how ordinary, how blessedly normal it fel
t. For the next few days they lived in a daze, but nothing changed. In their work they were more zealous, more dutiful. They drove themselves harder than before. Secure in the night, they took no chances in the day and were remote but friendly with each other. Weeks accumulated in which neither spoke of what was happening. Only, in the depth of the night, with the window curtained, they made love with a charged tenderness that left them faint and weeping. Before falling asleep, they set things straight and returned to either side of their wall of books. Each whispered good night to the spines, the massed pages, then lay still underneath the heavy patched wool of the quilts of army blankets.
The snow melted into the earth and they walked now, through mud and swollen mashkiig, to bring communion to the laid-up devout, to instruct for various sacraments. Returning one cold spring day, they paused to rest on the soft old winter-dusty grass. They sat down silently. Gregory tore off a piece of the bannock given to them, and Agnes accepted the bread from his hands and ate. The massed reeds in the slough were a scorched and radiant yellow. The sun shot down from a half-gray sky, picking out the birch with a fierce light.
“I belong to you,” said Gregory to Agnes. “I love you.”
When she said the same to him, the bread went dry on their tongues and they felt spreading from those words a branching fury of impossible difficulty.
BERNADETTE’S CONFESSION
As Father Damien hustled across the yard to hear confessions, he saw that the nuns had frozen their pump again and were using Mary Kashpaw as their beast of burden. He watched her as he walked, saw her stagger as she rounded the corner to the back door of the convent, a great pole laid across her shoulders, two buckets hanging down from either end. He made a note to stop the sisters from overusing the girl’s strength, and passed at once into the church. There were a few parishioners hunched in contemplation near the jerry-built box of boards and blankets in which he heard confessions. He sat in the middle box, on a small cushioned stool, and bent to the muslin shadow. A discreet cough. The sinner spoke.