Mary Kashpaw did not acknowledge the presence of the nun, but fixed her attention on her priest. Across her powerful features, as she stepped into the cabin, there stole an unlikely expression of protective gentleness. It was a look that certainly had not been seen before on her person by Hildegarde. The girl bent over her priest, and with huge compassion she brushed her fingers on the old buffalo robe she’d dragged from a trunk to warm Father Damien. Then she sank to the floor beside the bed, composed herself, and refused to leave. Mary Kashpaw stayed day and night with the priest from then on, keeping watch. She lighted his glass kerosene lamp and kept it going.
For although he appeared to be lying inert in one body, heavily sleeping underneath the burly brown robe, Father Damien was, in truth, wandering mightily through heaven and earth. He was exploring worlds inhabited by both Ojibwe and Catholic. And had Mary Kashpaw not kept that beacon going, he might, in his long and rambling journey, have become confused or even got lost. For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.
DAMIEN’S INNER TRAVELS
Mary Kashpaw watched how his hands pierced the air, always moving. Fingers rippling on the covers, he smiled, humming endless, complicated, unrepeatable music that went on all night and made Mary Kashpaw sigh with radiant emotion.
All the while that the priest was traveling, she stayed at the side of his bed, first crouched on the floor and then, a great womanly boulder, on a chair that she had made of peeled logs hacked to planks. Motionless, rapt as an ice fisherman, she watched. Gazing into Father Damien’s shuttered face, she hummed or rocked slightly on the uneven boards. From time to time, as though she were burning off a bit of surplus energy, she shuddered all over. Then she bit her lip and leaned to peer closer as if gazing into a deep pool ruffled on the surface by a stray breeze. Sometimes she left off staring at his face and frowned heartily at the wall, as if maps of Father Damien’s current whereabouts were posted there. Eyes closed, she traced the imaginary paths, the roads of rivers. At last she came to wonder why she saw no whiskers and recorded no beard growth on his chin.
Other white men had them, these whiskers, and in truth she was curious to see them sprout. On Damien, none showed. On the third day of his sleep, Mary Kashpaw put her hand out and, with one finger, lightly stroked his chin. She drew her finger back and continued to sit, thoughtfully, staring like someone who has glimpsed the shade and outline of a larger picture.
Every morning after that she heated a kettle of water, readied the mug of shaving soap, dipped in the brush, stropped the razor, and was seen, ostentatiously, to be putting these things aside just as Sister Hildegarde arrived.
The practical Sister Hildegarde was in fact pleased to see how carefully Mary Kashpaw cared for Damien, and she tried to say so in signs, for she never did quite accept that, although Mary Kashpaw refused to speak, she understood everything around her perfectly. Hildegarde nodded at the carefully damped or blazing fire in the tiny metal drum of the stove. Gestured approvingly at the shine on the windows and the urgent cleanliness of Mary Kashpaw’s floor. The big girl scrubbed with an artificial madness of intention. The floor smoothed and the wood settled underneath her punishing hands.
Watching her zeal, one day, Hildegarde was sobered to observe a mechanical strength, as though her body were able to operate without the direct guidance of her mind. Bending before Mary Kashpaw, the nun passed her hand rapidly before the girl’s eyes and sure enough, she got no reaction. Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance. So, she thought, scrubbing floors! As well as who knows what! Hildegarde had seen her eat, too, with just this sort of blank fixity. These were actions Mary Kashpaw did in her sleep.
SLEEPERS
The sleepers traveled deep into the country of uncanny truth. Mary Kashpaw scrubbed floors in her sleep while, on the low bed above her, through dense thickets Father Damien plunged onward. He soon became thoroughly and miserably lost. Having strayed off the dream path leading to the house of his friend, Nanapush, he made the mistake of continuing—after all, dusk was nearly on him and he didn’t want to spend the night in the woods, even though it was a dream woods. That, however, is exactly what happened. Damien sat against a tree, drunk with exhaustion. After a short period of electrified panic, he felt a dim fuzz stealing over his brain.
Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed. And so it went from there, a series of dreams, tunnels of brilliance snaking and tangling into the low hill, then out, then farther back—through unknown swamps and broad lake fields high with sweeping reeds and farther yet into the great many islanded lakes with their powerful, secret rock paintings. Impossible to say how many dreams within the dream before he met the one who followed him in to guide him back: Mary Kashpaw.
It was good she found the priest. For if Damien had dreamed himself much farther into that overgrown country how could he ever have returned? Who is to say this isn’t exactly how, one morning, people wake up mad? They have simply dreamed themselves down too many paths and at each turn or pause, as they attempt to travel back, they are swept up in the poignancy of being. Except it is another dream that they unknowingly inhabit.
THE SACRAMENT
Father Damien walked through the woods in a state of pleasant resignation, his satchel full of strychnine. For a while he pretended to wander in a meaningless attempt to lose himself, so that he could die with no bother to anyone else, but he had to admit finally that he was on his way to Nanapush. Well, why not? Why not say good-bye to the person who had been most kind to him and most understanding of all Anishinaabeg. Besides, out of a sense of pride and rightness he had inherited from his predecessor, he hadn’t told Nanapush of what he suffered. The way Damien understood it, he was to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around. Still, when he entered the familiar yard that afternoon, heart full, the pleasure and kindness in Nanapush’s face somewhat eased his certainty. In that moment of relaxation, he showed Nanapush the poison and admitted he had come into the woods to die.
Nanapush gently took the bottles from Damien’s hands. Miserable with relief at his admission, Damien dragged himself to the side of the yard, lay down in a patch of grass, on a blanket, and fell into a sudden and childlike sleep that lasted for most of the afternoon. He came swimming to consciousness and was vaguely aware that there were several men working in the yard, then he passed out again. When he came to the second time, the world was dark and Nanapush was sitting next to him with his pipe lighted, blowing the smoke over Father Damien in a faint and fragrant drift.
Father Damien sat up, embarrassed at himself. As though he’d upset some inner water level, tears filled his eyes. He looked at the ground, his hands trembling.
“We put up a sweat lodge for you,” said Nanapush. The glow of a huge, steady fire lighted his features. Nanapush took the priest’s hand, then, and led him to the entrance of a small, domed hut, gestured for him to crawl inside. He did, entering on all fours. Then Nanapush himself followed and crouched next to Damien. “Give me your robe,” he said, and Father Damien removed his heavy cassock, but kept on the light black shift he wore beneath. The shadowy presences of men surrounded him and he could see their faces by the light of the glowing rocks that soon were brought in a pitchfork and lowered into the pit at the very center.
Every so often, someone would make a little joke. Otherwise, they were calm with expectation.
“This is our church,” said Nanapush.
Hunched in the pole hut and sitting upon bare tamped ground, Agnes at first smiled wanly at the irony. But once the flap was closed and the darkness was complete, once the glowing rocks were splashed with water, then sprinkled with sharp medicines that gave off a
healing smoke, once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that Nanapush had spoken truthfully and without double wit, and that this was indeed her friend’s true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagle’s nest of the sweat lodge over them.
Straining to make sense of the rapid prayers, her Ojibwemowin at the level of penetration at which words made sense a beat or two beats after she heard them and puzzled out the meaning, Agnes surrendered. According to Church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake God’s worship in so alien a place. Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? It wasn’t as though she made a choice to do it—Agnes simply found herself comforted.
That night, stretched out in blankets beside the fire that had heated the stones, Agnes lay peacefully alert. For the first time since the pain had gripped her, she felt a deliciousness of honest sleep close down. Not weariness or exhaustion, those things Father Damien strove toward in his work to try to outwit the grip of insomnia, but the luxuriant stretching of an utterly relaxed spirit.
After returning from despair, Father Damien loved not only the people but also the very thingness of the world. He became very fond of his stove—a squat little black Reliance with fat, curved legs. The stove reminded Agnes of a cheerful old woman who had given her bread as a child, and raw carrots, when she’d been hungry and there was nothing to eat at home. The old woman had pulled the carrots from the ground and held them under the spout of her pump until the dirt flowed off and they glistened. Then the old woman, whose fat legs ran straight down from her knees into her shoes, sat Agnes on a stump in her yard.
The gold secret tang of sweet marigolds was on the woman’s hands. She had put the bread in Agnes’s lap, soft and fresh, and the carrots, and a clear glass shaker of salt. Kindly, she’d left her to eat. Agnes could still taste the crisp juice of the carrots, the buttery interior whiteness of the bread, the salt bringing them together on her tongue, when she looked at the stove.
Thus was her salvation composed of the very great and very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. The bread of life. The gold orange of washed carrots and the taste of salt.
12
THE AUDIENCE
1922
Just behind the log church, a long, flat slab of rock rose abruptly at a steep angle into a craggy cliff. Father Hugo’s dream had been to build upon that floor and against that rock. Now Agnes continued to work the idea into reality. The vision absorbed her, it was nothing she’d ever done before. She took measurements, observed the fall of the sun, used a level and compass and pencil to sketch. She lighted a lantern, spread out her papers on the table, and drew long into the night, planning, driven by a sudden and engulfing force of practicality. She fell into it as a way of not thinking about Gregory, and then the idea took on its own life. Soon she could fully imagine the church—it was a most absorbing vision.
A church with the floor of stone and the altar built against the stone. There would be two stoves, both set directly upon the floor of rock. Every morning in winter those fires would be kindled, and then the warmth would flow into the rock and toast the feet of worshipers. The stone behind the altar would be carved and polished bit by bit; she could see it, a most incredible grotto, an attraction that people would come to see from miles away. And of course, the useless but somewhat decorative piano.
All that Fathers Hugo and then Damien intended came to pass, very slowly, but it was within the working out of that small destiny that Agnes realized how even careful plans cannot accommodate or foresee all the tricks of creation. The church planned in October mud, mulled over during the winter blizzards, plotted in icy April, raised in early May, was enough shelter in mid-June for Sister Hildegarde to move the piano inside. It stood to one side of the altar. As soon as the sides of the new church were framed and the roof on tight, the Superior wanted to test the acoustics. She wanted to hear the notes bounce off the spars, walls, ceiling, stones. Not that she could play. No one played. Sister Hildegarde had sent away to Fargo for instructional books, but Father Damien pretended to have lost the key to the shut keyboard.
A nameless and disturbing energy about the piano haunted Agnes. She felt uncomfortable whenever she chanced to be alone with it and she found, then, that she always kept an eye on the piano, as though it were alive and waiting for her to turn her back. Why? So that it could flip up its keyboard protector? Laugh? Agnes wondered at herself. Did she really believe the instrument would move forward, gnashing its poor, stained, ivory keys?
She stood in the entrance to the new church one afternoon, regarding the placement of the piano with an uneasy, critical eye. Later, she was sure it was the long summer light, the full golden quality of afternoon light that wakened her hands and set them moving about more restlessly than they had for some time. She thought of Gregory’s hands, then put the thought away. The key to the keyboard was hidden in the piano’s odd claw foot. An aperture behind a toe. Suddenly, Agnes bent and removed the key. She then opened the keyboard. All of a sudden there it was, the notes spread out before her in the slant light of afternoon, the discolored ivories of the sad keys gaping at her, the breath of the thing sighing out like an animal.
There was a small brown bench Sister Hildegarde had found and placed before the creature. Agnes sat, adjusted the distance, and watched the keys carefully. Nothing happened. There was nothing to be afraid of, after all, except that her hands sprang out of her sleeves. Then they jumped off her lap like claws and crashed down in an astonishing chord. She clutched her hands to her chest. The sound reverberated. With a soft and, she feared, insane longing, her hands crept forward again. This time, quite movingly, they brushed the keys in the secret contradictory melody that opens the Pathetique. Her hands moved on and on. She crouched over the keyboard in amazed concentration and played, or allowed herself to be played by, the music that had racked her inside and struggled for release. This was how it was with her gifts. God had taken the music away for a time to bring her closer, then returned it when removing the last sexual love she would ever have. Even in the astonished flood of her discovery, she knew that this sudden solace was presented to help her through her loss. As her hands assembled and disassembled their patterns of old harmony and counterharmony, the mystery of their motions became entirely sensible. She understood the intricate purpose of a language she had guessed in the dark and even practiced on the body of Gregory. Music poured out in a rational waterfall.
Time passed, or no time passed. Absorbed in the rush of knowing, Agnes felt eyes watching. Perhaps children, she thought, unable in her awed greed to quit. Or one of the sisters, or an Ojibwe curious or gripped by longing. She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.
The rhapsody woke them, Debussy drew them forth, Chopin made them listen, and Schubert put them back to sleep. It was luck that Agnes was alone that day, for the nuns, except for Hildegarde, screamed for the hoe whenever they saw a serpent and killed it on the spot. The occurrence explained, anyway, the reason that so many snakes did appear in their garden—the rock beneath the church sheltered their ancient nest.
There were at least a hundred. More. Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth bacarolle, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel
gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks. Their heads were slightly raised off the floor and if they weren’t actually listening to the notes, they were positively fixed on the music. They were suspended, somehow, by whatever means were available to their senses.
Agnes continued to play. Once, during the music, Sister Hildegarde came near, she heard her enter. Though tough, the nun emitted a stifled gagging hiccup and fled. Not long after, Mary Kashpaw came, unafraid, and worshiped as though with her kind. A crowd collected murmuring outside the church door. Growing weary, Agnes at last hit upon the Kinderscenen from Schubert and finally, playing “Sleep” repetitively and with all the kindness of a good parent, she succeeded in driving the snakes, the ginebigoog, back to their beds.
GINEBIGOOG
The news of Father Damien’s suddenly revealed musical ability caused an excited curiosity. People came in shy numbers to listen. For one month he played concerts instead of delivering sermons. When they felt the music, the snakes still flickered to the edges of the main floor of the church, even with the full congregation. As for Nanapush, when he heard about the snakes, he became intent with interest and told Father Damien that this was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart. After the snakes, Damien was gratified to find that he was consulted more often and trusted with intimate knowledge. Perhaps he was considered to have acquired a very powerful guardian spirit, or perhaps it was the piano. A grand wave of baptisms followed in the wake of his music, people of all ages, some new.