The thin, black, metal shelf hung down from the body of the engine to support three exhaust pipes. It was just the right size for a child, an intriguing little place. I scrambled backward with the fan, a beautiful and cunning fan made of a prairie chicken tail. I caught up with the other dancers and I did my dance piece, but all the time that I danced, I was busy thinking something I could not define, something that had to do with the shelf and pipes underneath the bus.
It was easy for me. When they loaded the buses two weeks later for the summer trip home, I slipped around back. I rolled into the shadow of the undercarriage, crawled under the body of the engine, onto the shelf with the pipes, and spread myself out flat on my stomach. I grasped hold of the brackets like handles, as though I were on a sled. Only I couldn’t steer, of course. I would go where we were bound to go, flat and straight over the road until we stopped at Little No Horse, home.
Bubbles of excitement welled up in me as all around the motor came to life and as with slow grandeur the bus began to move. The shelf was more perilous than it looked. As the bus gathered speed I found I had to hold tightly to the brackets. Still, using one arm and then the other, I could rest. And the gas-smelling air was flushed out behind the bus so I wasn’t breathing it. I had worried about that, my only worry brought on by Rose’s declaring that gasoline was squeezed from dead bodies and you’d die if you breathed it. The air was fresh, then, still with a raw spring bite, and cold. My teeth chattered at first but then the pipe under me, the middle pipe, grew warm. It ran straight down the center of me, warming me, burning me, although that would be in the end a complete surprise.
All through my life, to the mystery of my devoutest lovers, I have borne that central scorch mark—a thin stripe of gold lighter than my skin, a line evenly dividing me, running between my breasts and vanishing between my legs. And that surprised me, for although the pipe did indeed grow uncomfortably hot, it did not seem to burn me, certainly not to the point where it would leave a mark. Perhaps the cold air that kept on flowing all around me cooled my awareness, or perhaps it was the fear. One hour, then two hours, passed. When they stopped to fuel up, I wrung my agonized hands and arms. Got the blood moving. With the pavement a sweeping blur just inches beneath me, and the certain knowledge that if I let go or fell asleep I would die, I managed to stay awake. But that was the hardest thing of all. My brain wanted to go to sleep. The heavy movement was soothing, the vast unintelligible roar, the workings of the metal bowels.
At my birth, a bear had visited. I came from the lake. Nobody knew who my father was or nobody would tell. I am the last of the last of the Pillagers, Lulu, so how could I not go home?
At the next stop, I was able to rest. All I did was breathe hard and stare into myself, rubbing my arms. The other children were eating their cheese sandwiches. I was so keen with hunger that I could smell them in a park beside the gravel parking lot, having a picnic. I was in a blur of pain and sleepiness, and I wanted to be with them—just a child munching on a sandwich, bound home. To comfort myself I imagined Margaret and Nanapush. My eyes closed. When I opened them, I was staring into the startled face of the bus driver, checking the tires, who thought at first that I was dead.
They sent me back.
I sat in the sheriff’s office for hours, wrapped in a blanket, while Mr. Eaglestaff drove from the school to fetch me. He was the school’s head janitor, and he really didn’t care what I did. That was one good break. They issued me the longest, ugliest worst dress on earth—the punishment dress—a solid block of green reaching to my ankles, shapeless and embarrassing. Then I went to work scrubbing the sidewalks that led around the campus. Down on my knees, I washed section after section of concrete. Day after day that summer, I scrubbed the cement in watery circles. Kneeling above, staring into the swirls, I sometimes saw the face of my mother in the evaporating water. When I did, I scrubbed harder, twice as hard, erasing her.
One day as I paused there on my knees, brush in my hands, I looked up at the sky. I had the sense, though there were no clouds, that something bigger than a cloud passed over and through me, a huge thing that trailed a terrible breath-stopping sorrow. There was no one to disturb me. The campus was entirely still. I didn’t cry, of course, in spite of the pain. It was at that moment that my love for my mother left me, simply flowed out of me like a heavy cloud. Useless. Then gone. I stood up. I was so much lighter without this useless love. And this scrubbing was tiring. I marched back to the matron and said, You don’t have to punish me anymore because I learnt my lesson and I won’t run away again.
Mrs. Houle was matroning and she herself was partly Indian so she had pity. “Let’s burn up that damn green dress,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed with pleasure as she rummaged through the school clothes until she found one of black-and-white check so smart it looked like a town girl would wear it. I put it on, brushed out my hair down my back, and started work first on “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language and then the Twenty-third Psalm. I beaded my own makazinan and they gave me a dress of fawnskin as soft as the softest fabric. I wore an eagle feather and an underskirt and I got to go everywhere with Rose for those next few years. Us two perfectly synchronized our movements and really looked good in a spotlight.
One day, my mother arrived wearing eye paint and lipstick, white woman’s clothes: a small blue hat, a suit with blue stripes, a square black handbag, leather shoes that matched. She was there to retrieve me, who would not be retrieved. She disappeared into the school building. Walked to the office door. The principal, looking at her and the car she drove, parked right outside his window, sent a little girl to fetch me immediately.
Since I behaved both the best and the worst of anyone else, I didn’t know whether I was in for a prize or for punishment when I was called to the office. Nobody told me. But the woman in the office wore those clothes and had that high, white-woman attitude. Maybe my mother was a charitable person, like the lady who sent us to the circus. I had no warning at all of my mother’s presence, except the scent of smoked moosehide, just a faint and elusive whiff in the corridor, which made me pause, and then I was in the principal’s office. He beamed as he readied himself to witness a tenderhearted reunion.
Which did not take place.
The minute I saw my mother, or rather, absorbed her, took in the hat, the shoes, the tightly fitted beautiful suit, too exquisite to be worn, really, that perfect and that simple, that achingly sharp cut, the minute I took in the scent of smoked moosehide under Paris perfume, the tiny swatch of veiling that hung down off her hat, the immaculate, casual handbag and gloves, and again the shoes, tight calfskin and buttoned to one side, a blue to match the blue in the thinnest stripes of the suit, the minute I saw all of this and saw that the face beneath the hat was indeed my mother’s face I took it all in and spat it out.
“She ain’t my mother,” I said, flat as bannock.
I whirled and ran away down to the spot at the powerhouse where the steam pipes blasted exhausted moist air down into the ground. The grass stayed green all year-round there. I sat tight for about an hour before I thought, What are they going to do about it? If they believed me, and did not send me back with my mother, I’d proved my point, and if they did send me back with her I’d proved my point, too. Either way, I had done what I had to do. So I went back to the dorm and got together with my friends for kitchen duty and I didn’t say a word about my mother’s visit.
Nor would I, when my mother came again and again, meeting with the principal and meeting with me. Alone in the room together, I could feel my mother’s strength pull upon me like a sucking wind. I could feel my clothes flutter. Flaps of yearning prayer cloth. Strings of hair tugged and twined from my braids and snaked into the space between us. I could barely breathe. I took in my mother’s air. I couldn’t look at her. I had to focus all the hatred inside me upon my mother’s feet, slim in their fancy heeled shoes, in order to keep any sense of myself at all. I had to call on my spirit, the one who came from the earth, to stre
ngthen me whenever I had to meet my mother’s gaze.
She ain’t my mother.
You ain’t my mother.
I allowed myself four words, exactly four and those only. As long as I stuck with them, I was safe enough. Six visits into the year, the principal took the paperwork and shoved it at Fleur.
“I’m satisfied,” he said. “Whatever the reason for her denying it, she is indeed your daughter. You may withdraw her.”
Now he was talking about me like a library book.
I closed myself tight as a book then.
“No.” My mother’s voice. “I won’t take her unless she wants to go. I won’t force her, she’s too much like me. Daga,” she said for the thousandth time, in a voice of great longing, “daga, n’dawnis, ombe. Gizhawenimin. Izhadaa.”
I felt the pull very strong then, it almost pulled me over, and I knew if she had just taken my hand I would have gone with her then. But she couldn’t, and I righted myself, walked out of the room. Outside, alone in the hallway, I fell on my knees as if shot. Then I picked myself up.
So it was, always, with me after that. You can go up to a certain point with me and I with you, giving, giving, but then the line might snap. My loving goes very deep unless you cross that boundary, do to me what I will not tolerate. I am not an all-forgiving person, not Lulu. Even when Nanapush and then Father Damien went to work on me shortly after, in regard to my mother, they had no success. The line had snapped. I had no interest. Even if I love you, the way I am, Father Jude, if you hurt me, I’ll turn cold on you. Turn away like a cat.
PART FOUR
The
PASSIONS
16
FATHER DAMIEN
1921–1933
Word by word, I trudge closer, stumbling through the underbrush of sound and meaning. Agnes bit the end of her scarred fountain pen, switched back to English, As I understand the place of the noun in the Ojibwe mind, it is unprejudiced by gender distinctions. That is some relief. Yet there occurs something more mysterious. Alive or dead. Each thing is either animate or inanimate, which would at first seem remarkably simple and sensible, for in the western mind the quality of aliveness or deadness seems easy to discern. Not so. For the Anishinaabeg, the quality of animation from within, or harboring spirit, is not limited to animals and plants. Stones, asiniig, are animate, and kettles, akikoog, alive as well. In the sweat lodge, red-hot stones glowed with a power upon which she’d once gazed full on and scorched her eyeballs. For a day or two, everything she saw was surrounded by a halo of warm frost. Amid the protocols of language, there is room for individual preference, too. Some old men believe their pants are animate. Nanapush had sometimes chastised his baggy trousers.
Perhaps it is fortunate after all, she wrote, that Ojibwemowin is a language lean in objects. That leaves its bewildering wealth to reside in the storm of verbs and verb forms, which, heaven help us, require the literal extension of divine assistance for the novice speaker to comprehend.
Agnes set aside her carefully kept pen. Most often she cleaned it with a toothpick and alcohol before retiring it, but tonight she was agitated with thoughts and sensations. The little cabin was too small a container. Outside, the strong cold air of Gashkadino-giizis, the freezing moon, lay still as iron on the ground. The reservation was suspended in its grip, snowless and icily tranquil. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars. She took up her pen once more and composed, instead of the rest of her article, a letter.
My Lord Bishop,
I am writing to inquire, on rather a long shot, whether you have any knowledge of a woman in your diocese who is widely rumored to have moved to Minneapolis. Although she is a woman yet adhering to the non-Catholic ways of her people, she has been in close contact with members of our mission here at Little No Horse. Fleur Pillager is her name. Perhaps one of your mission priests, someone running a charitable clothing dispensary for the indigent or perhaps providing free bread and soup, has knowledge of her whereabouts.
If so, we would be most glad for the information, as I am anxious to tell her news of her daughter.
Father Damien Modeste
Soon there arrived an answer.
Dear Father Damien Modeste,
It was with great interest I received your letter, and I am happy to report to you that I do have knowledge of a woman by the (former) name of Fleur Pillager. She is, however, anything but in want of either bread or soup. I myself performed a marriage ceremony between this woman of our soil’s natal blood, and a prominent member of our community (whose marriage was annulled on grounds of the wife’s insanity resulting in lack of consummation). Having entered the Mount Curve Avenue household as a domestic, Mrs. John James Mauser is currently presiding over household affairs at that same address and she is received, not without some ironic curiosity, in the highest society here. She is known for her good works among the people of her background in Minneapolis, who roam the streets.
I hope this information serves your purpose and helps you in your quest.
Every month or so, after his first letter, Father Damien wrote to Fleur, or, it would be more accurate to say, he cast a letter to the winds in her direction. She could not read the letters but must finally have got someone to translate them for her. At long length, a package of red cloth arrived with her Mount Curve return address embossed on the box. Gorgeous red cloth. Brocade. Obviously meant for a priestly robe. No writing to accompany it, and only, as the years went on, that one package. Similarly, Margaret and Nanapush received goods Fleur shipped: blankets, a great cast-iron stove with blue enamel doors, crates of oranges, a fat doll with golden hair and eyes that shut, bags of hard candy, more cloth, tobacco. And money. She certainly had money. Still, they heard nothing from her, no word, not even when Nector borrowed Father Damien’s fountain pen and paper and wrote her to say that Lulu was home.
All they heard of Fleur was from newspaper clippings sent by city relatives. Fleur ate with so-and-so. Visited so-and-so. Motored to Wayzata. Motored to the banks of the St. Croix River. Picnicked. Vacationed. Bore a child. All they saw of her were three or four printed photographs, her figure slim and unrecognizably dressed, a round hat shading her face. Her hair was long again, held up in a chignon in one photograph. In another, she wore a slender, white, scandalous, gravity-defying gown. Next to her, and everyone puzzled about him, her husband stood. He was dressed to match her—formal, complete—every detail of his getup observable and described in print too, right down to the cuff links. Gold nuggets. John James Mauser had invested in the Black Hills gold that Custer coveted and died in an attempt to secure. His face was taut, strained, soulful. Even in that grainy society-page photograph, it was quite clear that Fleur’s husband was different from the jowled and coarse-whiskered bankers in whose company he smoked. Of course, he had to be in order to fall in love with such a dangerous woman. The photograph had caught him midglance. He looked sideways at her. She was poised in the white gown, standing before a dance floor as though she’d alighted and folded her feathers. She gazed upon the array of St. Paul society with an eagle’s unconscious ferocity. Her husband’s look held something any man anywhere could understand, or any woman, or for that matter any priest.
He would kill for her, thought Agnes, the poor man suffers a wrenching passion. When she witnessed the insanity of love, Agnes made upon her breast the sign of the cross, the emblem to her of protection and pity. Thoughts of Gregory or Berndt were usually acceptable features of her history now, yet there were other times, in her dreams, when old feelings assailed her with a sudden and crippling sickness of emotion.
The moon vanished and retrieved itself. Vanished again. In those years, a great want descended upon the nation, and the Ojibwe were no longer the only vagrant and hollow-eyed beggars on the plains. There were others. Farmers. Those who had stolen and plowed the earth were upended by the earth, buried in dust. Yet in the scrap of reservation, the lake remained, the woods, the poor cabins with no more than a streak of grease to wipe acros
s the bread. Winter did in the old people and the young died of rotted lungs. Most people forgot about Fleur, or gave her up to the city. But of course there came a day, it was inevitable, when Fleur finished with the man in the beautiful tuxedo, and returned.
Spring brought her to the reservation in a tumult of wild birdsong. Agnes sensed it the way an animal knows low pressure in its bones. There was a spring storm approaching. A dark cloud. Behind it, a full and aching, female, swollen, hungry moon. Sure enough, it was Fleur. Not only that, but as though to present an opposing force, Pauline Puyat was sent back as well from Argus and the exhausted community where she had finally professed her permanent vows and become Sister Leopolda.
Father Damien kept to his breviary, tried to attend to his daily office and his predictable rounds. But he could feel the wary energy of people at Mass. Fleur’s return, and the Puyat’s, were the subject of tense whispers. In the watery weight of air and the burgeoning light, people talked.