19
THE WATER JAR
1962
Mid-July and a windless morning. After the day began, dust would lift and hang solid in flat ribbons along the reservation boundaries, but for now the dew held down the surface of the roads. For the ladies, who had risen early, who now stood behind the long plate-glass windows of the Senior Citizens’ lounge, the air was clear enough for them to see that, for the third morning in a row, the man had come through the night and was still sitting in his car.
It was a dull green two-door Chevrolet, the kind of car that escaped most attention, but the man inside it, usually obscured by blowing dirt, could be seen clearly at this hour. Even from the shoulders up, his good looks were obvious. His face was bold and strong featured. His thick gray hair was trained to sweep back over the ears. He looked well dressed, but not until some hours later would the full effect of his dark and well-cut suit be shown. He sweltered and sweat in it all that time. The heat descended and the air was thick and punishing by noon. Breezes too faint to stir the heavy brown drapes hung by the government’s contractor occasionally filtered through the screens below the glass. Men with bad knees or weak lungs joined the ladies who might, in their privacy, have worn nothing but their baggy nylon slips. By now, the dozen or so who sat and watched had little left to say that was original. The man was simply there.
In two days no one had seen him leave the car, take a drink of anything, or eat a bite of food. He never dozed or relieved himself, by daylight anyhow. He was so silent that a bird flew in the window, hopped around and flew back out. He was so handsome that Mrs. Bluelegs looked his picture up in her collection of star magazines. He wasn’t anyone. The good looks were a distant impression, too. Up close, the tribal police said, he was surprisingly old. They stopped twice on their rounds to make sure he wasn’t dead and examine his license.
Father Gregory Wekkle. Eyes brn. Hair brn. Height 6'3". Indianapolis address. There was nothing out of order. Everything was up to date. He was not possessed of liquor or narcotics. He wasn’t wanted for any crime. When they asked what he was doing, he asked if there was any law against a guy sitting in his car. He kept his eyes on the convent, the church, but did not seem interested in those who came and went.
Someone thought it might be best to tell the sisters up the hill. However, when it came right down to it, no one wanted to interfere.
He wasn’t blocking any traffic. He wasn’t in people’s way. He wasn’t anybody’s business, and so they let him be. As the day went on and he sat without moving, he drew escalating interest from the young who roared past, raising dust, then stopped just to watch it settle on his windshield. Thicker by the hour, that dust coated the fenders and hood, his hair and the one arm crooked half out the window, thicker, heavier, until he was obscured, almost part of the landscape, and it was a shock that caused the men to crane forward and the women, finally, to open the door and file onto the sidewalk and shield their eyes against the sun when upon that third day the car’s engine roared into gear.
It was as if the road itself had moved. The ladies behind the window, deaf to the engine’s catch, pointed to the car bucking into first gear and chugging up the remainder of the hill.
From there the story came down.
Sister Mary Martin was the one who told what happened after he had parked at the convent, got out, and walked up to the door.
When he disappeared into the entry, the women outside the Senior Citizens dropped their hands from their eyes and retreated. There was nothing to see from all that distance. According to Sister Mary Martin, the man knocked on the door and she opened it wide. By then, his hair was the tan of the air and his face and clothes were drifted with the road’s same powder. He would not come in, but he would be very much obliged for some water. His voice was hoarse, his look was patient. Sister Mary Martin left him standing, went back into her kitchen, found a clean mayonnaise container, and filled it from the tap. She brought this back down the hall. The man was standing just inside the door. In exchange for the jar of water, he gave Mary Martin the contents of his pockets. Then he removed the cover of the jar, allowed himself one careful swallow, and sealed it again.
“You don’t look well,” said Mary Martin. “Please come, sit down.”
His skin was dead-white, gray around the deep-set eyes, his lips were baked and cracked. His hands shook so badly that the water in the jar rippled.
“No, thank you,” he said, backing to the door.
He pushed out into the yard with his shoulder and Mary Martin grasped his elbow and helped him to balance. The wind had risen. His hair, caked with a clay of sweat, dust, and oil, remained secure and stationary, but his dark suit flapped.
The man pointed at the low rebuilt cabin where Father Damien lived, and asked if he lived there still. When Mary Martin said yes, but that just at present he was hearing confessions, the man started off eagerly, striding in a rapid uncontrolled stagger. She stared after him in amazed concern and didn’t think to look into her hand until he had passed beneath her gaze. Not until she turned to enter the convent did she open her fingers. Then she found that she held a piece of paper money folded into a tiny square, a quarter, a penny, a sodality club button, and two car keys on a small aluminum ring.
FORGIVENESS
Even though a younger priest lived in a brand-new rectory and said the Mass every day and shared the confessional, most who practiced faithfully preferred to visit Father Damien. Something in the quality of his forgiveness really made people feel better—his human sympathy, or his divinely chosen penances. He was in demand. Therefore, Father Damien studiously kept confessional hours.
Father Damien rubbed his stiff knees until they loosened, slid to the side of the bed, climbed out, then with a careful bow entered the cassock he’d hung as always on his bedroom door. Clothed, Father Damien peered around the door, looked to both sides. He’d been ill lately and the nuns were infinitely solicitous, loving, a nuisance. He stepped out and then sped straight to the back of the church and sidled through the entry, from there to the cabinet, where he kissed his stole as he donned it. He sneaked along the wall. Panting, he fell into the priest’s box of the confessional. His head spun a bit. He took deep breaths and counted them waiting for his first customer.
A slight rustle, and Father Damien opened the screened shutter. The voice, a low rasp, was familiar. Yet this was not one of his regulars or even, as far as he could ascertain, a parishioner. He strained to understand the heavy clunk of words. Low distress in the breathing. There was a long, then longer pause after the preliminaries.
“Are you still there?” said Damien at last. His voice was gentle, for it seemed very possible that this was a sinner who had borne his guilt for years, until it ate away his resolve, at which point the poor sinner finally, belatedly, had come in to be forgiven. Damien took pity on such people. Their sins weren’t usually even terrible—just the worst in their own minds. Infidelities, usually, or shameful little thefts.
“Go ahead,” urged Damien, compassion flooding him, “you will be forgiven.”
“I . . .” said the petitioner, “I . . .” The man could not continue.
“Do not be afraid,” said Damien, but the sinner lapsed again into a miserable quiet.
“I will wait with you,” said Damien, tenderly. “I will sit with you here until you have the courage to speak.”
“I am . . .” Again, the sinner could not complete the sentence, but then he didn’t have to because Agnes knew. Sudden ice. Frozen, breathless, Agnes sat motionless and then she panicked. Threw her trembling hands up to her face.
“Oh God, forgive me,” she prayed silently, her heart in her throat. “This man I cannot absolve!”
GREGORY
As they regarded each other across the uncertain band of dim space just outside the confessional, a thrill of self-consciousness washed over Agnes. Father Damien was not beautiful. Agnes wanted to touch back her hair and bite her lips. The mere thought of such gestures made
her cheeks flame red. Then she wanted Father Wekkle to leave, immediately, to leave her to the simple contentment she’d nurtured to replace the great drama of human love. Get out of here! Get thee behind me! she wanted to yell at him. The urge passed and she only blinked hard at the apparition. Her vision cleared and she saw that he was ill.
Not just poorly, but seriously ill. His racked, dry body told her this as soon as she was a foot away from him. As she walked him to the cabin, she noticed the dazed and careful way he stepped, like one uncertain of his tenure on the earth. She ducked her head and let him into her house. When she closed the door, and they were inches apart, pausing before they crushed together and there was no space between them, she was positive that he was dying.
Father Gregory Wekkle had continued, by slow means and over many years, to outrage his liver with hard drink, and now the cancer accomplished what he had begun. He was in a silent period of remission, he knew it, and while he had the strength he had driven straight from Indiana intending to throw himself at Agnes’s feet, but he had stopped midway up the final hill and sat there on the side of the road, sat there not quite knowing why. Afraid of many things—perhaps Father Damien was dead, or if he lived, perhaps his side of the cabin was occupied, perhaps books had filled the space, perhaps a dozen or two dozen outcomes were possible, but only one was capable of causing that dusty paralysis. Driving onto the reservation, Gregory Wekkle was struck by the recognizable ordinariness of all he saw, which caused him suddenly to fear that all he’d felt in his youth for Agnes, and all that he had suffered since, was an illusion.
For two days, he took stock of his memories and questioned the reality of each touch, each act, each recognition on his part and on hers. Finally knowing that there was no way for certain to understand what she felt, but positive he had felt what he did, and moreover, sick with thirst, he moved.
“So here I am.”
He sat in the ruins of a chair he remembered, and he allowed a sudden weakness to drain him and to ice his blood. He shivered in the awful heat and Agnes brought a blanket. Practice had perfected her masculine ease, and age had thickened her neck and waist so that the ambiguity which had once eroticized her now was a single and purposeful power that, heaven help him, he found more thrilling. She sat before him and held his hand, just as both of them had done with so many of their own ill, and merely waited.
“Is it too much to ask?” he drank in the new version of her face the way he’d drunk to forget it, with a voracious calm.
It was too much, truly, but she couldn’t say it. Agnes put her hands out and bent slowly until her forehead touched his knee. She sighed and rested it there. Holding on to his knee like a rock, she breathed in the dust he brought while he stroked her short, man’s hair. In the dark beneath his hands, in the dark of her mind, while she simply breathed and existed, she absently put out her tongue. She tasted the cloth of his pants. Tasted grit in the weave. Tasted his medicinal sweat. Tasted soap and the burnt, tarry odor of his death, and her own death, and at last the cavernous sweetness of their old lust.
Over the years, the log walls of Father Damien’s cabin had been plastered over, then Sheetrocked and Sheetrocked again, wallpapered, rewallpapered, painted and painted over, then bookshelved, so that the little house was now thickly insulated as a bear’s den. It was painted white on the inside, but contained a sweeping array of intensely colored beadwork and Ojibwe paintings. A gorgeous dress of white buckskin, fringed and set with blue-and-gold designs, hung off a hook in the wall, next to a cradle board decorated with tiny miigis shells, dreamcatchers, cutouts made of birch bark. The low tables were covered with quilled baskets and rattles, and set around with stacks of books. The shelved walls were darkened with lettered book covers and spines. The books were neatly shelved by category and then alphabetized all through the house, even in the kitchen.
From the first, Father Wekkle was comforted by the order. He weakened quickly—the trip seemed to have exhausted his temporary gift of strength, and it was clear that his remission was only a short touch of grace. For weeks, to begin with, they talked long into the night and there were even—tremendously secret, shrouded, final—nights they entered the exquisite and boundless quietude of the body. And then those nights stopped. He relapsed into the illness, and spent his days on the fold-out couch, watching birds at a feeder through a large plate-glass window cut into a small addition. From the window, he could see a bright wedge of sky and several branches of the tall pines and thicker oaks that had been striplings when he first knew Agnes.
He prayed, as he gazed into the soft wash of needles, to Saint Joseph, the keeper of the happy death. More than anything now, Father Wekkle hoped for a serene deliverance. He prayed to die before the window, in the night, peacefully and with no trouble to Agnes. But of course that did not happen.
In she came, striding big, with a tray of food. She set it down beside the couch on a little table and uncovered the simple dinner—mashed potatoes, beans, chicken, an oatmeal cookie. He regarded it dubiously, but when he ate some of it he felt better. The sky was darkening, the sun was a deep gold haze in the pines. The diffused radiance lighted the sides of trees and when the small birds popped from the bird feeders the undersides of their wings flashed red. Fire tipped the needles and then slowly bled to purple.
“Gregory,” she shook him slightly, “do you want to sleep here or walk to the bed?”
Agnes’s face glowed a deep sere on one side, and Gregory reached out to touch it. She put her hand over his hand, and held it there without smiling, looking into his eyes.
“I think I’ll stay right here,” he gently said. “For now.”
Until the air was entirely pitch-black, she sat next to the couch, on a chair. Later on, in the music of cicadas and crickets, she took a short walk around the grounds of the church, to calm herself and to release the strange collection of feelings—some noble, she supposed, some unworthy—that his presence engendered. It made her uneasy to have him here, an embarrassing outcome after all she’d wished and felt! And the difficulty wasn’t even the disease or his dying, or the years they had not been together, and how much of each other’s lives they’d missed. The difficulty was that Father Wekkle subtly condescended to her. He was unaware of it, but in all worldly situations, where they stood side by side, he treated her as somehow less. She couldn’t enunciate the facts of it, but of what she experienced she had no doubt. She wondered, Had he patronized her way back then? Had she noticed? Or had he learned this? Did she patronize women too, now that she’d made herself so thoroughly into a priest? It was never anything that others might note, but when they were together, he spoke first, took charge even when he felt most ill, took information from doctors regarding his disease and translated it for her into terms, simpler, he thought she would understand.
And there was another thing: that tone in his voice when they were alone. An indulgent tone, frankly anticipating some lesser capacity in her—whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual, she could not say. The most difficult thing was, however, something that was really not his fault. Again, when they were alone, he called her Agnes. But for so long now she had been the only one who called herself Agnes, that for him to say it made her anxious, as though he’d stripped out and revealed something much more private than that part of her anatomy but having to do with some irreducible part of herself that only she was meant to possess. That Agnes. Agate. That stone made translucent by pressure. That was absolutely hers.
Out of the mystery of one dark pine tree, an owl called as she walked along. Nimishoomis, she said, grandfather. Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls. Agnes hooted back, giving a sleepy, hollow call. There was a pause, and then with some interest the owl answered, and again Agnes asked the question, and the owl did too, and for a while they asked together into the black night. That was what it was, she thought now, to love someone else’s body in the darkness. It was to ask that sa
me question, while knowing that the answer would not be given. The owl flew down to look at her, launching on wings feathered so softly that its flight was soundless, ghostly. It came so close she felt the wind of its movement along her neck.
There was a park near the hospital in Fargo, and after Gregory died, Agnes went there. The grass was studded with acorns and fat squirrels busied themselves in the wealth. Mothers walked by with strollers and carriages, dressed in pink, aqua, lime. There was a wading pool at some short distance, and from the bench where Agnes sat, she could hear the faint splashes and cries of children and the hysterical notes of gathered crows. The air moved over her quietly, with a city exhaustion, like a half-spent breath. Agnes really didn’t know how to feel at all—she wasn’t devastated or even terribly sad. Those feelings were for when Gregory had wrestled with pain, struggled to get free from it, to throw it off. Now that he had, there was a lightness, a numb pleasantness, a newness, to everything she did. It was while she examined this curious state of mind that a figure, approaching from across the coarse green blanket of grass, caught her eye.
A huddled shape, it lurched forward then slowly tottered back, then threw itself forward again just a pittance, as though it were fighting a great wind. As it got closer, she could see that the person was dressed fantastically in a church-basement assortment of sagging clothing, a vibrant dress over men’s plaid pants, a filmy blouse of fairy-pale floating polyester, a green man’s hat, and thick unmatched shoes. An old Indian woman. Hunched, drunk, half collapsed. The woman stumbled closer and peered at Father Damien, then put her hand out and asked for change. Her voice was ragged and her cheeks sunken. She had lost all of her visible teeth but the two sharp incisors, and her eyes were covered with a dull, scratched film, but Agnes recognized her and rose, now taller than the stooped old lady, and took the gnarled claws of her hands in hers.