“Mashkiigikwe!”
The woman reeled back a bit, suspicious, at the sound of her own name, and snatched away her arthritic paws.
“It’s me. Father Damien.”
“Could you help me out with some pocket money?”
“Mashkiigikwe,” Damien tried again.
“What are you calling me by the old name for?” said the old woman in English. “Left that one years ago. Do you have money?”
“I am the priest from Little No Horse. Father Damien. Don’t you remember me?”
Shaking her head, ruffling her fantastic costume, Mashkiigikwe started away from the priest, mumbling half under her breath, throwing her arms out in erratic little gestures.
“How did you get here? Where are your children? What’s your name now?” Damien tried again, following her along just a few steps. The woman laughed, suddenly lucid.
“Winos don’t have names, priest. Go back and save the others like you saved me.”
Then she let her lip drop and shambled off with surprising speed. Agnes sat back down on the park bench and looked at the shined black tops of her shoes. When she closed her eyes, the color of emptiness assailed her. She gazed deeper into the color of that absence and slowly, for the first time in many years, remembering those first years and Kashpaw, the round children and that woman’s strength and skill, Agnes felt tears gather behind her eyelids. Soon they would spill over, drag slowly down her cheeks. These tears horrified her, suddenly. They were tears of self-pity for the seeming waste of her own life, her own efforts.
With that thought her eyes dried and she jumped up, heart pounding, wrenched into a sudden fury. She spotted the bright dot of Mashkiigikwe, now far off, opportuning someone else, and with a swift jog Agnes powered herself down the sidewalk until she drew up behind Mashkiigikwe. She grasped the old woman’s shoulder and swiveled her roughly so they stood face-to-face.
“Here,” Father Damien said angrily, pulling what dollars and quarters he had from inside pockets, smashing them into the old, brown hands. “Here and here. Take this! Ando miniquen! I didn’t put the bottle in your mouth! I didn’t make you suck the sauce!”
The old woman’s mouth had dropped wide open in astonishment, but now she closed it to a firm line and her eyes flickered. Her face unblurred and just for a moment her features composed into the real face of Mashkiigikwe, aware, intelligent, bewildered to find herself in hell.
“Who did it then?” she asked the priest. “How did it happen? For I don’t like to be this way, and yet, Father Damien, I am.”
20
A NIGHT VISITATION
1996
Now she was old, truly old, of an age she’d never imagined. Her skin was waxen and her brain flickered, dropped things, seized others. Still, she possessed a startling vigor. There were days she did her stretches and arm whirls and went out walking and nothing hurt—not the hip gouged by the bullet so long ago, not even her toughened beanbag of a heart. And she listened to confessions with more attention and stamina than she’d ever possessed.
One such evening, walking out of the church, in the half darkness, Agnes was suddenly afflicted by an unbearable thirst. Instinctively, she bent to the font at the entrance and steadily as a parched horse pulled water from the surface into her dry throat. The blessed water was mineral stale and soothing, and she stood after a few moments, wiped her face, and went on, refreshed. Straight back to her dinner of ham and pickled beets, then an immediate swoon of profound, dreamless sleep.
Having drunk so deeply of the holy water, Agnes woke in the middle of the night. Two things were happening. She was in the throes of a sense of overwhelming blessedness—from within. And also, she needed to relieve herself. She rolled over and swung her legs out over the cold floor. Gingerly, she touched down. Stood. She walked through the dark hallway to the bathroom, and then, returning to her bed where she planned to lie still and enjoy the interesting inner effect of the blessed water, she was suddenly directed elsewhere. When, many years past, the church had acquired the loud organ with pipes running to the ceiling, the door of her cabin had been enlarged and the Steinway moved inside. She found herself standing before the instrument, serenely lustrous in the dark.
Sometimes, now, at this brittle age, she buried her hands in a cast-iron pot of wet, hot sand for ten or fifteen minutes before she played. Tonight, she had no chance to set up the hot sand, so her fingers twitched on the keys. Still, as Chopin had been kind to aging musicians and written some particularly easy preludes of great beauty, she played. The piece she loved best was meditative and slow, aching of the world’s sorrows and fugitive joys. As she played, she gradually awakened. Her fingers loosened and forgot their age. She played on. Wondered. Had she the promise, could she exact one from the black dog’s muzzle, if the thing should appear to her again, dare she ask: Was there a good piano in hell? The music soared, her hands curved around an intricate series of trills. If there were a good piano in hell, would she play this well once she got there? Her music, inaudible to all the sleeping reservation, spilled through the little house, uncurled beneath her hands like smoke. For an hour, two hours, almost three of her waning life, Agnes lived fully and intimately in a state of communion.
THE MIGHTY TEMPTER
Agnes felt it in her bones when the wind came up—a freedom in which she imagined, sleepless, springing from the narrow bed. She was sleeping very soundly, so heavily, in fact, that she lost track of the current of her life. Waking in the dark, she surprised herself. Old again! A priest! She did not move. She could not move. She wondered what had awakened her. Then she smelled under the fugitive breeze the low and maggot-quick, rich, warm, fish-gut breath of dog.
“Where are you? Show yourself!”
She tried to struggle up on one elbow, but a weight of air pinned her in the sheets. There was a panting and a lolling. A dogness surrounded her. The dog itself walked heavily up her legs and stood there in the dark, one paw on her heart and the other on the green scapular she wore under her nightshirt. Faintly, Agnes hoped. Might the scapular offer some protection? But her voice box rusted shut and bitter anxiety zipped down her windpipe.
“Get off!” She tried to say it, willed it. The visitor slouched massive on her chest, and then it spoke in a cloud of foul whispers.
“Wie geht’s? How’s my little priestette?”
Dug scraggly claws into Agnes’s frail skin and settled full length. Stretched its legs along hers. She sensed fleas shooting off her nemesis like popcorn. Felt the soft plop of the dog’s heavy balls between her knees.
“Open that black door in your chest,” rasped the dog, “I’m hungry.”
“Never!” Agnes’s brain squeaked.
“Oh,” the dog whined, “for a taste of nice fresh heart!”
A racking dryness. A hacking, lung-wrenching cough sent needle-fine pains shooting through her lungs, warning her not to move a muscle, a hair. The pinching pains radiated from each breath, from her center, like pulses of the sharp light depicted in paintings of the sacred heart. Now, at last, Agnes was horridly awake; her mouth went sandpaper dry and her esophagus shut.
“Talk to me,” said the dog, and its voice was insufferably gentle.
Agnes gritted her teeth against the longing, sharp and sudden, for she knew that her only refuge lay in categorically not giving in to the false compassion in the dog’s tone.
“Get thee behind me,” she managed to croak. “I’m not ready to go.”
“Still, I will take good care of you.” The dog settled its lanky, bony haunches. “I am very loyal.”
“You want me to die.”
“You are tired, and you want to die, too.”
“I don’t know anymore,” said Agnes, wearily. “Is there a good piano in hell?”
“The devil owns all of the finest makers of musical instruments,” the dog said. “That darkness, that blood of sorrow in the most expressive woods, where do you think that comes from?”
“Suffering,” said Agnes.<
br />
“Causing it,” said the dog.
“I want an angel, a real dog, a good dog! I’d like to have a dog to protect me,” Agnes blurted out.
“I will not let her, it, whatever, live,” said the black dog. “Just as I can kill every person you love, I will kill whatever dog you love.”
Agnes’s heart thudded to the very end of her gut and she pleaded.
“Leave me.”
“I can’t,” said the dog, wheezing with a sly and malevolent sympathy. “I am yours, and don’t think I enjoy my work! Watching over you has been infuriating, though it had its moments. I did enjoy tickling Berndt with those bullets, and Gregory with the black knives of cancer. Recall when you made love how dutifully their hearts beat under your hand—how steady and warm? I stopped them. I shut their dear eyes . . .”
Agnes started to tremble.
“. . . just as I shut the black eyes of Napoleon via the rosary in the hands, the very hands of the nun . . . how could you forgive those two, and others, the worst of sinners? Your forgiveness has opened many a door to me, old friend.”
It was then that Agnes was assured that her Father Damien had done the right thing in absolving all who asked forgiveness, and the realization filled her with a sudden and bouyant strength. Here it was—the reason she’d been called here in the first place. The reason she’d endured and the reason she’d been searching for. This was why she continued to live. She shut the dog out and drew strength from the massive amounts of forgiveness her priest had dispensed in his life. She saw that forgiveness as a long, slow, soaking rain he had caused to fall on the dry hearts of sinners. Father Damien had forgiven everyone, right and left, of all mistakes and shameful sins. All except for Nanapush, who had never really confessed to any sin, but had instead forgiven Damien with great kindness for wronging him and all of the people he had wanted to help, forgiven him for stealing so many souls. Nanapush!
“You were not able to silence Nanapush!” laughed Agnes. “He sneaked past your two-way road onto the road of life. He’s probably gambling day and night, eating berries without getting the shits, telling stories with old friends and enjoying his many wives. You had no power over Nanapush!”
There was a pause before the dog responded.
“Who could silence that talker?” But then a slinking insinuation. “So you did love him. Yes, I knew it. Oh, you little priestette, you loved him, you lusted after him, you kept this secret from me, didn’t you? Yes, but now I have it. I have your memory.”
“No, you do not!” Though weakening, Agnes was indignant. “You will never have my memory. Even I don’t have it all, you rotten hound. You stole it in the form of the Actor and in the person of the gun. You took my memory, and I have spent my whole life gathering it back.”
Agnes shut down, closed her eyes, imagined herself a bulwark, a wall. “Of course I loved Nanapush,” she went on, impatient. “The old man was my teacher, my confidant, my priest’s priest, my confessor, my friend. Plus, he was funny and you don’t get funny much in this life. God, how we used to laugh! Even his funeral was hilarious—I miss him. There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin.”
“That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer?”
The dog ranted—it had never liked the composer, it turned out it was jealous—but Agnes didn’t notice anymore. She fought. She gathered every memory and prayed starting from her center and radiating outward. Called every ancestor, blood and adopted. The aadizokaanag, spirits. Bent her thoughts on Nanapush. Asked for the old man’s help. Filled herself with every good that had been done to her and every caring act she’d known. Cried out for the young, strong spirit of Mashkiigikwe. For Chopin. Sucked with thin threads of air the ravishing stillness of the ghost note that lingers after each chord of Chopin’s three repudiated posthumous nocturnes. Went further, back into the folds of brain that hid and held in their recesses such memories as she had of her childhood, girlhood, lost messages. Gathered in her strongest molecules the urge to live and the strength to snap shut her knees, suddenly, clasp with viselike ardor and squeeze with Catholic ferocity the testicles of the black dog.
Death. That was its name. That’s what she dealt with and she knew it, dreaded it, hated death’s intimacy and the strange greed with which it pursued every living thing. Agnes screamed, bent her fingers into wire hangers around the mange-bald throat, locked her knees, squeezed harder, harder, harder, until the dog yelped, gave up, and disappeared.
THE WINES OF PORTRARTUS
Most High Eminence,
I remind you, we both exist in the compassionate dream of an unseen God. Please send me an answer . . .
“Are you that answer?”
Father Damien peered hard at Jude. Morning. Or maybe early afternoon. Father Damien spread his hands resignedly upon the tray and tilted his chin back to accept a solicitous towel pat from his visitor, the one who’d brought him his breakfast. Damien had wakened groggy, and was annoyed to have been restricted to his room by Sister Mauvis.
“I’m not entirely feeble.” Damien suddenly clawed the napkin from the younger priest’s hands.
“I know you’re not,” said Jude, “it’s just that you had a bit of oatmeal stuck to your chin.”
“There. Satisfied?”
With one sharp movement, Father Damien swiped at his chin once more and sat back in bed.
“They insist upon this, periodically.”
“Bed rest,” said Father Jude, sympathetic.
“Confinement!”
Father Jude tried to soothe the outraged and frail man before him. “I’m sure it is rather demeaning, in a way. But you see, they weren’t able to rouse you this morning.” His voice took on the chiding parental quality that vigorous, impatient people sometimes use with the elderly. “It seems that, last night, you were just a little . . . tipsy.” The younger priest’s voice was suddenly prim.
A cunning, soft, puzzled expression crept over Damien’s face. “Tipsy!” he mocked, his voice lilting. “Do you mean to say, drunk?”
“More or less.”
“Loaded, shkwebii, pinned to the leather, purpled, pumped, schnockered?”
Father Jude didn’t smile. He found no humor in these words, none whatsoever. Oh yes, he had seen the misery of alcohol’s effect and believed such words were not just words! His reply was stiff. “They found no sign of a bottle, but yes, you were sloshed.”
“No sign of the bottle, you say?”
“None,” said Father Jude, leaning close. “And you didn’t particularly smell like wine, or what have you. Yet last night you were distinctly intoxicated.”
“And no bottle?” Father Damien’s voice grew in intensity. He fixed Jude with a deep stare.
“None!”
“My house was searched?”
“Completely.”
“No explanation? No clue? No cause?”
“Not that your good Sister Mauvis could discover, or any of them for that matter. But you can trust me with the knowledge.” Father Jude leaned very close to Damien, smiled in conspiratorial sympathy. “Tell me, where on earth are you hiding your stash? We took the cupboards apart, the closet, the woodpile. What’s your explanation?”
“Explanation? Obvious!”
Father Jude waited.
“It is a miracle.”
Father Jude laughed at the joke, but the old priest maintained a dignified calm and lightly stabbed a leather bone of a finger at him.
“I have only to refer you to the early saint Portrartus.”
Father Jude looked indulgently blank, and Father Damien persisted stubbornly. “While tending sheep in the mountains, our Portrartus manifested a profound drunkenness in spite of the isolation of his flock. There was no tangible source of intoxicants. Like Portrartus’s, my drunkenness is not of this world.?
??
“Ohhhh?” Father Jude reacted with exasperated amusement.
“I do not”—here Father Damien grew intense—“require the fruit of this earth in order to experience an exaltation of the spirit. I have only to think back and consider my life. Soon, I find myself in a state of delirium, which, I understand, resembles the less rarefied behavior exhibited by—”
“Habituated winos,” Father Jude cut in, his patience lapsing.
“Last night I was also visited both by musical manifestations of the Holy Ghost and, I am sorry to say, of the devil himself.”
“These manifestations, they consisted of . . . ?”
Father Damien put a trembling hand in the air now, and appeared much troubled.
“A stinking mutt,” he whispered, “a dangerous intelligence.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Recall, when the dog plunged its foot into my bowl of soup and that soup was tasted by the sisters across this lawn. I kept the dreams of the nuns in a locked tin box. I should not like them to fall into the wrong hands, though I must admit some were novel to the point where I read them again and again—”
“You read demonic torments for your own pleasure? Should I be scandalized?” Father Jude was diverted by Damien’s ploy and, Damien could tell, his curiosity was piqued. The older priest resumed with sly ease, “I found the dreams instructive. I did not avert my eyes. To others it may seem odd that a curious and passionate being, for I do consider myself such, should have chosen a life of denial. To me, it was not at all strange, for the choice itself was made with lust. Passion over passion. Hungrier for God, I came here . . .”
Controlling his interest with some effort, Father Jude attempted to double back.
“And so the black dog, it was a delirious vision? Or was it possible,” said Father Jude in the most respectful and nonthreatening tone he could manage, “that for a time, you went mad?”