With an outraged jerk of his head, the older priest quashed Jude’s gesture. He folded his hands, composed himself, and shot the younger priest a shrewd glance.
“When our senses are weakened by hunger or illness, we see things and hear things that are not of this world. The question is this: Do we invent these things in the cabins of our sorry brains, or are they there always and we too comfortable to reach them or to care? At any rate, whether the answer is the former or the latter, I have no doubt, none at all. Last night’s visit has persuaded me. I saw the black dog.”
The old priest sank against the pillows, limp, folding like a window blind, but he was thinking very deeply and the thinking visibly exhausted him. His head dropped to his chest and he began to breathe deeply. Jude felt a pang of quick guilt, although not enough for him to let the old man sleep.
“Can I fetch you some water? A blanket?”
Damien shrugged off the false solicitousness. “These old bones. This old flesh. The devil will have me soon enough, cold or hot.” Damien then laughed, a dry, papery sound. “At least I know his shapes, the ones he manifests here on reservation land.”
Father Jude finished his adjustments to the tape recorder, moved it closer to Damien. He turned it on and clipped the microphone closer to the old priest’s lips, for he had lapsed into the near whisper that he used when he was exhausted or wandering.
“You believe I mean the devil . . . metaphorically . . . of course . . .” Father Damien nicked his head, weary, but as he spoke his voice gathered passion. “Metaphors have very little influence in this world and the devil a great deal. The black dog! What is the devil but the lack, the crying hole in the skein of thought, Father Jude, that reasoning that says, All is plain to see and yet you are deceived. I am a priest. All that I am is based upon belief. And to begin, now, after all that has passed, to think perhaps he did not speak to me as a dog and from the dog’s mouth is, quite frankly, to cast doubt upon all else . . .”
Father Jude switched off the tape recorder and leaned back, frustrated and shaking his head. He’d had a truly inadequate breakfast and thought now of driving to the café he’d found, the next town over, where the food was edible.
“You don’t believe me,” said Damien, after a long silence fell between them. “That’s only because he’s never paid you a visit. If he had, the question you would be forced to ask is this: If the devil can take the time to make an appearance, where’s God? Why can’t God make more of an effort?”
“God is not a politician,” said Father Jude, his voice neutral. He kept his thoughts to himself, his expression blank, and took his mind off the hot roast beef sandwich he craved. He reminded himself that his task was to record, not judge, what he heard. Still, the idea that the devil should appear in person was disappointing, an unworthy piece of superstition, a marker of Father Damien’s unreliability. He saw that Father Damien was ready to start his morning, so he left him in peace and gladly sought a meal.
After the younger priest left, Father Damien gathered his wits, his strength, and then sat up and waited for the fog in his brain to clear. He got out of bed. Teetering stiffly with hands on the back of his chair, and then taking minute steps, the old priest shuffled off through his small residence. The exchange had actually rejuvenated him a little, and he sat down at his desk and began to write with enthusiasm. “Consider the word spirit, manidoo,” he wrote, “and all of the forms in which it resides. That which we consider vermin, insects, the lowest form of life, are manidooens, little spirits, and in their designation it is possible at once to see the penetration of the great philosophy that so unites the smallest to the largest, for the great, kind intelligence, the Gizhe Manito, shares its name with the humblest creature.”
Returning later from the café where he’d eaten, thoughtfully, alone in a scarred brown booth, Father Jude frowned into the blond sky. He was well thought of in his parish, calm and good. Things had been going smoothly down in Argus. He’d had a comfortable routine figured out. And now, what an unwelcome complication, in spite of the huge honor, to be afflicted with so many new problems, uncertainties, even doubts. And how terrifying, this feeling of loving someone. Thrilling. Awful. With an explosive shake of his head, Father Jude put the thought of Lulu from his mind. Not only had he fallen desperately in love, and at this age, but he was failing at the task entrusted to him by the highest levels of Church authority.
These interviews with Damien Modeste were not going as he’d hoped. Father Damien was an extremely difficult subject. Impossible to penetrate one day, and all too transparent the next. There were gaps in the old priest’s story, missed connections, all too many loops of obfuscation. It was clear, too, that the old man regarded Jude’s presence as a disappointment. Father Damien had been hoping for an envoy directly from the Pope, and was irritated by the younger priest’s humble, local origin. Now, exhausted with their sparring, Father Jude decided that he would once again visit the person Damien had pointed out as Leopolda’s first young victim. Marie Kashpaw.
THE INTERVIEW
Marie Kashpaw liked to bake in the outdoor heat, and could sit for long hours in a lawn chair in her courtyard garden, motionless, head tipped to catch the most intense angle of the sun. She seemed lethargic, but when threatened, she could vanish with surprising swiftness. Catching the shadow of movement from Father Jude, who approached across the courtyard, she disappeared into the safe gloom of her Senior Citizens apartment, from which he was unable to rouse her by knocking.
It was clear she didn’t want to talk to him, but that didn’t matter to Jude. He had to talk to Marie Kashpaw. He had to persuade her to share her story with him. Still, he had no idea how to accomplish his mission. Sitting in the lobby, thwarted, he planned. She took the Eucharist every week, but that was from Father Damien. He could bring the sacrament to her himself, since Father Damien actually was indisposed, but, he wondered, did that put him in the highly uncomfortable position of using the Sacred Host as the lure for an ulterior purpose?
It felt wrong, but half an hour later he returned with the black leather traveling Eucharist kit, 100 percent calfskin, as official-looking as a spy toy. He knocked at the door to her apartment. Seeing who it was, she frowned, but nevertheless she allowed him to enter and stand next to her kitchen table.
“Would you like to take communion?” he asked her.
She shrugged at a chair. He sat, the case in his lap. Again, she just looked at him with those opaque eyes, and waited.
“Are you in a state of grace?” he asked.
Here, she smiled.
“Are you?” She threw her question back at him, and touched her gray forelock absently. “You shouldn’t,” she went on, “use the holy body of God as bait.”
Father Jude actually flushed.
“I know what you want.” Her voice was flat.
Now it was Father Jude’s turn to go silent. In what he now thought of longingly as his “regular life,” he was routinely in charge of every human exchange. He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease. He sighed, caught, and as he had some humility even as spoiled as he was by his authority, he set the case carefully aside on a metal tea tray, folded his hands in his lap, and said to Marie, “Yes, you read my intentions. I am sorry.”
And so she nodded. And so again the silence.
“I will tell you a few things,” she said to him at last.
So, of course it was fortunate that he happened to have carried along the tape recorder, which he now removed from within the soul-saving kit he’d brought. He set the recorder carefully between them, tested it by counting into the microphone, played it back. Now she was a little nervous. At first, as she began to speak, she stared at the tape recorder as though it were a separate consciousness. But then, as her memories collected, the picture shaped itself
between them.
RED MOTHER
Marie Kashpaw
When you don’t have a mother, as I never did, you have to make one. Get yourself a piece of clay and shape in your fingers and the shape you always make will be a mother. Or press her together of mud and sticks. Sometimes a tree would do, gnarled around me. Bundles of reeds. I used a blanket rolled and bunched in the shape of her. Rags. Sometimes there was a little extra stew in the pot and I stole it and said to myself she gave it to me. Sometimes just grass, grass was all I needed. The warmth of it in the sun was her golden green smell and the soft brush of it her fingers, stroking my face.
You don’t have a mother, you make one up. That’s how I made mine and still she is standing where I made her, dark and red in the heavy woods.
What happened to me when I went up on the hill with the black-robe women is between me and my confessor, Father Damien. I came down with a broken head and a bloody palm wrapped in a pillowcase, with a raging spirit and a man who would be my husband. But that is not the story here. For I came down with an inkling inside me of what I knew. I later found that my instinct was true. There was something about that nun that drew me to hate her with a deep longing. How, you say, can that be? To long for that black scarecrow flapping for crows. She had a face like a starved rat and a taste for cruel games. But the worst thing of all was that Sister Leopolda loved me—I felt that like a blow.
It is hard to hate a person if they love you. No matter what they do. What you feel in return twists between the two feelings. Not one. Not the other. But painful.
At the time, I was kept by the Lazarres. But I was a dog to the Lazarres. So instead of going back to the Lazarres, or claiming my new husband right after the convent, I went to the woods. I aimed to live by myself in the old shack Agongos had died in the winter before. The place was deep in the birch, other side of a little pothole. Slough ducks came to land in there, turtles haunted it, muskrats made their twig-pile houses, and there was plenty to eat. I had decided just how I would support myself. Before I’d left the Lazarres, I stole two dollars, my life’s wages. I used it to buy two bottles of nameless brown-red whiskey. I knew where there was a heap of old bottles in the woods, and I polished up two empty ones. Then I added some slough water to the good stuff and made four bottles in all, plugged neatly with white strips from my nun’s pillowcase.
Those four bottles, I sold for twice the profit. I bought more whiskey. I kept on moving up. I was just a child, just a girl, but I was a bootlegger now. And I sold to the best and I sold to the worst. I bought a long steel hunting knife for when my customers got ugly. I bought a rib-skinny paint horse named Brownie, and fattened her on good sweet grass and boughten grain. I traded a stove off an old white farmer, and nails and boards to fix some shelves on my walls. Blankets. At last my winter store, a fifty-pound sack of flour, potatoes, onions, apples. I dried a load of berries for some winter sweetness, and I dug a deep pit behind my little house and lined it with slough grass. Into that pit, I set a cache of whiskey, precious bottles. Each wrapped in reeds like an offering. Then I covered it up and let the snow fall where it might. I was ready for whatever came to me, I thought. But I was not ready for the truth of my beginnings.
One day, I returned to find Sister Leopolda had come for me. She was a pillar of stark blackness praying in the yard.
“Come back,” she said. She put out her hands and they were pierced in the palms, like mine.
I let her stand there, and I stood to watch her in a dull trance. Sun turned through the yellow leaves, rippled across her one way, then rippled back. I thought lazily of all that black hate that boiled up in me back at the convent, but I could not catch hold of it. I guess it had steamed away with the water from the kettle. Nothing was left, not shame, not indifference, not even a numbness or a heaviness—although, for the first time in my whole life, I thought with interest of my whiskey. I never drank my profits before, but maybe I would start.
I left the nun standing where she was, her arms held out stiff. Maybe she would stand there all night. I went on my rounds. She was gone when I returned. I staked Brownie in the clearing, where he could stuff himself, and I fried myself a potato with deer meat, boiled up a pot of tea. Then I went outside and sat on the little stump I had put right beside my door. There was something so deep of a pain in me, Father, like the end of all things was drawing near. I didn’t think it over, I just picked up the bottle. As I drank my first whiskey, I watched the darkness collect.
It came peacefully out of the hearts of things. Bled from the leaves. The clouds sifted darkness out of them and it swirled into the air. I put my head back against the log wall, still warm, and I felt comfortable. I drank again, deeply. The stuff burned, then spread through me with a radiator comfort. Before me, as the dark was all of a piece, then, I saw my real mother rearing up. Even booze has a spirit. Yes, I said, it is the liquor who cares for me now. Alcohol is my red mother. She was fire, she was stupidity, she was light. She was all I needed. Her heart was a golden catchall of sorrows and pains. She told me that if I chose her, she’d stay by me and she used the word forever, which with her I could believe.
As I said, I was a dog to the Lazarres. I ate the scraps when there were scraps. The old dress I wore sagged off my shoulders. My shoes were hides I tied onto my feet and my coat was the blanket I slept with. Besides my own so-called family, my best customers back in those days were Morrisseys. If someone was on a long dirty bender and coming down slow, I’d bring the bottle to them on Brownie. We’d make special delivery of the booze to certain drunks like Sophie Morrissey, who was long ago, as a girl, in that house hit by the Virgin’s statue and found it almost impossible after that to manifest a drunk state, though she tried. Anyway, this Sophie returned the favor by telling me the answer to the origin of Marie Lazarre.
We were sitting on broke chairs in her stomped-over yard. Sophie, she used to be a pretty woman in her time. When she told me these things she knew, her face still showed it, even though her body was strange—big bellied and spidery soft. Her features, blurred over with drink, were mild and stupid. She had brown skin and big wild green eyes, a straight little delicate nose, a darker sprinkle of tiny freckles. Her lips were slack and puffy, but when she smiled at the cork as she pulled it out, there was still a ghost of that girl I’d heard about. Frowzy hair caught up in a bun, wrinkled hands tough from the farmwork she did when not in ruin, she slugged back a good one, then carefully corked the bottle again and looked at me, eyes watering.
“You’re a good little niece to me.”
“Miigwetch.” I thought she was grateful to me for getting her wasted, and I didn’t take that serious. I sat with her for some time in the pleasant sunlight of her blasted yard—nothing grew there. It was peopled with dogs, fur sticking every which way, dogs nursing pups and biting fleas and sleeping belly up.
“This here’s my last bottle. I got to taper down so I can go cut hay.” She grinned at me, friendlier even than before. “Geget igo, you are a good little niece.”
Once again, I nodded. I took that in, but she wouldn’t let go of it yet.
“Eyeh, your deydey, he was my uncle.”
That was like a lightning wand went down my back.
“Take a hit and tell me more,” I said, all merry like I was a drinker too. I smiled with pleasant expectation at her, as though my heart weren’t beating in my throat, as though I didn’t have that sick way-down empty craving feeling that even at that moment I understood why she turned to the liquor to fill.
“She showed early. I was just a girl at the time and these things weren’t anything to me, but her belly popped right out!”
Sophie laughed, a cackling screechy sound, not unpleasant—unless she is laughing at your mother’s little tub of a stomach that once contained a baby who was you. I just wanted to slap her face, and it was even harder to stay in control of my tongue. All my life I have fought my quick anger and I did so, then, looking at my feet in their heavy, black, men’s boots
. Listening. She knew about my mom. The Puyat. All I knew about my mom was her last name and the fact that not even the Lazarres would talk about her—she was that bad, I guessed, or that dead.
“My Puyat mama,” I commented, letting it hang in the air.
She took another long drink, extending her wrist to my mom’s memory, and then she began to talk, like all drinkers seem to do, about all the wrongs accomplished against them. In this case, the wrongs were specific to my mother, so I listened closely to try and gather more information.
“She witched me! She stole my virginity!”
Sophie started laughing until she choked.
“To be a Puyat is to be a thing not of this earth. Down below it”—she spat—“down where they put together dead bones and skin and hair and raise things up—witch creatures.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I never left my hair around her. I burned it, my fingernail clips neither. I threw them on the fire. I never let her get a part of me. At night, she witched me. I know what she was doing.”
“What?”
“Working me! She tried to work me like a puppet on a string!”
Some people, they go so deep. They are like a being made of tunnels. Passageways that twist and double back and disappear. You have a foot on one path and you follow for a while, but then there is a sinkhole, bad footing, a wall. My mother, she was this kind of person, so deep and so intricate of design. Now, when I think about her, I feel my head go heavy. My brain hauls freight—all that I will never know. For it seems to me that in my life I have thought everything there was to think about my mother, the Puyat. Only then, I didn’t know her fate.
And wouldn’t have, except for Sophie.
Of course, she told me. It didn’t come out in so many words, but little by little. First I heard more about the way Sophie was enforced by the Puyat to witless behavior. As she told it, the witch drew a certain pattern in the spongy ground just beside the outhouse. Buried in Sophie’s path a rag of monthly blood. Cursed her with owl’s feathers laid underneath the mattress. My mother bit like a wolf into her dreams. She, poor Sophie, was subjected to the advances of handsome men and, although she didn’t want to, the witch forced her to give in. Sweets tempted her. Again, she could not resist, and it wasn’t her own faulty determination but the Puyat’s bad medicine that weakened her so much. Drinking, likewise. She was still being influenced.