“Father Jude, I would like to introduce you to Mary Kashpaw. She is my housekeeper, keeper of the church grounds, master general of all you see.”
A slight smile tweaked the corner of Mary Kashpaw’s line of a mouth, cut like a seam in stone. Her eyes gentled as they rested on the old man, then narrowed as she turned her attention to Father Jude. As she slowly assessed the visitor, she stiffened into a mountain and became so monumentally rooted that it was almost a surprise when she walked away. Slightly shaken by her presence, though without any reason he could discern, Jude busied himself, poured thin coffee into white ceramic mugs. Father Damien frowned.
“Have you,” he peered behind Father Miller, “brought a bit of wine, perhaps, to complement the meal?”
“If I’d known.” Father Miller hooked his shoulders.
“No matter.” Father Damien waved his hands. “Best, anyway, that I abstain. At least for this particular afternoon.”
“You’ll need your wits about you.” Father Miller was teasing, but even so his demeanor was challenging enough to quicken Damien’s pulse, causing, in turn, an increase of circulation that often led to heartburn. Damien picked slowly at his food, raised a string bean to his lips, bit the end off, chewed, put it down again. In the meantime, Jude Miller ate two-handed, busily sopping up extra juice with a piece of soft white bread while rhythmically forking the hot dish into his mouth. He was a powerful and appreciative eater, and he gave his whole attention to the mediocre meal, took another portion of the string beans, polished his plate with more bread, ate his dessert with gusto, settled back to the coffee while Damien nibbled another bean.
“They’re good,” said Jude Miller, unconvincingly.
“Mary Kashpaw. I know her beans, only too well. A little white vinegar, pinch of sugar, salt.”
“Pepper, too,” Jude said, coughing. He put down his fork. “Your housekeeper . . .” He asked how long she’d been with Father Damien, and was surprised when he answered that the great woman had worked on the grounds, cared for the church and graveyard, lived with the nuns since she was a child, and then cared for his household since she was grown.
“The story of her existence is also my story here,” said Father Damien. “Her story and mine are twined up from the roots of the place. There is no telling my story without hers! It began immediately after my arrival here in 1912, with a visit to the notorious Nanapush, who tricked me into obtaining for him a wife. Mary Kashpaw was the victim of my earliest mistake, an innocent, though she has seen all of life one way or another since. It all goes back to conversion, Father, a most ticklish concept and a most loving form of destruction. I’ve not come to terms with the notion even now, in my age, when I should be peacefully moldering up there on the hillside with the bones of my friends.”
Father Jude followed the other priest’s gaze, saw the gentle brown granite markers, the sheltering oak trees, the pale lichen-eaten crosses, the neat and faded plastic flowers on wire legs, the whole array of memoria spread out up and over the quiet hill.
PART TWO
The
DEADLY
CONVERSIONS
4
THE ROAD TO LITTLE NO HORSE
1996
The old priest tottered exhaustedly into his little house and closed himself into the bathroom. Washed his face, his hands, dried them carefully and slowly with a soft hand towel. Combed his white fluff. He felt a burning sensation along the corners of his eyes and he realized that he needed to weep. That afternoon with Father Miller, he’d drowsed and awakened to hear himself talking, talking too eagerly, though of course he kept back his deepest secrets. He’d known then what memories he was headed for, what scenes, what sorrows beyond imagining that had forever changed him. No! He lunged toward his desk, for the task of letter writing would, he hoped, throw him off course and allow the memory of his first years to pass him much as storms passed over bearing within their clouds whirlwinds that did not touch the earth.
On the Eve of St. Dismas, once again. At some late hour.
Dear Holy Father,
It is with a sense of gratitude and excitement that I address you tonight, largely in order to praise and give thanks for the notice denied me by your predecessors, but also, if I may be so unworthy, to lodge a small complaint. Although you’ve no doubt dispatched a priest deemed competent by his superiors here in the Middle West of the United States, I feel it my compelling duty to sadly inform you that not only is Father Jude Miller an obvious amateur at interviews, but he seems to have in coming here some agenda ulterior to that which he is dispatched to learn. In short, master of my vocation, I think he’s something of a dud. With false intentions to boot. I cast no aspersions upon those who chose him for this task. Your cardinals did, of course, check his credentials, but with the explosion of technology these days it is so easy to present an impressive paper face to the authorities when in actuality the subject lacks . . .
Useless ploy. He smelled the ashes of fever, the scent of wormwood and roses, tinctures of blessed oil. Here it came. Father Damien’s vision sank inward, into the past.
THE ARRIVAL
1912
Just as in a dream or under extreme duress, we make plans and decisions that panic us with their force and strangeness by the light of day, so Agnes shocked herself. The first morning that she woke on the train heading north, in disguise, she reeled with her own foolhardiness and thought of leaping out of the caboose. The train was slow enough, but was traveling through a waste of open land in which only rarely could she pick out the slightest human feature. Surely she’d die of exposure out there. And then the train stopped at a small board shack hardly bigger than an outhouse.
She spent the night there, curled around the lukewarm flanks of a rusted stove. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll get rid of this cassock and be Agnes DeWitt again, formerly Sister Cecilia, who has lived enough for two women and two nuns already, let alone a mission priest. She imagined that she’d find some way of trading clothing or if all else failed come clean with the nearest sane person in North Dakota. But she was alone. And considering what she’d just done, probably no judge of sanity. The next morning, she waited miserably for the driver who, it said in a tattered note nailed to the wall, would transport the priest to Little No Horse. By the time the wagon arrived, Agnes was so famished with hunger that she had dipped into a sack waiting next to her and chewed some raw, dusty oats. Though in a daze of passivity, when she found herself climbing into the seat of a rough wagon drawn by winter-shagged horses and driven by a man still rougher than the whole lot, her heart clenched and the urge again took her to bolt back into the skin of Miss DeWitt. But how could she? Perhaps once the wagon stopped, once they’d arrived, she’d seize a chance.
They started out for the reservation in the wake of a killing sickness, on the eve of St. Dismas in the gain of the year. March, Onaabani-giizis, it is called. Crust-on-the-snow moon, for the angle of the sun strikes just so, enough to melt and refreeze the surface while the snow lies beneath. Ever after that day, Agnes was to mark St. Dismas upon her calendar because it was the first day of her existence as Father Damien, the first day of the great lie that was her life—the true lie, she considered it, the most sincere lie a person could ever tell.
Agnes was a person of deep curiosity, and so even in extremity she couldn’t help observing all around her that was new. She rode along with interest, even though her brain was half frozen and she suffered stabs of intense cold. On the way to the reservation, she found intriguing correspondences with her old life. The river was flooding three hundred miles to the south because to the north its mouth was still frozen. So in a way, she thought, the region had conspired with itself to bring her north, to dump her from her house into the current where she was rescued and where she changed clothing with the priest—ah, the priest’s clothes! That was another thing. Even now, the driver treated her with much more respect as a priest than she’d ever known as a nun. He was deferential, though not uncomfortable. Agnes wa
s surprised to find that this treatment entirely gratified her, and yet seemed familiar as though it was her due. Robes or not, I am human, she said to herself. So this is what a priest gets, heads bowing and curious respectful attention! Back on the train, people also had given Father Damien more privacy. It was as though in priest’s garments she walked within a clear bell of charged air.
Priest or not, the rain fell, wetting and then filming the road with a dangerous slick, coating her face and icing the goods crowded into the loaded wagon. She hunched underneath a powerfully dusty old buffalo robe, shook miserably, and then warmed as the ride bumped her forward, into her strange new life.
Kashpaw was the driver’s name. He was the first Indian she’d ever met and he would be one of the first she’d bury, come that summer and the feast of saints. He was dark and in the cold his skin took on a purplish cast. Dressed as he was in a French red wool capote with a swirl of hot yellow turban cloth and weighted by moosehide leggings, great mitts made of wolves’ fur, velvet shawls, and another curly buffalo robe thrown on besides, he was a mountain of texture and sharp color. He spoke, of course, no German, only some English, and his French was of a vintage extremely valuable were it only wine. In addition, that eighteenth-century trapper’s French was knocked aside or disarranged by words only to be guessed at—probably the language spoken by Ojibwe. And yet in spite of their language problems, Agnes couldn’t help questioning Kashpaw eagerly. Something new was at work, she could feel it, an ease with her own mind she’d never felt before, a pleasure in her own wit she’d half hidden or demurred. As Agnes, she’d always felt too inhibited to closely question men. Questions from women to men always raised questions of a different nature. As a man, she found that Father Damien was free to pursue all questions with frankness and ease.
On the long drive north, she learned all of the polite Ojibwe she could cram into her brain—how to ask after children and spouses, how to comment on the weather, how to accept and appreciate food. These last phrases, unfortunately, would be useless until there actually was food on the reservation.
The road was slick, frozen muck under the hooves of the wild, tough horses, so Kashpaw halted the wagon. From under the seat he took eight snugly made straps that fitted neatly around the horses’ pasterns. He fixed onto the bottom of their hooves sharply studded contraptions that enabled them to grip the ice. Along they went, then, more secure. As they traveled, Kashpaw laboriously made known further details of the situation Father Damien would face. There was starvation, but with luck the thaw would end its grip. In addition to the priest, Kashpaw had picked up eighteen sacks of horse-grade oats. This rough slurry was to be distributed among twice as many families and would make up their diets until the false winter entirely broke—the snow and ice still looked to have a strong hold on the land.
“What can be done?”
Kashpaw looked shrewdly at Father Damien. He took in the open, girlish earnestness, the curiosity, the restless hands tapping patterns on the robes, the intelligent regard. At last, he decided the priest was both harmless and worth challenging.
“Some say, go back to the old ways.”
“And what do you say?”
Kashpaw narrowed his eyes at the ice road, snapped the reins lightly on his horses’ rumps. When he smiled to himself, his huge soft face rounded in gentle humorous curves that Agnes found compelling. The only Indians she’d known were pictures in a book—in her part of Wisconsin, they were hated and cleared out. Once she had escaped her family, entered the convent, and taken up music, of course, there was very little to see or know of the outside world. So this new sort of human next to her, his self-possessed knowledge, upset her with an intense wish to understand everything about him.
“Here’s what I say,” he answered at last. “Leave us full-bloods alone, let us be with our Nanabozho, our sweats and shake tents, our grand medicines and bundles. We don’t hurt nobody. Your wiisaakodewininiwag, half-burnt wood, they can use your God as backup to these things. Our world is already whipped apart by the white man. Why do you black gowns care if we pray to your God?”
All that he said was strange to Agnes, and again she had to question him on each point. The half-burnt wood referred to half-breed people. Nanabozho was someone she would hear of often—a god, a story figure. The sweats and the shake tents were houses where Ojibwe ceremonies took place. All of this, he took his time to patiently explain. Agnes watched him closely, memorizing him, feeling in her heart he was so certain of himself that he would be impossible to convert. The great firm slabs of Kashpaw’s cheeks were pitted with dark pocks. As she found out later, he had survived that particular killing scourge only to lose many of his family. The abyss of loss had led him to his present complex marital situation—a problem with which Father Damien would presently become involved. For the time, as they endured the miles, Kashpaw’s openhearted ease was reassuring. Between the two, there grew a pleasant, thoughtful, silence. The space around the wagon, boundless and gray, serene and cold, changed only subtly as they passed through on the nearly invisible road. Suspended in the whiteness, they could have been traveling in place. The wheels moved, the wagon jounced and rocked, but nothing changed. The land rolled on in bitter white monotony.
The cold bit down, harder. Kashpaw maintained a politely fixed expression while his thoughts turned. He was a shrewd man, and he sensed something unusual about the priest from the first. Something wrong. The priest was clearly not right, too womanly. Perhaps, he thought, here was a man like the famous Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife, where he had lived until old, well loved, as one of the women. Kashpaw himself had addressed Wishkob as grandmother. Kashpaw thought, This priest is unusual, but then, who among the zhaaganaashiwug is not strange?
The two fell deeper into private thoughts, and let the screeching and knocking of the wheels take over until at last the horizon grew, upon its distant edge, a deeper set to the filmy pearl, then a definite gray patch that slowly gained detail. There were hills now, covered in bare-leafed oak, and soon there were houses among those hills, small and modest little cabins neatly plumed with smoke, for a windless, icy seizure gripped the settlement and woods beyond. The wind of the great plains dropped off in this complex shelter, diminished by windbreaks of earth and mixed forest. They passed into the hills, through a town that centered around a modest trader’s store, seeing only one or two Indians at a distance. The people were dressed in farmers’ clothes, some in thin swaths of cloth and some heavily jacketed in wools.
The road to the settlement at Little No Horse led up, gently at first, but there was in those days a fierce, ungraded climb near the end. At last, the ice became too smooth for even the strong horses—their heavily feathered fetlocks and thick necks showing draft blood along with Sioux war-pony fleetness and nerve. One nearly slipped to its knees. Kashpaw stopped the wagon and wished Father Damien bonne chance in climbing the rest of the way on foot.
All alone, then, bearing on her back the thinly strapped bag, Agnes slipped and toiled, smashing continually through the snow’s glassy crust. The sharp ice pierced the crude leggings she’d made of a rough stole found in the priest’s bag and bloodied her shaking calves. By the time she clawed and scrambled to the hilltop, she was exhausted to the point of nausea and lay down to gasp for breath.
There was stillness, the whisper of snow grains driven along the surface of the world. It was the silence of before creation, the comfort of pure nothing, and she let herself go into it until, in that quiet, she was caught hold of by a dazzling sweetness. In the grip of this sudden, sumptuous bloom of feeling, Agnes rose and walked toward a poor cabin just behind the log church. Entering this new life, she felt a largeness move through her, a sense that she was essential to a great, calm design of horizonless meaning. There was the crooked-built church, the cabin silent as a shut mouth, the convent painted a blistering white—the scenery of Father Damien’s future.
Sil
ence held.
In that period of regard, the unsettled intentions, the fears she felt, the exposure she already dreaded, faded to a fierce nothing, a white ring of mineral ash left after the water has boiled away. There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here. The true Modeste who was supposed to arrive—none other. No one else.
DEATH ROBES
All great visions must suffer the test of the ordinary, and Agnes’s was immediate. She unlatched the door of the small tight-built cabin, her first rectory, and stood in the dim entry adjusting her eyes to the sadness. Just here, Damien’s predecessor, Father Hugo LaCombe, tough and well trained, one of the first, had died of a sweating fever. Upon the cabin’s floor a scatter of stiff photographs. Agnes picked up the card of a woman, perhaps a sister of Hugo’s, wearing a floral hat. His brother, cradling a gun. These people stared out, frozen in a bad dream. She stacked the pictures on the table. Touched an extra folded cassock, underclothing, a silver holy medal on a nail driven into the frosted gray wood next to the window. The bed made of sagging willow poles was covered with heavy quilts and buffalo robes, stripped beneath. Had someone at least taken out the linen? No, there it was, balled in a corner, rusted with the blood of poor Father Hugo and, even in the cold, smelling of shit and gall.
Father Damien didn’t want to pray. Nevertheless Agnes went down on her knees and spoke earnestly aloud. There was no answer but the howl of wind rattling shingles, the mice drifting in the eaves. There was no wood for a fire. No water but ice. Enough, she thought. Wearily, she climbed into Father Hugo’s deathbed. She wrapped herself tightly into the death robes, slept.