She dreamed first of black nails driven through the tender bloody sac of her heart. Dreamed second of Berndt’s trusting gaze. In a third dream, which lasted the rest of the night, Agnes ate and drank at an endless table. Boiled carrots. Foaming milk. Fresh, buttered potatoes in their jackets, thick stews of meat and onions. She woke more desperate with hunger than ever in her life, her stomach gnawing, pinching, her mouth still working on the rich imaginary meal. Some Catholic on the train had given her a bit of jerky, which she chewed still huddled in the quilts. There was no need to dress, as she’d slept in Father Damien’s clothes for warmth. There was no washbasin. She reached out, rubbed her teeth and face with a handful of snow sifted onto the sill of the ill-fitting window. She combed the tatters of her hair back with stiff fingers, swatted strings of dust from her arms and chest. She then bundled on the dead priest’s heavy black wool cloak and walked out.
MIRACLE OF THE MEAT
The nuns lived in a small white frame building of two rooms, one for eating and one for sleeping, pitilessly cold within. There were no sisters in sight, but on the rough board table Agnes spied a pot of tea steeping lukewarm on a towel. She drained it from the spout, then opened a cupboard and found a poor rock-hard bit of bread beside a thimble’s worth of raisins. The meal, however paltry, gave her the strength to walk over to the church, where the six nuns had dragged themselves to say their morning prayers.
Snow as fine as smoke blew in as she entered the church, but the nuns did not move. They knelt, hunched in cold, swathed in layers of patched wool, quiet as stones. There was only one parishioner in attendance, and in spite of the extremity of the cold and the tension of her first test in saying Mass, Agnes noticed her. The girl seemed, in her stiffness, to creak as she turned to watch. She stared as Father Damien walked to the nave of the church.
The girl’s nose jutted, her face was white and beak-thin, and her mouth was shaped by birth into a pale and twisted line. She stared at the priest with great, starved, black, disturbing eyes. Stared unblinking and with fixed aggressiveness. Young and scrawny as a new bird, she opened her mouth as though to shout, then shut it as Father Damien put out his hands to the women, the sisters, and held their hands and greeted them—the sight of their resigned and exhausted faces washed over him with a familiar tenderness.
“My dear sisters in Christ, my dear, dear sisters . . .”
They rose in surprise. Apparently, Father Damien wasn’t expected to arrive—thus the terrible disorder of the cabin. Their faces, gazing dull, were the maws of starved animals and their fingers were limp as wilted stalks. By the shape of their skulls, the wrinkled hands of privation, it was easy to see death was poking through their very skins. For the first time, now, Agnes was afraid, for she knew that the food she had eaten back in the convent was absolutely all they had.
“Let us pray,” Father Damien’s voice squeaked. Agnes tried to control the shaking and keep her voice low, but her tongue was thick with cold despair. She remembered to venerate the relic in the altar—what was it: splinters from the true cross? a filing from St. Peter’s manacles? perhaps a bit of bone, a slice of skin, a toe, an ear? What saint? How would she find out or ever know? It was the priest’s job to know. There was no altar boy, no vestments, and the chalice was humble pewter, but when Father Damien opened the sacristy and found fourteen holy wafers and a thread of wine, he turned in elation to the sisters.
“We have no choir”—he was already half delirious again with hunger—“but we will raise our best hymn! Body of Christ, blood of Christ, same here as in the richest cathedral. This is our cloth-of-gold.” He touched the burlap weave of the mantle, laid out on the altar stone. “This is our pearl-studded gospel.” He lovingly stroked the rag-bound book. “Our incense is God’s own breath—the wind through these rough walls!”
The women sighed together, all except for the one parishioner, the seething girl in a black scarf. She laughed out loud, screeched really, then coughed to contain her mirth. The nuns seemed numb to her. They prayed together and a cloud of breath stirred from their lips. Their hands were blistered with cold, their cheeks frostbitten and raw. The priest’s words were brave, but the sisters were at the razor edge of their endurance. They slumped against the wood of the pews, barely managed to hold themselves upright.
At least, now, the fire in the little tin stove had begun to warm the cabin of the church.
The Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive. The phrases were in her and part of her. Once she began, the flow was like the river that had carried her to Little No Horse. In the silences between the parts of the ritual, Father Damien prayed for those women in his charge.
“Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam . . .” He crossed his breast five times, within those words, and the next: “Qui pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas . . .” And lifted his eyes and said the words “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” and the bread was flesh.
Of course it was, as it always was.
“Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti: mysterium fedei . . .” The wine was blood.
And again, as she had before, the strange girl in the front pew emitted a sudden croak of laughter.
On her lips, in her mouth. Real and rich, heavy, good. Agnes choked with startled shock. She hesitated, put the food to her mouth again. Real! Real! Hunger roared in her as she broke the bread. Ate the flesh. Delivering the communion meal to her starving sisters, Agnes was caught in a panic of emotion. She heard nothing, saw nothing, went through the rest of Mass on reeling instinct. Was it really true and had they, as well, experienced what she’d felt? Was this something that happened, always, to priests? Did their part of the sacrament transubstantiate in real as well as metaphorical terms? Had the dry thin consecrated Host turned into a thick mouthful of raw, tender, bloody, sweet-tasting meat in the mouths of the sisters? And the wine to vital blood? And were they all full, as Agnes felt, satisfied and calm? They finished the Mass and stumbled back, holding one another by turns, all except for the black-eyed child, who abruptly left, quite alone, prompting Agnes to ask the nun nearest for the name of this striking person.
“She’s a Puyat,” said the sister. “Her name is Pauline. She is here every morning, most devout, but . . .” She paused as if to say something more, but only shrugged as though, after all, she was too weak to explain.
Once alone, Agnes went dizzy with questions.
Had Christ’s real presence entered them? Certainly, now, they were saved from the place of skulls, from the bones of death. Were they fed with the fat of the wheat and honey out of the rock? Was this just part of the ritual or was it miraculous?
That night, she composed Father Damien’s first letter.
March 1912
Gracious Leader of the Faith,
I write in humble fearfulness and wonder. To whom else might I turn? I beg you to indulge me, Your Holiness. Please forgive my attempt to explain, though it be insufficient. It is just that to reconstruct, to go back, to establish the scene requires at present a spiritual energy I cannot summon. I am reeling. I have such questions.
To wit: Have you or your holy minions knowledge of a case in which the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ has in actuality (and I mean physically, not only in a spiritual sense) nourished the flock?
In other words, did the wafer turn into visible meat, the wine to actual blood?
And also, to your understanding, would it be wrong for a cleric to request a visit by the devil, just to make certain of his physical shape?
I await your reply.
SISTER HILDEGARDE’S VIEWS
The Superior, Sister Hildegarde Anne, was a woman of German resourcefulness. Short, boxy, impenetrable, she had saved her sisters, as well as many others, early on that winter by ordering the church horse butchered while it still had flesh, and distributing its store of oats and grain. She had a toughness
of expression unusual in a nun, and spoke bluntly. Also, she was effortlessly cheerful in a way that often outraged or frightened other people. Now, for instance, as she spoke to Father Damien in the intimacy of the kitchen, she shaved the last of that poor beast’s hooves into a pot of boiling soup water. As she worked, she hummed and then sang out, trimming the great rocky chunk of chitin with a sharp filet knife. Beside the soup pot, half a precious potato soaked in salted water. The sparsity didn’t seem to bother her. Someone had left six other potatoes and a rind of bacon, held now under lock and key. All of this would keep the religious band alive today, and today, she said, was as far as she ever went in her prayers.
Although Agnes felt what she felt, believed what she believed, about what had happened during the Eucharist, the two exchanged no more than a significant sentence. Agnes was to find that Sister Hildegarde was of such deeply skeptical stock that she did not entirely accept her own experience as true. Hildegarde’s concerns were down-to-earth. Since she was on the reservation to be useful, she lost no time in telling Father Damien how he could make himself useful too.
“Father,” said Hildegarde, “you must go visiting with the sacrament. The poor Indians are dying out. Now is a good time to convert them! They live like wretches anyway, and then the sweating fever takes them. Some are gone in only hours once the illness sets in, so you must be quick. Some wait for death to walk down the road. They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick. You could easily baptize them while they’re tranced.”
“What cures this fever? Who is our doctor?” Agnes ignored the nun’s avidity regarding souls. Yes, she thought, Father Damien was bound to baptize. But she must read up because she couldn’t remember much of anything about the ritual or the words. She pursued the subject of the illness itself.
“We have no regular doctor, but the cure is plain. Food, warmth.”
“Simply that?”
“It is possible, with skillful care, to nurse even a weak subject through this fever. We could have saved Father Hugo, had he only come to us!”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Father Hugo wouldn’t endanger us, and so hid his condition. Barred himself inside of his cabin. He was sick to death by the time we broke in. And then, of course,” she said with hurt pride, “you found the place in sad repair. We hadn’t any notion you would stay there but had a place for you with a pious family. You see, we have not entered to clean for fear of the fever . . . only the Puyat doesn’t fear most illness. She was supposed to have cleaned.”
“The one at the Mass this morning?”
“That one.”
“No need,” Agnes said, anxious even then to avoid contact with the girl. “I’m trained to keep my surroundings in good order.”
“Oh,” Hildegarde was a bit surprised. “Very unlike poor Father Hugo!”
Poor Hugo. With a powerful thrust, a scene stabbed into Agnes’s mind. She saw the priest laboriously sinking, taking leave of the world alone, speaking his good-bye prayers. She struggled to gain control of her exhaustion. The walk from the river had been endless, the train smoky and jolting, the miserable wait in the foul railroad hut a foretaste of hell. The drive with Kashpaw was encouraging, but Agnes had hardly slept the previous night and now could not battle the pressure of tears and more tears. She tried to lean on last night’s certainty, tried to keep her faith with the Christ who had fed her broth and taken on a human shape to give her comfort. She must follow through with the original plan, the vision. But to find herself here, in the midst of another’s vocation, was shockingly difficult. What had she supposed? Father Damien was in charge of these souls!
“I am nowhere near as strong as the confidence Christ has placed in me,” she said to Hildegarde Anne, who sighed.
“None of us is.”
Agnes was tempted, next, to confess the specifics of her identity, the nature of her calling, to this good nun. After all, she looks much more capable than I, she thought with a certain faint hope. But Sister Hildegarde, perhaps sensing the despair of her tormented self-sympathy, squeezed Agnes’s hand in hers so hard she cracked the knuckles.
“I prayed for a priest just like you,” she said, “young, with a tough, fresh faith!”
So Agnes shut Father Damien’s mouth on that revelation.
“Show me all you know of this place,” she demanded instead, steadying Father Damien’s voice and stilling the quaver in her heart.
Sister Hildegarde drew out a path with the stub of a pencil. “This bisects the land they call ‘their’ reservation,” she said. “The place is shaped roughly like a house with a square beneath and one slanted roof, a jutting outpost like a chimney. They’ll lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan. Yet, it’s going constantly into private ownership and already they are selling out to lumber interests. Father, your poor charges cannot read the documents they sign.”
Here, Hildegarde was obviously distressed—she hated a bad business deal. “The government is not so much our problem,” she blurted out. “It is the thieves that surround us!”
She showed every path and road, labeled cabins on the reservation, pointed out where certain of the most faithful parishioners lived.
“Here, here, and here”—she pointed at nearly every spot—“the sickness has taken someone. Here, it took them all.” She stabbed out several places upon her map. Seeing the nun’s finger smash down, Agnes’s heart was touched with horror. The still cabin. The huddled forms. The unspeakable loneliness. Tears flashed again and Hildegarde, seeing this, slapped a dish towel on Father Damien’s arm.
“No use for that,” the nun grumped. “Now here, here, here, and here all died but two, I’ve heard—a stubborn girl, an old man. They live out there yet.”
“I must go to them.”
Sister Hildegarde agreed, but looked a bit worried. “Father Damien, they live way out in the bush, if they’re living at all yet. The older man is a stubborn, crafty, talkative sort, much resistant to conversion. The vile things he says, the reprobate! He had a big old toot with my communion wine two years ago. Sneaked it from my cellar cask. He’s too tricky to die, him. And the other, that Fleur. Truly the daughter of Satan, so they say. The two of them, almost the only ones to survive from their respective families, are rumored to have special powers.”
As the nun spoke, Agnes breathed in deep drafts to gather control of her sorrow, and when she had, she took on the studied authority she’d mustered in private.
“I’m always intrigued with special powers,” she said mildly. “What sort of skills do you mean?”
Hildegarde shrugged, dismissive. “The usual. Drumming their drums. Singing until it breaks your ears. Shaking stuffed skins, rattles, and bones, so I’ve heard. All ineffective against the slightest of colds.”
“I see.” Though Agnes did not see. “What else?”
“They are the last of their families, as I’ve said. I think that gives them some sort of conjuring skill. There are magicians among them, of course, cheap tricksters. They throw their voices and levitate. They scare the gullible to death and are said to wing balls of fire toward their enemies at night. We’ve seen a few, you know, whiz by us up here! Unimpressive!”
“So you believe in their skills.”
Hildegarde looked sharply at the priest.
“Believe, why yes, just as I believe it is possible to hide coins and pebbles behind the ears of small children and draw these objects forth to delight them. It is easy to mystify children. Their conjurers employ just such means to prey upon the gullible. That is all.”
I am sent here, thought Agnes, to accept and to absorb. I shall be a thick cloth. Therefore, she nodded and said nothing in answer, but only thanked the nun for speaking frankly.
Some Rules to Assist in My Transformation
Make requests in the form of orders.
Give compliments in the fo
rm of concessions.
Ask questions in the form of statements.
Exercises to enhance the muscles of the neck?
Admire women’s handiwork with copious amazement.
Stride, swing arms, stop abruptly, stroke chin.
Sharpen razor daily.
Advance no explanations.
Accept no explanations.
Hum an occasional resolute march.
A parishioner had left a Sears catalog near the door of the church, and Agnes rifled through it secretly, as much to revisit the clothing, the china, the unfamiliar feast of powders and perfumes, as to scheme a way to purchase Dr. Feem’s Scientific Programme of Muscular Expansion, a kit that involved a set of dumbbells, a book of directions, and one muscle tonic that promised to improve the tone of the entire upper body and another bottle that worked on the half below.
5
SPIRIT TALK
1912
The reservation at the time was a place still fluid of definition, appearing solid only on a map, taking in and cutting out whole farms sometimes on the say-so of the commissioner, or the former agent Tatro, and other times attempting to right itself according to law. It was a place of shifting allegiances, new feuds and old animosities, a place of clan teasing, jealousy, comfort, and love. As with most other reservations, the government policy of attempting to excite pride in private ownership by doling parcels of land to individual Ojibwe flopped miserably and provided a feast of acquisition for hopeful farmers and surrounding entrepreneurs. So the boundaries came and went, drawn to accommodate local ventures—sawmills, farms, feed stores, the traplines of various families.
Many did sell for one simple reason. Hunger. As the government scrambled for the correct legal definition of the land, any fluctuation meant loss, any loophole was to the advantage of the thieves, boosters, businessmen, swindlers, sneaks, Christians, cranks, lumber and farm dealers, con artists, and reprobates of all types who had drifted to the edges of reservations hoping to profit from the confusion.