The two French with hands like paddles. They were down on their knees.
Black capes were slung over some of their heads. My name was buzzing up and down the room, like a fat auturrin fly lighting on the tips of their tongues between Latin, humming up the heavy blood-dark curtains, circling their little cosseted heads.
Marie! Marie! A girl thrown in a closet. Who was afraid of a rubber over boot Who was half overcome. A girl who came in the back door where they threw their garbage. Marie! Who never found the cup.
Who had to eat their cold mush. Marie! Leopolda had her face buried in her knuckles. Saint Marie of the Holy Slops! Saint Marie of the Bread Fork! Saint Marie of the Burnt Back and Scalded Butt!
I broke out and laughed.
They looked up. All holy hell burst loose when they saw I’d woke. I still did not understand what was happening. They were watching, talking, but not to me.
“The marks … ” “She has her hand closed.”
lethe peux pas voir. ” I was not stupid enough to ask what they were talking about. I couldn’t tell why I was laying in white sheets.
I couldn’t tell why they were praying to me. But I’ll tell you this: it seemed entirely natural. It was me. I lifted up my hand as in my dream. It was completely limp with sacredness.
“Peace be with you.”
My arm was dried blood from the wrist down to the elbow. And it hurt.
Their faces turned like flat flowers of adoration to follow that hand’s movements. I let it swing through the air, imparting a saints blessing.
I had practiced. I knew exactly how to act.
MA
They murmured. I heaved a sigh, and a golden beam of light suddenly broke through the clouded window and flooded down directly on my face. A stroke of perfect luck! They had to be convinced.
Leopolda still knelt in the back of the room. Her knuckles were crammed halfway down her throat. Let me tell you, a saint has senses honed keen as a wolf. I knew that she was over my barrel now. How it happened did not matter. The last thing I remembered was how she flew from the oven and stabbed me. That one thing was most certainly true.
“Come forward, Sister Leopolda. ” I gestured with my heavenly wound.
Oh, it hurt. It bled when I reopened the slight heal.
“Kneel beside me,” I said.
She kneeled, but her voice box evidently did not work, for her mouth opened, shut, opened, but no sound came out. My throat clenched in noble delight I had read of as befitting a saint. She could not speak.
But she was beaten. It was in her eyes. She stared at me now with all the deep hate of the wheel of devilish dust that rolled wild within her emptiness.
“What is it you want to tell me?” I asked. And at last she spoke.
“I have told my Sisters of your passion,” she managed to choke out.
“How the stigmata … the marks of the nails … appeared in your palm and you swooned at the holy vision …… “Yes,” I said curiously.
And then, after a moment, I understood.
Leopolda had saved herself with her quick brain. She had witnessed a miracle. She had hid the fork and told this to the others.
And of course they believed her, because they never knew how Satan came and went or where he took refuge.
“I saw it from the first,” said the large one who put the bread in the oven. “Humility of the spirit. So rare in these girls.”
“I saw it too,” said the other one with great satisfaction. She sighed quietly. “If only it was me.”
now N Leopolda was kneeling bolt upright, face blazing and twitching, a barely held fountain of blasting poison.
“Christ has marked me,” I agreed.
I smiled the saint’s smirk into her face. And then I looked at her.
That was my mistake.
For I saw her kneeling there. Leopolda with her soul like a rubber over boot With her face of a starved rat. With the desperate eyes drowning in the deep wells of her wrongness. There would be no one else after me. And I would leave. I saw Leopolda kneeling within the shambles of her love.
My heart had been about to surge from my chest with the blackness of my joyous heat. Now it dropped. I pitied her. I pitied her. Pity twisted in my stomach like that hook-pole was driven through me. I was caught. It was a feeling more terrible than any amount of boiling water and worse than being forked. Still, still, I could not help what I did.
I had already smiled in a saint’s mealy forgiveness. I heard myself speaking gently.
“Receive the dispensation of my sacred blood,” I whispered.
But there was no heart in it. No joy when she bent to touch the floor.
No dark leaping. I fell back into the white pillows. Blank dust was whirling through the light shafts. My skin was dust.
Dust my lips. Dust the dirty spoons on the ends of my feet.
Rise up! I thought. Rise up and walk! There is no limit to this dust!
L WILD GEESE Gr (1934)
NECTOR KASHPAW
On Friday mornings, I go down to the sloughs with my brother Eli and wait for the birds to land. We have built ourselves a little blind.
Eli has second sense and an aim I cannot match, but he is shy and doesn’t like to talk. In this way it is a good partnership.
Because I got sent to school, I am the one who always walks into town and sells what we shoot. I get the price from the Sisters, who cook for the priests, and then I come home and split the money in half Eli usually takes his bottle off into the woods, while I go into town, to the fiddle dance, and spark the girls.
So there is a Friday near sundown, the summer I am out of school, that finds me walking up the hill with two geese slung from either wrist, tied with leather bands. just to set the record clear, I am a good-looking boy, tall and slim, without my father’s belly hanging in the way. I can have the pick of girls, is what I’m saying. But that doesn’t matter anyhow, because I have already decided that Lulu Nanapush is the one. She is the only one of them I want.
I am thinking of her while I walk-those damn eyes of hers, sharp as ice picks, and the curl of her lips. Her figure is round and plush, yet just at the edge of slim. She is small, yet she will never be an armful or an eyeful because I’ll never get a bead on her. I know that even now. She never stops moving long enough for me to see her all in a piece. I catch the gleam on her hair, the flash of her arm, a sly turn of hip. Then she is gone. I think of her little wet tongue and I have to stop then and there, in my tracks, at the taste that floods into my mouth. She is a tart berry full of juice, and I know she is mine. I cannot wait for the night to start. She will be waiting in the bush.
Because I am standing there, lost on the empty road, half drowned in the charms of Lulu, I never see Marie Lazarre barrel down. In fact, I never even hear her until it is too late. She comes straight down like a wagon unbraked, like a damn train. Her eye is on me, glaring under a stained strip of sheet. Her hand is wound tight in a pillowcase like a boxer’s fist.
“Whoa,” I say, “slow down girl.”
“Move aside,” she says.
She tries to pass. Out of reflex I grab her arm, and then I see the initialed pillowcase. SHC is written on it in letters red as wine.
Sacred Heart Convent. What is it doing on her arm? They say I am smart as a whip around here, but this time I am too smart for my own good.
Marie Lazarre is the youngest daughter of a family of horse-thieving drunks. Stealing sacred linen fits what I know of that blood, so I assume she is running off with the Sisters’ pillowcase and other valuables. Who knows? I think a chalice might be hidden beneath her skirt. It occurs to me, next moment, I may get a money bonus if I bring her back.