But I hadn’t seen her visiting the sick nor raising the sad ones up.
No everyday miracles for her. Her talent was the relishment of pain, foaming at the mouth, and it was no surprise to me that lately there had been a drastic disarrangement of her mind.
I heard that she was kept in her little closet now. Confined. I heard she had an iron spoon that she banged on the bedstead to drive away spirits. Sparks flew up her walls. They had to keep her room very clean, I heard, otherwise she licked dust off the windowsills.
She made meals of lint. They didn’t dare let a dust ball collect beneath her bed. I knew why this had happened. I knew it was the heat.
The prolonged heat of praying had caused her brain to boil.
I also knew what they did not know about her appetite for dust.
She ate dust for one reason: to introduce herself to death. So now she was inhabited by the blowing and the nameless.
Packing apples in my jars, I came to the last. I was thinking of her with such concentration that I poured the syrup on my hand.
“Damn buzzard!” I screamed, as if she’d done it. And she might have.
Who knew how far the influence spread?
I slipped my apron off and hung it on a chair. A sign perhaps. My hand was scalded. I hardly noticed. I was going up the hill.
again “I’ll visit her,” I said, to hear it said out loud. “I’ll bring Zelda.
That was one thing I had not expected of myself. Deciding that I’d bring the girl along with me, I realized another reason. I would visit Leopolda not just to see her, but to let her see me. I would let her see I had not been living on wafers of God’s flesh but the fruit of a man. Long ago she had tried for my devotion.
Now I’d)et her see where my devotion had gone and where it had got me.
For by now I was solid class. Nector was tribal chairman.
My children were well behaved, and they were educated too.
I went to the wardrobe and pulled out the good wool dress I would wear up the hill, even on a day this hot. Royal plum, they called the color of it in the Grand Forks clothing shop. I had paid down twenty dollars for it and worn it the day they swore Nector to the chair with me beside him.
It was a good dress, manufactured, of a classic material. It was the kind of solid dress no Lazarre ever wore.
Zelda was sixteen, older than I was when I took on the nun and pulled the demon from her sleeve. Zelda was older in age but not in mind; that is, she did not know what she wanted yet, whereas my mind had made itself up once I walked down the hill. Fourteen years, that was all the older I was at that time, yet I was a woman enough to snare Nector Kashpaw. But Zelda still floundered, even with her advantages, and sometimes I found her staring in a quiet mood across the field.
This morning, however, she had been working in the garden as supervisor of the younger ones. As always, she had kept clean.
“Where are you going?” she asked, coming in the door.
“You’re wearing your dress.”
“I’m wearing it,” I said, “to visit the nuns. I want you to come along with me, so hurry up and change.”
“All right!” She was glad to go up there anytime. She was friendly with a few of them, and could be found at Holy Mass-MIA any day of the week. Yet she had not decided to go any special route.
It did not take her long. She wore a pressed white blouse and plaid skirt. With her money from the potato fields she had bought herself anklets. Her saddle shoes were polished clean white. I would never have believed this was the granddaughter of Ignatius Lazarre, that sack of brew. There was even a ribbon in her hair, which she put up every night in pinned coils to get the curl.
So we went. It was a long enough walk, and the road was hot when we came out of the woods. I had my dress on, so I did not let myself sweat. The hill was covered with dust. Dust hung gray, in shifting bands, around the white convent walls. There had been no rain that fall, and the fields were blowing through, the town. But we walked.
We passed the place on the road where Nector had tried to throw me. We had passed this place many times before without me thinking of Nector, but today I was remembering everything.
“This is where I met your father,” I told Zelda. For all I knew, it was the place we made Gordon as well, but I never exactly said that.
“Your father could not keep away from me, ” I suddenly bragged. I suppose I said that to put some other expression on my daughter’s face.
She was getting that serious glazed-over stare, as if she had to look down the well of her soul. But now she started, and went red.
“Don’t give me that cow look,” I said to her shocked face.
“Maybe you’re a little backwards about men, but your time will come.
She wouldn’t look at me after that.
“How come we’re visiting?” she asked, after we walked a bit farther.
“Take them some apples,” I said. In my hand I held a jar of fresh canned crabs. I had planted the tree myself twelve years iL A
before, and for a long time It was the only apple tree on the reservation. Then the nuns had planted two on their hill. But those trees hardly bore yet. Mine was established.
“And also,” I told Zelda, “to see the old nun who was my teacher.
That’s Leopolda.”
“I never knew she was your teacher,” said Zelda. “She’s pretty old.
“Well she’s sick now, too,” I said. “That’s why we’re going to see her.”
We came to the door. The lawn had shrunk back, to make room for a parking lot. Large square hedges went off to either side. The walls still blazed with cheap whitewash as before, but now most of the cracks were filled and the birds’ nests were knocked down. The old convent had got a few fresh nuns and come up in the world.
I rang the bell. It made a deep and costly sound in the hall. I heard the knock of thick black shoes, the rustle of heavy cloth, and a slight wind caught me. I had imagined coming back here many times to this door, and always it was the carved bone of Leopolda’s face that met me, not Dympna, who opened the door and plumply smiled. She had only three teeth left, now, in her wide pale face. Two were on the top and one was on the bottom.
That, and her eyes so red and blank, gave her the look of a great rabbit.
I realized the strangeness of what was happening. Over twenty years had passed since I’d set foot in this place and been worshiped on the couch of the Superior as a saint. Twenty years since Leopolda had speared me with her bread poker. Twenty years while I also came up in the world.
“We are here to see Sister Leopolda”” I said.
“Come in! Come in!” The rabbit seemed pleased and eyed my jar.
“Are these apples from your tree?”
“Yes. ” I offered them.
“This must be your mother,” Dympna decided. Zelda nodded.
The nun did not recognize me. “Please come upstairs.”
She took the apples from my hands and led us down the hall.
We went up a flight of brown tile stairs that I remembered. We went down a shorter hall and stopped at the very end. All her grown life, Leopolda had lived in the same room.
Dympna tapped. There was silence.
“Maybe she’s asleep,” said Zelda.
I am not asleep,” the voice said, very low, so we hardly heard it from our side.
“Please go in,” said Dympria, “she’ll be expecting you now.”
So Dympna left us, and we stood by the door as it fell, opening slowly into the dim camphor-ball air of Leopolda’s room. I stepped in first, Zelda following. I saw nothing but the bed sheets, so white they almost glowed. Leopolda was among them.