Why do they make it a secret, because anybody can read what it says in the Bible, lo, I am with you alway?
Did great-grandfather Weiss like Christian Henry more than he liked Francis, who is Mama’s own father?
Why do you always think there might be a fire or didn’t you, was it me or Mama thought it?
Why are you frightened and put your hand to your hair? (I want long hair, but if an Indian came to scalp you, perhaps it would be worse.)
What were the papers?
“What were the papers, Mamalie?” I said.
Now Mamalie told this story which I did not altogether understand but pieced together afterwards — I mean long afterwards, of course, because the “thing” that was to happen, that was in a sense to join me in emotional understanding, in intuition anyway, to the band of chosen initiates at Wunden Eiland, had not yet happened.
The “thing” that was to happen, happened soon afterwards, maybe that very autumn or winter. It was before Christmas, say in November, or it was after Christmas was well over, say in February, but I cannot date the time of the thing that happened, that happened to me personally, because I forgot it. I mean it was walled over and I was buried with it. I, the child was incarcerated as a nun might be, who for some sin — which I did not then understand — is walled up alive in her own cell or in some anteroom to a cathedral.
It was as if I were there all the time, in understanding anyway, of the “thing” that had happened before I was ten, the “thing” that had happened to me and the “thing” I had inherited from them. I, the child, was still living, but I was not free, not free to express my understanding of the gift, until long afterwards. I was not in fact, completely free, until again there was the whistling of evil wings, the falling of poisonous arrows, the deadly signature of a sign of evil magic in the sky.
The same fear (personal fear) could crack the wall that had originally covered me over, because to live I had to be frozen in myself — so great was the shock to my mind when I found my father wounded. I did not know, as Mamalie began talking, that Wunden Eiland was Island of the Wounds; it came clear afterwards. Bits of it came clear, as I say, in patches; the story was like the quilt that I drew up to my chin, as I propped myself up in her bed, to listen.
Roughly, a hundred years had passed, since the founding of the town and the rituals practiced at Wunden Eiland, which, Mamalie had explained, was actually an island in the Monocacy River which, in Mama’s day, was called a creek, though it could occasionally break its boundaries in the season of floods, as that time Mama told us about, when the deer that Papalie had in the seminary grounds were lost.
A hundred years had passed, since the founding of the town I mean, when Mamalie’s Christian found the papers or the scroll of flexible deerskin which told the story of the meeting of the chief medicine men of the friendly tribes and the devotees of the Ritual of the Wounds. Christian, who was no mean scholar, glimpsed here a hint in Hebrew or followed a Greek text to its original, and so pieced out the story of the meeting, deciphered actually the words of strange pledges passed, strange words spoken, strange rhythms sung which were prompted, all alike said, by the power of the Holy Spirit; the Holy Ghost of the Christian ritualists and the Great Spirit of the Indians poured their grace alike; their gifts came in turn to Anna von Pahlen, to John Christopher Frederick Cammerhof, to John Christopher Pyrlaeus, who was not only a scholar and authority on the Indian languages, but a musician as well.
Well, where had Mamalie’s gift gone then? I did not ask her, but I sense now that she burnt it all up in an hour or so of rapture, that she and her young husband together recaptured the secret of Wunden Eiland; and not only the secret, but the actual Power that had fallen on Anna and Zeisberger and Paxnous and Morning Star, fell, a hundred years afterwards, on the younger Christian Seidel and his wife, Elizabeth Caroline, who was our grandmother. As Mamalie outlined it, it seemed that, in trying over and putting together the indicated rhythms, she herself became one with the Wunden Eiland initiates and herself spoke with tongues — hymns of the spirits in the air — of spirits at sunrise and sunsetting, of the deer and the wild squirrel, the beaver, the otter, the kingfisher, and the hawk and eagle.
She laughed when she told me about it, so I know that she and Christian (or Henry) who was Aunt Agnes’ father, must have been very happy.
We are back at the beginning. This is just a bedroom. Why, I am sitting up in Mamalie’s bed, and there were voices outside my window. My garden is under the window is the first line of a poem that I recited, the first time I recited anything on a stage. It was a large audience, they clapped, and Miss Helen said I must go out and be out of the window and make a bow. I made a bow. Now, this is something like that. They were acting something.
Mamalie has forgotten that she was not at Wunden Eiland; she said, “The laughter ran over us,” but she was a hundred years later, and she just picked out notes (that she had carefully looked up in the hymnbooks and in the old folios) that John Christopher Pyrlaeus had indicated to her, down the side of a page. Mamalie must be very clever. She never told me about this. She never, I know, told anyone about this. And now she is telling me about it. It is as if she had been there at that meeting, only she couldn’t have been there. How does she know that they laughed?
There was a seal that had a cup and an S on it. The S was for Sanctus Spiritus that means the Holy Ghost that nobody seems to understand, but that Mamalie said that Annavon Pahlen and John Christopher Frederick Cammerhof found at a meeting at Wunden Eiland; that was a scandal. What is a scandal?
It was a blot on the church, they said, and they didn’t have any meetings like that anymore, and Mamalie says that Christian — her Christian — found that they had made a pact or a pledge, but it was in the spirit, in the Sanctus Spiritus, and it seems they didn’t keep it. They couldn’t keep it because the stricter Brethren of the church said it was witchcraft. What exactly is witchcraft? You can be burnt for a witch. Is Mamalie a witch? She is crouching over the candle, she is holding the saucer with the candle in it in her hand. What is Mamalie saying to the candle?
“… until the Promise is redeemed and the Gift restored.”
But she said that before. She said that when she was telling me about the copy of the promise that they made to one another, that was written on deerskin, or maybe it was parchment. They made a promise, but it was not Mamalie’s fault if they did not keep the promise; how could it be? I suppose the gift was their all talking and laughing that way and singing with no words or with words of leaves rustling and rivers flowing and snow swirling in the wind, which is the breath of the Spirit, it seems.
Mamalie helped her husband who was named Henry, but she called him Christian, or maybe his name was Henry Christian — anyhow, he was dead. I mean, he was dead almost from the beginning, because Aunt Aggie was not a year old, I think, when he died. Morning Star was the Indian Princess who was the wife of Paxnous, who was baptized by the Moravians. She was really baptized, it seems; Paxnous was not baptized, but the Indians took Anna von Pahlen into their mysteries in exchange for Morning Star. I mean, Anna was Morning Star in their mysteries, and Morning Star (who had another ordinary Indian name like White-cloud or Fragrant-grass or one of those names) was Angelica which was another name of Anna von Pahlen, who was really Mrs. John Christopher Frederick Cammerhof, but I like to think of her as Anna von Pahlen.