I think if I just take the glass and hand it to Mamalie and she just says, “Thank you, Helen,” or “Thank you, Hilda,” then it will be that I was asleep or half-asleep on the bed and that I dreamed all this and that maybe, I did, after all, only dream about the old man and the drive in the snow when all the streets were empty, when we drove past our house on Church Street and Mama sat opposite me with Harold and Gilbert under the fur rug and the man, who at first I thought was the gardener, sat up in front and drove the horses.
Maybe, that was just a dream, and maybe the lily with the short stem that I held in my hands like a cup, was something I dreamed, just as maybe I dreamed that Mamalie said that our church-beginnings went back to the ninth century (and that would be a thousand years ago) and that there was a branch of the church that was called Calixines that had something to do with a Greek word, she thought, for cup, like calix is a word for part of a flower that is like a cup.
There were flowers that were like flat daisies or roses, she said, on the old belt, and Ida said they were called water lilies, water roses in German, so maybe the lily I held in my hand and afterwards put on Papalie’s grave (straight up, stuck in the ground so that it looked as if it were growing there) could be a rose, too. Maybe the white rose and the black rose that Mamalie used to talk about to Aunt Laura and Mama (when they got too excited and laughed too much about nothing at all) are the shadow of the Calixines rose that I had given me by the man who I thought was the gardener, who drove the sleigh. Maybe, when Mamalie looks up and says, “Thank you, Hilda, isn’t it time you were in bed?” I will see that it was all a sort of dream that I made it up, that Mamalie never did say anything about an Indian who was at Wunden Eiland, who was named Shooting Star.
Maybe, it was just that I was dreaming something because I was afraid a shooting star might swish out of the sky and fall on the house and burn us all up. Maybe, it was because I was afraid of being burnt up that I made Mamalie, in the dream, say she wasn’t just afraid of being burnt up— though she was afraid — only she was more afraid that she might lose the papers. The papers were lost.
“Here is your glass of water, Mamalie,” I say.
But though I call her Mamalie, so that she can now be herself out-of-a-dream, she says, “Thank you, thank you, Lucy.” She says, “Yes, Lucy, you’re right…
“What was it young Brother Francis was saying yesterday? Yesterday, he said that nothing is lost; there are things, he says (like the invisible plant forms in the drops of water he studies under his new microscope), in the human soul that have not yet been discovered.
“It was cool in the room and when he finished the communion prayer for the sick, I felt that I wasn’t burning up anymore. Don’t mind, Lucy. It was the fever. I was burning up with fever. Yes, Lucy, tell Brother Francis if he calls for vespers, that I’m all right. Tell Brother Francis when he comes for vespers.”
She says “vespers” and the word “vespers” means those meetings they have sometimes, almost like love feasts, when they have coffee and sugar cake around a table.
It is sitting round a table and talking about the sand island and Christiansbrunn and the Singstunden and Liturgien and the famous water music on the river in the old days, and the tree here or the tree there that was cut down, what a pity! And remembering the time when the steel mills had not even been thought of, and now Bother Francis is taking her hand and saying that he will not speak again of these things that have troubled her unless she herself particularly wants it, and that he will tell no one of it; it must have happened, he said, he could not doubt her word nor question the reality of the experience and Henry Seidel’s concern about the matter, though poor Brother Henry had been overworking for a long time and had burnt himself up with zeal and devotion.
There had been strange forces at work, he said, in this great land from the beginning, and the Indian ritual in the early days was not understood, and after all, it was not so very many years since the massacre at Gnadenhuetten.
(Gnadenhuetten? So they had been killed at Gnadenhuetten.)
I cannot follow what Elizabeth Caroline and Brother Francis are saying; I cannot hear what they are saying, but I have a feeling that our own grandfather had heard stories— from his grandfather even — that brought fear and the terror of burning and poisonous darts (that arrow that flieth by day) very near.
It was not just a thing that had happened even in the days of Papalie’s grandfather, it was something that might still happen.
I seem to hear Brother Francis talking it out with Mamalie, very clearly and in the most understanding and sympathetic way, recalling the early missions and the work of Zeisberger and the young Count, Christian Renatus, yet seeing the other side, seeing the extravagances, the plays and processions and the strange gatherings, as a sort of parody on their saviour and the story of the gospel, which shone clear and in simple symbols for him.
The redeemer was not to be parodied (however sincere the feeling back of it) in robes and processions through the streets of this very town. Our saviour was not to be worshipped in a startling transparency which showed the wounds, wide and red and blood dripping, when a candle was pushed forward, back of the frame, in the dark.
There were actual extravagances too, practical issues, the question of church funds squandered in these elaborate meetings that were ritualistic sort of parties, really, where certain favorites of the group bore the names of the followers of our Lord.
These things, remembered, heard about, forgotten, passed through Papalie’s mind; he did not want to offend dear Sister Elizabeth Caroline, who had so recently lost her husband. He would wait. But he feared that she had been carried away by some feverish phantasy; he has loved and admired his colleague, Henry Seidel, and their families had been bound up in the interests of the Moravian Brotherhood for generations. He thought of Henry’s little daughter.
“I will look in on little Agnes, on the way home,” he said. “I met Sister Maria Bloom actually, coming here,” he said. “Rest,” he said, “I will look after your little Agnes.”
I seem to hear him say “little Agnes,” or is it Mamalie who says “Agnes?” Mamalie says “Agnes,” so whoever I am, I am not now Lucy.
I was Lucy or old Aunt Lucia when I went over to the washstand, when I thought, “If she looks up and says, ‘Why aren’t you in bed, Helen’ or ‘What are you doing here in my room at this hour, Hilda,’ ” then I will know that all that about Shooting Star was a dream or a sort of waking dream or just thoughts while I was sitting there in her bed, picking out the patches of the old dresses they wore and the pervanche blue, she called it, that one of the old-girls from New Orleans sent Mamalie in a letter once, to show her the color of her bridesmaid’s dress when her sister was married.