“You want to,” she held a finger up to him. “I know. I can tell.”
Wanting was not the problem. Not going with her was the problem. In desperation, Father Jude went to ask Father Damien what he should do, and to try to elicit counsel that would shore up his resolve not to venture to the Bingo Palace, or anywhere, with Lulu.
“I’m no help,” said Father Damien, “I won’t tell you what to do. You wouldn’t listen if I did.”
“I’m not asking you to dissuade me,” said Father Jude, gathering his pride. “I suppose, anyway, it’s not a place a priest should likely venture.”
“I venture.”
“Do you go with her too?”
“Of course,” said Father Damien. “The years between us have shrunk away. Since I retired from my active role in the Church to write my reports, Lulu has been kind enough to relieve my solitude with occasional trips to the Bingo Palace. There, we sit among friends, enjoying the workings of chance as we sip on cold drinks. We listen to the gossip, the bragging over grandchildren and lamenting of the actions of grown sons and daughters. She listens and I smile. She does not judge and I need not absolve, for after all these years my forgiveness is taken for granted.”
Father Jude nodded, flexed his hands, sighed wearily. “I should just go to bed and forget about this. But I know I won’t. I’ll end up going with her and going to the devil.”
He said the last extravagantly and earned a disapproving frown from Damien. “She is good,” said the old priest, “one day you will understand this. She is goodness itself.”
Three hours passed in which he thought she’d forgotten all about him. Then she came back and asked him again, just to make sure, and she brushed against him when she did this and he said, in that instant, yes he would. He got into her car. As soon as he did so, he realized that he’d never let a woman drive him anywhere before. He should have seen it coming, then, as he rode along in the sun-struck, dark, red seat in unaccustomed passivity. He’d never been so alone with a woman, except in the anonymity of the confessional. And now that it was just the two of them in so small a space, he wanted to drive forever. And then they were at the Bingo Palace.
“I’ll stake you,” she said, purchasing a bingo package. They sat down together at a long table with ashtrays in front of a big-screen TV on a stage. Not long, and the numbers rolled off the announcer’s lips. On B-10, Father Jude’s mouth went dry. His glasses fogged on G-40, and by the time they’d cleared and he saw the possibilities his lips were buzzing, numb, and he dabbed delicately on the square O-63.
“Someone else bingoed.” She tore off the flimsy sheet of numbers and tossed it away. Then she asked him what she’d got him here to ask him, solo and in her power: “What are you doing with Father Damien?”
The implication being, What are you doing to him.
“Interviewing him,” said Father Jude.
“He looks tired.” Lulu dabbed smoothly, marking a number he’d missed. “But he also looks”—and here she stamped his paper just a bit harder—“stronger. He actually looks stronger and healthier than I’ve seen him in quite a while. So whatever you’re interviewing him about…”
“Church business.”
“Seems he likes to talk about Church business then. What kind of business?”
Somehow, the way she asked, conversationally and distractedly, as though she had a perfect right to ask and know, left him undefended. He told her. Horrified later, he couldn’t remember the exact words and all that went with them, but he did know he’d treated her like a confidante and colleague. Not just telling but discussing the implications of what was to become of whatever findings he made, and even worrying about the difficulty of establishing a literal or factual truth when there were opposing versions of Leopolda’s life and story, when the life — as opposed to the evidence of miraculous interventions — did not add up.
“Should I be telling you all of this?” he asked at one point.
“Why not?” she asked calmly.
He couldn’t think of a reason, and then he couldn’t think of anything. He was looking at her helplessly. He couldn’t look away.
“You’ve got it bad,” she said, diagnosing his fever like a compassionate doctor.
He mumbled agreement and the great burden of his feeling pressed up all around him in a buzz of noise. Saying it lifted away the burden of strangeness. Relieved, he smiled at her, and then she was staring straight into his eyes, with an easy, knowing sympathy that made his blood hum in his ears.
LEOPOLDA’S PASSION
Father Jude Miller had always loved to read about saints — the first and oldest of course somewhat apocryphal, the stories structured to end with ingenious tortures, the saints even in agony making clever retorts to butchers and emperors. As well, he loved the more contemporary saints whose lives obtained of more possibility of emulation — he marveled at their sense of sacrifice and fervor. He found himself dwelling on the symmetry of the saints’ passions, or stories, on their simplicity of line. He was having trouble with passion, from the Latin pati, to suffer, defined in the Catholic Dictionary as a written account of the sufferings and death of one who laid down his life for the faith. He was persuaded that the God he knew, at least, wanted him to write a passion, a recognition for this very complex person, Leopolda.
Besides that, he wanted to get the whole thing over with, this mission. As soon as possible, he would then leave the priesthood, immediately marry Lulu, get old with her. Wait, they were old already. They would die in each other’s arms, then. He must concentrate. He turned back to the task of describing Leopolda.
With some dismay, in the welter of files and note cards in fans and toppling stacks, Father Jude understood that to tell the story as a story was to pull a single thread, only, from the pattern of this woman’s life, leaving the rest — the beautiful and brutal tapestry of contradictions — to persist in the form of a lie.
Still, he tried.
Sister Leopolda of Little No Horse was born in extremely humble circumstances and during a time when accurate birth and death records were not kept, especially for families of wanderers among the Ojibwe, Cree, and
métis
families of the plains frontier. Although only sporadically exposed to the teachings of the Church, her piety was marked from a very young age.
Here, he stopped, shuffling through his papers for examples noted during the brief period, especially, when she had lived in Argus with relatives. She was spared during a tornado that had ripped the town apart. Though she attributed her survival to prayer and to the rigid defense of her virginity, an elderly man who, as a child in that family, had been lifted with her into the roil of air that same day, said otherwise: She used to cuff me around, slap me, scream, if that’s what you call praying. Yet there had also been stories of her fervid attendance at Holy Mass. She was unflaggingly pious. Though Father Damien remembered their first encounter in the church as disturbing, others reported a dull metallic glow surrounded her when she was lost in prayer, and the strong, resinous scent of burning pine pitch, not unpleasant, filled the air when she spoke out loud the sincere act of contrition.
She had a great deal to be contrite about, Father Jude thought, so why was she then rewarded with spiritual favors? Not his place to figure out, he told himself, and continued writing.