It was hours before anyone got to the scene and in that time Arnold “the Actor” Anderson could not budge the dead man. Inch by inch, with incremental slowness and tiny sucking noises the earth crept over the Actor and into him, first swallowing his heels, back, elbows, and then stopping up his ears, so his body slowly filled with soupy, rich topsoil. At the last, he could not hear his own scream. Dirt filled his nose and then his tipped up straining mouth. No matter how he spat, the earth kept coming and the mud trickled down his throat. Slowly, infinitely slowly, bronchia by bronchia the earth stopped up each passage of his lungs and packed them tight. The ground absorbed him. When at last the first member of the reluctantly formed posse arrived, he thought at first the robber had escaped, but then saw how only the hands of the Actor, clutching Berndt’s arms and back like a raft, still extended above the level of the horizon.
FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
After she came to, nursed by her own former sisters in the hospital, a bullet crease shadowing her mind, did Agnes DeWitt sorrow in her bones that she had teasingly pushed Berndt away that morning? Did she dream all that month, while she hovered in and out of death, of his entering and her receiving him? Recall looking into his eyes pillowed close to hers? Long for the rough cup of his hand on her breast? No, not for a moment. Rather, she thought again of music. Chopin. The kind bullet that split and roped her scalp had remarkably fused her musical joys with all memories of Berndt.
She didn’t even recall, donning her jacket, how it came to be fitted behind the satin lining with an astonishing amount of money. Though she’d lost portions of her memory, she had not lost her wits, and she said nothing. Counted it in secret. Kept it safe in a Fargo bank. So she was well off. Berndt had written a will in which he declared her his common-law wife and left to her the farm and all upon it. There, she continued to raise rose-comb bantams, dominickers, reds. She played piano, too, for hours, and practiced more intensely than ever. She began to read. In the convent, she had not been permitted to read beyond her daily prayers and the lives of the saints. Now, with a town library full of volumes she’d never touched, she became a reader. A wolfish, selfish, maddened, hungry reader who let the chickens scream and peck one another to death, who ignored the intelligent loneliness of the pig and forgot to milk the groaning cow. She read or she played piano, did little else except that she did keep teaching. Only her toughest chickens survived.
Perhaps a season or so after Berndt’s death, her students noticed she would stop in the middle of a lesson and either pick up a book to gulp a page in with her eyes, or smile out the window as though welcoming a long expected visitor. One day the neighbor children went to pick up the usual order of eggs and were most struck to see the white-and-black-flecked dominickers flapping up in alarm around Miss DeWitt as she stood bare upon the green grass.
Tough, nonchalant, legs slightly bowed, breasts jutting a bit to either side and the dark flare of hair flicking up the center of her. Naked. She looked at the students with remote kindness. Asked, “How many dozen?” Walked off to gather the eggs.
That episode with the chickens made the gossip table rounds. People put it off to Berndt’s death and an unstringing of her nerves. Still, she lost only a Lutheran student or two. She continued playing the organ for Mass, the celestial Bach, and at home, in the black, black nights, Chopin. As she had formerly when a Christ-dedicated virgin, she played with unbearable simplicity. Her music was so finely told it hurt to listen to the notes that struck the high sweet breeze. If she was asked, once, by an innocent student too young to understand the meaning of discretion but having overheard some story about Miss Agnes DeWitt — some very alert student longing perhaps to see the dimple where the bullet was dug from her hip or push aside the lively darts and strands of her hair to find the curved clef of a scar — if that student were to ask Miss Agnes DeWitt why she did not wear her clothes, sometimes, Miss Agnes DeWitt would answer that she removed her clothing when she played the music of a particular composer, when she played at her finest, and when the mood would strike her. No other display of appreciation could express her pure intent. Miss DeWitt would meditatively nod and say in the firmest manner that when one enters into the presence of such music, one should be naked. And then she would touch the keys.
FATHER DAMIEN MODESTE
(THE FIRST)
When she didn’t show up for several days on end to play the organ, it was known that Miss DeWitt was suffering from nerves again. Incrementally, tortuously, unnecessarily, she was unblessed by tiny fragments of memory. Berndt materialized, cruelly, touch by touch, until he was all there but not there. A word and a look, a moment they had spent together, had apparently entered the heart of Agnes to be kept sealed and safe until, for no particular reason, she was to be tormented by an elusive recovery. She shut herself away. Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship. Some grieve with tears and some with dry howls. Some grieve like water, some burn. Some are fuel for the fire of sorrow and some are stone. Agnes was pure slate, dark and impenetrable.
Even books didn’t help — she began and discarded them until they threatened her couch in tottering stacks.
A priest en route to his Indian mission and taking wayfarer’s advantage of the local rectory’s hospitality was dispatched to the suffering widow with communion — of which she now partook as she lived no longer in a state of mortal sin. She heard his knock, but did not rise to meet him, only called out from her place on the couch that he should enter, and so he did. Father Damien Modeste was a small, prunish, inquisitive man of middle age who had been called by his God, from a comfortable parish near Chicago, to missionize Indians. Momentarily intrigued, she sat up, but then almost immediately she lost interest. He gave her communion. Took what food she’d set out. And then, as she was silent in her blanket, brooding, he remained a bit longer and attempted to raise her spirits by telling her of his zeal.
“I am going north,” he insisted, and went into detail regarding the harrowing details of his trip to the reservation. “Letters addressed to me by my fellow priest, Father Hugo, confirm the deep need for my service. Oh, there had been inroads. We are not the first generation of priests, but the devil…”
Here Father Damien paused, gauging Miss DeWitt’s despairing reserve, licked his thin lips, and went on, “The devil works with a shrewd persistence, Miss DeWitt, and is never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven. Our labor is required here on earth, in the ordinary world. Evil, oh yes, evil—”
“What do you know of evil?” Miss DeWitt’s attention shifted suddenly from the acorn pattern of the wallpaper to the prematurely withered face of the missionary. He opened his mouth to go eagerly forward. But before he could speak, Miss DeWitt did.
“I’ve seen evil,” she told her confessor, firmly. “It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size ten. The feet are narrow. The hands are square. The build is slight and I’d say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I’ve seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock.”
Father Modeste, already in possession of the story, nodded with barely hidden avidity.
“God dispensed great justice that day.”
“Selectively.”
Now Miss DeWitt glared tiredly at her piano.
“I couldn’t play this afternoon. Something haunts me, as though another terrible memory is ready to pour into my mind and only a sheer finger’s breadth of earth is holding it in place.”
“I suppose you are referring”—here Father Damien coughed delicately—“to your… ah… companion.”
“Yes,” Agnes admitted, unwillingly. She hated being pegged and didn’t much like this priest with the avid eyes. She touched the frail mend of the bullet’s crease. “Only a short time ago, I was a sister in the local convent, having taken my temporary vows at a very young age. I remember every word, every Mass, every confession I made, every note I played. But only at times do I remember Berndt’s features. And yet I recall with unwished clarity the face of the man who killed him! Fortunately, I often see another man, one I’ve never met, hair parted far over to the left, a deep-eyed brow, a broad, beaky nose, a small and rather full mouth and low cheekbones, lumpy and sad.”
“Is it him?” The priest was curious.
“Him who?”
“Your companion, may he rest—”
“No, not him,” said Agnes DeWitt, her fingers moving suddenly, flying on the tea plate, tapping, possessed by the thought of the photograph reproduced in the frontispiece of her favorite musical text. Chopin! Chopin! Father Modeste changed the subject in some bemusement. What was there to say? He tried to round the horn and cleave to his original subject all in one sentence.
“Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways. For that reason, I’ve studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo. Ah, poor unfortunate Father Hugo! His death of the sweating fever was compared by witnesses, I have it in a letter, to Christ’s agony in the garden. Blood, yes, beads of it all over him. He sweated blood from every pore of his body.”
Diverted, Agnes imagined the scene. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.
“Aren’t you afraid?” she asked, but her voice was mocking, for truly, there was more to fear for her in a simple bank visit.
Father Damien raked his strands of hair back. His hand was a yellow claw. Something about the distracted way he mumbled out an answer in the negative told Agnes that he was, indeed, nervously disposed. The urge to tease him came upon her.
“I would be afraid,” she said. “Not so much of the Indians themselves, but of the many plagues and vermin that assail them — most pathetic of all God’s doomed creatures! Lice are very catching, for instance, and the devil trains them to descend in droves on the unwary priest who forgets to bless himself before he enters one of their homes.”
Father Damien was silent in surprise.
“Oh, I’ll bless myself all right,” he said at last. “With a lye bath every week. And constitutionals. I will look after my health.”
Agnes DeWitt could not help but tease more sharply. “Will you really bathe in lye? How brutal! And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in séances.”
“Most likely.”
“Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne.”
“No doubt.”
“There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers!”
Father Damien could not help glancing down at his lean thighs, pressed together under his cassock. They didn’t look all that tempting even to him. He really had to go. He dispensed a quick blessing and left with the cookies pressed on him by Agnes DeWitt, whom he had managed, though not by the avenues he’d attempted, to cheer so thoroughly that she rose from her couch, folded her blanket, and sitting down at her piano laughed so hard her fingers dropped off the keys.