She took a coat from the mission store, a thing no one would recognize, a hatchet, the Ziploc bag of money, and another waterproof container of matches. Mary Kashpaw hadn’t trimmed Father Damien’s hair lately and it curled around her pate, a halo of white floss, so she brought a hairbrush. She threw in a heavy blanket, which she’d sink, and a nondescript pillow. She assembled all of these things and prepared for her trip as though for an adventure, which of course it was: death, the ultimate wilderness.
Rowing out to Spirit Island with cheese and crackers, candy bars, a bag of apples, and a case of wine, she stopped often to rest and to contemplate the easy chasing waves that rippled beside her. The wind was with her, so she corrected her drift and breathed the fire from her chest and the stinging emptiness from her muscles. The air was so pure and watery that it tasted like a tonic food. Her mind was phenomenally clear. Memories came back in waves, thoughts, passages of music, old songs Nanapush had taught her. They’d sing together once she reached the island. The trip took her most of the day, and it was dusk by the time she arrived, pulled up, and tied the boat to a tree.
The first night, all she did was start a tiny fire, curl up in the blanket, and eat crackers. Too tired even to uncork the wine, she gazed at the meek velvet tarp of the sky, the stars poking through, and she was visited in her drowsiness with a quiet intensity of happiness. Having unburdened herself of all that regarded her nemesis, she was right with the world. She had even forgiven Leopolda. The spirits of her friends, all those whom she’d loved, surrounded her. Gregory tumbling through the wall of books. His last, liquid golden stare, his hands cooling in her hands, his mouth set in an enigmatic half smile. She had parted lovingly with Mary Kashpaw and left off adequately with Father Jude. There was nothing left to torture herself over except, and this was inevitable, she didn’t want to die. And Lulu, she hated leaving her, especially in the middle of one of her flirtatious intrigues. And yet, she thought, with some hope, perhaps here on this island she would be protected from the black dog. Her soul might slip past the cur’s slimy teeth and sneak by the hell gates and pearly gates into that sweeter pasture, the heaven of the Ojibwe.
Next morning, she washed her face carefully in bits of broken sun. She took the hatchet to the boat and began to hack it apart, her arms so weak from the previous day’s exertions that she diminished it only by splinters. Bit by bit, however laboriously, she fed it to her new fire. The blaze gave off a warm friendliness that drew her to sit near. The day was cool and fresh. She ate an apple. A candy bar. At noon, she opened the first bottle of wine, toasted her surroundings, upended it, and drank to the dead.
“Make room,” she said cheerfully to the spirits in the sighing trees.
Dreamily comfortable, she planned. Her death would be simply another piece of the process, she would hardly notice it once the moment came. She’d be drunk, of course, but more than that, she’d be spiritually resigned and prepared. She would accomplish her own end as smoothly as all else. She would simply keep drinking until she got down to the last bottle and then, once she drained it, she’d put stones in her pockets and walk out where the water dropped suddenly to an unknown depth. She would open herself to the water, she would let creation fill her.
Not yet, though. Above her two eagles, a hunting pair, circled. Aloof, lethal, beautiful, they were like two gods who invented and now occasionally plucked their sustenance from the body of the world. She watched them intently, blinking into the whiteness of day. The fire sent shoots of sparks into the afternoon. She reviewed with hope the promise of slipping past the black dog into heaven, and drank, first keenly and then with numb greed, the pleasant blandness of the white Australian wine.
The end of the first bottle undid her. Complications arose. She was surprised how quickly her resolve shrank and how distinctly unpacified her thoughts and her feelings were. No matter what she’d done, no matter how many souls saved or neglected, no matter if she’d betrayed her nature as a woman or violated the vows of the long dead original Father Damien, her life was vapor, a thing of no substance, one note in the endless music, one note that faded out before the listener could catch its shape. Who was this Agnes, or this Damien, this overlay of leaves and earth? Her brain filled with a sound like the terrible jeering of sparrows in the eaves of the church. Her life was vast in its purposelessness, and yet confined to the narrow spectrum of her senses. She rocked beside the fire, her head in her hands.
The long night of the body came flooding back, her losses and stuffed desire. At her age, she was supposed to be at peace with the world, not filled with this darkling rage. The forgiveness she’d bestowed on the author of Berndt’s murder twisted in her brain like a weasel and she couldn’t subdue it. The forgiveness got out and turned its sharp teeth on her, sank to the quick in her heart a bitter thrill as she imagined the unborn children of Agnes and Berndt wrestling in the clean, straw-raising clouds of sun-glittering dust in the vast and windy barn. Agnes threw her head back, a headache spiked her temples. The pain probed open a door, a last new memory of the robbery came to her out of the dark.
Words. She heard herself as she gazed at the barrel of the Actor’s pistol. She told him that it was an old belief of her mother’s people that the soul of a murderer’s victim passes into the killer at the instant of death. “Are you prepared to bear the weight of my soul?” She had asked just this question before the gun went off, either causing the Actor to pull the trigger or ruining his aim by the hair that saved her life.
It was my soul that pressed him into the deep mud, she thought — I’ve never realized the weight of myself until now! Can I put it down? She asked this of the black sky, the stars. She no longer saw the constellations as she had before knowing them in Ojibwe, but saw the heavens as her friends defined them. Saw the otter. Saw the hole in the sky through which the creator had shot down at a blistering speed.
“Nanapush, Fleur, all of you!” She cried out to the ghosts of her friends, drunk and marveling with sorrow. “Come and sit with me.” When she poured just a bit of wine onto the ground, she felt Fleur approach, knew she sat just beyond the circle of firelight, in the rustling melt of shadows.
Reassured, she now sipped lightly, rested in a trance of increasing ease. Yes, it was time to put the weight down, the burden. The constant murmur of the pines, her beloved music, now became comprehensible to her in the same way that flows of Ojibwe language first began to make sense — a word here, a word there, a few connections, then the shape of ideas. Instead of growing duller, shutting down her senses, turning away from life, she found to her joy and consternation that she was growing keener. Her understanding was more intense, her vision wary and her hearing razor sharp. The roar and whisper of the pine needles intensified and she fell into a reverie of nostalgia.