“Just think,” she toasted history, speaking aloud to all of the invisible, assembled spirits. “Think all the way back to Agnes. If only she’d banked an hour earlier or later. If only she’d managed to fall off the moving car. If only Berndt hadn’t been going to Upsala to fix that harrow. How different my life. A farm woman with a beautiful piano.” Agnes held the bottle high and drank, deeply, to her lost Caramacchione and to her lost life as Agnes Vogel. Then she drank again to the huge life she had known at Little No Horse.
“Forgive me for drinking wine.” She asked pardon of the spirits. “I’m too weak and I’m alone. I have too many thoughts. If only the priest, the first Damien, hadn’t visited me with his doubts and stories. If only, if only. If only I’d thought to get out of the way when the river came for me. How easy my life would have been. How tedious! Thank god, I met your visionary, strange servant Nanapush!”
Agnes started to remember, and in remembering she couldn’t help laughing. In great joy at the foolishness of all design, she allowed herself to think openly and deeply of the incredible events of the last year of her old friend’s life. The even wash of black sky, clouded over and starless, fell about Agnes to muffle her closely. Whole sequences involving Nanapush bubbled up and she laughed at the awful absurdity, at the picture of her old friend dodging moose pellets, and the alert look on his face when he sat up at his own wake. Nanapush! The laughter grabbed in Agnes’s belly and she doubled over until she painfully gasped. Nanapush. The laughter cut her breath short and she took a huge wheezing gulp of air that made her snort. Aaah, it was all too unbearable. Tears squeezed out of her eyes shut tight in mirth. She’d taper off, but then the laughter spurted out and began, stronger, with a sweet, free vengeance that racked her ribs. Laughter traveled up through her feet, down her arms when she lifted her arms. It burst from her gut, unexpectedly. The laughter made her dizzy.
To clear her head, Agnes tried to lurch to her feet, thinking mirthfully, I’m going to laugh myself to death! It was then that she felt the stifled warm report of a blood vessel bursting just above her left ear. One side of the world went dark. She sank to her knees and with an amused wonder watched as slowly, with an infinite kindness, darkness covered up the other side as well. Sightless, now, she sank to earth and felt the heat of the leaping fire on her face. I am going, I am going, she thought. Underneath her and before her, a wide plain of utter emptiness opened. Trusting, yearning, she put her arms out into that emptiness. She reached as far as she could, farther than she was capable, held her hands out until at last a bigger, work-toughened hand grasped hold of hers.
With a yank, she was pulled across.
MARY KASHPAW
She paddled out to the island in a beat-up and awkward old aluminum canoe. She got out in shallow water, laced together her big rough shoes and slung them over her neck, tied the boat to a tough tree root, and waded ashore. She sat down on a powerful twist of exposed root. Methodically, very carefully, Mary Kashpaw tied the shoes back on her feet. Creaking monumentally, she stood. The island could be traversed side to side in ten minutes. Walking the rough shore might take half an hour to negotiate. The center was rock, piled rock rising in a solid cliff. Everyone knew the cave that Moses Pillager used and where his drum still lived. His cats had long ago died of boredom or devoured one another. Birds sang thick in the scuttering bushes, and a red squirrel chattered high in the lyre spread of an old white pine. Mary Kashpaw crossed a bed of soft duff, made her way over to the side of the island where the camping was easiest. There, she saw him right away and she stopped. He was no more than a fold of black cloth crumpled near the white ash circle of his fire. One arm was stretched alongside his hip and the other was bent, a pillow under his head. She knew before she understood that the stillness of his body was the immobility of earth.
She relighted his campfire, rolled him into a blanket, and laid out his limbs straight and true. She handled him gently, as though his bones were flower stalks, his skull fragile as a blown egg. She folded his arms across his waist, and then Mary Kashpaw sat beside him. Her eyes were clouded, her body stunned, her thoughts far away and tiny as a view through the wrong end of the telescope. Her heart was numb with a kind of odd embarrassment.
She felt shy now, entrusted with far too much power. Left with the choice whether to bring him back across the lake in the canoe or to bury him here on the island, she froze. She listened to the pines, paced, even considered opening a bottle of the wine at his feet although she never drank. She watched the waves, shut her eyes, fell into a drowsy suspension wherein she received what felt like an answer. She found the Ziploc bag of money and the note. It took a while to read the note, letter by letter she made it out. Of course she understood exactly what he’d expected.
She buried him in the lake.
Pulled him to the hacked rowboat and hoisted him in. Chose rocks to weigh him down, lashed them tightly into his clothes with strips of plastic taken from his stash of goods. Brought her canoe around and lined it up with the funeral boat. Towing her priest in his damaged rowboat, holes hacked in the bottom, she paddled out into the lake. She stopped where the water was of an anaerobic cleanliness, cold, black, and of an endless depth. As the sky filled with light, she watched the old heavy rowboat slowly fill and then sink. Father Damien’s slight figure, serene in its halo of white hair, lay just under the waves. As the dark water claimed him, his features blurred. His body wavered for a time between the surface and the feminine depth below.
EPILOGUE: A FAX FROM THE BEYOND
1997
At the convent of the mission of the Sacred Heart at Little No Horse, it was uncommon to receive donations too large to be set upon the revolving lazy Susan, which conducted boxes of macaroni, surplus apples and eggs, sweet corn in season, and canned corn in winter from the world outside to the world behind the walls. But this afternoon, having rung the buzzer and disappeared, a person or persons left within its original cardboard box an item of the latest office equipment.
Sister Adelphine had followed Father Jude Miller on his permanent move to Little No Horse. He had succeeded in persuading the bishop to allow him to conduct continued research on the question of his new project, the proposed blessedness and possible sainthood of Father Damien Modeste, recently perished. Now, Sister Adelphine answered the ring of the bells. She entered the room in a state of disturbance, for she had been canning passionately, attempting to set by a load of turnips that had appeared just that morning in many bread bags saved and reused by a thrifty farm family. So many turnips, all at once, indigestible. But if preserved, a welcome addition to many a forthcoming winter stew.
She’d dried her hands, given instructions to the sturdy novice who was helping her, and made her way to the anteroom, but was too late to thank the visitor or ask instructions for the use of the instrument, which she carried, with help from Father Jude when he arrived, into the room used for settling the account books, keeping track of donations, sending letters to the diocese, and paying bills.
The room was neat, and upon a wooden desk salvaged from the renovation of the local high school, there was sufficient room for the contraption. Father Jude lifted it from its carton and set it down gently. The fax machine was a small thing, rather pleasant and neat, made of off-white plastic, bearing lettered buttons and a small blank screen for a digital readout.