– You needn’t have, says Mary Voolnd.
– No?
– No. It’s all included in the so-called fuck.
– I can imagine whatever I want?
– Yes. But hurry!
16
We are at the heart of the winter of 1680. Catherine Tekakwitha is cold and dying. This is the year she died. This is the big winter. She was too sick to leave the cabin. Secretly starving, the thorn mat continues to bounce her body like a juggler. Now the church was too far away. But, le P. Chauchetière tells us, she spent a part of each day on her knees or balanced on a crude bench. The trees came to beat her. We are now at the beginning of Holy Week before Easter, 1689. Holy Monday, she weakened considerably. They told her she was dying fast. As Marie-Thérèse caressed her with birch, Catherine prayed:
– O God, show me that the Ceremony belongs to Thee. Reveal to your servant a fissure in the Ritual. Change Thy World with the jawbone of a broken Idea. O my Lord, play with me.
At the mission there was a curious custom. They never carried the Holy Sacrament to the cabin where the sick lay. Instead, they carried the sick people on a bark stretcher to the chapel, hazardous as the trip was. The girl was definitely too sick for the stretcher ride. What were they to do? Customs were not that easily come by in early Canada, and they longed for a Jesus of Canada dignified by convention and antiquity, as He is today, pale and plastic above the guilty traffic tickets. This is why I love the Jesuits. They argued about to which they had the deepest obligation, History or Miracle, or to put it more heroically, History or Possible Miracle. They had seen a strange light in Catherine Tekakwitha’s mucous eyes. Dare they deny her the supreme consolation of the Body of the Savior in His Viatique Change, the Wafer Disguise? They gave their answer to the dying girl, half naked among her thorn-torn rags. The crowd cheered. An exception was justified in the case of Perfectly Shy, as some of the converts had begun to call her. To dignify the occasion, we have the humble detail, Catherine asked Marie-Thérèse to cover her with a new blanket or anything to hide her half-nakedness. The whole village followed the Holy Sacrament as it was borne to the cabin of the invalid. The crowd pressed around her mat, all the converted Indians of the mission. She was their best hope. The French were murdering their brethren in the forests, but this dying girl would somehow certify the difficult choices they had made. If ever there was gloom thickly laced with unmaterialized miracles, it was here, it was now. The voice of the priest began. After the general absolution, with ardent filmed eyes and bruised tongue, she received the “Viatique du Corps de Nôtre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ.” Visibly she was dying now. Many of the staring crowd wanted to be remembered in the prayers of the departing girl. Le P. Cholenec asked her if she would receive them individually. He asked her softly because she was in agony. She smiled and said she would. Throughout the whole day they filed by her mat with their burdens.
– I stepped on a beetle. Pray for me.
– I injured the waterfall with urine. Pray for me.
– I fell on my sister. Pray for me.
– I dreamed I was white. Pray for me.
– I let the deer die too slowly. Pray for me.
– I long for human morsel. Pray for me.
– I made a grass whip. Pray for me.
– I got the yellow out of a worm. Pray for me.
– I tried to grow an ointment beard. Pray for me.
– The west wind hates me. Pray for me.
– I darkened the old crop. Pray for me.
– I gave my rosary to the English. Pray for me.
– I soiled a loincloth. Pray for me.
– I killed a Jew. Pray for me.
– I sold beard ointment. Pray for me.
– I smoke manure. Pray for me.
– I forced my brother to watch. Pray for me.
– I smoke manure. Pray for me.
– I spoiled a singsong. Pray for me.
– I touched myself while paddling. Pray for me.
– I tortured a raccoon. Pray for me.
– I believe in herbs. Pray for me.
– I got the orange out of a scab. Pray for me.
– I prayed for a famine lesson. Pray for me.
– I dirtied on my beads. Pray for me.
– I’m 84. Pray for me.
One by one they kneeled and passed her bristling Lenin couch, leaving with her their pitiful spirit luggage, until the whole cabin resembled one vast Customs House of desire, and the mud beside her bearskin was polished by so many kneecaps that it shone like the silver sides of the last and only rocket scheduled to escape from the doomed world, and as the ordinary night fell over the Easter village the Indians and the Frenchmen huddled beside their barking fires, fingers pressed to their lips in gestures of hush and blowing kisses. Oh, why does it make me so lonely to tell this? After the evening prayers, Catherine Tekakwitha asked permission to go into the woods once more. Le P. Cholenec granted her the permission. She dragged herself past the cornfield under its blanket of melting snow, into the fragrant pine trees, into the powdery shadows of the forest, on the levers of broken fingernails she pulled herself through the dim March starlight, to the edge of the icy Saint Lawrence River, to the frozen root of the Crucifixion. Le P. Lecompte tells us, “Elle y passa un quart d’heure à se mettre les épaules en sang par une rude discipline.” There she spent 15 minutes whipping her shoulders until they were covered with blood, and this she did without her friend. It is now the next day, Holy Wednesday. It was her last day, this day of consecration to the mysteries of the Eucharist and the Cross. “Certes je me souviens encore qu’à l’entrée de sa dernière maladie.” Le P. Cholenec knew it was her last day. At three o’clock in the afternoon the final agony began. On her knees, praying with Marie-Thérèse and several other whipped girls, Catherine Tekakwitha stumbled over the names of Jesus and Mary mispronouncing them. “… elle perdit la parole en prononçant les noms de Jésus et de Marie.” But why didn’t you record the exact sounds she made? She was playing with the Name, she was mastering the good Name, she was grafting all the fallen branches to the living Tree. Aga? Muja? Jumu? You idiots, she knew the Tetragrammaton! You let her get away! We let another one get away! And now we have to see if her fingers bleed! We had her there, nailed and talkative, ready to undo the world, and we let the sharp mouths of the relic boxes gnaw at her bones. Parliament!
17
She was dead at 3:30 in the afternoon. It was Holy Wednesday, April 17, 1680. She was 24 years old. We are in the heart of the afternoon. Le P. Cholenec was praying beside the new corpse. His eyes were closed. Suddenly he opened his eyes and cried out in amazement, “Je fis un grand cri, tant je fus saisi d’étonnement.”
– Eeeeeoooowwww!
The face of Catherine Tekakwitha had turned white!
– Viens ici!
– Look at her face!
Let us examine the eyewitness account of le P. Cholenec, and let us try to suppress our political judgments, and remember that I promised you good news. “From the age of four years, Catherine’s face had been branded by the Plague; her sickness and her mortifications had further contributed to the disfigurement. But this face, so battered and so very swarthy, underwent a sudden change, about a quarter of an hour after her death. And in a moment she became so beautiful and so white …”
– Claude!
Le P. Chauchetière came running, and a village of Indians followed him. As if in peaceful sleep, as if under a parasol of glass, she floated into the dark Canadian afternoon, her face serene and bright as alabaster. Thus she launched her death, upturned face of white, under the concentrated gaze of the village. Le P. Chauchetière said:
– C’était un argument nouveau de crédibilité, dont Dieu favorisait les sauvages pour leur faire goûter la foi.
– Shhhhhhh!
– Hush!
Two Frenchmen happened to be passing by later on. One of them said:
– Look at that pretty girl sleeping there.
W
hen they found out who it was, they knelt in prayer.
– Let us make the coffin.
At that precise moment the girl entered the eternal machinery of the sky. Looking back over her atomic shoulder, she played a beam of alabaster over her old face as she streamed forward on the insane grateful laughter of her girl friend.
18
Red and white, skin and pimples, open daisies and burning weeds – pace, old friend and all you racists. Let it be our skill to create legends out of the disposition of the stars, but let it be our glory to forget the legends and watch the night emptily. Let the mundane Church serve the White Race with a change of color. Let the mundane Revolution serve the Gray Race with a burning church. Let the Manifestoes attach all our property. We are in love with a tower view of rainbow bodies. Suffer the change from red to white, you who weave insignia, which is all of us in our night. But we are merely once upon a time. Another second from our raw fingers, now we are in love with pure flags, our privacy is valueless, we do not own our history, it is borne away in a shower of tiny seed dust and we filter it as in the network of a high drift of wild daisies, and our fashions change beautifully. A kite climbs over the hospital, some O.T. prisoners follow or ignore it, Mary and I, we slip into the orgy of vase Greeks and restaurant Greeks. A new butterfly rollercoasts on the jerky wax shadows of the greenery, small circus falls like air-pocketed kite, the village parachutist essays the tipping fern, plunging in blur Icarus postage stamps. Montréal laundry flaps from the high rent – but I fail perfectly naturally, since I’ve elected to swell the Fact Charity. Here is good news for most of us: all parties and churches may use this information. St. Catherine of Bologna dies in 1463, a nun of fifty. Her sisters buried her body without a casket. Soon the sisters felt guilty, wondering about all the weight of mud on her face. They were given permission to exhume the body. They scrape her face clean. It is found to have been only slightly distorted by pressure of the mud, perhaps a collapsed nostril the only trophy of 18 days’ interment. The body smelled sweet. As they examined it, “the body that was white as snow turned slowly red and exuded an oily liquid of an ineffable fragrance.”
19
The funeral of Catherine Tekakwitha. Anastasie and Marie-Thérèse worked softly over the body. They washed her limbs, stroked away the dried blood. They combed her hair and rubbed oil into it. They dressed her in white beaded robes of skin. With new moccasins they covered her two feet. Usually a corpse was carried to the church on a bark stretcher. The Frenchmen had made her a real coffin, “un vrai cercueil.”
– Don’t close it!
– Let me see!
The crowd had to be satisfied. They longed to contemplate her new beauty for another hour. We are now in Holy Thursday, day of sadness, day of joy, as her biographers observe. From the church they carried her to the great cross of the cemetery situated beside the river, where the girl loved to forge her prayers. Le P. Chauchetière and le P. Cholenec had argued about the location of the grave. Le P. Chauchetière wanted to bury her inside the church. Le P. Cholenec wished to avoid this singularity. During another grave-digging in which Catherine had participated, the priest had heard her state her own personal preference – beside the river.
– Then I give in.
The next day was Holy Friday. The missionaries preached the passion of Christ Jesus to an audience seized with the deepest emotion. They wanted to weep for longer time. They wouldn’t let the celebrant get past the first two words of the Vexilla.
– Vexilla re–
– No! No! Sob! Arrgghh!
– Vexilla regis–
– Stop! Time! Sob! Please!
That whole day and the next day, the priests witnessed the most excessive mortifications that they had ever seen.
– They’re tearing themselves apart!
– It’s happening!
On Friday night a woman rolled on thorns until the morning. Four or five nights later another woman did the same.
– Bring the fire closer.
They beat themselves until they bled. They crawled on their bare knees through the snow. Widows vowed never to remarry. Young married women took the vow and renounced remarriage should their husbands die. Married couples separated and promised to live as brother and sister. Le P. Chauchetière cites the good François Tsonnatoüan, who turned his wife into a sister. He made a little rosary which he called “Catherine’s Rosary.” It consisted of a cross on which he said the Credo, two “grains” for the Pater and the Ave, and three other “grains” for the three Gloria Patri. The news was passed from fire to fire, from convert to convert, from convert to heathen, from heathen to heathen, across the land of the Iroquois.
– La sainte est morte.
– The saint is dead.
In the early Church this type of popular recognition was called la béatification équipollente. Look down, look down, see the snowy mandala, see the whole village, see the figures writhing on the white field, try and see through the opaque prism of personal blister of accidental burn.
20
Here is the testimony of Captain du Luth, commandant of Fort Frontenac, a man after whom a Montréal street is named. He was, says le P. Charlevoix, “un des plus braves officiers que le Roy ait eus dans cette colonie.” He also gave his name to an American city on Lake Superior.
I, the undersigned, certify to whomever it may concern, that, having been tormented with the gout for twenty-three years, with such pain that for a space of three months I had no rest, I addressed myself to Catherine Tegahkouita, Iroquois virgin, deceased at Sault Saint-Louis a saint in the general opinion, and I promised to visit her grave, if God would give me back my health because of her intervention. I have been so perfectly cured, at the end of a novena which I arranged to be done in her honor, that for fifteen months now I have not suffered a single attack of gout. Fait au fort Frontenac, ce 15 août 1696.
Signé J. du Luth
21
Like a numbered immigrant in the harbor of North America, I hope to begin again. I hope to begin my friendship again. I hope to begin my rise to President. I hope to begin Mary again. I hope to begin my worship again to Thee who has never refused my service, in whose flashing memory I have no past or future, whose memory never froze into the coffin of history, into which your children, like amateur undertakers, squeeze the carelessly measured bodies of each other. Not the pioneer is the American dream, for he has already limited himself by courage and method. The dream is to be immigrant sailing into the misty aerials of New York, the dream is to be Jesuit in the cities of the Iroquois, for we do not wish to destroy the past and its baggy failures, we only wish the miracles to demonstrate that the past was joyously prophetic, and that possibility occurs to us most plainly on this cargo deck of wide lapels, our kerchief sacks filled with obsolete machine guns from the last war but which will astound and conquer the Indians.
22
The first vision of Catherine Tekakwitha appeared to le P. Chauchetière. Five days after the girl’s death, at four o’clock in the morning of Easter Monday, while he was hard at prayer, she came to him in a blur of glory. At her right was a church upside down. At her left was an Indian burning at the stake. The vision lasted two hours, and the priest had time to study it in ecstasy. This is why he had come to Canada. Three years later, in 1683, a hurricane hit the village, tipping over the 60-foot-long church. And in one of the attacks on the mission, an Iroquois convert was captured by the Onnontagués and burnt slowly while he proclaimed his Faith. These applications of the vision may satisfy the Church, dear friend, but let us beware of allowing an apparition to leak away into mere events. A useless church, a tortured man – are these not the usual factors in a saint’s flourishing? Eight days after her death she appeared to the old Anastasie in a blaze of light, her lower body beneath the belt dissolved in the brilliance, “le bas du corps depuis la ceinture disparaissant dans cette clarté.” Had she lent her other parts to you? She appeared also to Marie-Thérèse when she was alone in her cab
in and gently reproached her for some of the things she was doing.
The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers Page 39
