Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  The narrative contained effusive gratitude to the Virgin, as well as long, descriptive paragraphs about her beauty and grace.

  Her hair rolls in gentle waves down her breast, at which one can imagine the infant Jesus suckling his first nourishment. In her gaze, I could imagine the smiles she produced upon the infant Jesus as He looked up at her, transfixed in the moments just after His birth in that humble stable on a cold Bethlehem night shiny with stars but unwelcoming to a bare babe. How fortunate He was to have such a Mother to cover Him and press Him to Her heart! Her voice, a lullaby of soft whispers, singing love songs in His infant ear! Her face, a beacon of love and steadfastness, a face bespeakt of devotion and allegiance. A Mother’s Love for the Ages for Jesus and for all the sons of the world!

  In this way, Our Lady of the North came to be printed, bound, and distributed, and by his death in 1878, Clement had recounted again and again, all over the new country, his miraculous encounter with Our Lady of the North. Pilgrims traveled great distances to fold their hands and listen to the blinded man tell his tale. They were enraptured by his tale of the Virgin Mother, sitting on a low tree branch in some accounts and floating on a cloud in others, wearing a white gown or a blue gown, a crown of roses on her head or a ring of roses around her waist, depending upon Clement’s whim. They were transfixed as Clement described how she covered him, saved him, and told him a prophecy that he was to reveal only at his death.

  On the morning of his death in 1878, at the age of thirty-eight, Clement Piety drank chicory coffee and ate a piece of bread with Big Waters. He stood and said, “We can’t wait for miracles to occur. The greatest wonderments manifest themselves as we walk the blade’s edge between life and death.” He picked up his guiding cane and walked out the door and toward the river.

  Big Waters, her mouth suddenly lax and her eyes blinded by flashes of light, let him go.

  51

  Lydian

  THOUGH SHE TRIED AND though she wanted to, Mother St. John couldn’t bring Big Waters out of her listless and silent bereavement in the days after Clement’s disappearance into the waters of the St. Croix, from which he had so miraculously emerged twice before. Her mouth, and her eye and the extremities of her left side, hung low. She drooled and wet herself. With so many children now, coming by trainloads from the East in some months, and so many sick to tend, and so many new nurses and teachers to supervise, Mother St. John felt helpless in regard to Big Waters, her old friend, and she admitted to Father Paul that the old woman needed more help than she could give.

  Father Paul arranged for a bed at the nearby Convent of St. Joseph of Carandelet, where a new passel of nuns had for more than a decade been assisting the deaf and the mute and the old and the unwanted in a way not so dissimilar from Mother St. John’s work with the orphans in Stillwater. Big Waters would be a fine fit there.

  Big Waters made no objection or fuss as she was moved. Mother St. John patted her hand and kissed her on the forehead and that was it between two women who had raised more children together than anyone could ever count.

  The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carandelet began their ministries in France at the onset of the French Revolution and grew so that they spread to St. Louis in the late 1840s and grew again so that they were able to send a contingent up the Mississippi to St. Paul in 1860, where they established St. Joseph’s Help for the Deaf and Dumb. Here is where Big Waters arrived, carried into a large kitchen in the arms of Father Paul.

  Standing at a table lined from one end to the other with nut cakes and fruit pies and sugar pastries was a nun dressed in the regular black-and-white habit but dusted with flour and sugar. She smiled at the old woman and said, “One thing to know about the French is that they know how to make a sweet.” She hacked a slice off a round cake and put it on a plate. “You eat this now, old one, and I’m going to sample this one I’ve just got coming out of the oven. You arrived just at the right time.”

  Nearly thirty years before, a pair of old German bachelors named Schmidt went out to check their traps and happened upon a girl crumpled in a snowdrift. Crimson blossomed from her. The men lived in a simple one-room cabin with two doors and two windows, finished their supper at three o’clock, cleaned their fingernails with toothpicks while their food settled, then washed the dishes and dried them, and put on their coats to walk to the place where the warm spring fed the river to check their muskrat traps. This evening, they each closed the curtain on their respective window. They walked out their respective door. They locked its lock with the key they each kept in their coat pocket. This evening as they approached the bank where everyone knew the Schmidt brothers laid their barrel traps in the water, the one brother said to the other, “Looks liken someone’s thieven our skins.” In truth, all he could see through the trees and with what little daylight was left, was the shape of a body spread out along the river’s edge a few feet from where he knew his trap sat, more than likely full of one or two or maybe even three animals. The skins brought a good price, and the brothers stewed the meat with parsnips and onions and pepper if they had any.

  “Better notten be if he knowsen what’s good for him,” said the other. The brothers picked up their pace as best they could along the icy path, well compacted and slick with the mist that came off the river. They squinted to make better sense of what the one thought he was seeing: a man curled up on the ground near the place where their muskrats congregated. Both men had eyeballs full of cataracts. For the thin brother, even on the clearest day in the brightest light, the world was cloudy at best, as if cold milk had been poured over his pupils and he was expected to see through it. For the fat brother, the world as seen through his eyes was full of black holes surrounded by halos. He sometimes described this phenomenon to his brother as “Polka-dotted. Like Ma’s Sunday bonnet.” But with their German sensibilities and inborn distrust of anyone but the other of them, they assumed a thief was raiding their animals. The Schmidt brothers were forever on the lookout for people trying to rob them, and they had lived a long life rarely being victim to such crimes. They attributed this fact to their intense vigilance.

  “You besten putten those muskrats back where you founden them!” yelled the fat one. “What do you seen?” he said to his brother. “Tellen me what he looks liken.”

  The skinny brother tightened his grip on his walking stick. He thought he may have to wield it against the thief. He approached the bank.

  “Hey, you!” yelled the fat brother.

  Both brothers sat down on their bottoms and slid down the bank on slides made by beavers. The one brother pointed his walking stick like a gun at the thief.

  “Hey, I saiden,” said the fat brother. “We’re talken to you. Are you deaf? Gotten wax in your ears?”

  The thin brother used his stick to steady himself as he stood. The fat brother was out of breath. The thin brother helped him to his feet.

  “Oooh. I’m stiff as a board,” said the fat one. He placed one hand on his hip and raised the other into the air. “Thaten smarts.” He twisted one way and then the other until his back cracked. “Well, let’s go seen,” he said. They walked a bit and got a good view of the body.

  “It’s bad for him,” said the fat to the thin. “He’s been out heren a while, sure. Also he looken to be a girl.”

  The thin brother leaned in to get a better look. They knelt beside her and touched her cheek. She was cold, but clouds of mist arose from her mouth. She was breathing.

  “Is she deaden?” said the fat one.

  The thin one shrugged his shoulders.

  The fat one touched her shoulders. “Shesen breathing,” he said. “And shivering.” He pointed to her skirt and to the snow around her. “And she’s bloody in them neverparts.” He eased closer to the girl. He put his face nose to nose with her and breathed warm air over her nose. “My. My. My. What happenden to you, little girl?” Then he slapped her gently on one cheek and the other. He sat back. “We’re gonnen picken you up and carryen you home, so don’ten be sca
red,” he said. “Can you hearen me?” he said.

  The girl fluttered her eyes a little. And the men came to life at that. The fat brother moved behind her and perched her up in his lap. The girl seemed to be trying to say something.

  “What’s that?” asked the fat. “Can you talken louder? I don’ten hear too well.”

  “I fell down,” she said.

  “You fellen down?”

  “May as well check the traps so long as we came all the way,” said the fat.

  “Makes sense to me,” said the thin. “Nothing for you to do but wait until I get back anyway.”

  The two old bachelors brought a great bounty of muskrats to their humble home that day. And Lydian took the fat one’s bed, and he took to the floor. She stayed with them, getting strong, learning to sing German songs about bells and towers and castles, listening to fairy tales about dwarves and forests and trolls until the fat one died the next year and cataracts in the thin one’s eyes blinded him completely. He sold the cabin to the lumber company and moved to St. Joseph’s Help for the Dumb and Deaf, which is where he thought would be the most practical place to go. The girl accompanied him and began the life of a sister in the Convent of St. Joseph of Carandelet, whose work on earth was to tend to the deaf, the dumb, and now the blind. She’d always thought it would be nice to be a sister anyway.

  Big Waters moved her gums but said nothing. Father Paul helped her onto a stool and pushed the plate in front of her. Big Waters pinched a corner off the cake and lifted it to her lips.

  “You look quite familiar to me,” said the nun. “But I just can’t place you.”

  Big Waters chewed on the side of her mouth that worked. Tears welled. What was the use of being so old? she wondered. What had been the use of any of these years? What had it mattered? Who had she helped? She sniffled.

  “Come, come now,” said the nun. “I’m going to take good care of you. And the Lord shines upon all who enter here. I was a mournful woman too. My heart was near broken until I happened upon this place and turned my heart to God and to the service of the needy. I have been serving in his ministry for so many years now that I can’t even count them. I’m a natural born mother, even to old ones like yourself.” She put her arm around Big Waters’ sloping shoulders and squeezed. “I’m going to love you just like a mother would.” The sister talked about how she would wrap her up and feed her treats and tell her stories and rub her feet. The sister said, “Even when we’re old, we need to be mothered.”

  Big Waters thought that was true. Big Waters looked hard into the nun’s face and was certain she recognized something familiar, though she could not place it. The eyes of the nun were fringed with red lashes and the irises were a warm earth color. Clement, she thought.

  Epilogue

  THOUGH THE MORNING had been dark, the remaining snow now glowed in the dusk. Near Stillwater, on an unnamed pond fed by the St. Croix and under the shelter of a rare tamarack stand, a swan patrols the nest where her gray cygnets sleep, heads resting, beaks tucked. Their backs rise and fall in mute slumber, and they bandy dreams of clear skies and gentle winds and plentiful pondweed and tadpoles. The mother swan has chased away the spring animals, the skunks, geese, frogs, and even the curious weasels and beavers that threaten her baby birds. She’s ferocious and attentive, a good mother. Again and again she glides over the place where a human body lies beneath water, caught in the weeds and tree trunks. He rests face up, motionless but for the pond’s mild whims of buoyancy. Through a memory imprinted somewhere in her fowl brain, she remembers him.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the Minnesota State Arts Board for the generous grant toward the completion of this book and to the citizens of Minnesota who passed the Minnesota Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment, which guarantees persistent stewardship of our state’s natural resources and artistic culture.

  And thanks to the following people:

  To Pam Becker, my office mate who serendipitously has in her head a wealth of information on the lives of fur trappers.

  To all my colleagues and students at South Central College in North Mankato, Minnesota.

  To Minnesota State University, Mankato, particularly the creative writing department and the Good Thunder Reading Series, for continued support.

  To the people at the Washington County Historical Society and the Warden’s House Museum in Stillwater, Minnesota.

  To Jeremy and Erin Drews at the Ann Bean Mansion in Stillwater, Minnesota.

  To Ted Genoways, author of Hard Time: Voices from a State Prison.

  To Richard Moe, author of Last Full Measure: The Life and Death of the First Minnesota Volunteers.

  To William Lass, author of Minnesota: A History.

  To the photographer who took “Log Jam at Taylor’s Falls, 1884,” the photo that inspired the whole project.

  To Trampled By Turtles for the music that put me in the mode to imagine Beaver Jean.

  To The Pines for more foresty mood music.

  To Frederick Manfred and Lord Grizzly. Victor Hugo and Les Misérables. O. E. Rolvaag and Giants in the Earth. Ken Burns and The West and The Civil War. Willa Cather and O Pioneers! Walt Whitman for everything. The personal narratives of missionaries and settlers and the recollections of Joseph Farr. I liked poking around in your lives.

  To Faye Bender, my agent and advocate.

  To Jenna Johnson and all the folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  To my writing group, Nick Healy, Tom Maltman, Aaron Frisch, Nate LeBoutillier, great writers and my first and best editors.

  To my mom and Janet Lohre, my grandma, and Pat LeBoutillier.

  To Nate, always, for the encouragement and edits, for inclement and clement weather both.

  To Isabella, Mitchell, Phillip, Violette, Archibald, and Gordon, my little Minnesotans, lovers of the dirt and bark and critters and insects and winter skies and summer humidity, who’ve provided me with endless mothering experiences that have inspired details in this book and who force me again and again to go outside.

  About the Author

  NICOLE HELGET received her B.A. and M.F.A. from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her previous novel, The Turtle Catcher, was a winner of the Tamarack Prize. Her memoir, The Summer of Ordinary Ways, was a People Critics’ Choice pick. She lives, teaches, and writes in Mankato, Minnesota.