horse, traversing ravines and hillocks, negotiating the holes and mounds of vast prairie dog cities without a stumble. A horse would have weakened and grown thin as the grass grew shorter and drier, but Alphonsus remained in fine flesh on poor grazing and was ready to move on each morning. He was a sensible and reliable animal, patient and uncomplaining.
It was only when Alexander was
“
“That horse looks pretty sick! Have you tried a sweat lodge?”
“I hope you didn’t trade your gold cup for that big rabbit.”
These sallies, and others like them, were considered the height of comedy. Maybe they were funnier if you spoke the language well, and if you didn’t have to ask for them to be repeated over and over, in a slow and painful effort to understand exactly how you’d just been mocked—an effort the Indians found almost as funny as the mule’s giant ears.
When he finally understood a joke, Alexander did his best to smile, but there was always one remark that made him blush. More mimed than spoken, it needed no translation. One of the women would look appraisingly at the mule’s ears, then at Alexander’s own, and ask, deadpan, “Cousins?”
Hilarity, inevitably, ensued.
Father Paul had warned that such teasing was to be expected among Indians. Paul himself put up with a lot of nose jokes, being Roman in physiognomy as well as in ancestry and faith. So Alexander soldiered on, in baking heat under a glaring sun, with no companion except Alphonsus on the long rides between each round of rejection and ridicule.
The summer and his own resolve wore away.
Alexander often prayed for patience and strength, but once, in what he suspected was the actual, factual geographic middle of absolutely nowhere, he lost all momentum and allowed the mule’s pace to slow to a halt. For a time, he simply sat there, his own head the highest thing on earth as far as the eye could see in any direction, and his heart the lowest.
Perhaps, he thought, it is time to take Schopenhauer’s advice. Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison.
Assuming he could find a toad.
Staring at the table-flat horizon, he would sometimes watch an electrical storm gather, build, break, and dissipate, often in eerie silence—the entire drama so far away that he hardly heard the thunder, though he could see the lightning. Late on one sweltering afternoon, a funnel-shaped cloud emerged from the bottom of a towering green-gray thunderhead in the distance. Lengthening, reaching toward the ground, the cyclone wobbled and spun drunkenly across the empty land, its journey as useless as his own.
He had not felt so hopeless since his days as a novice, still learning the community’s ways, still doing everything he could to get thrown out—things that would have gotten him flogged in the military. “Do you
“I want what God wants for me,” Alexander would answer, stubborn, willful, and friendless.
Which simply raised the question …
… that was, at last, answered one night on the Oklahoma plains where he lay on the open ground, in the rain and near the mule, probably lost and certainly despondent. To his dying day, he was not sure if he was awake or asleep or someplace in between when he heard a single word:
The next morning, at first gray light, he awoke to the bland curiosity of Alphonsus, who watched, munching weeds, while Alexander rolled creakily onto his hands and knees, swatted insects away, checked his boots for scorpions, scratched a dozen new bites, took a piss, and dug a small New Testament out of his oilskin pack. He opened it to the letters of Saint Paul. Before his eyes, the text turned inside out.
Every line of Paul’s praise and encouragement whispered to Alexander of the dejection and frustration that Timothy must have been reporting as he followed in the footsteps of the saint. Like Timothy, Alexander von Angensperg was ready to teach the Gospel, willing to endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, eager to receive knowledge and understanding from God in the service of God. Like Timothy, everywhere he went, he was considered nothing more than a poor and unwelcome substitute for a man named Paul.
Over the next few days, Alexander studied and took to heart the saint’s instruction to Timothy on the teaching of sound doctrine and on being an example of faith in word, conduct, love, and spirit. While Alphonsus found his own way along a trail that the mule had walked three times a year for twenty years, Alexander’s mind was free to compose a sermon that might lead Indian converts to see a connection between themselves and the early Church established by their beloved pastor’s patron saint.
From then on, in every village, Alexander promised to convey the Indians’ concern, good wishes, prayers, and love to Father Paul, just as Timothy must have promised to convey news of the Philippians and Ephesians and Colossians to Saint Paul. He stopped trying so hard to say everything correctly and learned to laugh at his own mistakes, and learned as well to enjoy the good-humored teasing that marks so much of Indian life. When he stopped talking and listened instead, he found that even the proudest and most recalcitrant of the
In early August, Alexander arrived at yet another indistinguishably squalid village and was taken immediately to an Indian girl of fifteen. She requested baptism from Alexander himself, rather than waiting for Father Paul, for she knew she was near death from consumption and wished to join the Church. Though her relatives were heathens, they could not deny this beloved child anything that might ease her passing. Alexander had just enough time for a brief preparation before the girl’s wish could be fulfilled. Then he laid the consecrated Host on the tongue of the newly christened Mary Clare.
With that food of angels in her mouth, she breathed out her soul and was immediately united with her Creator. There was a hushed, awestruck moment before her family began to wail. She is in heaven, Alexander thought, stunned. I have witnessed a saint’s death.
In the long years to come, Alexander von Angensperg would pray for Mary Clare’s intercession, especially after he was transferred to the Rosebud Reservation in the 1890s. Nine of ten Lakota died of tuberculosis in those days, and each time Alexander was called to a deathbed like Mary Clare’s, he prayed that she would bring about one of the three miracles he needed to present her case for canonization.
By the time Alexander had assembled his evidence, the Sacra Rituum Congregatio had already begun beatification of a young Carmelite nun known to her devotees as the Little Flower of Jesus. Like Mary Clare, Thérèse of Lisieux had suffered from and died of tuberculosis, but the Little Flower had influential European supporters who were able to press her cause in Rome; Mary Clare had a single elderly Jesuit in South Dakota, so the petition on her behalf languished in back offices of the Vatican. But Alexander von Angensperg knew what he knew. That beautiful Indian child was in heaven. She was especially solicitous of those dying of consumption. And she could effect a cure—or at least a remission—of the disease in special circumstances.
He had seen this thrice, he believed, with his own eyes. The first time was in the summer of 1878, just outside Dodge City.
That August, after the crops were in and before the harvest began, a two-week platform convention for the Republican Party of Kansas was held in Topeka. Among the delegates was Wyatt S. Earp (occupation: policeman; residence: Dodge City, Ford County). Neatly dressed in black and wearing a decent pair of freshly polished boots, Deputy Earp was accompanied by a quiet woman whose age was difficult to guess. She was not young, but neither was she more worn than might be expected of a farmer’s wife, and she was well turned out in a deep blue that complemented her hair and complexion. Wyatt would introduce her as Mattie Earp but did not call her “my wife,” for they were not married then and never would be. He let her use his name for the occasion and did not tell her to quit it afterward.
The morning Mattie and Wyatt left for Topeka, Morgan and Lou and Doc and Kate came to the Dodge depot
