– 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 im 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.
When 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
