6
She wandered through the leafy woods on the south bank of the Saint Lawrence River. She saw the deer start from the thicket, listening even in the arc of his leap. She saw the rabbit disappear into his burrow. She heard the squirrel rattling in his hoard of acorns. She watched a pigeon building a nest in a pine tree. In two hundred years the pigeons would sell out and loaf on statues in Dominion Square. She saw the flocks of geese shaped like unstable arrow heads. She fell to her knees and she cried, “O Master of Life, must our bodies depend on these things?” Very still, she sat on the shore of the river. She saw the leaping sturgeon scattering drops like beads of wampum. She saw the bony perch, fast as a single flute note in a wild song. She saw the long silver pike and below him she saw the crawfish, each on his separate layer of water. Letting her fingers drift, she cried, “O Master of Life, must our bodies depend on these things?” Slowly she walked back to the mission. She saw the field of corn, yellow and dry, plumes and tassels rustling in the wind like a crowd of aged sacrificial dancers. She saw the little blueberry bushes and strawberry bushes and made a tiny cross out of two pine needles and a drop of spruce gum and erected it beside a fallen gooseberry. A robin listened as she wept, a fucking robin stopped in his tracks and listened. I have to start you off with fiction, such is your heritage. Now it was night and the whippoorwill raised his melancholy song like a ghostly teepee over her weeping, a teepee or a pyramid, from a long way off it has three sides, the tune of the whippoorwill. Some men deal in teepees, some in pyramids, and it does not seem to matter, but in 1966, and in your predicament – it matters! “O Master of Life,” she cried, “must our bodies depend on these?” On Saturdays and Sundays Catherine Tekakwitha took no food at all. When they forced her to drink soup she would only do so after stirring ashes into it. “Elle se dédommageait en mêlant de la cendre à sa soupe.”
7
O God, forgive me, but I see it on my thumb, the whole wintry village looks like a Nazi medical experiment.
“On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two inches of the Caucasian mean.” – Morton, Crania Americana, page 195. It is remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or Peruvians. “The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the occipital and basal portions” – in other words, to the region of animal propensities. See J. S. Phillips, Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the United States.
This is a footnote by Francis Parkman on page 32 of his book about the Jesuits in North America, published in 1867. I memorized it while looking over your shoulder in the library. Do you understand, now, that with my photographic memory it would have been disastrous to hover too long beside your ear?
8
Catherine Tekakwitha’s best friend at the mission was a young widow who had been baptized under the name Marie-Thérèse. She was an Onneyout, her original name being Tegaigenta. She was a very beautiful young woman. At the mission of la Prairie she was famous for her disorderly conduct. In the winter of 1676 she left with her husband on a hunting expedition along the Outaouais River. There were eleven in the party, including an infant. It was a bad winter. Wind blew away the paw prints. Heavy snows made the track impossible. One of the party was killed and eaten. The baby ate some amid jokes. Then there was famine. First of all they ate some little pieces of skin which they had brought to make shoes with. Then they ate bark. Tegaigenta’s husband became sick. She stood guard over him. Two hunters, a Mohawk and a Tsonnontouan, went after game. At the end of a week the Mohawk came back alone, empty-handed but burping. The party decided to press on. Tegaigenta refused to abandon her husband. The others left, winking. Two days later she rejoined the party. When she arrived the group was sitting around the widow of the Tsonnontouan and her two children. Before eating the three of them, one of the hunters asked Tegaigenta:
– How do the Christians regard anthropophagist meals? (repas d’anthropophage).
It didn’t matter what she answered. She ran into the snow. She would be roasted next, she knew. She looked back over her sweaty sex life. She had come on the hunt without confessing. She asked God to forgive her and promised to change her life if she got back to the mission. Of the eleven persons who comprised the hunting party only five returned to la Prairie. Marie-Thérèse was one of them. The mission of la Prairie moved to Sault Saint-Louis in the autumn of 1676. The girls met shortly after Easter in 1678 in front of the little church which was nearing completion. Catherine began
