– 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
