Beautiful Losers Page 20

  – 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 cites the good François Tsonnatoüan, who turned his wife into a sister. He made a little rosary which he called “Catherine’s Rosary.” It consisted of a cross on which he said the Credo, two “grains” for the Pater and the Ave, and three other “grains” for the three Gloria Patri. The news was passed from fire to fire, from convert to convert, from convert to heathen, from heathen to heathen, across the land of the Iroquois.

  – La sainte est morte.

  – The saint is dead.

  In the early Church this type of popular recognition was called la béatification equipollente. Look down, look down, see the snowy mandala, see the whole village, see the figures writhing on the white field, try and see through the opaque prism of personal blister of accidental burn.

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  Here is the testimony of Captain du Luth, commandant of Fort Frontenac, a man after whom a Montréal street is named. He was, says le P. Charlevoix, “un des plus braves officiers que le Roy ait eus dans cette colonie.” He also gave his name to an American city on Lake Superior.

  I, the undersigned, certify to whomever it may concern, that, having been tormented with the gout for twenty-three years, with such pain that for a space of three months I had no rest, I addressed myself to Catherine Tegahkouita, Iroquois virgin, deceased at Sault Saint-Louis a saint in the general opinion, and I promised to visit her grave, if God would give me back my health because of her intervention. I have been so perfectly cured, at the end of a novena which I arranged to be done in her honor, that for fifteen months now I have not suffered a single attack of gout. Fait au fort Frontenac, ce 15 août 1696.

  Signé J. du Luth

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  Like a numbered immigrant in the harbor of North America, I hope to begin again. I hope to begin my friendship again. I hope to begin my rise to President. I hope to begin Mary again. I hope to begin my worship again to Thee who has never refused my service, in whose flashing memory I have no past or future, whose memory never froze into the coffin of history, into which your children, like amateur undertakers, squeeze the carelessly measured bodies of each other. Not the pioneer is the American dream, for he has already limited himself by courage and method. The dream is to be immigrant sailing into the misty aerials of New York, the dream is to be Jesuit in the cities of the Iroquois, for we do not wish to destroy the past and its baggy failures, we only wish the miracles to demonstrate that the past was joyously prophetic, and that possibility occurs to us most plainly on this cargo deck of wide lapels, our kerchief sacks filled with obsolete machine guns from the last war but which will astound and conquer the Indians.

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  The first vision of Catherine Tekakwitha appeared to le P. Chauchetière. Five days after the girl’s death, at four o’clock in the morning of Easter Monday, while he was hard at prayer, she came to him in a blur of glory. At her right was a church upside down. At her left was an Indian burning at the stake. The vision lasted two hours, and the priest had time to study it in ecstasy. This is why he had come to Canada. Three years later, in 1683, a hurricane hit the village, tipping over the 6o-foot-long church. And in one of the attacks on the mission, an Iroquois convert was captured by the Onnontagués and burnt slowly while he proclaimed his Faith. These applications of the vision may satisfy the Church, dear friend, but let us beware of allowing an apparition to leak away into mere events. A useless church, a tortured man – are these not the usual factors in a saint’s flourishing? Eight days after her death she appeared to the old Anastasie in a blaze of light, her lower body beneath the belt dissolved in the brilliance, “le bas du corps depuis la ceinture disparaissant dans cette clarté.” Had she lent her other parts to you? She appeared also to Marie-Thérèse when she was alone in her cabin and gently reproached her for some of the things she was doing.

  – Try not to sit on your heel when you’re beating your shoulders.

  Le P. Chauchetière was favored with two more visions, one on July 1, 1681, the other on April 21, 1682. On both occasions Catherine appeared to him in her beauty, and he heard her say distinctly:

  – Inspice et fac secundum exemplar. Regarde, et copie ce modèle. Look, and copy this model.

  Then he painted many portraits of his visionary Catherine, and they worked perfectly when placed on the head of the sick. At Caughnawaga today there is a very ancient canvas. Is this the one that le P. Chauchetière painted? We will never know. I pray that it will work for you. But what about le P. Cholenec? All the others had their candy. Where were his movies? It is he whom I most resemble, as he endures without so much as a cartoon spark, hunted only by the Papacy.

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  “… An infinity of miraculous cures,” writes le P. Cholenec in 1715, “une infinité de guérisons miraculeuses.” Not only among the savages but even among the French at Québec and Montréal. It would take volumes. He calls her la Thaumaturge du Nouveau-Monde. With a sense of pain you must now be able to imagine, I record some of the cures.

  The wife of François Roaner was 60 during January 1681 and close to death. She was an inhabitant of la Prairie de la Magdeleine, where le P. Chauchetière was also serving. The priest hung a crucifix around her neck. It was the same crucifix that Catherine Tekakwitha had grasped to her rags while dying. When Mme. Roaner was cured she refused to surrender the relic. The priest insisted but gave the woman a little bag of mud from the tomb of Catherine to hang in place of the crucifix. Some time later, she happened to take it off for one reason or another. As soon as it was clear of her head she collapsed, stricken to the ground. It was only when the bag returned to her chest that she recovered once again. A year later, her husband was seized by a violent pain in the kidneys. In a reckless instant of charity she removed the mud from her person and hung it over his neck. His pain stopped immediately, but she staggered, stricken again, crying out that her husband was murdering her. He was persuaded by several bystanders to return the little sack to his wife. She was instantly cured but his kidneys began again. Let us leave them here, in their new cruel service to Catherine Tekakwitha, as she invites their souls. Is this familiar, dear comrade? Did Edith move between us like a package of mud? Oh God, I see the miserable old Roaners, who had not touched each other for years, clawing each other like animals on the stone floor of their kitchen.

  In 1693 the Superior at Sault was le R Bruyas. Suddenly his arms became paralyzed. He was removed to Montréal to receive treatment. Before he left he asked the Sisters of Catherine, a group of devotees which had formed around her memory, to do a novena on behalf of his cure. In Montréal he refused all treatment. On the eighth day of the novena there was still no change in his stiff arms. Faithful, he kept the doctors away. Four o’clock on the next morning he awakened waving his arms, not surprised, but ravished with joy. He hurried to thank.

  1695. The cures began to creep into the upper classes like a dance step. They began with the Intendant, M. de Champigny. For two years he had had the same cold, which worsened day by day, until now he could barely make himself heard. His wife wrote the Fathers at Sault, begging them to have a novena done to their holy girl in order to obtain her husband’s cure. The prayers they chose for the novena were one Pater, one Ave, and three Gloria Patri. M. de Champigny’s throat cleared up day by day, and on the ninth day it was normal – indeed, his voice possessed a special new resonance. Mme. de Champigny extended the cult of the Iroquois Virgin. She had thousands of Catherine Tekakwitha pictures distributed everywhere, including France, and even Louis XIV looked carefully at one.

  1695. M. de Granville and his wife mixed the mud with a little water and fed it to their little daughter, who was dying. She sat up laughing.

  “The power of Catherine extended itself eve
n to animals,” writes le P. Cholenec. In Lachine lived a woman with only one cow. One day, for no apparent reason, the cow became so bloated, “enflée,” that the woman thought the beast would die. She fell to her knees.

  – O good holy Catherine, have pity on me, save my poor cow!

  She had barely spoken the words when the cow began to unswell, returning to its ordinary size right before her eyes, “et la vache s’est bien portée du depuis.”

  Last winter, writes le P. Cholenec, a steer fell through the ice in Montréal. They hauled him out but his body was so frozen that he couldn’t walk. He was obliged to spend the winter in his stable.

  – Kill that animal! commanded the master of the house.

  – Oh, let him live one more night, a servant girl pleaded.

  – Very well. But he dies tomorrow!

  She put some of the tomb mud which she cherished into the steer’s drinking water, saying:

  – Pourquoi Catherine ne guérirait-elle pas les bêtes aussi bien que les hommes?

  This is the actual quotation. The next morning the steer was found on his feet, to the great astonishment of all except the girl and the animal. The most important question the histories naturally ignore. Were the cow and the steer eventually eaten? Or did nothing really change?

  Thousands of cures, all recorded, among children and among the senile. A thousand novenas and a thousand bodies glow again. Twenty years after her death the miracles were not so frequent, but we have evidence as recent as 1906. Let us examine the April 1906 edition of Le Messager Canadien du Sacre-Coeur. The miracle took place at Shishigwaning, an Indian outpost on Ile Manitouline. Living there was a good Indian woman (une bonne sauvagesse) who had been afflicted, for the past 11 months, with syphilis ulcers in the mouth and throat. She had contracted the disease by smoking the pipe which belonged to her syphilitic daughter, “en fumant la pipe dont s’était servie sa fille.” The disease advanced hideously, the ulcers spreading and widening their circumferences and their crater depth. She couldn’t even take a little soup, so swollen with sores was her mouth. The priest arrived September 29, 1905. Before becoming a Jesuit he had been a doctor. She knew this.

  – Help me, Doctor.

  – I am a priest.

  – Help me as a doctor.

  – No doctor can help you now.

  He told her that her cure was beyond human dominion. He pressed the victim to ask for the intercession of Catherine Tekakwitha, “your sister by blood!” That night she began a novena in honor of the long-dead Iroquois Virgin. One day passed, two days passed, nothing happened. On the third day, she sent her tongue searching over the roof of her mouth, but the syphilis Braille had disappeared like the volumes of Alexandria!

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  In 1689 the mission of Sault Saint-Louis moved farther up the Saint Lawrence River. The reason for the exodus was soil exhaustion. The old location (at the place where the Portage River enters the Saint Lawrence) had been called Kahnawaké, or, at the rapids. Now it took the name Kateri tsi tkaiatat, or, the place where Catherine was buried. They took her body with them to the new village which was called Kahnawakon, or, in the rapids. They called the abandoned site Kanatakwenké, or, place of the removed village. In 1696 they moved once again up the south bank of the great river. The last migration took place in 1719. The mission installed itself in its present location, across the rapids opposite Lachine, now connected by a bridge to Montréal. It took the Iroquois name of 1676, Kahnawaké, or in its English form, Caughnawaga. There are still some relics of Catherine Tekakwitha at Caughnawaga, but not all. Some of her skeleton had been given away at different periods. Her head was carried to Saint-Régis in 1754, to celebrate the establishment of another Iroquois mission. The church in which the head was placed burned to the ground, and the skull did not survive.

  KATERI TEKAKWITHA

  Apr. 17, 1680

  Onkweonweke Katsitsiio

  Teotsitsianekaron

  KATERI TEKAKWITHA

  17 avril, 1680 La plus belle fleur épanouie

  chez les sauvages

  THE END OF F.’S HISTORY OF THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF CATHERINE TEKAKWITHA’S LIFE

  There! Done! Dear old friend, I did what was necessary! I did what I dreamed about when you, Edith, and I sat on the austere seats of the System Theatre. Do you know the question with which I tormented myself during those silvery hours? At last I can tell you. We are now in the heart of the System Theatre. We are in the dark jockeying for elbow dominion on the wooden armrests. Outside on Ste. Catherine Street, the theater marquee displays the only neon failure in miles of light: dropping two letters which will never be repaired, it signals itself as stem Theatre, stem Theatre, stem Theatre. Secret kabals of vegetarians habitually gather under the sign to exchange contraband from beyond the Vegetable Barrier. In their pinpoint eyes dances their old dream: the Total Fast. One of them reports a new atrocity published without compassionate comment by the editors of Scientific American: “It has been established that, when pulled from the ground, a radish produces an electronic scream.” Not even the triple bill for 65¢ will comfort them tonight. With a mad laugh born of despair, one of them throws himself on a hot-dog stand, disintegrating on the first chew into pathetic withdrawal symptoms. The rest watch him mournfully and then separate into the Montréal entertainment section. The news is more serious than any of them thought. One is ravished by a steak house with sidewalk ventilation. In a restaurant, one argues with the waiter that he ordered “tomato” but then in a suicide of gallantry he agrees to accept the spaghetti, meat sauce mistake. But this is far away from the glass pillar of stubs which the three of us passed and satisfied hours ago. Let us not forget that these doorway ticket depositories are not altogether docile. On more than several occasions I have stood behind a customer whose stub the chute rejects absolutely, and he is forced to get his money back from the contemptuous female sentry booth. They are not pleasant to deal with, these women posted in the entrances of every cinema: they are bound by choice to guard Ste. Catherine Street against self-destruction: the little streetside offices which they dominate protect the army of traffic by an administration which combines the best functions of Red Cross and G.H.Q. And what of the unacceptable patron with his money back? Where can he go? Was the cruel rejection arbitrary, in the sense that Society invents Crime so as to make itself indispensable? There is no dark for him to eat the Oh Henry! – all candy is threatened! Mere suicide vaudeville for the living? Or is there some ointment on the refusal of the toothed throat of the stub depository? Is this the kingly oil of election? Does some new hero discover his ordeal? Is this the birth of the hermit, or his equally passionate complement, the anti-hermit, seed of the Jesuits? And this chess side choice between saint and missionary, is this his first tragic testing? No matter to Edith, you and I, who have safely passed two aisles and half an alphabet, well into the bright amusement. We are now in the heart of the last feature in the System Theatre. Within severe limits, like smoke in a chimney, the dusty projection beam above our hair twisted and changed. Like crystals rioting in a test-tube suspension, the unstable ray changed and changed in its black confinement. Like battalions of sabotaged parachutists falling from the training tower straight down in various contortions, the frames streamed at the screen, splashing into contrast color as they hit, just as the bursting cocoons of arctic camouflage spread colorful organic contents over the snow as the divers disintegrate, one after the other. No, it was more like a ghostly white snake sealed in an immense telescope. It was a serpent swimming home, lazily occupying the entire sewer which irrigated the auditorium. It was the first snake in the shadows of the original garden, the albino orchard snake offering our female memory the taste of – everything! As it floated and danced and writhed in the gloom over us, I often raised my eyes to consult the projection beam rather than the story it carried. Neither of you noticed me. Sometimes I conceded surprising territories of the armrest so as to distract your pleasure. I studied the snake and he made me greedy for
everything. In the midst of this heady contemplation, I am invited to formulate the question which will torment me most. I formulate the question and it begins to torment me immediately: What will happen when the newsreel escapes into the Feature? What will happen when the newsreel occurs at its own pleasure or accident in any whatever frame of the Vista-vision, willy nilly? The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature like Boulder Dam, vital as a border in the Middle East – breach it (so I thought), and a miasmal mixture will imperialize existence by means of its sole quality of total corrosion. So I thought! The newsreel lies between the street and the Feature: like a tunnel on the Sunday drive it ends quickly and in creepy darkness joins the rural mountains to the slums. It took courage! I let the newsreel escape, I invited it to walk right into plot, and they merged in aweful originality, just as trees and plastic synthesize new powerful landscapes in those districts of the highway devoted to motels. Long live motels, the name, the motive, the success! Here is my message, old lover of my heart. Here is what I saw: here is what I learned:

  Sophia Loren Strips For A Flood Victim

  THE FLOOD IS REAL AT LAST

  Joy? Didn’t I promise it? Didn’t you believe I would deliver? And now I must leave you, but I find it so hard. Mary is restless now, she is jiggling restlessly, neither of us has any pleasure now, and some of her fluids are so ancient and unreplenished that there are pinchy paths of evaporation down my arm. Patients in O.T. are signing unfinished baskets so they can be identified in the nurse’s collection. The short spring afternoon has darkened and the tight lilac buds beyond the barred window are barely redolent. The afternoon linen has been sterilized and crisp folded beds require us.