This is what my grandmother said: “He who is a windigo sees the other Indians as his totems. He sees anybody who has a bear for his totem as a bear, and so he kills and eats him, and so with someone who has the deer as his totem. If anyone has a beaver as his totem, that’s how he sees him and so he kills and eats him.”
And she said: “When it’s beginning to be spring, perhaps in March, and it’s starting to warm up, then it melts,” she says, “the ice he must bear within himself,” she says.
So he who is a windigo melts when it starts to warm up, then he recovers. He doesn’t know much of what he did previously as a windigo. That’s all.
—Maude Kegg,”When AazhawakiwenzhiinhAlmost Became a Windigo,”from Nookomiks Gaa-inaajimotawid,
What My Grandmother Told Me
And the same man had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy. —Acts 21:9
Our Lady of the Curlers. That’s what we call Agoba, our sister. Her boyfriend is the unwanted lover of the lake. He calls to each wave, superior, and speaks to ships and freighters gone to their watery graves. Cordelio is Hispanic; his family came north for work. Agoba met him at church, but sometimes on Sunday morning, Cordelio goes to Mass at the Catholic church with his family. The cold, the cold is a god, he says. Cordelio calls the snow angels falling; there’s no one left in heaven to do God’s work, he worries. But God’s work is done on earth, my father tells him. We snatch the lost from the fire: Jude 23. We are a blemish on Agoba’s love feast. We sit in church and hear the testimonies: I chopped one tree shared the wood with my neighbor had wood all winter. I was in the lion’s mouth. I was in the whale’s belly and he spit me out on the shore at Little Marais. A church family has its trials just like others. Pentecostal Christianity is no guarantee against trials, though my father spells it trails in his sermon notes. When Agoba translates his handwriting into readable sermons, she corrects his misspellings.
Agoba was my father’s grandmother’s name. He thought it was, anyway. Agoba hoped so, suffering as she did with that name ALL HER LIFE, she said. We call her Agie. Over that she has suffered as well. She won’t speak for herself. Meekness is her mark, her cross to bear. It’s what she says anyway. There are four of us: all sisters. Dunlin, Juna, Phoebe, and Agoba. Our father is the preacher in the Waters of the Superior Church, the kind with signs and wonders following.
I, Dunlin, called Dunie, or Dumie sometimes by the sisters, am named after a plover, a shore bird which nests on the ground at the intersection of blue sky, blue water, and the blue distance of the north woods. It also was a family name; my father thought his grandfather’s name was something like it. Phoebe is a biblical name. Juna is named after no one.
The four of us are a year apart; we look nearly the same except Agie was given Hair. My father’s grandmother was known for the hair she kept tied up like a freighter to the dock. But when she let it loose, it sprang from her head in masses. The Hair hit every other generation, and only one girl in that generation. Agoba was the Chosen. She fluffed it, brushed it, curled it, and she outshone us. None of us had hope of anyone sitting on the front pew with us as long as Agoba was not taken. One boy who couldn’t make up his mind between Juna and Phoebe after Agie wouldn’t have him was soon gone. We lost our patience. Though Agie had all the boys, she wanted only Cordelio. She wouldn’t leave the house until her Hair was curled and she looked like an angel flown down from heaven. Our Mother of Sorrows. Our Father of Mystery. Our Holy Spirit of Many Tongues. Our Sisters of Manifest Density. Our Sisters of Holy Inspiration and Divine Intervention.
My father also holds tent revivals in Croftville, Hovland, Tofte, and other places along the north shore; some of the churches no bigger than an ice-fishing house and just as cozy, with a woodstove and a hot plate, a few rows of pews with holders on the back for hymnals and Bibles, some lace tatting at the windows for curtains made by the old ladies. Sometimes we go as far inland as Isabella. Biwabik. Other towns whose names have been forgotten. A long line in the mass of the forgotten. All hoping they don’t run us out. You see my father had a vision some time back at the church: one Sunday morning he saw the church was failing, was remiss in not getting Jesus’ word out to people. Side-stepping the gospel message: Are you saved by the blood of the Lamb? That to him was the central core. The glacial plate of unbelief had to move off the north country.
We have a camper we park behind the church. Sometimes we hit the state parks where my father preaches over his loudspeaker to the campers. Sometimes I want to jump off Gooseberry Falls.
Precious one I have dreamed of you out where the moon stays over Superior unless the clouds come there are exceptions my love surely you know you are my sweet one let’s dance in the dark not tell anyone who are they to know most of all my father let us skip that ship hold me tonight as a light to your body it’s what I was made for baby be mine.
That was Juna. We barely got her out of there in time. All she wants is a BOYFRIEND more than life itself she’ll jump from the lighthouse on Split Rock Point or whatever cliff she can find if not into the lake to drown forever she’ll marry the waves that’s Juna who received fish bait for a brain at birth. Only the Holy Ghost keeps her alive. I hear my father’s prayers until they are red as the Masabi Range; that raw ore in Minnesota that ships take away. IT IS ALL and everyday my prayer O LORD that you keep my daughters pure; let the boys look elsewhere with their desires. My father will not allow it, will not let his daughters give themselves until they are wives. My father the dreamer.
His taste for sugar keeps him pinned to Juna for her pies. When a boy came around for her, my father beat him away with the word of the Lord. What a swift rod: heavy as January ice.
In church we make up names for our boyfriends: St. Lars, St. Bill, St. Jake, St. Cordelio for Agoba.
Nearly everyone is Catholic, but that doesn’t stop Philip, my father, who holds out for the gospel without a denominational banner. Christ alone is our fortress. It is Philip’s revelation. We are along for the ride. But we have to pull our weight, so to speak. We prophesy, which women are allowed to do in church. Not preach, though Agie would be good at it. But we are charismatic Christians. Filled with the Holy-Filled-One, filled with Holiness of the Holy Ghost. Once I had a vision of the aborted babies crying out like honeybees buzzing the hive of the unwanted. I was sick for days afterwards saying Holy Holy how can we do that knowing the soul has wings that cries forever for its life.
It’s a grim note, those birds with open beaks in the heat. We have it sometimes here along the shore. HEAT. Spell that for me PLEASE, Cordelio says, I’ve forgotten.
Sometimes I’m given a hundred visions a day. It’s like dreams passing, partial ones not given full life. It’s those baby parts like milagros on the altar before God. Those birds flying above the shore in the sky. Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctoose.
WHAT would you let go of? Philip, my father, preaches. WHAT is holding you back from running the race? Grief. That’s what came to mind. Grief? What do I have to grieve? All the voices in the grieving world. I pick them up somehow. I was born with hornlets on my head. Sometimes Juna sees them at night where horns would be if I were a deer. She calls Agie and Phoebe to feel them while I sleep. Not that animal transformations aren’t a part of the faith. But not in everyday acknowledgment.
Don’t you want a son-in-law? we asked Philip. Don’t you want another man in the house? You live with women. Don’t you get tired of being the only man?But his prayers never helped as far as any of us knew. In fact, he seemed to drive the men off. Don’t you want grandchildren? Don’t you want to see us married wives and mothers of children? He answered that he did and we searched his face with the spirit eyes in our head and it seemed he was saying he did. But his prayers, if they were prayers, never were answered. Once Juna got to crying and didn’t stop until the next day. Mother kept making her drink water; otherwise she’d dry up. When it’s darkest, you see the blue light of the Word, my father said.
Philip, my father, was from a large family. They lived near Soudan along highways 1 and 169; highway 1 coming north from Lake Superior to Ely where it joined 169 from nowhere, and together they traveled to a point four miles west of Soudan where they separated. My mother was an orphan, raised by an aunt near Ely. The story was that my mother’s parents parted like the highway and she never saw them again. It was for the best, she said, though I don’t think she believed it. My father said sometimes he could see the blue light of sorrow in her eyes. She made up names for her parents: Joseph and Mary. We laughed when she told us and she seemed hurt.
On one trip she decided we should memorize the names of the ten thousand lakes in Minnesota. With six of us, that made 1,666 names each, or close to it, all the lakes made by the hoofprints of Paul Bunyan’s blue ox, if you can believe that. If Cordelio would travel with us, we would be down to 1,428. If the four of us all had boyfriends, we would each have 1,000 lakes to memorize. We started with the major lakes: Superior, Lake of the Woods, Lower and Upper Red Lake, Leech Lake, Winnebigoshish, Mud Lake, Mille Lacs and Vermillion. I don’t remember how far we got after that.
Sometimes we stop at campsites along the Temperance River or Manitou State Park. Sometimes we stop at Bear Head State Park near Vermillion near the Iron Range. We pull up at campsites where several tents are pitched. Then on Sunday morning Philip lets it rip with the guitar my sister, Phoebe, plays. The campers look up in the wilderness, startled. I wish I could say I was embarrassed, and would leave with the first motorcyclist or camper who wanted another girlfriend or grown child or wife, if there was a Mormon in the park. But there is joy in being in the Lord’s presence. I actually can feel it. A Holy Someone who stands with us. The campers ignore us, or try to look pleased while holding one eye on the road for my father to take his first breath so they can make their escape. I can’t say that we saved anyone. We helped a man with a broken tent once, and we’ve given money sometimes instead of taking an offering. We even found a family camping in the woods because they couldn’t afford to live in town. We let them stay in our camper behind the church, but they finally moved on.
It’s grief I pick up: those gone ones. Those who had the land before the preachers and their congregations. Yes, I think it’s Indian voices who lived without the message of salvation. The ice they carry within. Sometimes we leave feelings behind that others pick up. Sometimes I feel they are eating me with their grief. I snap as if a Communion wafer.
At times, even Cordelio seems to move away from us. What is it like to prophesy? he asks. I never know what I say until I speak. I have to give myself to it. I feel the silence and the silence opens my mouth. Then words are there, words of another language, I don’t know what language, I don’t know what the words say, but I speak. Then someone interprets, gives the message in English.
There’s a blue lizard living in me that plays the bass guitar, I tell Cordelio. I open my mouth and prophesy. The words are like herds of different animals: moose, wolf, bear, badger, beaver. That was the message once: it was from the animals in heaven. They were all right. We didn’t need to grieve. They didn’t remember their painful deaths by arrow or gunshot or trap. Then I picked up a message from a bird flying over. It spoke old voices just under the ledge of civilization.
My father glared at me from the pulpit.
I had a message from the animals, I tell him afterwards, I say what I receive. I don’t think animals come into the kingdom of God. I THINK THEY DO.
It was one of our major disagreements. That and there is no shame in being the father of four UNMARRIED DAUGHTERS!!!! Yes, watch out for your sons, they’ll be hogtied behind our camper and dragged off for one of the sisters. We would have shot anyone who said that, even thought it, though you could tell what they were thinking the way they looked at us as though we were manitous with a taste for blood. One minister started to say something in a church we visited once. You can imagine us on the front row turning scarlet, burgeoning with shame. He had no more sense than a muskrat, had us trapped with no escape. But we are unmarried women. Women without men. Virgins: all of us, though we look at Agoba with one eye.
Some would call us lucky. I’ve seen plenty of unhappy wives wondering how they got into what they were into. We were blessed in their eyes. Nothing like being stuck with a husband you feel your love for drifting away like the sweet smell of bread out of the oven that turns to a hard block if left on the counter a couple of days. Even an ax won’t cut it and you’re married to it for life. Even salvation doesn’t cure the blot that marriage makes. The children one after one until you figure out how to stop them, and by then you’re in for three or four or five. Some of the women feel they chop firewood that just keeps coming.
Our Lady of the Curlers nearly caught one. Cordelio seemed everything he was not, just up from Mexico with us into diversity and inclusiveness of other cultures and he with his cross and belief in the saints and Ave Marias and saints be praised. He could pray silently to himself longer than anyone in that church cluttered with icons and apostles and saints and how could anyone else get in the door?
It was easy to see Cordelio from the barrio where they have ’57 Chevys with dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, the car weighted in back or front, full of guys with their black hair slicked back. Agie thought Cordelio was hers, but St. Cordelio transformed under the weight of the ice and joined the ethereal, the invisible, the never present St. Jake, St. Lars, St. Bill. In church, I prophesy: He is like the ice that disappears with the winter. For a while Agoba hung around the Catholic church on her cross, but we dragged her back. Then she grieved in silence. We will marry the sky, I tell Agoba. There is enough of it for everyone. Remember the mystery of the five loaves two fishes that fed the multitudes with twelves baskets of bread left? We’re still puzzling over that one. But we have driven to a town without enough gas to get there, by my father’s calculations who has been calculating gasoline for some time.
When you are born again a new life opens somewhere under the ribs and fills your head with a wave that is Christ himself. The water grows inside you and you get puffier with the new life until you shuck the old body and you are his new being.
We have been undone by waiting. Even Agoba’s hair seems wilted. By knowing the second birth, the lion’s den, the marching band, the mariachi band, the illuminata of the Waters of the Superior Church of Our Glory of the Risen One, and the dimming hope we would have Husbands, the desert turns to SNOW. We stay low in winter. The roads nearly impassable in bad years. A few Sundays, there’s no one in church but us. A few weeks, there’s only beans and bread on the table. In good years we get from here to there. My father is a circuit rider in a camper, taking the wife and the four daughters with him. The daughters being: Juna of the Wild Blueberry Pies, Agoba of the Hair, Phoebe of the Guitar, Dunlin of the Plover Tongue; as though by taking us around the state he would make us visible to more men. The more we saw the fewer there were to see. They seemed to know we were coming and cleared out to the Boundary Waters or even Bemidji. Some had been known to leave for Canada.
But what came from our travels, looking at the blue map, was a story, as if heard through the hornlets Juna saw on my head. The voices of the land, the Indians who lost the land, the first settlers, the poor, the cold, whoever knew what it was to lose their place in line, transformed into birds who traded their places in the tree for the open spaces of God, who would fly upward and upward into the blue light that God is, who goes on and on forever, as if the map reflected what was above it: the story of our migration into the blue light of sorrow which we call heaven, and whosoever believed in Jesus was pulled on a string over the ox, the lake, the shadows in the north woods, the eyes, the holy word: all blue.
I think what happened in history was insignificant to the eye: a man called Jesus and his followers. They didn’t seem like much at the time. When Jesus was taken, his disciples fled because they were weak with unbelief. But afterwards they must have seen him again. Whatever Christianity is, it’s a kindgom that’s invisible unless by need you are born into it, then it’s the blue hereafter you see.
Jesus and his group of men had seen another world and gave up everything for it. We could do no less, but marry that reflection of the sky in the map as an image of the world we could not yet see, but was there, delivered by a paltry band of men and a leader who were not much recognized but came with a message that once you heard and entered you were never the same again.
It’s like we know we are in Christ, but can’t know it’s true until we get to his house and he unwraps us from himself, and we can’t remember the troubles we had on the way.
I prophesy above the glacial plate of the north shore. COME UP O COME UP WITH ME. It’s a unique perception: not seeing as things are, but seeing those things which are not as though they were (Romans 4:17), which are the tenets of faith that can shift things out of their place.
For a while it seemed as though Agoba would crack like the ice that expands and crawls over itself. She grew black eyes on her forehead, those spirit eyes we have inside our head actually showed on her forehead! But it wasn’t a transformation of the purest light as it should have been. In the night, Juna called us to feel the feathers on her arms and back. The beak of her mouth just under her nose. I petted Agie until I could see the blue light of the hereafter transformed into something like a loon with circles around the eyes like the sun when you look too close.
The snow is so white, she said, the white so cold it’s blue.
Diane Glancy is professor of English at Macalester College, where she teaches creative writing and Native American literature. She is the author of many books of fiction, poetry, essays, and plays, including most recently The Mask Maker, a novel published earlier this year by University of Oklahoma Press.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
