Mary Russell - Doc

Alexander did his garbled, halting best to reassure the Indians of various tribes that Father Paul was neither dead nor dying but merely much in need of rest. There was great relief when this understanding was reached, but that was followed by even more visible disappointment. Told that the sacraments celebrated by a different Black Robe were equally valid in heaven and on earth, the Indians displayed not so much skepticism as disgruntlement.

Arms crossed over chests.

Brows wrinkled.

Lips pursed in annoyance.

“I wanted Father Paul,” the bride, or the catechumen, or the dying man would say. “Father Paul is better.” And, Alexander was given to understand, he was better in all possible ways.

Father Paul spoke properly. He didn’t make confusing mistakes when signing.

Father Paul brought better presents. He was more gracious in receiving gifts.

Father Paul understood how to be polite, and he knew when to make a joke. He certainly never insulted anybody by accident.

Father Paul had kinder eyes. He was friendlier and more amusing.

Father Paul knew how to dance. He was a better singer, too.

Alexander was beginning to hate Father Paul.

Alphonsus, on the other hand, was growing on him. And that, too, was a useful measure of his own lingering vanity, for—man and boy, prince and cavalry officer—Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had owned and ridden some of the finest horseflesh in Europe.

As long as he was alone on the empty plains, Alexander could appreciate the mule’s easy gait, his surefootedness, and his calm. When a prairie hen whirred into the air, a horse might well have bolted, but the middle-aged Alphonsus merely flicked his long, expressive ears in worldly disdain, for horses are flighty animals who accumulate fears and superstitions with each passing year, whereas mules learn from experience, becoming more sophisticated as they mature. Day after day, Alphonsus picked his way through terrain that would have lamed a horse, traversing ravines and hillocks, negotiating the holes and mounds of vast prairie dog cities without a stumble. A horse would have weakened and grown thin as the grass grew shorter and drier, but Alphonsus remained in fine flesh on poor grazing and was ready to move on each morning. He was a sensible and reliable animal, patient and uncomplaining.

It was only when Alexander was seen atop this admirable beast that he felt humiliated and embarrassed. And Indians unerringly took notice.

“ Ata! There’s a man with no women to impress!”

“That horse looks pretty sick! Have you tried a sweat lodge?”

“I hope you didn’t trade your gold cup for that big rabbit.”

These sallies, and others like them, were considered the height of comedy. Maybe they were funnier if you spoke the language well, and if you didn’t have to ask for them to be repeated over and over, in a slow and painful effort to understand exactly how you’d just been mocked—an effort the Indians found almost as funny as the mule’s giant ears.

When he finally understood a joke, Alexander did his best to smile, but there was always one remark that made him blush. More mimed than spoken, it needed no translation. One of the women would look appraisingly at the mule’s ears, then at Alexander’s own, and ask, deadpan, “Cousins?”

Hilarity, inevitably, ensued.

Father Paul had warned that such teasing was to be expected among Indians. Paul himself put up with a lot of nose jokes, being Roman in physiognomy as well as in ancestry and faith. So Alexander soldiered on, in baking heat under a glaring sun, with no companion except Alphonsus on the long rides between each round of rejection and ridicule.

The summer and his own resolve wore away.

Alexander often prayed for patience and strength, but once, in what he suspected was the actual, factual geographic middle of absolutely nowhere, he lost all momentum and allowed the mule’s pace to slow to a halt. For a time, he simply sat there, his own head the highest thing on earth as far as the eye could see in any direction, and his heart the lowest.

Perhaps, he thought, it is time to take Schopenhauer’s advice. Eat a toad first thing in the morning; the rest of the day will seem pleasurable by comparison.

Assuming he could find a toad.

Staring at the table-flat horizon, he would sometimes watch an electrical storm gather, build, break, and dissipate, often in eerie silence—the entire drama so far away that he hardly heard the thunder, though he could see the lightning. Late on one sweltering afternoon, a funnel-shaped cloud emerged from the bottom of a towering green-gray thunderhead in the distance. Lengthening, reaching toward the ground, the cyclone wobbled and spun drunkenly across the empty land, its journey as useless as his own.

He had not felt so hopeless since his days as a novice, still learning the community’s ways, still doing everything he could to get thrown out—things that would have gotten him flogged in the military. “Do you want this?” the novice master demanded every time Alexander defied a superior or came to blows with one of his potential brothers in Christ.

“I want what God wants for me,” Alexander would answer, stubborn, willful, and friendless.

Which simply raised the question …

… that was, at last, answered one night on the Oklahoma plains where he lay on the open ground, in the rain and near the mule, probably lost and certainly despondent. To his dying day, he was not sure if he was awake or asleep or someplace in between when he heard a single word: Timothy .

The next morning, at first gray light, he awoke to the bland curiosity of Alphonsus, who watched, munching weeds, while Alexander rolled creakily onto his hands and knees, swatted insects away, checked his boots for scorpions, scratched a dozen new bites, took a piss, and dug a small New Testament out of his oilskin pack. He opened it to the letters of Saint Paul. Before his eyes, the text turned inside out.

Every line of Paul’s praise and encouragement whispered to Alexander of the dejection and frustration that Timothy must have been reporting as he followed in the footsteps of the saint. Like Timothy, Alexander von Angensperg was ready to teach the Gospel, willing to endure hardship as a good soldier of Christ, eager to receive knowledge and understanding from God in the service of God. Like Timothy, everywhere he went, he was considered nothing more than a poor and unwelcome substitute for a man named Paul.

Over the next few days, Alexander studied and took to heart the saint’s instruction to Timothy on the teaching of sound doctrine and on being an example of faith in word, conduct, love, and spirit. While Alphonsus found his own way along a trail that the mule had walked three times a year for twenty years, Alexander’s mind was free to compose a sermon that might lead Indian converts to see a connection between themselves and the early Church established by their beloved pastor’s patron saint.

From then on, in every village, Alexander promised to convey the Indians’ concern, good wishes, prayers, and love to Father Paul, just as Timothy must have promised to convey news of the Philippians and Ephesians and Colossians to Saint Paul. He stopped trying so hard to say everything correctly and learned to laugh at his own mistakes, and learned as well to enjoy the good-humored teasing that marks so much of Indian life. When he stopped talking and listened instead, he found that even the proudest and most recalcitrant of the Wilden believed in a spiritual reality beyond the physical, that they shared his own desire to understand and join with the sacred power alive in this world. And there were moments, now and then, when he sensed strongly the presence of the Holy Spirit amid the souls who had gathered in tiny board churches or simply stood together during the Mass under broad blue skies.