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Saint Marie

Summary: Saint Marie

The time shifts back to 1934, narrated by Marie Lazarre/Grandma Marie Kashpaw when she was a fourteen-year-old girl living at Sacred Heart Convent and taught by Catholic nuns. Marie describes Sister Leopolda as a nun who is obsessed with Satan and who convinces Marie that she is possessed by evil, too. One day at Sunday school, Marie senses Satan’s presence and laughs. Sister Leopolda uses a spear-like hook she always carries in her black boot to stab Satan, and then drags Marie to the closet and puts her inside. Sister Leopolda tells Marie that she can either marry a no-good Native American or join the convent, and Marie chooses the convent, going there to live, mostly to enact revenge on Leopolda. She moves in and sees the larder of food, including the goat cheese she loves. Sister Leopolda tells Marie that Satan followed her here. When Marie drops a cup under the cookstove, Leopolda orders her to retrieve it. As Marie reaches for the cup, Leopolda pins her neck with her foot and pours boiling water on her back to “burn him from your mind.” 

In her pain, Marie has visions of bejeweled breasts. Leopolda takes Marie to her private cell. There, Leopolda rubs salve on Marie’s burns. Marie feels as if she is losing her mind, unsure of what has happened. When Leopolda forces her to help her bake the loaves of bread, Marie tries to push her into the open oven, but a poker in Leopolda’s hand prevents Leopolda from falling all the way in. In anger, Leopolda stabs Marie in the hand with a fork and knocks her unconscious with the poker. When Marie wakes up in Mother Superior’s office, the nuns worship her. Marie calls Sister Leopolda forward to speak. Leopolda has convinced the others that Marie is a miracle whose hand bleeds with stigmata, which are scars that look like the wounds of the crucified Christ. Marie pities Leopolda’s dark soul and knows that she must leave the convent. 

Analysis: Saint Marie

This horrifically violent story deals directly with religious themes and imagery, as Marie vividly describes the “Dark One” embodied by a Catholic nun. As it begins, Marie describes herself as a mail-order Catholic girl who was raised in poverty, in stark contrast to the whitewashed Catholic convent. Even though the exterior of the convent is literally so white it blinds Marie, Sister Leopolda is a hellish, twisted version of religion, bent on punishment and pain as a means to salvation. From the start, Leopolda sees her younger self, black and filthy, mirrored in the innocent Marie, and dedicates herself to exorcising Satan from the young girl to rid herself of him. In a shadowy and perverted narrative, the child emerges as the saint and the nun is the devil incarnate.

Connected to the first story by the character of Marie, this story uses a different language and style. Told in the stilted vernacular of a naive teenage girl, the narrative feels detached from reality and somewhat surreal. Marie is traumatized by her childhood experience at the convent, which ties it thematically to much of the novel. Childhood traumas, including abandonment and pain, shape the characters as adults, usually in devastating ways. Often, these traumas seep through the generations and become multi-generational patterns, not just individual burdens.

Marie will visit Sister Leopolda again, in “Flesh and Blood,” which happens twenty-three years later. After admitting that there is surely no reason to go up that hill to the convent again, she does, taking her daughter Zelda with her. The nun Leopolda is dying, and Marie wants to see her and show off both her good life and her grown daughter. That story, like this one, ends in an adverted disaster, this time a psychological one rather than a physical one.

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