Doc - Mary Doria Russell [141]
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.
In early August, Alexander arrived at yet another indistinguishably squalid village and was taken immediately to an Indian girl of fifteen. She requested baptism from Alexander himself, rather than waiting for Father Paul, for she knew she was near death from consumption and wished to join the Church. Though her relatives were heathens, they could not deny this beloved child anything that might ease her passing. Alexander had just enough time for a brief preparation before the girl’s wish could be fulfilled. Then he laid the consecrated Host on the tongue of the newly christened Mary Clare.
With that food of angels in her mouth, she breathed out her soul and was immediately united with her Creator. There was a hushed, awestruck moment before her family began to wail. She is in heaven, Alexander thought, stunned. I have witnessed a saint’s death.
In the long years to come, Alexander von Angensperg would pray for Mary Clare’s intercession, especially after he was transferred to the Rosebud Reservation in the 1890s. Nine of ten Lakota died of tuberculosis in those days, and each time Alexander was called to a deathbed like Mary Clare’s, he prayed that she would bring about one of the three miracles he needed to present her case for canonization.
By the time Alexander had assembled his evidence, the Sacra Rituum Congregatio had already begun beatification of a young Carmelite nun known to her devotees as the Little Flower of Jesus. Like Mary Clare, Thérèse of Lisieux had suffered from and died of tuberculosis, but the Little Flower had influential European supporters who were able to press her cause in Rome; Mary Clare had a single elderly Jesuit in South Dakota, so the petition on her behalf languished in back offices of the Vatican. But Alexander von Angensperg knew what he knew. That beautiful Indian child was in heaven. She was especially solicitous of those dying of consumption. And she could effect a cure—or at least a remission—of the disease in special circumstances.
He had seen this thrice, he believed, with his own eyes. The first time was in the summer of 1878, just outside Dodge City.
That August, after the crops were in and before the harvest began, a two-week platform convention for the Republican Party of Kansas was held in Topeka. Among the delegates was Wyatt S. Earp (occupation: policeman; residence: Dodge City, Ford County). Neatly dressed in black and wearing a decent pair of freshly polished boots, Deputy Earp was accompanied by a quiet woman whose age was difficult to guess. She was not young, but neither was she more worn than might be expected