Tracks

Pauline suffers greatly from her burned arms and hands. She also endures many visits from either Jesus or Lucifer: she cannot determine which one. Confused and half-insane with pain from her injuries, she decides that Jesus has turned away from her.

Pauline tries to die by holding her breath. She travels to Matchimanito lake, where the lake monster—which she sees as a Satanic serpent—rises from the water before her. She takes a breath and finds herself still in her convent bed being fed fish broth.

In her mania, she determines to visit Matchimanito Lake one more time to confront Nanapush, Fleur, and the lake monster, and to attempt to save their souls and vanquish the monster before taking her vows and renouncing her self-proclaimed responsibility for them forever. She takes Nanapush’s boat out on the lake and rows to within sight of the family on the shore. She cannot row to the shore, and in her madness, she does not care. She shouts for Nanapush and Fleur.

Bernadette and Pauline’s child, Marie, and the rest of her extended family, the other Morrisseys, including Sophie and her children, gather to try to save Pauline. The waves drive Father Damien back. Nanapush manages to steer through the waves to her side, but she will not get into his boat. She just tries to grab his paddle, so that he will drown too. He leaves her and returns to shore.

As darkness falls, the holes in the boat swell shut, and she watches the fires lit on shore. She is determined to wait 40 days and 40 nights until the devil appears, so she can fight him. She throws off all of her clothes. She imagines that the lake monster severs her anchor as the boat moves toward the shore, landing on the beach near one of the fires. She sees the devil approach her, and she strangles him with her metal rosary. When her vision clears, she sees that she has killed Napoleon Morrissey.

She drags him into the woods by his suspenders and belatedly realizes that she is naked. On the way back to the convent, she rolls in mud, ditches, feathers, grass, and feces. By the time she reaches the convent, she “was nothing human …[She] was nothing but a piece of the woods” (204).

Pauline regains her senses over the next few months of tender nursing by her sisters. Soon to become a nun, Pauline will assume a new identity and a new name: Leopolda.