This essay is excerpted from <em>Off-Kilter: A Woman’s Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother and her Polish Heritage</em> with the author’s permission. It is my pleasure to offer you this sample of the
book’s excellent essays — each one evokes the writer’s growing up clearly and vividly.

Less than a mile into our school field trip, my friend Rita’s father stopped
the car so Karol, the new kid, could throw up in the weeds beside the road.
Karol had just moved here from Poland. Rita’s dad said Karol had never ridden
in a car before. As I look back on that day, his nausea seems a fitting
prelude.

When Karol returned to his seat, we moved  as far away from him as we could and
stared out the windows. Rita’s father, a small, quiet man who wore glasses and
worked the night shift, drove onward to the National Shrine of North American
Martyrs in Auriesville, New York. The shrine was only
a few miles from St. Stanislaus School, where a group of parents had gathered
in the parking lot that morning to carpool us fourth graders. We traveled over
the Church Street Bridge to the South Side, then on beside the river, past
small dairy farms where black and white cattle grazed oblivious to our caravan.

At last our cars had climbed the steep hill to the shrine. We ran to put our
lunch boxes on tables in the covered pavilion. Then we formed lines with
partners, and filed two-by-two into the Coliseum. We did this quickly and
quietly. By the fourth grade, we’d had lots of practice in line formation.

The huge building had room for six thousand worshipers on long wooden benches
with kneelers. Built in 1930, its eight sides lifted open in warm weather like
a Hawaiian lanai. The ceiling rose to a point in the middle like a teepee,
while the four-sided altar resembled a frontier stockade.

When the priest spoke into the microphone, his deep voice boomed up to the
rafters. What we were about to hear took on the awesome power of the building
itself.

The story of Father Isaac Jogues, Brother Rene Goupil and the lay missionary, John Lalande,
was gruesome, and the priest described their suffering in gory
detail. Although these saintly men were bent on converting them to the Catholic
Church, the Mohawk Indians who lived in the area were unappreciative. They
pulled out the martyrs’ fingernails and bit off their fingers. They tied the
men to the ground, where Indian children threw live coals onto their helpless
bodies. Finally, the martyrs were forced to run a gauntlet of warriors who beat
and tomahawked them to death. Jogues’ head was impaled
on a palisade picket fence facing north as a warning to future French
missionaries. The martyrs were holy men, the priest said, who had endured all
this for the love of Christ.

Rita, Karol and I filed outside in silence, horrific images in our nine-year-old
heads. We all got the message. It was good to insist on converting savages who
wanted to kill you. God wanted us to do things like that.

Our teachers were solemn Polish nuns from the Felician
Order. They wore full black habits with only their hands and faces exposed.
Wooden crosses dangled from the beads encircling their waists. They led us past
stately evergreens where the name of Jesus in red paint marked the rough bark
on the tree trunks. The martyrs had written Jesus’ name with their own bloody
finger stumps, a Sister said. I was horrified, but her story had me in its
spell. I secretly tried to figure out which trees had held the marks of the
real blood, long since worn away.

The nuns led us to the Ravine, where plaques beside the trail told the story of
Goupil’s torture. Descending the dark path into the
trees, I imagined the holy man beaten and stoned, bravely praying as he
stumbled along. I half expected a fierce brave to jump out at me from the
forest, tomahawk raised, I knew I’d never be as brave as the martyrs, I wanted
to get out of the Ravine and back into the sunshine as soon as possible,

But homage to death was everywhere I looked, We entered a small chapel
dedicated to Kateri Tekakwitha,
an Indian maiden who devoted her life to Christian charity and died a virgin at
twenty-four. I knew from previous lessons that a virgin, whatever that meant,
was a good thing for a woman to be, especially if you were going to die a
martyr. Nobody mentioned the male saints’ virginity. I didn’t think to ask if
they got extra points for it, like Kateri had.

Outside the chapel, I saw a stone pieta of Mary cradling the body of Jesus.
Nearby, a garden filled with mosaics depicted her Seven Sorrows. This was not
the place to honor her joys.

In the Martyrs’ Museum, we stood before a diorama of Jogues
being tortured. More statues added to the heaviness of spirit. We saw St.
Aloysius Gonzaga, who “died during the plague in Italy, 1591,” and
St. Joseph, “patron of a happy death,” It didn’t occur to me then
that these two had no connection to the shrine. Someone had obviously been
carried away with the overall theme: Suffering is good.

Subdued and depressed, my friends and I ate a quick lunch and went out to the
field to play kickball. I was confused, my thoughts in turmoil. We had been
exposed all morning to tales and images of horrible suffering. We were told
that one day we, too, might have to die for Christ. Especially since the
godless Communists had overrun Poland, the land of our grandparents. It could be
only a matter of time before they came over here and lined us up against the
Coliseum wall, machine guns at the ready. And our teachers wanted us to play
kickball?

Karol ran off with some boys, while Franny, Rita and
I passed a ball back and forth with our feet, giving it slow, tiny kicks,
“What would you say?” I asked my friends, “Would you deny
Christ?”

“No, of course not! I would never deny Our Lord,” Franny
said. Her words were strong but she sounded on the verge of tears. She pushed
her eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose with one finger.

“What if they shot you?” I demanded. “Sister said the Com­munists
shoot you for believing in God.”

Rita made a disgusted face, “Stupid, you’d go right up to heaven, not even
pass through purgatory! So it would be okay if they shot you.You
would die for Christ! And the Communists would burn in hell!”

What Rita said made perfect sense. We’d heard the same words from Sister many
times, and from Father Gospodarek, our parish priest.
It was good to suffer. God deducted it from your time in purgatory. Even so, I
wasn’t ready to die for Christ, not in the middle of fourth grade. And I didn’t
feel like playing kickball on such a holy spot.

The grownups said it was beautiful there and I tried to believe them. They
didn’t look scared at all, but my shoulders were cringing. I looked around at
the evergreens, the hillside, the field and the river below, but all I could
see was bloody heads on posts and wild Indians waving tomahawks.

“Hey, Linda, did you know that Sister is bald under her headdress?”
Rita tried to make me laugh. She always did that when I got too serious.

“She is not,” I said.

“Is too!” Frizzy brown curls stood out from Rita’s head like little
Orphan Annie’s. Her big brown eyes challenged me.

“How would you know?” I taunted her.

“My aunt, Sister Irene, said they chop off all your hair when you take the
habit!” Rita bounced around me in a circle, making scissors motions with
her fingers, but the image of nuns getting their hair hacked off did not lift
my spirits.

There was no getting around it. This holy place frightened me, and I was glad
to leave it. Still, I returned to the shrine with my classmates or my parents
all through my grade school years. We called our visits pilgrimages, and we
didn’t think twice about going. Like many things in the 1950s, it was just
something we did. Summer was a popular time to visit, because our church in
town wasn’t air-conditioned and the Coliseum was open on all sides to the
summer breeze.

The memory of hundreds of Polish Catholics praying loudly to French saints in
an ancient Mohawk village is so incongruous, I don’t know what to make of it
now. I do believe the place held a morbid fascination for us kids, like running
past a haunted house or staring at a bloody car wreck.

When I left home for college, I learned that all conflicts have more than one
side, and that not everyone looks at life the way my parents and teachers did.
Wondering if there was more to the story of the Auriesville
shrine, I did some research in the campus library.

During the time of the Jesuit missionaries, the Mohawks traded with the Dutch,
who brought them smallpox. The disease killed sixty percent of the Indian
population. Their villages were abandoned, their families torn apart. Into this
turmoil came Isaac Jogues spreading the good news
about Christ. The Indians, who had their own sacred traditions, believed the
religious articles he brought contained evil spirits responsible for their
sickness. It was a colossal misunderstanding on both sides.

Seen through my grownup eyes, the shrine is more tacky than frightening, but
it’s still an eerie place. I never brought my own children there. On visits
back home, while my parents were alive, I had no wish to go back to the shrine.
Mom and Dad loved to go to Mass there on summer Sundays. They often brought a
picnic lunch. For some people, the place is a meditative spiritual haven. For
me, it epitomizes the glorification of suffering I learned as a child. I still
want to run, not walk, in the opposite direction.

Recent archeological evidence indicates the Mohawk village where the martyrs
were killed was actually in another spot, a few miles down the river. Catholics
have prayed at Auriesville for over seventy years,
but the place has lost any meaning it once had for me and instead is a symbol
of the suffering I have worked all my life to transcend.

Rita’s father passed away in 1987, and her two children have grown and moved
away. Rita still lives in the area with her second husband: She doesn’t go to
church very often, but sometimes, in summer, she takes a ride to the shrine. Franny moved to Florida after college and hasn’t been back
since her folks died in the 1990s. We lost track of Karol after grade school.

In 1993, a small group of Mohawks bought 322 acres of land near their ancestral
home along the river that bears their name. They grow berries and vegetables,
and raise horses, cows and chickens. During the summer, they sell handmade
items in their craft shop and teach workshops on the Iroquois culture, which
you can read about on their new web site. Some of them go to Mass at the
shrine. A few years ago, they opened a bed and breakfast. I wish them every
success, but I won’t be staying.

I wonder how they feel about the fake blood on the trees.

****

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