But for a long time the man seemed unable to go farther. He saw the Bishop slip the little pocket stole around his neck and seemed to know what it was and what it was for. The swollen lips, however, only continued to mumble the words with which they had begun:
“Mon Pere, je me ’cuse––”
Rafe Gadbeau could speak English as well as or better than he could speak French. But there are times when a man reverts to the tongue of his mother. And confession, especially in the face of death, is one of these.
Again the Bishop lowered the man’s head and changed the position of the body, while he fanned what air there was across the gasping mouth with his hat.
Now the man tried to gather his straying wits 175 to him. With a sharp effort that seemed to send a tremor through his whole long body he forced his faculties back into their grooves. With a muttered word of encouragement from the Bishop, he began hoarsely that precise, recitative form of confession that the good priests of Lower Canada have been drilling into the children for the last three hundred years.
Once the memory found itself going the long-accustomed way it worked easily, mechanically. Since five years he had not confessed. At that time he had received the Sacrament. He went through the “table of sins” with the methodical care of a man who knows that if he misses a step in the sequence he will lose his way. It was the story of the young men of his people in the hills, in the lumber camps, in the sawmills, in the towns. A thousand men of his kind in the hill country would have told the same story, of hard work and anger and fighting in the camps, of drink and debauch in the towns when they went down to spend their money; and would have told it in exactly the same way. The Bishop had heard the story ten thousand times.
But now––Mon Pere, je me ’cuse––there was something more, something that would not fall into the catalogue of the sins of every day. It had begun a long time ago and it was just coming to an end here at the feet of the Bishop. Yes, it was undoubtedly coming to an end. For 176 the Bishop had found blood caked on the man’s shirt, in the back, just below the shoulder blade. There was a wound there, a bullet wound, a wound from which ordinarily the man would have fallen and stayed lying where he fell.
He must tell this thing in his own way, backwards, as it unrolled itself to his mind.
“I die, Mon Pere, I die,” he began between gasps. “I die. Since the afternoon I have been dying. If I could have found a spot to lie down, if I could have had two minutes free from the fire, I would have lain down to die. But shall a man lie down in hell before he is dead? No.
“All day I have run from the fire. I could not lie down to die till I had found a free place where my soul could breathe out. Here I breathe. Here I die. The rabbits and the foxes and the deer ran out from the fire, and they ran no faster than I ran. But I could not run out of its way. All day long men followed the line of the fire and fought around its edge. They fought the fire, but they hunted me. All the day long they hunted me and drove me always back into the fire when I would run out.