Saint Francesca of Assisi

"For God's sake don't tell them about the bear,"
I cautioned her.  Gerta Sautalouma looked up
At me with surprised, uncomprehending eyes,
Like those of a puppy that had just been scolded.
Admitting that need had finally vanquished pride,
She'd submitted a plea for help from Social Services.
She'd received a reply.  Two caseworkers were
Coming to her home to assess her situation.

She'd just told me of the bear that she feeds apples to.
It lumbers up to her, tame as one of her dogs.
I'd met her today at the end of her long driveway
That nature was reclaiming with scrubby poplar,
Weeds, and knee-deep grass between the old ruts.
Every week I'd haul a load of bones and suet out to her;
I'd remain to help the gentle, plump-faced Finnish woman,
Who dressed in a flannel shirt and overalls, to load her sled.

"What would the bureaucrats make of her?" I wondered.
Pillars of stacked newspapers and sheet-covered ghosts
Of furniture past have conspired to compress her house
Into a labyrinth of narrows and hands and knees trails.
Gerta Sautalouma had gone without for too long
To let go of anything now.  Latticed with cobwebs.
Cardboard boxes still wait stacked in the living room
For the move that she could never bring herself to make.

A box of toys in a corner and a bat and glove by the door
Conjure up images of her twelve year old boy.
His blonde hair used to glisten in the morning sun
As he would run down the driveway to meet the bus.
The dust-covered smoking stand, the leather easy chair
That oozes a trail of stuffing toward a mouse nest,
The moth-ravaged clothing hanging in an upstairs closet;
To her, these are holy relics of her late husband.

She lives in the woodstove-warmth of her sauna now.
Often, lying awake in the silence of a winter night,
Her memories will limp on back to better times;
Her life before the accident that took her two men from her,
Leaving her to run the family grocery store, alone.
She'd failed, letting it slip through her toil-gnarled hands.
Hard-working and honest herself, she'd dispensed credit
To anyone who'd ask for it.  She trusted folks back then. 

The day her store was auctioned off, she fled in tears.
When people hurt they cope with pain in different ways.
Some coil into a hissing rage of brooding venom
And strike out at anyone who comes near them.
Some can shake hurt from themselves like a dog does the rain
While some flee from those who have hurt them, as did Gerta.
She took refuge in her home, like the battered child
Who hides in a closet to escape drunken blows and curses.

Bones lay scattered about her yard and driveway;
Brittle, bleaching remnants of life, giving her land
The appearance of an ancient battleground.
Last fall Costable Toivo paid her a visit.
Knowing she did without to feed her dogs, he donned the Law
To mask his mercy, and told her "Your dogs were chasing deer."
Ignoring pleas that would've softened Herod's heart,
He gave lead dispatch to all but two of her companions.

Late that winter she was telling me, her ruddy face
Livid with pain, anger and outraged disgust,
Of the heartless bastards that had abandoned
A box of puppies at the end of her driveway
In sub-zero cold.  "Three of them had frozen to death,"
She said mournfully, "but I was able to save the two
That were huddled in the middle."  Less than a year now
Since Toivo's slaughter, and she was back up to ten dogs.

"I just told them to let me be," she explained,
Her voice quavering with indignation.
"I just told them to stick their help up their ass."
The social workers, aghast at the living conditions
That had embraced her existance, had tried to pry her
From her home, but fled when she picked up a pitchfork.
"If I don't ask them for anything anymore," she insisted,
"They can't hurt me.  They'll have to leave me alone."

As she turned from me to pull her sled's burden
Of old bones down a rut of her driveway,
The fiery leaves of early autumn
Framed her bowed, kerchiefed peasant figure
In a blazing panorama of color.
Her canine disciples padded silently alongside her.
She was Saint Francesca of Assisi, surrounded
By the adoration of God's guileless creatures.