Addison Zeller

The Missionary Bishop

To be clear, I’m the Missionary Bishop of the Lakes. Those are my vestments they show in the treasury. It’s my tomb in the cathedral floor. They carved out part of the roof so the sun would hit the spot. On warm days, my tomb gives off a loamy smell, like a hot riverbed. “Everything in the cathedral feels like him.” Visitors often say that, and no wonder. In place of crucifixions, nativities, annunciations, the usual, they see murals of my life, my expedition, my diocesan administration. The grandest, over the altar, shows me stepping out of the canoe with a cross around my neck. On my right side are two scouts in buckskin with muskets and powder horns. On my left is the guide who led us here, a member of the tribe and my first convert. For reasons of perspective, the ridge where the cathedral was built is shown behind me, bare of anything but a nest of eiders. That’s a poetic touch: eiders don’t fly so far inland. I can live with that, but the ridge bothers me. To me it looks like we landed on the wrong bank, realized no one was there, and leaped back in the canoe to try the other side. I know that’s not the idea, of course—the cathedral chapter wouldn’t have commissioned a mural of that. Maybe I’m wrong about this. I have to describe it all from memory; I can’t see through the windows now, they’re stained glass. 

All that was put in after I died. Probably for the best. I spent so much time dreaming about the cathedral in my days of nature, maybe nothing would have pleased me. Before I even reached the spot (incorrectly situated in the mural), I sketched, measured, drew designs. I built a model from olivewood. A banker in my hometown provided money and a table for the model. I even folded little paper converts to sit in the pews. Some of them had tiny pipes, but they didn’t smoke out of respect for that holy place. One of life’s ironies. When I did build my cathedral, people smoked in it constantly. They pretended it was incense, but I knew better. I didn’t even light incense after a while, just to prove it was them. “Brood of vipers,” I said, coughing, but no one listened. I was as audible to them then as I am now. People often detected me in the cathedral after my death, as a chilly vapor moving from one window to another, but they couldn’t hear anything I said. “His holy aura,” they called it, but they were wrong: I’m a ghost. 

A ghost: not a saint, but they only use that second word. And it’s true, saints are people for whom things work out perfectly, even if they’re martyred. Whatever they try to do, it happens. I hadn’t realized that. When I made my plans, staring into the nave of the model with my banker friend, I genuinely believed I was looking at a life’s work. When I was consecrated bishop in my hometown, walking down the aisle and blessing all the young women in the pews dressed in their white organdy, I knew I was beginning a long journey. Everything would take many years. Selecting my scouts for the expedition, striking out, crossing lakes and rivers to reach the unbaptized tribes—I assumed it would eat up a decade or two, and then the conversion process would be fitful: I wouldn’t break ground on the cathedral until half my life was gone. Then the decades would drag out as I dug the foundations myself, alone, in pathetic moth-eaten rags. I loved to picture it. In my fondest dreams, I saw myself feebly shoving the cornerstone into place, an old man, as young unconverted women laughed at my feebleness and prodded me with sticks. The banker would be long dead and I would die immediately after I got that stone in place. My successor would misappropriate any remaining funds after a year or two and skedaddle, leaving an empty shell open to the sky, known only to passing caravans and migrating, shitty geese. Just a few choir stalls by an unconsecrated altar, caked with shit and lined with nests. My body would be locked in a vault under the mud and rainwater would collect over it. Otters would mate there, indifferent to my holiness. Nobody would visit. Many years later, a youth would discover my plans in the drawer of the banker’s desk. He would dust off my olivewood model and the figures inside it. He would conceive of a desire to complete my work. A wealthy banker of the region would donate the sums. In joyful memory of me, the community would set to work erecting walls, blowing glass, plucking feathers for the bishop’s throne cushion. Draping regionally appropriate items from the clerestory: bearskins, beaver pelts, ropes of dry tobacco, eagle feathers, canoes, paddles, the American flag. I saw the cathedral rising above my weathered tomb, justifying my life’s labors, even as my name faded on the stonework. A cause for my canonization would open in Rome. Miracles would be recorded. The pope… I cried thinking about it.

Sadly, it all went right from the start. My guide was eager and dutiful. I saw that the minute he stepped in the canoe. After his long captivity, he wanted to go home. He was happy to help me convert his family and people. Better than letting something bad happen to them. “I’m only an instrument,” I told him, and he took me seriously. For him, it wasn’t about me at all. 

At least the two scouts were untrustworthy. That was a blessing. After just a few days, they regretted the deal. Wiping the humidity from their eyes, they turned from me to my guide and to me again. They didn’t know who annoyed them more. In lazy, unhappy moments they probably thought of killing us. If only they’d tried! But they didn’t want to navigate that maze of rivers and lakes alone, so they had to spare the guide, and if they spared him they might as well spare me too. They dulled their boredom with tobacco. Sometimes they disappeared behind a stand of reeds and engaged in unnatural acts. If I hadn’t been consumed with my holy task, I might have stomped into the reeds to hurl abuse at them. Instead I rubbed my cross and mumbled the word cathedral.  

The guide was relentless. He needed to do everything right away, to bark out orders, as if to distract us from what was on his mind. I wondered about it sometimes. If things got too quiet in the canoe, he’d shout at a duck or an otter he spotted on a bank. Occasionally he yelled at a fish we couldn’t see; we had to take his word it was there. “My family cries to me from the pit.” That’s what he said. He knew my sermons backwards and forwards. The thought of people he loved being in danger preyed on him like a mosquito in his ear, taking another sip whenever he let his guard down. Nothing was more important than getting there fast. “Anything could happen to us. The canoes might capsize, the scouts might murder us.” He said that out loud. 

The scouts didn’t like that. “He’s looking out for his own, thinks they’re safer converted. Who knows what he really believes? Maybe he just wants to go home—maybe it’s that simple.” They said that right back. 

I sat in the rear, as far away as possible, staring behind me at the rushes so I wouldn’t have to see him pent up in the bow, ready to spring out the moment we touched land. Some days he drove us on so long he suddenly felt lost. He panicked and said he messed up. We’d run the canoe aground and let him collect his bearings. Trembling, we lit fires and huddled with our muskets as he shouted and walked in circles on a rock. Then he’d calm down, lie across the rock, and say it was fine, he remembered where we were. “We can rest or go on.” But that scared us even more. It was like being led around by a sleepwalker. 

We arrived in half the time expected and he jumped out to greet his people. It was clear he wanted to explain everything himself. I saw him lead the elders away to talk in private. I barely got a glimpse before they all disappeared. For days no one approached us. We stayed by the canoe, nibbling jerky, smoking, swatting flies and mosquitoes. At night we threw a buffalo skin over ourselves and shivered. I thought my chances of martyrdom were fair. One morning the tribe marched down to the canoe and demanded to get the baptism over with. It was that simple. I baptized through the afternoon. 

Afterward, he ceased to exist. He didn’t eat with us. When I saw him, he seemed just like the rest, agreeable but distant. He acknowledged me no differently than anyone else, with a bow and a slight folding of his hands across his chest as he moved on. I forgot which was him. The foreman on the cathedral site showed me the day’s work. I’d examine it, comment on the progress, make the sign of the cross, review the list of laborers and see his Christian name. 

I felt like I was in a trance. When I officiated at mass, standing out in the reeds like in that mural, I barely noticed the weather, if it was rainy or sunny. It was painfully obvious that my life’s work would be complete in only a few years. The workers were efficient, the funds enough. The diocese was easy to administrate. Once navigated, there was nothing complicated in the lakes. I laid the cornerstone without a single hobble of old age. The sky that day, as I learned from a hagiographical book about me, was open and blue. Sparrows hopped joyfully and sang in the space reserved for the choir. Not a single person failed to see a good omen, I’m sorry to say. 

I didn’t stay long at the celebration. I walked home, staring at my feet. When I crawled into bed, I immediately wanted to run back and say something—command them to stop. All night, I lay awake thinking. How exhausted I was. How deep into the lakes I’d come. How easily and inexorably everything turned out well. I saw ambitionless years heap up. Peaceful decades stretched out to a quiet, painless death. When you see the role life’s given you, it’s terrible. Your life’s already complete. 

I fought off despair. Sometimes I tested my workers. I delayed pay, or waylaid the foreman in circular conversations that left him confused about his job. To little effect. Then I canceled the delivery of necessary materials. I visited the site and saw the workers lined up on the edge of a fountain, eating sandwiches and drinking from a bottle they passed between them. “Is this your lunch hour?” I asked, and they all nodded yes, I’d caught them at lunch. There was embarrassment in their voices. I strolled around, patted the stonework, tapped on the altar, and returned to the fountain. “It’s a long hour today,” I said. “Yes,” said the foreman, “this one seems to have forgotten to end. If it doesn’t by 5 o’clock, we won’t get much done.” 

The diocesan office was ramshackle, draped with furs. When I returned, the scouts were smoking on the floor, cross-legged. I sighed, anointed them priests on the spot, and ordered them to say the rest of my masses for the week. Then I crawled into bed and stared at all the heads on the animal skins until it was time for my inspection. When I examined the site, I found fresh plaster applied to some of the walls, stones put up where possible, and other obvious attempts to work around the problem. The foreman had a melancholy expression, so I decided to upset him. “The devil finds work for idle hands,” I said. “Then our hands can’t be that idle,” he replied sadly. He questioned me about materials, pay. I promised to handle everything and went home, ashamed of myself. 

I set a kneeler made of antlers in front of my crucifix and had almost begun to pray when the words “You know everything, so it doesn’t matter” slipped out instead. In the morning, I saw that the workers were paid and the materials delivered. From then on, there was always progress. It was always rapid. 

“You’re one tense asshole,” the banker once told me. “There’s so much frustrated energy in you.” He was righter than he knew. No wonder people felt my ghostly presence. I had ability, I had energy, but the available outlets were always blessed, consecrated duties anyone could have performed. The tasks I set myself out of genuine ambition, the most difficult problems of my bishopric—anyone could have handled those. 

To feel, as anyone must, that I had something more in myself, for which no outlet existed on earth, drained my emotions and desires. I secretly began to play cards, and read novels, but my holiness did not abate. My life became a process of achieving one thing after another. Watching me say mass, people thought I was enraptured, inspired. I was listless, vacant. I didn’t even have the satisfaction of having wasted my life. I saw clearly that I’d accomplished a number of reasonably notable things. That was the cruelest blow. 

When death came, long after it could have been useful, I still found myself waiting, hoping for, if not anticipating, an occupation for my attention, but nothing happened then either. Sometimes I stretched out real long, or raised my voice a little above a whisper. I tried to open doors now and then. People who heard me guessed it was the wind, or a ghost—just not mine. They never understood I had finished all too easily the task I set out to do, with precisely the amount of money allotted for the purpose, converted without difficulty everyone I set out to convert, and managed my diocese for untroubled decades. 

“Do you wish to be free of this?” the voice asks me. 

“Yes, anything.” 

Then I leave town and ascend the ridge in a trailing smoke plume. I become a cloud and watch the cathedral shrink to the size of an olivewood model. For an instant I catch a glimpse of parishioners lighting their pipes. I float over the lake, give my little rain, diminish, and continue to linger.