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Pauline is pregnant with Napoleon’s baby. She tries desperately to abort the child, but she is unable to do so. Soon, Bernadette recognizes that Pauline is pregnant, and Pauline announces that Napoleon is the father, sealing the child’s fate. Bernadette intends to raise the child as her own. Pauline has already decided to become a nun, so this solution pleases everyone.

Pauline, we learn, lured Napoleon with love medicine from Moses Pillager. Bernadette sends Napoleon to live in the barn and helps Pauline hide her pregnancy from everyone. Though Pauline refuses to push the baby out, Bernadette saves both of their lives by pulling the baby out with spoons. Pauline imagines that the bruises on the baby’s head are the marks of “the devil’s thumbs” and that she is already “a fallen, dark thing” (136). The baby, Marie, is born on Armistice Day—November 11, 1918—as the church bells ring incessantly. Bernadette raises Marie, explaining that she is a dead relative’s baby.

Pauline goes to the convent as soon as she can walk, where she receives visions from Jesus that tell her she is white, not mixed-blood, and that she is forgiven for having had her daughter. Jesus, furthermore, tells her that she has a special mission to serve others and to discover the hiding places of his enemy (137). She decides that the Chippewa/Ojibwe people are bedeviled and that she must help root out the devil from their midst—that she must harvest souls for the Lord. She singles out Fleur Pillager as the primary target of her attempts to defeat the devil, and so begins to visit the house in Matchimanito daily.

However, Pauline also imagines that Satan gives her direction, so she knows she must be careful in which voices she listens to. She devises many mortifications of her flesh, including wearing potato sack underwear, wearing her shoes on the wrong feet, and forcing herself to go to the bathroom only twice each day.

Her Mother Superior does not approve of such strange penances, so Pauline must go to significant lengths to hide her secret practices. However, Nanapush quickly figures out Pauline’s secrets. He deliberately plies her with tea, forcing her to use the outhouse. She is mortified and angry that he sees through her, as she falls into his trap and drinks too much of the sweet tea. She rushes from the house to relieve herself.

As she grows more and more insane, Pauline devises additional penances for herself. She sleeps only on her back with her arms crossed over her breast. She refuses to bathe or to wash her clothing. One day, as she attempts to enter Fleur’s house, Nanapush refuses her entrance because she stinks. He leaves the house, unable to bear her odor. This, too, is one of Pauline’s penances, for she believes cleanliness is vanity.

Fleur, however, absorbed and distracted by her pregnancy, welcomes Pauline into the house. She boils Pauline’s underclothes, replacing the potato sack with a smooth, clean flour sack. She and Lulu bathe Pauline, scrubbing her clean and washing her hair. Deliciously relaxed, Pauline allows them to help her.

Once she is clean and dressed, she notices blood leading from the outhouse to the bed, where she finds Fleur. Fleur directs her to her herbs, asking for an herb tea to stop the labor because the baby is coming too soon. Pauline tries to help as Fleur sends Lulu to fetch Margaret and Nanapush.

Pauline—clumsy, useless, absorbed in prayer and visions—fails to prepare the medicines that Fleur needs as her premature baby is born. Fleur throws a knife at Pauline, pinning her to her chair. Fleur wraps the baby in her shirt and tries to make the tea she needs herself.

Pauline follows Fleur’s spirit to the Chippewa heaven, where Fleur asks to be dealt into the card game played by the three men who raped her and whom she and Pauline killed. Fleur wins, but the other spirits chastise Fleur for leaving her baby behind in the land of the living. A woman resembling Pauline’s mother takes the baby from Fleur: the baby is lifeless.

When she comes back to herself in Fleur’s cabin, the baby is dead, the fire is out, and Margaret shoves her aside, blaming her for Fleur’s terrible state, building the fire, and preparing the medicines that Fleur needs. Margaret places the baby in the shoebox that once held Lulu’s patent leather shoes. Eli takes the box and places it high in a tree, in the old traditional fashion. When Pauline leaves, telling them that she will send Father Damien, Margaret spits on her.