Read The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Online
Authors: Louise Erdrich
I write in humble fearfulness and wonder. To whom else might I turn? I beg you to indulge me, Your Holiness. Please forgive my attempt to explain, though it be insufficient. It is just that to reconstruct, to go back, to establish the scene requires at present a spiritual energy I cannot summon. I am reeling. I have such questions.
To wit: Have you or your holy minions knowledge of a case in which the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ has in actuality (and I mean physically, not only in a spiritual sense) nourished the flock?
In other words, did the wafer turn into visible meat, the wine to actual blood?
And also, to your understanding, would it be wrong for a cleric to request a visit by the devil, just to make certain of his physical shape?
I await your reply.
SISTER HILDEGARDE’S VIEWS
The Superior, Sister Hildegarde Anne, was a woman of German resourcefulness. Short, boxy, impenetrable, she had saved her sisters, as well as many others, early on that winter by ordering the church horse butchered while it still had flesh, and distributing its store of oats and grain. She had a toughness of expression unusual in a nun, and spoke bluntly. Also, she was effortlessly cheerful in a way that often outraged or frightened other people. Now, for instance, as she spoke to Father Damien in the intimacy of the kitchen, she shaved the last of that poor beast’s hooves into a pot of boiling soup water. As she worked, she hummed and then sang out, trimming the great rocky chunk of chitin with a sharp filet knife. Beside the soup pot, half a precious potato soaked in salted water. The sparsity didn’t seem to bother her. Someone had left six other potatoes and a rind of bacon, held now under lock and key. All of this would keep the religious band alive today, and today, she said, was as far as she ever went in her prayers.
Although Agnes felt what she felt, believed what she believed, about what had happened during the Eucharist, the two exchanged no more than a significant sentence. Agnes was to find that Sister Hildegarde was of such deeply skeptical stock that she did not entirely accept her own experience as true. Hildegarde’s concerns were down-to-earth. Since she was on the reservation to be useful, she lost no time in telling Father Damien how he could make himself useful too.
“Father,” said Hildegarde, “you must go visiting with the sacrament. The poor Indians are dying out. Now is a good time to convert them! They live like wretches anyway, and then the sweating fever takes them. Some are gone in only hours once the illness sets in, so you must be quick. Some wait for death to walk down the road. They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick. You could easily baptize them while they’re tranced.”
“What cures this fever? Who is our doctor?” Agnes ignored the nun’s avidity regarding souls. Yes, she thought, Father Damien was bound to baptize. But she must read up because she couldn’t remember much of anything about the ritual or the words. She pursued the subject of the illness itself.
“We have no regular doctor, but the cure is plain. Food, warmth.”
“Simply that?”
“It is possible, with skillful care, to nurse even a weak subject through this fever. We could have saved Father Hugo, had he only come to us!”
“Why didn’t he?”
“Father Hugo wouldn’t endanger us, and so hid his condition. Barred himself inside of his cabin. He was sick to death by the time we broke in. And then, of course,” she said with hurt pride, “you found the place in sad repair. We hadn’t any notion you would stay there but had a place for you with a pious family. You see, we have not entered to clean for fear of the fever . . . only the Puyat doesn’t fear most illness. She was supposed to have cleaned.”
“The one at the Mass this morning?”
“That one.”
“No need,” Agnes said, anxious even then to avoid contact with the girl. “I’m trained to keep my surroundings in good order.”
“Oh,” Hildegarde was a bit surprised. “Very unlike poor Father Hugo!”
Poor Hugo. With a powerful thrust, a scene stabbed into Agnes’s mind. She saw the priest laboriously sinking, taking leave of the world alone, speaking his good-bye prayers. She struggled to gain control of her exhaustion. The walk from the river had been endless, the train smoky and jolting, the miserable wait in the foul railroad hut a foretaste of hell. The drive with Kashpaw was encouraging, but Agnes had hardly slept the previous night and now could not battle the pressure of tears and more tears. She tried to lean on last night’s certainty, tried to keep her faith with the Christ who had fed her broth and taken on a human shape to give her comfort. She must follow through with the original plan, the vision. But to find herself here, in the midst of another’s vocation, was shockingly difficult. What had she supposed? Father Damien was in charge of these souls!
“I am nowhere near as strong as the confidence Christ has placed in me,” she said to Hildegarde Anne, who sighed.
“None of us is.”
Agnes was tempted, next, to confess the specifics of her identity, the nature of her calling, to this good nun. After all, she looks much more capable than I, she thought with a certain faint hope. But Sister Hildegarde, perhaps sensing the despair of her tormented self-sympathy, squeezed Agnes’s hand in hers so hard she cracked the knuckles.
“I prayed for a priest just like you,” she said, “young, with a tough, fresh faith!”
So Agnes shut Father Damien’s mouth on that revelation.
“Show me all you know of this place,” she demanded instead, steadying Father Damien’s voice and stilling the quaver in her heart.
Sister Hildegarde drew out a path with the stub of a pencil. “This bisects the land they call ‘their’ reservation,” she said. “The place is shaped roughly like a house with a square beneath and one slanted roof, a jutting outpost like a chimney. They’ll lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan. Yet, it’s going constantly into private ownership and already they are selling out to lumber interests. Father, your poor charges cannot read the documents they sign.”
Here, Hildegarde was obviously distressed—she hated a bad business deal. “The government is not so much our problem,” she blurted out. “It is the thieves that surround us!”
She showed every path and road, labeled cabins on the reservation, pointed out where certain of the most faithful parishioners lived.
“Here, here, and here”—she pointed at nearly every spot—“the sickness has taken someone. Here, it took them all.” She stabbed out several places upon her map. Seeing the nun’s finger smash down, Agnes’s heart was touched with horror. The still cabin. The huddled forms. The unspeakable loneliness. Tears flashed again and Hildegarde, seeing this, slapped a dish towel on Father Damien’s arm.
“No use for that,” the nun grumped. “Now here, here, here, and here all died but two, I’ve heard—a stubborn girl, an old man. They live out there yet.”
“I must go to them.”
Sister Hildegarde agreed, but looked a bit worried. “Father Damien, they live way out in the bush, if they’re living at all yet. The older man is a stubborn, crafty, talkative sort, much resistant to conversion. The vile things he says, the reprobate! He had a big old toot with my communion wine two years ago. Sneaked it from my cellar cask. He’s too tricky to die, him. And the other, that Fleur. Truly the daughter of Satan, so they say. The two of them, almost the only ones to survive from their respective families, are rumored to have special powers.”
As the nun spoke, Agnes breathed in deep drafts to gather control of her sorrow, and when she had, she took on the studied authority she’d mustered in private.
“I’m always intrigued with special powers,” she said mildly. “What sort of skills do you mean?”
Hildegarde shrugged, dismissive. “The usual. Drumming their drums. Singing until it breaks your ears. Shaking stuffed skins, rattles, and bones, so I’ve heard. All ineffective against the slightest of colds.”
“I see.” Though Agnes did not see. “What else?”
“They are the last of their families, as I’ve said. I think that gives them some sort of conjuring skill. There are magicians among them, of course, cheap tricksters. They throw their voices and levitate. They scare the gullible to death and are said to wing balls of fire toward their enemies at night. We’ve seen a few, you know, whiz by us up here! Unimpressive!”
“So you believe in their skills.”
Hildegarde looked sharply at the priest.
“Believe, why yes, just as I believe it is possible to hide coins and pebbles behind the ears of small children and draw these objects forth to delight them. It is easy to mystify children. Their conjurers employ just such means to prey upon the gullible. That is all.”
I am sent here, thought Agnes, to accept and to absorb. I shall be a thick cloth. Therefore, she nodded and said nothing in answer, but only thanked the nun for speaking frankly.
Some Rules to Assist in My Transformation
A parishioner had left a Sears catalog near the door of the church, and Agnes rifled through it secretly, as much to revisit the clothing, the china, the unfamiliar feast of powders and perfumes, as to scheme a way to purchase Dr. Feem’s Scientific Programme of Muscular Expansion, a kit that involved a set of dumbbells, a book of directions, and one muscle tonic that promised to improve the tone of the entire upper body and another bottle that worked on the half below.
S
PIRIT
T
ALK
1912
The reservation at the time was a place still fluid of definition, appearing solid only on a map, taking in and cutting out whole farms sometimes on the say-so of the commissioner, or the former agent Tatro, and other times attempting to right itself according to law. It was a place of shifting allegiances, new feuds and old animosities, a place of clan teasing, jealousy, comfort, and love. As with most other reservations, the government policy of attempting to excite pride in private ownership by doling parcels of land to individual Ojibwe flopped miserably and provided a feast of acquisition for hopeful farmers and surrounding entrepreneurs. So the boundaries came and went, drawn to accommodate local ventures—sawmills, farms, feed stores, the traplines of various families.
Many did sell for one simple reason. Hunger. As the government scrambled for the correct legal definition of the land, any fluctuation meant loss, any loophole was to the advantage of the thieves, boosters, businessmen, swindlers, sneaks, Christians, cranks, lumber and farm dealers, con artists, and reprobates of all types who had drifted to the edges of reservations hoping to profit from the confusion.
Into this complex situation walked Father Damien, with only the vaguest notion of how the ownership of land related to the soul.
THE LOSS
She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that she finally defined as the loss of Agnes. Ah, Agnes! She lived at night in the shelter of bedclothes. Disappeared in daylight, bandages wrapped as when she had been a nun. As she left the cabin, her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts. Her voice his voice, which deepened as his stride lengthened and grew bold. Agnes’s speech had always been husky and low for a woman. Father Damien’s voice was musical, for a man. There were gestures left over from the convent, and also from her life as a woman in love. In the convent, she’d been taught to walk with eyes downcast. Now, Father Damien tipped his chin out and narrowed his gaze, focused straight ahead. As a farm wife, Agnes had leaned out with a hand on her hip, carried things on her hip, nudged doors open and shut with her hip. Men didn’t use their hips as shelves and braces. Father Damien walked with soldierly directness and never swayed. Nor did he touch a finger to his tongue and smooth his eyebrows, or glance at himself in mirror surfaces. Sternly, he nodded up and down when he listened instead of tipping his head to the side.
Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?
Now and then Agnes recalled a tiny portion of her encounter with the Actor, and she came to understand it as a sure prefigurement and sign of what was to come. The Actor had influenced the quality of Father Damien’s disguise, for when Agnes was held by that rope-tough arm against the car door she’d felt remote enough, from blood loss, to marvel at and assess the Actor’s change in personality from priest to robber.
Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? Wasn’t he robbing all who looked upon him? Stealing their trust? Shameful, perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought only gave her satisfaction. She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.
NANAPUSH
Agnes said Father Damien’s office early and long one morning, with extra fervor because she was still in bed. She needed the strength. She had decided to visit the reprobate Nanapush, who survived marginally in the bush somewhere with the young woman named Fleur. The air deeply chilled her and cold stabbed up through the icy boards. She put on every stitch of clothing, even Father Hugo’s. Still, she trembled walking out into the bitter air. Longing for the sad warmth of her predecessor’s willow-pole bed, imagining the comfort of burrowing under the leaden quilts and buffalo robes, she ate a sorry breakfast of cooked potato skins and tea. Such food, now, only worsened the stab in her stomach. She was comforted by the news that the roads were open and there would soon be supplies, enough for everyone. Six wagons would be arriving with relief.