The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2 page)

Not receiving the honor of a reply from your great office, I have nevertheless continued, over the years and from the earliest days of my assignment to this remote reservation, to document the series of unusual events that has given rise to speculation regarding the Blessedness of one Sister Leopolda Puyat, recently (though perhaps not entirely) deceased. Although not formally released from my vow of secrecy regarding what is revealed to me under the seal of Confession, I have taken it upon myself after years of nights of soul-wrenching argument to furnish certain segments of these proofs from long soliloquies delivered to me in the privacy of the confessional box.

I hope, in these instances, that my revelation of confessed sins has been warranted by the serious nature of my quest. I did not lightly undertake to break the trust bestowed upon me, as I have said. Without placing blame specifically on any of your predecessors, I must say that it would have helped enormously if one or another pope had seen fit to guide me in respect to this question long ago! But no doubt, Fountain of Faith, there were reasons past my vision, substance beyond my power to digest. Perhaps the silence from beyond these poor boundaries has been a test, a shrewd marker of my endurance, my belief.

If so, let this last report confirm my lack of doubt.

Again, the burning hands, arthritis, and a writer’s cramp. Father Damien put down the pen with care this time and wrung his left hand with his right as though squeezing water from a cloth. He had not written for so long or with such single-mindedness—it had been many weeks, months perhaps. Even two glasses into the bottle of wine, his thoughts continued to flow with such rapidity that he decided not to quit. After all, how many such nights did he have left on earth? His hand, long and crooked, beautifully worn and supple, oval nails of opaque tortoise, surprised him on the stem of the glass. For a long time he had been old, then he was past old. A living mummy. Of all people to have become so ancient! Himself! He put his hand to his hair, just wisps of thin and brittle stuff parted by the white scrawl of the scar that unwrote so many of his early memories. And the heart in his chest, so touchy, so tremulous. Easy things had become difficult. For instance, children. He had always loved to be around them, but now their exuberance was rattling. Their voices and quick movements dizzied him. He had to sit, allow his heart to settle, and restore his strength. And his hearing had become quite tricky—sometimes he heard everything, the undertones in Chopin’s preludes, which he still played, though with a fumbling energy, the rustle of his own bedsheets, and at other times all sounds were cloaked by the roar of an unseen ocean.

Even so, he still excelled at listening to confessions. With his hearing aid at full power, he bent to the screen of secrets. More than any other blessed sacrament, Father Damien enjoyed hearing sins, chewing over people’s stories, and then with a flourish absolving and erasing their wrongs, sending sinners out of the church clean and new. He forgave with an exacting kindness, but completely, and prided himself in dispensing unusual penances that fit the sin. People appreciated his interest in their weaknesses as well as his sense of compassionate justice. Also, he knew when they lied to him. He read their hearts. He was a popular confessor. There were those, he knew, who waited to unlock their secrets until they witnessed him personally entering the box, and others who even backed out of the church when one or the other of his younger colleagues, Father Dennis or Gothilde, slipped through the narrow door. Hearing sins was work that required all of the tactful knowledge he had developed during the years spent among these people.
His people.
He was proud to say he had been adopted into a certain family, the Nanapush family, whose long dead elder had been his first friend on the reservation. Whose daughter, Lulu, was as his own daughter now. But did she, did any of his trusting friends, family, parishioners, suspect? Could they imagine? Of course, one could say that in his letters Father Damien had burst the seal Christ had set on words spoken in that box—but only to a higher confessor. The gravity of his confidences was such that he could not risk revealing all to even so local an officer of the Church as a bishop. To address the Pope was, he had to think, next door to confiding in God. Still, it made Father Damien uncomfortable that he should have taken on such a lonely responsibility.

If you would
deign
to answer, he thought now, but stifled that twinge of irritation with another sip of the remarkable wine.

The night was mild, and Father Damien rose to let in that spectral air. He hoisted a small-paned window and the sigh of night-singing grasshoppers and crickets entered his small study. A pure sound, welcome, promising a light refreshing rain. Clearing everything away, washing the world innocent. If only he, too, could be washed to perfect goodness, forgiven! Father Damien drank deeply of the old, secret pain, and once more took up the pen.

And if you would kindly take the trouble to look back into your files, you’ll find that I’ve been faithful in every respect, conscientious to the letter of my vow, except in regard to the problem of the confessional.

As long as the subject of Penance has been raised, however, I must also begin this final report by admitting that I address you abjectly, as a sinner and also as an impostor, hoping for an absolution. But lest your judgment of what I have to say be prejudiced by what I have decided to tell before death robs me of the chance to make a dignified revelation, I will save my explanations for later. For now, let me begin by humbly calling to your attention the various reports that I have mailed carefully to Rome. Because of the utmost secrecy of my undertaking, I have, of course, kept no copy of these epistles, relying instead upon the vast array of conscientious scribes with whom I picture Your Holiness surrounded, and whom I am quite sure will have studied and remarked upon the lengthy documents that I have sent to Popes Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, and yourself, my gracious and eternal father.

The wine changed suddenly to water. In a reverse miracle, Father Damien’s heart faltered, and he could almost feel the vagueness flooding upward into his mind like a ground fog. He capped his pen. Slowly and with regret, he turned off his desk lamp. In the sheer moonlight, he allowed his eyes to adjust and then he tapped his fingers on the letter to the Pope and pushed it underneath a set of files. He smoothed his cassock carefully as he rose and walked across the room to the only other piece of furniture within it—the dark and gleaming rectangular box of strings and keys that he loved with a human love. He stroked the glossy finish of the piano gently, as though touching the hair of a sleeping child, then turned away, walked across the narrow hall.

He used the bathroom, brushed his teeth, and washed vigorously, then tottered in exhaustion to his bedroom, a neat cubicle with just space enough for a single bedstead of new-painted white iron, a small rectangular wooden bedside table, a rough bureau of varnished pine, and a hanging closet, cedar scented but shallow. Father Damien tugged the chain on the lamp and then made sure the door was firmly shut. He first removed his starched white collar, laid it with care on the top of the bureau. Next he unbuttoned his cassock, stepped out of it, and arranged it on a slender hanger that he set upon a brass hook. The black gown was outmoded, but he refused to jettison the garb in which he had originally understood his calling. With a clothes brush, he sleepily swiped at a few bits of lint, then struck away a bit of dust from the black cloth and turned back to sit on the edge of the bed. Bending with an incremental tediousness, he removed one moosehide moccasin, waited for a moment or two, and then took off the other. He set them lightly on the floor on either side of his feet.

By the time he finished that task, he was breathing hard. He continued to sit, clad only in a thin cotton undershift, rubbing one foot with the other. His feet were clean, delicately arched, tough soled, white, and young looking. His thoughts were mightily drifting, but then, suddenly, there was yet one more burst of reason. A second wind! A delayed reaction. That last gulp of wine had powered him. With hungry movements, Father Damien reached into the bedside table drawer and drew out his emergency pencil and pad of notepaper.

If memory serves me right, and I am over one hundred years old, the first of my reports dealt with an occurrence that forever set me on my course, and caused me to assume the mantle under which I have since served with joyous devotion. With no offense to your prodigious memory, let me begin at last by telling the truth.

Father Damien continued to write on the notepad, ripping each page off and piling it beside him as soon as he finished. Bare feet dangling, he scrawled what he could remember. “3
A.M.
,” his report began, “In the Thrall of the Grape.” He wrote with increasing swiftness and passion, against his waning energy, for an hour and a half. When he had finished, he sank forward, set his feet down, and slowly balanced. Standing, he pulled the thin undergarment over his head and shook it out once before hanging it on an iron hook nailed to the back of the door. He was so tired that the room tipped. But he managed to stick to his routine. He lifted a neatly folded nightshirt from the top dresser drawer and laid it on the bed. Then, with slow care, he turned off the bedside lamp and in moonlighted dark unwound from his chest a wide Ace bandage. His woman’s breasts were small, withered, modest as folded flowers. He slipped the nightshirt over his head and took a deep breath of relief before crawling between the covers. At once, he fell deeply into slumber. During the night, assailed by dreams, he turned over once, unconscious, and knocked across the floorboards the sheaf of papers he had written.

PART ONE

The
T
RANSFIGURATION
of
A
GNES

N
AKED
W
OMAN
P
LAYING
C
HOPIN

1910–1912

Eighty-some years previous, through a town that was to flourish and past a farm that would disappear, the river slid—all that happened began with that flow of water. The town on its banks was very new and its main street was a long curved road that followed the will of a muddy river full of brush, silt, and oxbows that threw the whole town off the strict clean grid laid out by railroad plat. The river flooded each spring and dragged local backyards into its roil, even though the banks were strengthened with riprap and piled high with rocks torn from reconstructed walls and foundations. It was a hopelessly complicated river, one that froze deceptively, broke rough, drowned one or two every year in its icy run. It was a dead river in some places, one that harbored only carp and bullheads. Wild in others, it lured moose down from Canada into the town limits. When the land along its banks was newly broken, paddleboats and barges of grain moved grandly from its source to Winnipeg, for the river flowed inscrutably north. Across from what would become church land and the town park, over on the Minnesota side, a farm spread generously up and down the river and back into wide hot fields.

The bonanza farm belonged to easterners who had sold a foundry in Vermont and with their money bought the flat vastness that lay along the river. They raised astounding crops when the land was young—rutabagas that weighed sixty pounds, wheat unbearably lush, corn on cobs like truncheons. Then six grasshopper years occurred during which even the handles on the hoes and rakes were eaten and a U.S. cavalry soldier, too, partially devoured while he lay drunk in the insects’ path. The enterprise suffered losses on a grand scale. The farm was split among four brothers, eventually, who then sold off half each so that by the time Berndt Vogel escaped the latest war of Europe, during which he’d been chopped mightily but inconclusively in six places by a lieutenant’s saber and then kicked by a horse so ever after his jaw didn’t shut right, there was just one beautiful and peaceful swatch of land about to go for grabs. In the time it would take for him to gather the money—by forswearing women, drinking cheap beers only, and working twenty-hour days—to retrieve it from the local bank, the price of that farm would drop further, further, and the earth rise up in a great ship of destruction. Sails of dust carried half of Berndt’s lush dirt over the horizon, but enough remained for him to plant and reap six fields.

So Berndt survived. On his land there stood a hangarlike barn that once had housed teams of great blue Percherons and Belgian draft horses. Only one horse was left, old and made of brutal velvet, but the others still moved in the powerful synchronicity of his dreams. Berndt liked to work in the heat of this horse’s breath. The vast building echoed and only one small part was still in use—housing a cow, chickens, one depressed pig. Berndt kept the rest in decent repair not only because as a good German he must waste nothing that had come his way but because he saw in those grand dust-filled shafts of light something he could worship.

The spirit of the farm was there in the lost breath of horses. He fussed over the one remaining mammoth and imagined one day his farm entire, vast and teeming, crews of men under his command, a cookhouse, bunkhouse, equipment, a woman and children sturdily determined to their toil. A garden in which seeds bearing the scented pinks and sharp red geraniums of his childhood were planted and thrived.

How surprised he was to find, one morning, as though sown by the wind and summoned by his dreams, a woman standing barefoot, starved, and frowzy in the doorway of his barn. She was pale but sturdy, angular, a strong flower, very young, nearly bald and dressed in a rough shift. He blinked stupidly at the vision. Light poured around her like smoke and swirled at her gesture of need. She spoke with a low, gravelly abruptness: “
Ich habe Hunger.
”