The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (28 page)

“All the more valuable to me!” said the dog.

“You cannot have her.” Agnes’s voice was firm as she could muster, given the fainting languor of her illness. She groped for the crucifix chained around her neck, but her fingers seemed thick as wooden pegs, clumsy, and the dog noticed with a sly glance.

“I hear you’re a gambler. I’ll strike a bargain with you,” he insinuated.

“A bargain . . .” Agnes fell back into her chair, and though sweating and breathless she couldn’t help marvel. The joke was clever. Or was this what the mad saw, the fevered? The dog was here and he seemed perfectly real, not only that, but he knew of Agnes’s passion. Although she came onto this reservation never having placed a bet, thrown the dice or the bones, she had since found gambling was a compelling way to raise money, for she was unusually lucky, and also she took great pleasure in her small winnings. She knew that she was being tempted by the gambit, tempted to wager even as her lips formed the words.

“Name your offer . . .”

“My offer is this,” the dog said. “I will spare Lulu if you come with me instead.”

A frozen wind blew through the room and Agnes shivered, couldn’t speak. Soon there would be a punch line. Someone would pop around the corner, laughing at the hoax played on the good priest. For the benefit of whomever was listening to the ridiculous transaction, Agnes thought aloud.

“A priest puts the welfare of his flock above all else, for they are entrusted to him by the author of the world, and so even in this lonely and unspeakable moment, my duty is clear!”

Agnes waited for a hoot of laughter, none came.

“I will trade places with the child, with Lulu Nanapush,” she declared, “but you must not take me until I am good and ready!”

Now it was time for the applause. Silence. Agnes calmly lifted the dog’s paw from the soup bowl. It seemed real enough. She glanced away from the flames of the dog’s eyes. Frowning, she regarded the grained wood of the poor log table. When would the instigator of this farce show? And who would play so perverse a joke? Not even Nanapush.

“It is done,” the dog conceded just before he loped off, “your lifetime is doubled. But there is more. Your insolence moves me. I have decided to send you a temptation.”

It would come by mail, but not until the autumn rains soaked the walls of the cabin and drained the sky of heat.

Agnes put her hands to her cheeks. She was still dangerously fevered. Perhaps, after all, the dog was no prank but a vision produced by the illness. The resinous scent of burnt pitch lingered in the room, and she could not help remember the figure she’d seen on the horizon at the time of Kashpaw’s death—the gaunt spirit with the flapping coat, the dog trotting beside, its breath rising, foul steam.

At the thought, Agnes regretted her stubbornness, for what if the creature was real? She got the worst of the bargain. How could she know that she wasn’t meant to die that very night? She was young, and in a few more years eternity in hell could well stretch before her. On the other hand, she thought, once she’d calmed her breathing and lay down again, perhaps her natural life span was more like eighty years, in which case there was what seemed a huge amount of time in which to think of a way to win herself back from the black dog’s company.

Dwelling on that more cheerful idea, Agnes staggered around the room for exercise, then returned to bed, leaving the full bowl of soup, into which the devil’s foot had plunged.

That night, careful as always not to waste a drop or a morsel, Mary Kashpaw dumped the contents of Father Damien’s devil’s-paw bowl back into the soup pot and brought it over to the convent, where it was reboiled and served up to the nuns. The soup deranged their sleep. What terrible torments the sisters suffered! What a night of temptations! What lurid and arresting dreams! Poor Father Damien, who dragged himself to the church to hear confessions the next morning, was assaulted by a swimming sea of details. The sisters recounted their actions explicitly, and he became such a seething repository of voluptuous nightmares that he found it impossible to accomplish his duties. Weaker than ever, disturbed in mind, he was forced to cancel Holy Mass. As he was hurrying toward the solace of his tiny cabin behind the church, Sister Dympna came toward him from the opposite direction.

“Father,” she gasped in a voice of shamed panic, “I have been visited in the flesh!”

“You are absolved!” Damien cried out, and he practically blessed her on the run. Then he shut his door. Alone, he ran to the corner of his room and wrote feverishly, madly, until he had relieved his mind of the burden of an entire convent full of dreams.

Eternal Father,

The people to whom I have carried the faith believe there is a spirit behind or informing all that exists on earth. In dreams, they tell me, these spirits communicate with them. I thought it a harmless and empty fancy until I myself was visited.

Gracious Father, head of the church, the spiritual descendant of the one who has walked on water, what should I do?

I fear I may be losing my mind.

Modeste

As soon as she was well, Agnes went to the postal window at the trader’s store and bought the stamps necessary to ship her letter across the sea. As she slowly licked the stamps and pressed them onto the envelope, idly tasting the faintly medicinal glue, the loneliness that so often visited her since the bewildering deaths by influenza sank through her bones. It was a black marrow. Ice. Since those days, prayer had not helped. The intimacy and the special favor shown her in the very beginning, at the river, at the first communion she’d performed, was withdrawn. She endured, instead of that warm broth of rescuing love, a skeletal deadness that surely the dog had sensed. Perhaps, she thought now, smoothing the envelope, Christ was still busy helping admit or reject the dead millions, that harvest fattened by the Great War and by disease. There was probably a lot of paperwork to the admission process. Imagining Christ an overworked bureaucrat amused her. But she wondered whether such thoughts were a marker of her cynicism, and an invitation to the test of her commitment, which was presented in the next moment in the form of a different letter.

“There is something here for you,” said the wife of the trader, who handled the mail. She gave Father Damien a letter from the bishop, return address the cathedral in Fargo. Light-headed from the walk, Agnes put the letter in her pocket and forgot about it until, that night, the envelope crinkled in the folds of her cassock.

Dear Father Damien,

I am sending an assistant to work with you, not because you will need his help, though I am certain you will benefit from his presence, but because I would like you to train him.

He will stay with you and learn all that you can teach him.

Yours in Christ,

Bishop DuPre

Agnes dropped the piece of paper and stood mute and numb, staring straight before her at the dark, wet, log walls. For a week, nearly, the skies had opened every day. There was no let-up. Between drenching bursts a slow, cold drizzle descended. And now this letter from the bishop, a stunning threat.

Live with her? Quite impossible.

She wrote back.

I am in no need of assistance, and furthermore, there is no place for a young priest to live. As it is, my quarters are inadequate, not that I mean to complain. But to add another is impossible!

Impossible! Her brain locked on the word and was comforted by the lilt of it. Impossible. She refused in fact to consider or even remember the letter from the bishop, until one day the assistant simply, with no warning and no one to accompany him, arrived.

Father Gregory Wekkle walked up the hill quite alone, apparently having come in much the same way Agnes had originally. As she was striding across the crisp new dusting of snow on the church grounds, she saw him waiting at the door of her cabin, a small rounded suitcase and a wooden toolbox at his feet. Father Wekkle was of medium height and form, but gave the impression of being a bigger man, animated by a complex and slightly awkward energy. He moved eagerly, and had an open and friendly look about him, a disarming lack of polish or priestly grace. His hair was brown as a monk’s robe, his eyes a muddy Irish hazel. His smile was a great flash of light. Agnes sighed. There was a sweetness to the man she couldn’t have expected, a quality of taking pleasure in his own being. She decided that he had to be harmless. She underestimated, as she often did with men, his intelligence. Already, she imagined his developing into the kindly, rotund sort of priest who dispenses easy penances and excellent reassurances. What did he need from her?

She grasped his hand anyway, and shook it—a hard-palmed warm workman’s hand. She looked down at his box of tools and then the heat from his heavy palm flowed up her arm into her heart. Surprised, she took the jolt of his goodness almost painfully and tried to control the sudden flood of happiness that filled her with terror.

“Come in. Let’s set things up. Let’s make you comfortable, Father . . . ?”

“Wekkle. Gregory Wekkle.”

Agnes mustered the stern and kindly formality of Father Damien, and nodded him through the door. His presence startled her into an objective look at her house, and the clutter of it suddenly dismayed her. There were books everywhere. Books she had begged for in her newsletter, intending to set up a library. People from surrounding parishes now gave her books, tried to sell books to her, laid them on the church doorstep. Father Damien had become known for his avidity and was the first one people thought of when a book, any book, became useless. Thus she had a stack of the last century’s
Godey’s Lady’s Books
, as well as Lutheran hymnals, but also treasures. Thomas Aquinas in an endless indestructible leather-bound edition with Italian marbled endpapers and a gold-embossed title on the spine. A complete set of Dickens.

The two proceeded to make way through stacks of books into the tiny cabin. Out of the stacks of books, they made separate rooms. They stacked the books two by two, then crosswise, like bricks, into a wall. Then Father Wekkle was given a bedstead by Sister Hildegarde and the two priests placed it on the other side of the wall. They used blanket dividers, hung them from the beams. As they worked, they spoke, though Agnes tried to remain cool. Father Gregory Wekkle was young, but not as young as Agnes had expected, not that she
had
expected. They were the same age, a peril, as she’d have his questions. Fortunately, Agnes had memorized information from the newsletters sent to Little No Horse by the original Father Damien’s seminary. She was able to speak very generally of other priests they might know in common. To her relief, Father Gregory did not pursue their histories except as a polite gesture. He was much more interested in the present, and in learning from Father Damien all that he could before taking up a reservation post—he knew not where, not yet.

He was pleasant, he was congenial, he was both shrewder and more innocent than she saw at first. Already, that night, drifting into sleep behind her woolen blanket curtain, Agnes prayed that something would call Father Wekkle away immediately, that he leave precipitously, anything but risk again that jolt of pleasure in the immediacy of his presence.

The first deep snow isolated the reservation from the rest of the world and sank the cabin in a swirl of white drifts. The roads were blocked until the horse-drawn sledges would pack down the snow, or until the plow tore laboriously through the high snow pack down to the train station in Hoopdance. Still, there were rounds to be made. Communion to bring to the sick and the very old. Children to teach their catechism. Nanapush had taught Father Damien how to make bear paw snowshoe frames and lace them with moose guts and sinew. Now Agnes was teaching Gregory Wekkle.

“Make the fire extremely hot,” she said.

He’d brought logs in to feed the stove, and he stuffed its belly with dried birch until the iron glowed pulsing red. She had already split the ash and now she showed him how to heat it and bend it into a circle. In a pail by her foot, she’d covered fresh moose guts with water. Slowly, she smoothed each one clean between her fingers, forming a pile of moose-chewed water lilies on the table.

“Some people eat this,” she told Gregory. “It’s like salad with a dressing of moose digestive juices.”

“Unknown, as yet, in the fine St. Paul restaurants.”

Agnes laughed and asked him when was the last time he ate in a fine St. Paul restaurant.

“Before I came here, my parents had a farewell party.”

“Do you miss your family?” Agnes strung a loop of intestine between the sides of the hoop, fastening it tight.

“I do,” said Gregory. “They’re coming up to visit in the spring.”

Agnes’s heart jumped and sank at the same time. Would he stay here that long? It was too long. It was not long enough. The heat from the overfed stove rose in her cheeks. “No!” she roughly said, grasping the new priest’s wrists to help him bend the wood properly. “You do it like this.” A mistake. Close, she smelled the wood heat on his skin, the washed soapy scent of his neck, the scorched wool upon which he must have used a too hot iron, and sweat. A faint, low, clean, and intensely sexual workman’s sweat. Agnes felt herself leaning into the air around him.

“Damn,” said Gregory in a low voice as the heated wood popped from his hands. He laughed in derision at himself and crossed the room to retrieve the piece of half-bent wood. He lingered on the cool side of the cabin, and breathed deeply, disturbed at his own physical reaction to the proximity of Father Damien.

*

They traveled to the deep bush on those snowshoes, brought communion to Zozed Bizhieu and her troublesome daughter, visited Nanapush. When they traveled, they carried blanket rolls tied onto their shoulders, and a pack of bread, dried meat, raisins. Gregory Wekkle brought a flask, always, of his favorite whiskey, for he didn’t see anything wrong with a drop now and then. And although Agnes observed there were a good many nows, and a huge number of thens, she nonetheless drank with him a drop, or two, or maybe more than that. It became very pleasant while out on their visits to stop on the way back, build a fire, sit there with the whiskey and the bannock and the raisins, until it was time to go back to the parish cabin.