The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (32 page)

There was a small brown bench Sister Hildegarde had found and placed before the creature. Agnes sat, adjusted the distance, and watched the keys carefully. Nothing happened. There was nothing to be afraid of, after all, except that her hands sprang out of her sleeves. Then they jumped off her lap like claws and crashed down in an astonishing chord. She clutched her hands to her chest. The sound reverberated. With a soft and, she feared, insane longing, her hands crept forward again. This time, quite movingly, they brushed the keys in the secret contradictory melody that opens the Pathetique. Her hands moved on and on. She crouched over the keyboard in amazed concentration and played, or allowed herself to be played by, the music that had racked her inside and struggled for release. This was how it was with her gifts. God had taken the music away for a time to bring her closer, then returned it when removing the last sexual love she would ever have. Even in the astonished flood of her discovery, she knew that this sudden solace was presented to help her through her loss. As her hands assembled and disassembled their patterns of old harmony and counterharmony, the mystery of their motions became entirely sensible. She understood the intricate purpose of a language she had guessed in the dark and even practiced on the body of Gregory. Music poured out in a rational waterfall.

Time passed, or no time passed. Absorbed in the rush of knowing, Agnes felt eyes watching. Perhaps children, she thought, unable in her awed greed to quit. Or one of the sisters, or an Ojibwe curious or gripped by longing. She played in the embrace of that special sense of being heard, that expectancy, but when she finally set her hands in her lap and looked up to acknowledge the listener, no one was there. Only the still new leaves faintly twitching between the studs and the haze of gold light through the tremulous scatter of clouds. It wasn’t until she saw a twist of movement from the corner of her eye that she looked down and saw the snakes.

The rhapsody woke them, Debussy drew them forth, Chopin made them listen, and Schubert put them back to sleep. It was luck that Agnes was alone that day, for the nuns, except for Hildegarde, screamed for the hoe whenever they saw a serpent and killed it on the spot. The occurrence explained, anyway, the reason that so many snakes did appear in their garden—the rock beneath the church sheltered their ancient nest.

There were at least a hundred. More. Another moved, quick as a lash. Yet another seeped forward and Agnes put her fingers back upon the keys. A third uncoiled in a question mark that she answered with a smooth
bacarolle
, which seemed the right thing to play for snakes. She watched them out of the corner of her eyes. They were motionless now, their ligulate, black bellies flat against the stone. Parallel gold stripes down the center of their backs seemed to vibrate in the fresh June light. The snakes looked polished brand-new. Perhaps they’d shed their skins at the door, she thought, and even as her fingers rippled she imagined a pile of frail husks. Their heads were slightly raised off the floor and if they weren’t actually listening to the notes, they were positively fixed on the music. They were suspended, somehow, by whatever means were available to their senses.

Agnes continued to play. Once, during the music, Sister Hildegarde came near, she heard her enter. Though tough, the nun emitted a stifled gagging hiccup and fled. Not long after, Mary Kashpaw came, unafraid, and worshiped as though with her kind. A crowd collected murmuring outside the church door. Growing weary, Agnes at last hit upon the Kinderscenen from Schubert and finally, playing “Sleep” repetitively and with all the kindness of a good parent, she succeeded in driving the snakes, the ginebigoog, back to their beds.

GINEBIGOOG

The news of Father Damien’s suddenly revealed musical ability caused an excited curiosity. People came in shy numbers to listen. For one month he played concerts instead of delivering sermons. When they felt the music, the snakes still flickered to the edges of the main floor of the church, even with the full congregation. As for Nanapush, when he heard about the snakes, he became intent with interest and told Father Damien that this was a sign of great positive concern among the old people, for the snake was a deeply intelligent secretive being, and knew all the cold and blessed spirits who lived under stone and deep in the earth. And it was the great snake, wrapped around the center of the earth, who kept things from flying apart. After the snakes, Damien was gratified to find that he was consulted more often and trusted with intimate knowledge. Perhaps he was considered to have acquired a very powerful guardian spirit, or perhaps it was the piano. A grand wave of baptisms followed in the wake of his music, people of all ages, some new.

Agnes loved smelling the milky-sweet and faintly sour new babies. She rocked them in their carefully made cradle boards, their tikinaganan. She talked to the babies, pitching her voice low and pretending to have no wish for a child of her own. But she could feel them in her arms, their tensile dependence, and sometimes a wish stabbed. After baptisms, she played music with an extra sweet load of yearning, and was consoled by the sounds and challenges that rose beneath her hands. She accepted, now, the great gift of the music as a substitute for all she had lost. Still, one question sometimes nagged. Had the devil in its original tempter’s form returned her art, or had God? And furthermore, what did it matter?

THE PIANO

Once the memory of the music unknit in troubled and ecstatic skeins from her hands, Agnes remembered. In recalling, she wept for her drowned Caramacchione, played now only by fish, and the strange cruel river that had utterly changed her life. With the outline of new memories, interior bits of the puzzle emerged. Fortunately, there appeared in these new visions a windfall. As she regained more of the past, she recalled the source of the money she’d wakened long ago to find in the lining of Agnes’s jacket. She’d deposited that money in a bank in Fargo, under a false name. Cecilia Fleisch, she remembered it.

She wrote down the sum and the secret number under which it was deposited, and then decided how to use it. Perhaps in this decision Agnes ignored certain moral implications. The money was, in fact, stolen. But hadn’t Agnes suffered and hadn’t Father Damien? And would the anticipated use of the money constitute a form of justice? For Agnes must have a piano—not just any piano. A real piano.

Perhaps, truly, Father Damien could have bought food or medicines, blankets, pots, necessities of all sorts, seeds and seed grain. Perhaps he could have purchased a bell with a far more pleasing toll than the hollow clang of the one bought by the diocese for Little No Horse. Certainly, he could have purchased comforts and warmth for the sisters, who routinely suffered deep chills, or the old people, who were in great need, but he didn’t. Not as Damien. Not as Agnes. Not as priest and not as woman, not as confessor and not as the magnet of souls, consoler, professor of the faith. When it came right down to it, she acted as an artist.

TIME

Once Nanapush began talking, nothing stopped the spill of his words. The day receded and darkness broadened. At dusk, the wind picked up and cold poked mercilessly through the chinking of the cabin. The two wrapped themselves in quilts and continued to talk. The talk broadened, deepened. Went back and forth in time and then stopped time. The talk grew huge, of death and radiance, then shrunk and narrowed to the making of soup. The talk was of madness, the stars, sin, and death. The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who took out a small bound notebook and recorded words and sentences.

In common, they now had the love of music, though their definition of what composed music was dissimilar.

“When you hear Chopin,” Father Damien asserted, “you find yourself traveling into your childhood, then past that, into a time before you were born, when you were nothing, when the only truths you knew were sounds.”

“Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don’t sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman.”

“This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can’t think. You become flooded in the heart.”

“Powerful. Powerful. This Chopin,” asked Nanapush, “does he have a drum?”

“No,” said Damien, “he uses a piano.”

“That great box in your church,” said Nanapush. “How is this thing made?”

Father Damien opened his mouth to say it was constructed of wood, precious woods, but in his mind there formed the image of Agnes’s Caramacchione settled in the bed of the river, unmoved by the rush of water over its keys, and instead he said, “Time.” As soon as he said it, he knew that it was true.

“Time. Chopin’s piano was made of time. What is time in Ojibwemowin?” asked Damien.

Nanapush misunderstood then, and did not give the word but deeply considered the nature of the thing he was asked to name. When he spoke his thoughts aloud, his voice was slow and contemplative.

“We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time.”

“What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.”

“Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.”

Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

“A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.”

“Into the water?” asked Damien.

“No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time.”

Father Damien waited for Nanapush to explain, but after he’d lighted his pipe and smoked it for a while, he said only, “Let’s find something to eat.”

Agnes brushed the rich ebony rectangles, the black keys of the extraordinary piano on which she’d spent the bulk of the stolen money. A grand, exquisite and important, not a Caramacchione, but a new Steinway. The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim.

Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal. They were part of the art of Father Damien’s Mass, as were the vestments—an extraordinarily ornate and meticulously worked chasuble in green, for hope, a less ornate one in passion red. A plain silken stole embroidered only with a cross, but in gold, and a maniple to match. His alb and cincture had been Father Hugo’s, and he accepted from Sister Hildegarde a rough amice that he donned with great devotion and seriousness at every Mass. It was his symbolic helmet and he wore it to repel the assaults of the devil. Rotten mutt! Better yet, he commissioned Margaret to add beadwork anywhere that it would fit on the vestments. She covered every bit she could—each robe weighed upon him like a shield, like armor.

Agnes bought deep blue paint for the ceiling of the church, as well as metallic gold, a special gilding from Chicago. That was the only paint that would do for the stars she envisioned upon that blue. And last, with the spurt of money left at the bottom of the pile, the money which had nearly fallen from Agnes’s fingers clumsy with terror, she bought urtext music, stacks of it from foreign publishers—Masses, choral pieces, sensuous rhapsodies and pieces beyond her capabilities, as well as Easy Pieces for Small Fingers, for she had determined to teach. She also commissioned a statue from a maker of religious artifacts up north, bought it sight unseen.

THE MADONNA OF THE SERPENTS

There lived in Winnipeg an old
mangeur de lard
who had put down his paddle and taken up the tools of a wood-carver and a statue painter. He made cigar store Indians and mannequin shapes, shop signs, and carousel horses, but statues of a religious nature were his specialty. For those, he used a secret recipe of plaster. He had in his workshop special molded blanks for Joseph, the Blessed Mary, Baby Jesus and adult Jesus, for Saints Anne and Theresa, for Saint Francis, and a few others especially popular in the region. These raw white forms spoke to him sometimes, especially when he worked late into the night. The shadows, he claimed, moving in the light of flames, often inspired him. One particular night he began to work on a special blank and found that he couldn’t stop. This statue, commissioned by a church just south, he’d determined to finish as soon as possible in order to finance a lengthy drunk he anticipated commencing, soon, to celebrate the proud fact that, at age seventy-five, he was to be yet again a father. Though he’d bought the woman’s favors, she was inexperienced enough to have gotten pregnant. She would have to marry him now!

He thought about her as he worked on the plaster in the flicker of candles. Yes, she was fat and her chin ran into her neck in a way that made him think of a snapping turtle. Her nose was a bulb. Her teeth were all crooked. She was a good person, though, and her eyes were very beautiful, sad and kind. Extremely beautiful! He thought of her eyes. What good were they in a face so cunningly wrought to inspire a man to wince and look away?

Those eyes made him happy. They nearly brought tears to his own eyes.

“A son,” he prayed. If the boy inherited her features, he would at least be a man, though just why that should make such a difference he couldn’t say. He worked carefully, carving folds into the gown, the robe. He took special care with the snake she crushed, refined the moon, painted the scallops of her toenails a delicate pink. He worked out the proportion of the face and then refined the features and the hands, so complicated that he just curled the fingers up and thought, Be done with it. Yawning, he touched paint to the masterpiece and just before dawn tumbled into his rough rope bed.