The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (33 page)

The next morning, when he squinted at her in the light, he saw that he had made her ugly. Just the same as his bride-to-be, however, her eyes were both kind and extremely alive. He would have taken up his chisel, he could have removed the paint, he could have changed her. Somehow, all that next day, just when he was about to get started, every time, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared at her, shaking his head.

“Forgive me, Saint Joseph,” he said out loud, at last. “I like her this way. There are advantages, see? I’ve lived, and in my life I have had many women. I would not choose a beautiful wife ever again, oh no, I would choose for myself a pair of kind eyes over the most magnificent breasts.
Difficile!
But Saint Joseph, you poor God-fucked cuckold, if you’d chosen a woman nobody envied you for, you would have had many children of your own. You would have died a happy man surrounded by his own children, just as I will.”

With that, the old
voyageur
put his tools down, patted the Virgin’s rump, and began to whistle as he constructed a shipping case to send her straight down to Little No Horse.

On a pure fall day the statue arrived, packed in golden straw inside a wooden crate built around it, perhaps not so much to protect as to contain the features. The nailed, heavy crate was pulled along in a wagon. Father Damien and the sisters and the wagon driver wrestled the crate off the bed of the wagon, prized open the boards that protected the statue, pulled down the wads and sheaves of golden straw, and at last brushed the dust off the features of her face. They kept brushing, for as soon as her eyes and nose and lips came clear, she startled, she fascinated, she elicited some repugnance, she evoked sorrow in one heart and derision in the next and in still others peace and loving quiet, so that she needed to be touched to be believed and for many hours stood outside the doorway of the church.

“Send her back” was Sister Hildegarde’s immediate judgment, but Father Damien disagreed, much as Hildegarde had regarding the piano. The other sisters mainly disagreed, too, saying that the Virgin’s eyes were remarkable.

“The carver had a strange talent,” Damien pronounced, “and his vision was of this face. Who is to say among all creation God should choose only a beautiful human mother for His son?”

“I suppose there is a lesson in this.” Hildegarde’s voice was a bit sour. She narrowed her eyes at the statue, suspicious. The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.

THE SERMON TO THE SNAKES

“What is the whole of our existence,” said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, “but the sound of an appalling love?”

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends . . .”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

13

T
HE
R
ECOGNITION

1923

Surely it was delirium, thought Agnes, looking at the peaceful scene of twirling popple leaves and new-growth maple. Beside her sat Nanapush. He wore the huge plaid wool jacket Margaret had brought home from the sisters, and his hair, long and gray, was pulled back and tied with a reed. I was not really visited by the terrible dog, thought Agnes, nor did I nearly poison myself out of love and then despair. Her terrible abyss of mind seemed impossible now.

“Do you believe in the devil?” Agnes abruptly asked her friend.

Before he spoke, Nanapush gazed keenly at Father Damien through his little, round, wire eyeglasses. He tilted his head, considering. Damien lighted a cigarette, put it in his hand. Nanapush thanked the priest, his mouth pursed.

“Not yours,” he decided.

Father Damien waited for more.

“We have our own devils,” Nanapush said piercingly, all at once. “And our devils are not all bad. Ours are sometimes capable of showing pity, that is, if you can think of the right thing to say.”

“What, then, would be the right thing to say if you met up with a devil?” Damien leaned forward intently, eager.

“You would have to be clever about it,” said Nanapush.

“Say, for instance,” Damien decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

Nanapush leaned toward him, thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot out of my soup bowl!’ ”

Father Damien frowned, doubtfully. “And then?”

“If it took its foot out, you would know it had understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

Nanapush settled back into his chair.

“It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”

“Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark!”

“I don’t understand . . .”

“In order to confuse it.”

“I see. I would pretend to be a dog . . .”

“You already have a collar around your neck,” Nanapush pointed out.

Father Damien didn’t tell his friend about the conversation he’d had with the spirit, or about the sacrifice that he had made for Lulu, or about the painful temptation that followed. Instead, he took out the chessboard, an occupation that currently absorbed the two, and the playing of which they owed to a priest of a past century, Father Jolicoeur.

That young and largely unhistoricized eighteenth-century Jesuit had carried with him, into the unknown, a chessboard. He used it as an excellent means both to convince the natives of the superiority of a Catholic god who could design so perplexing and glorious an entertainment, and as a comfort to himself. Though he was uncertain whether his native guide and companion had the capacity to play such a game, he nevertheless made an attempt to teach the rudiments. Jolicoeur’s foundation belief in the innate superiority of himself was shattered when, to his amazement, in the space of just nineteen minutes the Indian trounced him in a match. Father Jolicoeur played again, hoping to recover his pride, but was the more severely beaten, causing him to put away his arrogance.

The fever for chess shook the Indians with the likeness of another epidemic, and they simply re-created the board and pieces to their own ability and began playing among themselves, often for deathly stakes. Long after Father Jolicoeur’s bones were cracked by wolves and cleaned by ravens in some lost corner of the wilderness, another lone adventurer, believing himself the first to gain a path into the uncharted glory of the west, was astounded when he accepted an invitation to a chief’s lodge only to be confronted with a chessboard properly laid out on a deerskin and his opponent waiting in eager anticipation of a violent game of wits. Of course, the stakes being, as they usually were, life or death, the trader wisely opted to pretend total ignorance of the game and used his evil queen, potent spirits, to bribe his way out of an encounter. It saved him then, but he was never the same in the estimation of the chess-playing Indians, for they did not count him a true man and took their peltries and tanned deerskins and bales of dried fish elsewhere, to another trader, who had learned the confounding game at his mother’s knee.

Father Damien now set the board up carefully on the level stump before Nanapush, the wooden pieces comforting to the touch, the ritual of putting them into order a small pleasure. Nanapush laid down his pipe, his hands careful among the pieces. Choosing white in the toss, he opened with a hopeful gambit that did not fool Damien. The afternoon was golden, the mosquitoes bearable in a light breeze. The sounds of birds accompanied their thoughts. Some time went by with little but the motion of their hands, and then Nanapush suddenly spoke.

“What are you?” he said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his bishop’s trajectory.

“A priest,” said Father Damien.

“A man priest or a woman priest?”

Agnes’s hand froze, pinching the knight, and her mental processes collapsed. A hollow roaring noise began around her, swirling, a confusion of sounds. Her mouth opened but no word emerged and slowly, very slowly, she drew back from the table and raised her eyes to Nanapush, who was simply looking at the priest as though that was not the one question in the world that would most upset Father Damien. The priest’s terror and confusion immediately registered on the older man, who leaned forward, frowning with perhaps too calculated a concern. Agnes still couldn’t answer, though now some little choking noises emerged. She tried to right herself, pretending she was heartily surprised at such a question but taking it as a joke. Agnes tried to laugh, but a spasm of sorrow cut the laugh in two. She found, maddeningly, that her eyes were spilling over with tears.

“I am a priest,” she whispered, hoarsely, fierce.

“Why,” said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn’t answered, to put the question to rest, “are you pretending to be a man priest?”

So then it was out between them, and the fact of it out in the open was tremendous. The tedious balloon, pressing inside of Agnes day after day so tightly, now floated out of her mouth, up into the air. She was instantly lighter, so light that when she took in a breath she felt she would lift from her chair.

“We used to talk of it, Kashpaw and myself,” Nanapush went on, “but when we noticed that you never mentioned it, we spoke of this to no one else.”

“So it is that obvious?”

Nanapush shrugged. “Nobody else ever said anything. But still, it is a question maybe just in my mind why you would do this, hide yourself in a man’s clothes. Are you a female Wishkob? My old friend thought so at first, assumed you went and became a four-legged to please another man, but that’s not true. Inside that robe, you are definitely a woman.”

Later, she understood it was the simple recognition, that level and practical regard that moved her to weep with relief. Nanapush was sorry, very sorry to make the priest cry, but he said anyway, abruptly, “Your move.”

Agnes moved her piece in a blur. Nanapush moved again in short order, and it was up to Agnes, who paused, moved her piece miserably, and answered her friend’s question all at once, trying not to cry for the relief of talking, trying to behave with a clarity and goodness that she did not know or feel. Nanapush, of course, waited to make his next observation until Agnes finally returned to the game and was deep in thought over her next move.

“So you’re not a woman-acting man, you’re a man-acting woman. We don’t get so many of those lately. Between us, Margaret and me, we couldn’t think of more than a couple.”

Something struck Agnes, then, and she realized that this moment, so shattering to her, wasn’t of like importance to Nanapush. In fact, she began to suspect, as she surveyed the chessboard between them and saw the balance tipped suddenly in her opponent’s favor, that Nanapush had brought it up on purpose to unnerve and distract her. The next move, in which Nanapush made an unexpectedly suave play and removed the bishop she protected for so long, convinced her. She looked sharply at the man to whom her defenses had fallen.

“Ginitum,” said Nanapush with relish.

The old man had used the subject in a sly bid to undermine his opponent’s concentration. And it had worked. There was at last no way to recover from the lapse and Father Damien let go now of piece after piece under the driving craftiness of Nanapush’s strategy.

“I’m losing,” Agnes muttered. “You tricked me, old man.”

“Me!” said Nanapush. “You’ve been tricking everybody! Still, that is what your spirits instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to require such a sacrifice.”

“Yes,” said Agnes, “my spirits are very strong, very demanding, very annoying.”

Nanapush nodded in sympathy.

“Check,” the old man said.

Infallible Eminence,

My hand is a human hand. My heart a human heart. My feet walk the earth to which our bones return. Directed by His voice, His hand, by the prompting and guidance of His spirit, what else was I to do?

14

L
ULU

1996