The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (36 page)

That big girl was a Pentecost. Rose Pentecost. Named as a family by a priest in the last century who tired of translating and just added feast days to the roll of names that year.

I got into the line with the other children and walked in to the morning meal. No dirt was on my face and no dirt was in my hair. I was neat and clean. My eyes were clear. I never told on the big girls, for which I was then a hero. None of the matrons ever knew. So even then, I did not get in trouble.

But later. Trouble? I ate trouble. I
was
trouble.

Being trouble started when they told me that I was not going home for the summer. Staying there, with the matrons, at school. At first I tipped sideways, as though the words pushed me over. Not going home was as much a shock as coming there in the first place. Not seeing my mother, my grandpa and grandma, the Yellowboy girls and the Anongs and again my mother—especially my mother, because in the beginning my skin ached for my mother’s touch and my ears kept straining. I hadn’t decided to hate her yet. And not that my mother exactly said,
I’ll be back to get you
, but I knew she would. When they told me I would not be going home, I staggered in a red zigzag and then sat by the bridal wreath bush outside the school office, there on the grass.

It was out-of-bounds to sit there, it was an offense. That’s why I did. I sat there for a while and then slowly edged myself into the shadows of the thousands of tiny leaves. Through the shadows, then, and farther back, until I was in the curved space between the bush and the wall of the building. A clean space completely hidden, a place where I could look into the crossed and baffled twigs, the timid green leaves, the sprays of white flowers, the petals, clouds of frail dots.

The idea first came to me when I boarded the school bus to visit the local school where we would do our yearly goodwill performance. I danced shawl and traditional. Rose Pentecost performed “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language. I had got stuck on Rose after Rose came and got me. I learned “The Lord’s Prayer” in trade sign language, because Rose Pentecost always got so much applause. I thought I would like to have that, and to stand up there alone and silent, only my hands moving, my hand and arm making the upward spiral, so graceful, to indicate the spirit. I was thinking about that, and at the same time walking up the school bus steps when I dropped the little fan that I carried, on loan from our dance advisor. The fan flicked under the bus, blown by wind, and I lay flat on my stomach to get it. That was when I happened to look sideways and up, under the school bus, and noticed the little shelf.

The thin, black, metal shelf hung down from the body of the engine to support three exhaust pipes. It was just the right size for a child, an intriguing little place. I scrambled backward with the fan, a beautiful and cunning fan made of a prairie chicken tail. I caught up with the other dancers and I did my dance piece, but all the time that I danced, I was busy thinking something I could not define, something that had to do with the shelf and pipes underneath the bus.

It was easy for me. When they loaded the buses two weeks later for the summer trip home, I slipped around back. I rolled into the shadow of the undercarriage, crawled under the body of the engine, onto the shelf with the pipes, and spread myself out flat on my stomach. I grasped hold of the brackets like handles, as though I were on a sled. Only I couldn’t steer, of course. I would go where we were bound to go, flat and straight over the road until we stopped at Little No Horse, home.

Bubbles of excitement welled up in me as all around the motor came to life and as with slow grandeur the bus began to move. The shelf was more perilous than it looked. As the bus gathered speed I found I had to hold tightly to the brackets. Still, using one arm and then the other, I could rest. And the gas-smelling air was flushed out behind the bus so I wasn’t breathing it. I had worried about that, my only worry brought on by Rose’s declaring that gasoline was squeezed from dead bodies and you’d die if you breathed it. The air was fresh, then, still with a raw spring bite, and cold. My teeth chattered at first but then the pipe under me, the middle pipe, grew warm. It ran straight down the center of me, warming me, burning me, although that would be in the end a complete surprise.

All through my life, to the mystery of my devoutest lovers, I have borne that central scorch mark—a thin stripe of gold lighter than my skin, a line evenly dividing me, running between my breasts and vanishing between my legs. And that surprised me, for although the pipe did indeed grow uncomfortably hot, it did not seem to burn me, certainly not to the point where it would leave a mark. Perhaps the cold air that kept on flowing all around me cooled my awareness, or perhaps it was the fear. One hour, then two hours, passed. When they stopped to fuel up, I wrung my agonized hands and arms. Got the blood moving. With the pavement a sweeping blur just inches beneath me, and the certain knowledge that if I let go or fell asleep I would die, I managed to stay awake. But that was the hardest thing of all. My brain wanted to go to sleep. The heavy movement was soothing, the vast unintelligible roar, the workings of the metal bowels.

At my birth, a bear had visited. I came from the lake. Nobody knew who my father was or nobody would tell. I am the last of the last of the Pillagers, Lulu, so how could I not go home?

At the next stop, I was able to rest. All I did was breathe hard and stare into myself, rubbing my arms. The other children were eating their cheese sandwiches. I was so keen with hunger that I could smell them in a park beside the gravel parking lot, having a picnic. I was in a blur of pain and sleepiness, and I wanted to be with them—just a child munching on a sandwich, bound home. To comfort myself I imagined Margaret and Nanapush. My eyes closed. When I opened them, I was staring into the startled face of the bus driver, checking the tires, who thought at first that I was dead.

They sent me back.

I sat in the sheriff’s office for hours, wrapped in a blanket, while Mr. Eaglestaff drove from the school to fetch me. He was the school’s head janitor, and he really didn’t care what I did. That was one good break. They issued me the longest, ugliest worst dress on earth—the punishment dress—a solid block of green reaching to my ankles, shapeless and embarrassing. Then I went to work scrubbing the sidewalks that led around the campus. Down on my knees, I washed section after section of concrete. Day after day that summer, I scrubbed the cement in watery circles. Kneeling above, staring into the swirls, I sometimes saw the face of my mother in the evaporating water. When I did, I scrubbed harder, twice as hard, erasing her.

One day as I paused there on my knees, brush in my hands, I looked up at the sky. I had the sense, though there were no clouds, that something bigger than a cloud passed over and through me, a huge thing that trailed a terrible breath-stopping sorrow. There was no one to disturb me. The campus was entirely still. I didn’t cry, of course, in spite of the pain. It was at that moment that my love for my mother left me, simply flowed out of me like a heavy cloud. Useless. Then gone. I stood up. I was so much lighter without this useless love. And this scrubbing was tiring. I marched back to the matron and said,
You don’t have to punish me anymore because I learnt my lesson and I won’t run away again
.

Mrs. Houle was matroning and she herself was partly Indian so she had pity. “Let’s burn up that damn green dress,” she whispered. Her eyes flashed with pleasure as she rummaged through the school clothes until she found one of black-and-white check so smart it looked like a town girl would wear it. I put it on, brushed out my hair down my back, and started work first on “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language and then the Twenty-third Psalm. I beaded my own makazinan and they gave me a dress of fawnskin as soft as the softest fabric. I wore an eagle feather and an underskirt and I got to go everywhere with Rose for those next few years. Us two perfectly synchronized our movements and really looked good in a spotlight.

One day, my mother arrived wearing eye paint and lipstick, white woman’s clothes: a small blue hat, a suit with blue stripes, a square black handbag, leather shoes that matched. She was there to retrieve me, who would not be retrieved. She disappeared into the school building. Walked to the office door. The principal, looking at her and the car she drove, parked right outside his window, sent a little girl to fetch me immediately.

Since I behaved both the best and the worst of anyone else, I didn’t know whether I was in for a prize or for punishment when I was called to the office. Nobody told me. But the woman in the office wore those clothes and had that high, white-woman attitude. Maybe my mother was a charitable person, like the lady who sent us to the circus. I had no warning at all of my mother’s presence, except the scent of smoked moosehide, just a faint and elusive whiff in the corridor, which made me pause, and then I was in the principal’s office. He beamed as he readied himself to witness a tenderhearted reunion.

Which did not take place.

The minute I saw my mother, or rather, absorbed her, took in the hat, the shoes, the tightly fitted beautiful suit, too exquisite to be worn, really, that perfect and that simple, that achingly sharp cut, the minute I took in the scent of smoked moosehide under Paris perfume, the tiny swatch of veiling that hung down off her hat, the immaculate, casual handbag and gloves, and again the shoes, tight calfskin and buttoned to one side, a blue to match the blue in the thinnest stripes of the suit, the minute I saw all of this and saw that the face beneath the hat was indeed my mother’s face I took it all in and spat it out.

“She ain’t my mother,” I said, flat as bannock.

I whirled and ran away down to the spot at the powerhouse where the steam pipes blasted exhausted moist air down into the ground. The grass stayed green all year-round there. I sat tight for about an hour before I thought, What are they going to do about it? If they believed me, and did not send me back with my mother, I’d proved my point, and if they did send me back with her I’d proved my point, too. Either way, I had done what I had to do. So I went back to the dorm and got together with my friends for kitchen duty and I didn’t say a word about my mother’s visit.

Nor would I, when my mother came again and again, meeting with the principal and meeting with me. Alone in the room together, I could feel my mother’s strength pull upon me like a sucking wind. I could feel my clothes flutter. Flaps of yearning prayer cloth. Strings of hair tugged and twined from my braids and snaked into the space between us. I could barely breathe. I took in my mother’s air. I couldn’t look at her. I had to focus all the hatred inside me upon my mother’s feet, slim in their fancy heeled shoes, in order to keep any sense of myself at all. I had to call on my spirit, the one who came from the earth, to strengthen me whenever I had to meet my mother’s gaze.

She ain’t my mother.

You ain’t my mother.

I allowed myself four words, exactly four and those only. As long as I stuck with them, I was safe enough. Six visits into the year, the principal took the paperwork and shoved it at Fleur.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. “Whatever the reason for her denying it, she is indeed your daughter. You may withdraw her.”

Now he was talking about me like a library book.

I closed myself tight as a book then.

“No.” My mother’s voice. “I won’t take her unless she wants to go. I won’t force her, she’s too much like me. Daga,” she said for the thousandth time, in a voice of great longing, “daga, n’dawnis, ombe. Gizhawenimin. Izhadaa.”

I felt the pull very strong then, it almost pulled me over, and I knew if she had just taken my hand I would have gone with her then. But she couldn’t, and I righted myself, walked out of the room. Outside, alone in the hallway, I fell on my knees as if shot. Then I picked myself up.

So it was, always, with me after that. You can go up to a certain point with me and I with you, giving, giving, but then the line might snap. My loving goes very deep unless you cross that boundary, do to me what I will not tolerate. I am not an all-forgiving person, not Lulu. Even when Nanapush and then Father Damien went to work on me shortly after, in regard to my mother, they had no success. The line had snapped. I had no interest. Even if I love you, the way I am, Father Jude, if you hurt me, I’ll turn cold on you. Turn away like a cat.

PART FOUR

The
P
ASSIONS

16

F
ATHER
D
AMIEN

1921–1933

Word by word, I trudge closer, stumbling through the underbrush of sound and meaning.
Agnes bit the end of her scarred fountain pen, switched back to English,
As I understand the place of the noun in the Ojibwe mind, it is unprejudiced by gender distinctions. That is some relief. Yet there occurs something more mysterious. Alive or dead. Each thing is either animate or inanimate, which would at first seem remarkably simple and sensible, for in the western mind the quality of aliveness or deadness seems easy to discern. Not so. For the Anishinaabeg, the quality of animation from within, or harboring spirit, is not limited to animals and plants. Stones, asiniig, are animate, and kettles, akikoog, alive as well.
In the sweat lodge, red-hot stones glowed with a power upon which she’d once gazed full on and scorched her eyeballs. For a day or two, everything she saw was surrounded by a halo of warm frost.
Amid the protocols of language, there is room for individual preference, too. Some old men believe their pants are animate.
Nanapush had sometimes chastised his baggy trousers.

Perhaps it is fortunate after all,
she wrote
, that Ojibwemowin is a language lean in objects. That leaves its bewildering wealth to reside in the storm of verbs and verb forms, which, heaven help us, require the literal extension of divine assistance for the novice speaker to comprehend.