The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (25 page)

BERNADETTE

After Bernadette came to her wits, she realized that she could do a lot more for her side of things than agreeing with Margaret. Even now, she was the one who made calculations on each parcel of land, the one who figured for the land company and government too, and for the lumbering operation co-owned by John James Mauser. She was the one who accidentally, by virtue only of her skill with small numbers, suddenly acquired an undeserved power over the fates of her neighbors and tribespeople. A half-blood, she called herself French and despised the old ones. She was mirthless and ruthless, and she decided that she would use her brother’s death to cast suspicion on the one whose mind no money would affect.

“Nanapush,” she told all who would listen. “He and those Pillagers killed my brother because he wanted to sign!” She thrust out her skinny neck. “The backwards ones, the holdouts. They threw his poor body in the bush and went on with their ceremonies!”

Once she said it the first time, her theory was repeated to every listener. Napoleon was killed, horridly and thoroughly, by the full-blood blanket Indians, she called them, who couldn’t understand that the money offered for the land and lumber came around once and once only. She asserted that, as a horse trader, Napoleon Morrissey had known a good deal. In no time, she had quite a number convinced that it was useless to do anything but go forward, live forward, take the money in their hands, and find a new place to put their hearts and their feet.

NECTOR KASHPAW

The tension ran so high that Father Damien was relieved he’d had the foresight to conduct two separate Holy Masses for the rancorous families. Their arguments split the reservation, and from then on they would contend for control of everything from jelly recipes and secrets of hide tanning to land and political say-so. The Morrissey and Lazarre camp, aligned with the company owned by Palmer Turcot and John James Mauser, took the early Mass. The Masses were widely spaced apart so that there would be no overlap, no meeting of the enemies in the innocence of the churchyard. Kashpaws, including Nanapush and those in sympathy with Pillagers, came walking to the late Mass. At first, there was complaint from the Morrisseys when Nector Kashpaw returned from government school and served at their Mass, too, but he was still a boy so they forgot about it.

That was a mistake.

For Nector Kashpaw would be the one who would count who was there and who wasn’t, the one who would make himself small and very quiet, the one who would eventually hold the power of the pen over Bernadette.

PENMANSHIP

As great towers are by the underpinnings weakened and overthrown, so the seeming insignificance of Nector was the key to the eventual downfall of the Morrisseys. Nobody knew of or saw the quick intelligence at work behind the holy-boy shutter of his face. No one thought to wonder what he learned at the hands of the nuns or from Father Damien. All the time that he was not trapping, hunting, attempting to dig and plant in accordance with the government wishes, and all the time that he was missing from the camps of his elders and the company of the medicine people and their wisdom, Nector was learning to read zhaaganaashimowin and to write the language of the conquering officials and the land companies in the beautifully flowing and elegant script that Sister Hildegarde Anne taught with painstaking love from two books—Merrill’s
Modern Penmanship
and the classic
Graphic System of Practical Penmanship
were her bibles.

It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life. That and hygiene—but though the hygiene just had to be adequate, the writing had to be exquisite. So she worked with her readiest pupil, Nector, until, using a pencil kept pin-sharp, then graduating to a precious, borrowed pen, he could form letters that rivaled the illustrations in the penmanship books. Soon his writing approached even Sister Hildegarde’s own for purity and consistency. His words were in their execution indisputably grander, firmer, and more controlled than the written words of Bernadette Morrissey, who corresponded with the government.

During this time, and while he was getting his growth, other extreme events occurred. The Lazarres and Morrisseys became still more bold and insulting to those who did not agree with their views. Earlier they had gone so far as to kidnap, threaten, and even shave the head of Nector’s mother, Margaret. The revenges that followed were distinct to the Pillagers. Fleur killed with fear, Nanapush used piano wire, Margaret flayed her enemies to nothing with the bitter blade of her tongue.

Nector got even by the use of penmanship.

After he returned from government school, he positioned himself carefully by pretending to be neutral. His bland, blinking, new-grown handsomeness caught the eye of Bernadette, who hired him—though that was a fancy word for a job that paid in grease, potatoes, and an occasional dime. He was to assist her in putting into operation an order from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. That order was this: the administrator at each agency was to mend, classify, and flat-file all of the old files. In this case, the files dated back to well before the birth of Nanapush.

Bernadette thought she could trust young Nector Kashpaw because he’d been exposed to the withering light of the government school. She thought he couldn’t hurt a system so snarled that she herself couldn’t account for where land or inheritance papers went and what happened to commodities ordered from various crooks. She was tired of the stacks of mail to answer, of the loss of landholdings personal to clans other than her own, tired of trying to account for these losses in words that she couldn’t invent fast enough to please the Chief of Methods Division. In Nector, so bright and obedient a boy, she thought she had a malleable, sensible son who understood that the time of the old traditions was accomplished and over, a boy who wished a clean sweep and progressive future, if he wished anything at all yet, for his people. Not that Bernadette Morrissey, cow hips jutting, face long and exhausted, eyes weak from doing money sums, had a vision. She didn’t. She only wanted what was most comfortable. What was secure.

Nector could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood held a vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. But he didn’t say these things, because they were useless in the first place and would give him away in the next. He said nothing except to lament, with her, the former practice of folding papers and the improper classification of files and the confusing change of names and locations, superintendencies and jurisdictions over various families of Ojibwe Indians.

Nector let Bernadette natter on, directing him to accomplish fair copies of documents. Soon, he learned to use—and here the story was given an unexpected twist—the black typing machine labeled Chicago. He began to love typing and that, plus the way he could sign what he typed, put him over the top. He was now preferred by the commissioner to Bernadette because he could manufacture documents of a more official-looking nature.

He practiced at night.

By frail kerosene light he laboriously struck the grown-up keys, each letter circled by a ring of metal, until his typing was of a consistent quality and speed. Papers moldering in the bottoms of desk drawers, ragged and unfiled or filed by the system that undid those whom Bernadette wished to thwart, Nector typed from her writing and restored. He had done a great many of these old transactions, and he had a great many more to go, when he made the following important decision: he destroyed the originals.

He was now in charge of history, which suited him just fine, and he was only a boy.

NECTOR

In the midst of all that revenge and suspicion—in addition to which, he was fooling with the only thing worth having, land and land ownership—Nector thought he’d best be very careful. Therefore, he never worked past dark and made his way home by alternating routes and unpredictable bushwhacking. And he never went drinking unless with a group of cousins, never alone. In fact, he tried not to be alone if he could help it, which is what got him in trouble after all.

Johnny Onesides was one of his cousins. He was a calm, uncomplicated sort who didn’t say much. But the few words he did say made him eloquent compared with his brother, Clay, who didn’t speak at all except on very special occasions. These two were staunch friends of Nector’s, along with a third cousin, called Rockhead, for reasons that would become apparent, and a friend of that cousin named Makoons. These five stuck together for good times as well as protection.

One still day, when Nector left the agency, they were waiting outside in Makoons’s uncle’s Model T Ford touring car, which for some reason Makoons was allowed to drive for the afternoon. This exciting privilege moved them all with expectation. They wanted to drive by girls and impress them, and other people as well, with the splendor of their conveyance. So once they crammed Nector in, they started off.

The thing they soon found was that while they’d imagined crowds of people around the trader’s and the agency building and the church, it was a very quiet afternoon and nobody at all was out. Therefore, they had to hunt around to find admirers, and they did find one or two people to impress—but Mrs. Bizhieu was impressed with anything, and Father Damien, whom they encountered on a genial afternoon walk, gave no more than a distracted wave of his hand. Finding even those two took some doing and used up gas. So on their fourth time through town they paused the car just outside the door of the trader’s. They got out. Nector bought the others each a cold, refrigerated grape pop. There was, in the act of tipping those bottles to their lips and baring their throats and then wiping their mouths manfully on their sleeves, and emitting a sound of relief and pleasure, a great chance for self-display—if only, again, there was someone to appreciate their pop drinking, but there wasn’t. The dusty road, the dust on the lower leaves and branches of the trees, a tired bird, the trader himself half asleep, this was all a most unsatisfactory audience.

Rockhead now suggested that they take the car up around Matchimanito Lake, but Makoons was uneasy with the idea. The road that lumber had carved to one side, in hopes of getting all the way around the lake, was rough and uncertain. Still, there was a certain beach where young people liked to go, and there at least they had a good chance of getting themselves admired. In the end, between vanity and good sense, there was no contest. They started up the car, jumped in, and took off.

Twice on the way there they had to jump out, heave and strain, push the car from potholes. Makoons drove nervously and wanted to turn back, but was unable to find a place wide enough on the narrow track. So he proceeded with ever more trepidation in his uncle’s precious car. The road closed over them. And then opened suddenly. Displayed the lake. There, to the boys’ glory, sat a knot of people on the shore. These people had heard the auto’s tortured approach and now waited and watched expectantly.

It took only a lurch or two forward to ascertain they were Lazarres. And only a lurch backward to get completely stuck.

“What the hell do we do now?” asked Johnny Onesides.

“We can each take two,” said Rockhead, who was counting the number of Lazarres now advancing toward them. “Or three.”

“Some are girls,” said Makoons, straining for a sign of hope.

“They’re worse than the men,” said Nector. He wished he hadn’t come along. All the filing and typing hadn’t done much for his strength, not like farm work, and he was the youngest of this bunch. He wondered if he’d be killed, or just beaten until his brain didn’t work anymore and he walked around drooling like Paguk, the young fighter who’d gone down to the Cities a god and come back stupid. While he was busy worrying about this and even seeing himself lurching down the reservation roads, and even feeling sorry for this vision that he had of himself, the Lazarres approached and then surrounded the car.

There was Eugene and his brother the Half-twin, there was Mercy Lazarre, grinning with her eyes on fire—she was anything but like her name—there was Fred and there was Virgil, both solid and muscular with mean red eyes, and there was Adik, known as the brains of the group, and several cousins perhaps from the plains or prairie or maybe from hell itself, whom the boys had never seen before but who were sharing a big jug of wine and pretending to fish while they snagged their own relatives.

“This is good,” said Adik. “We’re glad you’re here. We’re glad you could make it to the party.”

“Miigwetch,” Makoons croaked. If the Lazarres beat him up, he was afraid they might then do something really bad to his uncle’s car.

“I wanna take that good-looking one in the bush first,” said Mercy, nicking her boulder of a chin at Nector, who grinned weakly.

“Show me no Mercy,” he said, which made everybody laugh, but the laughter was not reassuring, and Adik soon stopped it.

“We don’t find it funny when a Kashpaw mocks our women.”

“Well,” said Nector with complete sincerity, “I’m sorry then. I didn’t mean anything.”

“That’s good, cousin.”

There was a chilled pause, and then—it was like some malevolent force simply reached down and plucked them altogether in a ragged pile from the vehicle and set sheer chaos into motion: beating, growling, punching, kicking, yelling, the enemies fought. Nector and his cousins were tough and labored valiantly to throw off the Lazarres, but there were too many and the conclusion was foregone—soon each was pinned to the ground, held in check by at least two Lazarres as Adik decided what they would do.

His idea came to him in a flash that made the other Lazarres gasp at the genius of it. No wonder people listened to him! Howah! Their agreement was unanimous. It was decided. The Lazarres would stage an accident with the car belonging to Makoons’s uncle—the car run deep into the lake and the boys drowned in their seats. That way, they would escape the suspicion of the Indian police and Father Damien, who helped them out.