The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (31 page)

A mourning dove called from a tree, a small oak in the graveyard behind the cabin. The vowels of its inquiry floated to Agnes one eternal dusk and she went into herself to strike a hopeful bargain. What do you want of me? she asked. But her pain had no needs, so there was nothing to offer or trade. She attempted with the deepest resolve to ignore it, but its grip on her chest intensified and she felt the iron seizing to her ribs. She wondered if she could scare it out. She sat up, gathered her breath, began screaming. There was no one to hear, the cabin was chinked so tight and the nuns asleep, calm at a safe distance. So night after night, she screamed in the darkness. Huge jagged rips of sound tore out of her but the pain was not impressed.

Only Mary Kashpaw, curled in the rough bench bed of the sleigh, stared into the great dark and listened.

Agnes woke with tiny veins broken in her eyelids. She tried again the next night. Again, the next. Finally after nearly a week of sleeplessness, beyond all weariness, agitated to the death, she rose in the dark, lighted a candle, and walked out of the cabin. She let herself into the school infirmary to search for some remedy. Without acknowledging her mission openly, she knew that she wanted the means either to cure the pain or to put herself to sleep forever.

With the brass key marked from her ring of keys, she opened the door and then lighted a lantern. She unlocked the white wall cupboard that Hildegarde bartered for with the government office, who contracted for these items to be sent every year. They had little use for them without a doctor. There, on the shelves, was an array of possible anodynes and comforts.

Agnes examined the bottles carefully. Tartar emetic in a green paste. Perhaps she could puke it out? Strychnine sulfate, a carefully sealed black jar—there was her last resort. Atropine in an innocent clear flask. Digitalin, tiny pills. Ginger and ergot. Belladonna with its own eyedropper. She shook the bottle and the clear stuff turned cloudy with promise. She tucked it into her pocket. What was this? Glycyrrhiza. Pure carbolic. Boracic powder, which she thought was for the eyes. Cocaine hydrochlorate,
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grain, twenty-five tubes of etched glass with red rubber stoppers at the ends. She took ten. Benzoic acid. Charcoal in a blue jar. Compound of gentian in a square bottle with a long wax-sealed neck. Myrrh and nux vomica, in identical rusting tins. Clove tincture of opium. Agnes sighed, frowned. Only one bottle and so obvious it would be missed. Still, she took it. Pepsin for the stomach. Oil of Ethereal Male Fern. Quinine. Cod liver oil. Sulphate of morphia set far back in the cabinet and very dusty. Four
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-ounce bottles of clear deep-brown amber glass. She took them also and shut the case.

FATHER DAMIEN’S SLEEP

For one delirious month, the anguish was survivable. It was Sister Hildegarde, of course, who dispatched herself to the priest’s cabin when he did not show up for morning Mass. She knocked, she prayed, she knocked again, prayed some more. After a while she went to the window, peered through, and saw that Father Damien was sleeping. Or was he dead? Crossing her breast, she entered the cabin. Drew near to the priest apologetically, put her hand to his lips and was satisfied. Yes, sleeping! But what a deep sleep. Likely, the good priest was ill or exhausted beyond illness, and Hildegarde took pity. She tucked the robe just underneath the chin of the priest and was turning to go when a great moon-black shadow fell across her.

Mary Kashpaw did not acknowledge the presence of the nun, but fixed her attention on her priest. Across her powerful features, as she stepped into the cabin, there stole an unlikely expression of protective gentleness. It was a look that certainly had not been seen before on her person by Hildegarde. The girl bent over her priest, and with huge compassion she brushed her fingers on the old buffalo robe she’d dragged from a trunk to warm Father Damien. Then she sank to the floor beside the bed, composed herself, and refused to leave. Mary Kashpaw stayed day and night with the priest from then on, keeping watch. She lighted his glass kerosene lamp and kept it going.

For although he appeared to be lying inert in one body, heavily sleeping underneath the burly brown robe, Father Damien was, in truth, wandering mightily through heaven and earth. He was exploring worlds inhabited by both Ojibwe and Catholic. And had Mary Kashpaw not kept that beacon going, he might, in his long and rambling journey, have become confused or even got lost. For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.

DAMIEN’S INNER TRAVELS

Mary Kashpaw watched how his hands pierced the air, always moving. Fingers rippling on the covers, he smiled, humming endless, complicated, unrepeatable music that went on all night and made Mary Kashpaw sigh with radiant emotion.

All the while that the priest was traveling, she stayed at the side of his bed, first crouched on the floor and then, a great womanly boulder, on a chair that she had made of peeled logs hacked to planks. Motionless, rapt as an ice fisherman, she watched. Gazing into Father Damien’s shuttered face, she hummed or rocked slightly on the uneven boards. From time to time, as though she were burning off a bit of surplus energy, she shuddered all over. Then she bit her lip and leaned to peer closer as if gazing into a deep pool ruffled on the surface by a stray breeze. Sometimes she left off staring at his face and frowned heartily at the wall, as if maps of Father Damien’s current whereabouts were posted there. Eyes closed, she traced the imaginary paths, the roads of rivers. At last she came to wonder why she saw no whiskers and recorded no beard growth on his chin.

Other white men had them, these whiskers, and in truth she was curious to see them sprout. On Damien, none showed. On the third day of his sleep, Mary Kashpaw put her hand out and, with one finger, lightly stroked his chin. She drew her finger back and continued to sit, thoughtfully, staring like someone who has glimpsed the shade and outline of a larger picture.

Every morning after that she heated a kettle of water, readied the mug of shaving soap, dipped in the brush, stropped the razor, and was seen, ostentatiously, to be putting these things aside just as Sister Hildegarde arrived.

The practical Sister Hildegarde was in fact pleased to see how carefully Mary Kashpaw cared for Damien, and she tried to say so in signs, for she never did quite accept that, although Mary Kashpaw refused to speak, she understood everything around her perfectly. Hildegarde nodded at the carefully damped or blazing fire in the tiny metal drum of the stove. Gestured approvingly at the shine on the windows and the urgent cleanliness of Mary Kashpaw’s floor. The big girl scrubbed with an artificial madness of intention. The floor smoothed and the wood settled underneath her punishing hands.

Watching her zeal, one day, Hildegarde was sobered to observe a mechanical strength, as though her body were able to operate without the direct guidance of her mind. Bending before Mary Kashpaw, the nun passed her hand rapidly before the girl’s eyes and sure enough, she got no reaction. Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance. So, she thought, scrubbing floors! As well as who knows what! Hildegarde had seen her eat, too, with just this sort of blank fixity. These were actions Mary Kashpaw did in her sleep.

SLEEPERS

The sleepers traveled deep into the country of uncanny truth. Mary Kashpaw scrubbed floors in her sleep while, on the low bed above her, through dense thickets Father Damien plunged onward. He soon became thoroughly and miserably lost. Having strayed off the dream path leading to the house of his friend, Nanapush, he made the mistake of continuing—after all, dusk was nearly on him and he didn’t want to spend the night in the woods, even though it was a dream woods. That, however, is exactly what happened. Damien sat against a tree, drunk with exhaustion. After a short period of electrified panic, he felt a dim fuzz stealing over his brain.

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed. And so it went from there, a series of dreams, tunnels of brilliance snaking and tangling into the low hill, then out, then farther back—through unknown swamps and broad lake fields high with sweeping reeds and farther yet into the great many islanded lakes with their powerful, secret rock paintings. Impossible to say how many dreams within the dream before he met the one who followed him in to guide him back: Mary Kashpaw.

It was good she found the priest. For if Damien had dreamed himself much farther into that overgrown country how could he ever have returned? Who is to say this isn’t exactly how, one morning, people wake up mad? They have simply dreamed themselves down too many paths and at each turn or pause, as they attempt to travel back, they are swept up in the poignancy of being. Except it is another dream that they unknowingly inhabit.

THE SACRAMENT

Father Damien walked through the woods in a state of pleasant resignation, his satchel full of strychnine. For a while he pretended to wander in a meaningless attempt to lose himself, so that he could die with no bother to anyone else, but he had to admit finally that he was on his way to Nanapush. Well, why not? Why not say good-bye to the person who had been most kind to him and most understanding of all Anishinaabeg. Besides, out of a sense of pride and rightness he had inherited from his predecessor, he hadn’t told Nanapush of what he suffered. The way Damien understood it, he was to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around. Still, when he entered the familiar yard that afternoon, heart full, the pleasure and kindness in Nanapush’s face somewhat eased his certainty. In that moment of relaxation, he showed Nanapush the poison and admitted he had come into the woods to die.

Nanapush gently took the bottles from Damien’s hands. Miserable with relief at his admission, Damien dragged himself to the side of the yard, lay down in a patch of grass, on a blanket, and fell into a sudden and childlike sleep that lasted for most of the afternoon. He came swimming to consciousness and was vaguely aware that there were several men working in the yard, then he passed out again. When he came to the second time, the world was dark and Nanapush was sitting next to him with his pipe lighted, blowing the smoke over Father Damien in a faint and fragrant drift.

Father Damien sat up, embarrassed at himself. As though he’d upset some inner water level, tears filled his eyes. He looked at the ground, his hands trembling.

“We put up a sweat lodge for you,” said Nanapush. The glow of a huge, steady fire lighted his features. Nanapush took the priest’s hand, then, and led him to the entrance of a small, domed hut, gestured for him to crawl inside. He did, entering on all fours. Then Nanapush himself followed and crouched next to Damien. “Give me your robe,” he said, and Father Damien removed his heavy cassock, but kept on the light black shift he wore beneath. The shadowy presences of men surrounded him and he could see their faces by the light of the glowing rocks that soon were brought in a pitchfork and lowered into the pit at the very center.

Every so often, someone would make a little joke. Otherwise, they were calm with expectation.

“This is our church,” said Nanapush.

Hunched in the pole hut and sitting upon bare tamped ground, Agnes at first smiled wanly at the irony. But once the flap was closed and the darkness was complete, once the glowing rocks were splashed with water, then sprinkled with sharp medicines that gave off a healing smoke, once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that Nanapush had spoken truthfully and without double wit, and that this was indeed her friend’s true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagle’s nest of the sweat lodge over them.

Straining to make sense of the rapid prayers, her Ojibwemowin at the level of penetration at which words made sense a beat or two beats after she heard them and puzzled out the meaning, Agnes surrendered. According to Church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake God’s worship in so alien a place. Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? It wasn’t as though she made a choice to do it—Agnes simply found herself comforted.

That night, stretched out in blankets beside the fire that had heated the stones, Agnes lay peacefully alert. For the first time since the pain had gripped her, she felt a deliciousness of honest sleep close down. Not weariness or exhaustion, those things Father Damien strove toward in his work to try to outwit the grip of insomnia, but the luxuriant stretching of an utterly relaxed spirit.

After returning from despair, Father Damien loved not only the people but also the very thingness of the world. He became very fond of his stove—a squat little black Reliance with fat, curved legs. The stove reminded Agnes of a cheerful old woman who had given her bread as a child, and raw carrots, when she’d been hungry and there was nothing to eat at home. The old woman had pulled the carrots from the ground and held them under the spout of her pump until the dirt flowed off and they glistened. Then the old woman, whose fat legs ran straight down from her knees into her shoes, sat Agnes on a stump in her yard.

The gold secret tang of sweet marigolds was on the woman’s hands. She had put the bread in Agnes’s lap, soft and fresh, and the carrots, and a clear glass shaker of salt. Kindly, she’d left her to eat. Agnes could still taste the crisp juice of the carrots, the buttery interior whiteness of the bread, the salt bringing them together on her tongue, when she looked at the stove.