The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (37 page)

“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.

Agnes set aside her carefully kept pen. Most often she cleaned it with a toothpick and alcohol before retiring it, but tonight she was agitated with thoughts and sensations. The little cabin was too small a container. Outside, the strong cold air of Gashkadino-giizis, the freezing moon, lay still as iron on the ground. The reservation was suspended in its grip, snowless and icily tranquil. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars. She took up her pen once more and composed, instead of the rest of her article, a letter.

My Lord Bishop,

I am writing to inquire, on rather a long shot, whether you have any knowledge of a woman in your diocese who is widely rumored to have moved to Minneapolis. Although she is a woman yet adhering to the non-Catholic ways of her people, she has been in close contact with members of our mission here at Little No Horse. Fleur Pillager is her name. Perhaps one of your mission priests, someone running a charitable clothing dispensary for the indigent or perhaps providing free bread and soup, has knowledge of her whereabouts.

If so, we would be most glad for the information, as I am anxious to tell her news of her daughter.

Father Damien Modeste

Soon there arrived an answer.

Dear Father Damien Modeste,

It was with great interest I received your letter, and I am happy to report to you that I do have knowledge of a woman by the (former) name of Fleur Pillager. She is, however, anything but in want of either bread or soup. I myself performed a marriage ceremony between this woman of our soil’s natal blood, and a prominent member of our community (whose marriage was annulled on grounds of the wife’s insanity resulting in lack of consummation). Having entered the Mount Curve Avenue household as a domestic, Mrs. John James Mauser is currently presiding over household affairs at that same address and she is received, not without some ironic curiosity, in the highest society here. She is known for her good works among the people of her background in Minneapolis, who roam the streets.

I hope this information serves your purpose and helps you in your quest.

Every month or so, after his first letter, Father Damien wrote to Fleur, or, it would be more accurate to say, he cast a letter to the winds in her direction. She could not read the letters but must finally have got someone to translate them for her. At long length, a package of red cloth arrived with her Mount Curve return address embossed on the box. Gorgeous red cloth. Brocade. Obviously meant for a priestly robe. No writing to accompany it, and only, as the years went on, that one package. Similarly, Margaret and Nanapush received goods Fleur shipped: blankets, a great cast-iron stove with blue enamel doors, crates of oranges, a fat doll with golden hair and eyes that shut, bags of hard candy, more cloth, tobacco. And money. She certainly had money. Still, they heard nothing from her, no word, not even when Nector borrowed Father Damien’s fountain pen and paper and wrote her to say that Lulu was home.

All they heard of Fleur was from newspaper clippings sent by city relatives. Fleur ate with so-and-so. Visited so-and-so. Motored to Wayzata. Motored to the banks of the St. Croix River. Picnicked. Vacationed. Bore a child. All they saw of her were three or four printed photographs, her figure slim and unrecognizably dressed, a round hat shading her face. Her hair was long again, held up in a chignon in one photograph. In another, she wore a slender, white, scandalous, gravity-defying gown. Next to her, and everyone puzzled about him, her husband stood. He was dressed to match her—formal, complete—every detail of his getup observable and described in print too, right down to the cuff links. Gold nuggets. John James Mauser had invested in the Black Hills gold that Custer coveted and died in an attempt to secure. His face was taut, strained, soulful. Even in that grainy society-page photograph, it was quite clear that Fleur’s husband was different from the jowled and coarse-whiskered bankers in whose company he smoked. Of course, he had to be in order to fall in love with such a dangerous woman. The photograph had caught him midglance. He looked sideways at her. She was poised in the white gown, standing before a dance floor as though she’d alighted and folded her feathers. She gazed upon the array of St. Paul society with an eagle’s unconscious ferocity. Her husband’s look held something any man anywhere could understand, or any woman, or for that matter any priest.

He would kill for her, thought Agnes, the poor man suffers a wrenching passion. When she witnessed the insanity of love, Agnes made upon her breast the sign of the cross, the emblem to her of protection and pity. Thoughts of Gregory or Berndt were usually acceptable features of her history now, yet there were other times, in her dreams, when old feelings assailed her with a sudden and crippling sickness of emotion.

The moon vanished and retrieved itself. Vanished again. In those years, a great want descended upon the nation, and the Ojibwe were no longer the only vagrant and hollow-eyed beggars on the plains. There were others. Farmers. Those who had stolen and plowed the earth were upended by the earth, buried in dust. Yet in the scrap of reservation, the lake remained, the woods, the poor cabins with no more than a streak of grease to wipe across the bread. Winter did in the old people and the young died of rotted lungs. Most people forgot about Fleur, or gave her up to the city. But of course there came a day, it was inevitable, when Fleur finished with the man in the beautiful tuxedo, and returned.

Spring brought her to the reservation in a tumult of wild birdsong. Agnes sensed it the way an animal knows low pressure in its bones. There was a spring storm approaching. A dark cloud. Behind it, a full and aching, female, swollen, hungry moon. Sure enough, it was Fleur. Not only that, but as though to present an opposing force, Pauline Puyat was sent back as well from Argus and the exhausted community where she had finally professed her permanent vows and become Sister Leopolda.

Father Damien kept to his breviary, tried to attend to his daily office and his predictable rounds. But he could feel the wary energy of people at Mass. Fleur’s return, and the Puyat’s, were the subject of tense whispers. In the watery weight of air and the burgeoning light, people talked.

FLEUR’S CHILDREN

At first, no one thought that the boy Fleur brought back to the reservation could possibly be her son. He was so white, so soft, so strange. But then, said the old women, in the land of the chimookomanag she’d probably forgotten all the things that a pregnant Anishinaabekwe must do—for instance, never to roll over in her sleep. Had she twisted the boy up inside of her somehow? And when it was born, did the men of the father’s chimookoman dodem make loud noises to frighten off evil and give the boy courage? It did not appear so, nor did the women think Fleur had kept him long enough in the tikinagan—not that there was anything visibly crooked about him. Yet he did not look straight, either, so perhaps the crookedness came from the inside. Had she remembered to rub him with bear grease? with goose oil? to bathe him in strong cedar tea? Had she sung the old songs to him before and after he was born and had she done the right thing and introduced him to the drum? They doubted it. Some even came and whispered to Father Damien. It was the flesh of the boy—too pale and soft, like risen dough, that upset them. And the eyes. Sometimes blue, sometimes black. As if his whole being could not make up its mind, which gave them the answer, at last, to what was wrong.

They had seen it before in a child whose indis was lost, or even worse, thrown away. Maybe by a nurse in the chimookoman hospital. Maybe the father, who did not keep Anishinaabe ways. For the boy seemed both clever and foolish, huge and weak. Had Fleur dried the boy’s birth cord in tobacco, then wrapped it in sage, and sewn it into a bag made of fine skin? If not, the boy would be hunting for it ever after. And he did appear to be looking too hard at everything, the people thought, maybe searching, but with such a quiet oddness that it truly seemed to them he must have lost the center of himself. Anyway, who knew if she was ever a good mother, seeing her own daughter would not speak to her anymore? Fleur didn’t treat her son with affection, never set her hand upon his hair, never even told his name to anyone. Perhaps he didn’t have one. Nameless, then, the boy trundled after her, begging, always, for sweets. More sweets. They called him Sweets for a time, and then someone looked into his eyes. That name was dropped.

Of course, from the newspaper record, his origin was known. Here was the son she had borne with John James Mauser. This was the son of the ravenous man in the tuxedo suit, the one who had stolen her land. The truth came clear. Upon that Mauser, it appeared she had taken her revenge, an idea. This son she brought home was the visible form of that revenge. So was he, or was he not, human? Was he then not something concocted of a bad form of medicine, or at the least, her purpose gone wrong?

The mother and son went back to their land and camped there, even though it was a place nobody liked to go. She put on men’s overalls and tied her hair back, bought an ax and a few other tools, then the two started building out by the ruined shores of Matchimanito. Some said she returned her parents’ bones to the ground. Dodem markers soon appeared, thrust upside down into softened earth. If so, there were still more reasons to avoid the place. More ghosts. A reunion of the dead.

As for the great trees, over which Fleur’s force was narrowed, then stilled, they were gone forever. But although the son and mother could not bring back the trees which, quarter sawn and polished with beeswax, composed the stylish foyer of the grand house Mauser built on a tranquil ridge in Minneapolis, the peace of which Fleur destroyed, there were other trees. Fresh green saplings had grown in Fleur’s absence. Kind trees, popple trees, flourished on her land, enough for her to construct a neat cabin of poles and mud. Once she was living in her new popple-pole house, she sought out her daughter Lulu once again. But in her adamant refusal of her mother, the girl would not change.

As soon as he knew Fleur was there and settled in her cabin, Father Damien walked out to Matchimanito. The old ladies constructed invisible webs of signs of crosses when they saw Fleur passing near, but Father Damien felt simple eagerness to see her, friend of his first years, and he walked the grown-over paths eagerly. That first visit, as though she’d taken on some city ways, Fleur was surprisingly talkative. It was only once he’d gone that Father Damien realized she’d told him nothing. City ways again. After that, she grew increasingly quiet and the boy, tanned and suddenly fond of daily fishing and hunting, stomped in and out of the house in silent concentration. Father Damien found the quietness of Fleur reassuring, not threatening or even mysterious. Often, they sat in silence and considered that period of absence of talk a good visit.