The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (44 page)

There was a park near the hospital in Fargo, and after Gregory died, Agnes went there. The grass was studded with acorns and fat squirrels busied themselves in the wealth. Mothers walked by with strollers and carriages, dressed in pink, aqua, lime. There was a wading pool at some short distance, and from the bench where Agnes sat, she could hear the faint splashes and cries of children and the hysterical notes of gathered crows. The air moved over her quietly, with a city exhaustion, like a half-spent breath. Agnes really didn’t know how to feel at all—she wasn’t devastated or even terribly sad. Those feelings were for when Gregory had wrestled with pain, struggled to get free from it, to throw it off. Now that he had, there was a lightness, a numb pleasantness, a newness, to everything she did. It was while she examined this curious state of mind that a figure, approaching from across the coarse green blanket of grass, caught her eye.

A huddled shape, it lurched forward then slowly tottered back, then threw itself forward again just a pittance, as though it were fighting a great wind. As it got closer, she could see that the person was dressed fantastically in a church-basement assortment of sagging clothing, a vibrant dress over men’s plaid pants, a filmy blouse of fairy-pale floating polyester, a green man’s hat, and thick unmatched shoes. An old Indian woman. Hunched, drunk, half collapsed. The woman stumbled closer and peered at Father Damien, then put her hand out and asked for change. Her voice was ragged and her cheeks sunken. She had lost all of her visible teeth but the two sharp incisors, and her eyes were covered with a dull, scratched film, but Agnes recognized her and rose, now taller than the stooped old lady, and took the gnarled claws of her hands in hers.

“Mashkiigikwe!”

The woman reeled back a bit, suspicious, at the sound of her own name, and snatched away her arthritic paws.

“It’s me. Father Damien.”

“Could you help me out with some pocket money?”

“Mashkiigikwe,” Damien tried again.

“What are you calling me by the old name for?” said the old woman in English. “Left that one years ago. Do you have money?”

“I am the priest from Little No Horse. Father Damien. Don’t you remember me?”

Shaking her head, ruffling her fantastic costume, Mashkiigikwe started away from the priest, mumbling half under her breath, throwing her arms out in erratic little gestures.

“How did you get here? Where are your children? What’s your name now?” Damien tried again, following her along just a few steps. The woman laughed, suddenly lucid.

“Winos don’t have names, priest. Go back and save the others like you saved me.”

Then she let her lip drop and shambled off with surprising speed. Agnes sat back down on the park bench and looked at the shined black tops of her shoes. When she closed her eyes, the color of emptiness assailed her. She gazed deeper into the color of that absence and slowly, for the first time in many years, remembering those first years and Kashpaw, the round children and that woman’s strength and skill, Agnes felt tears gather behind her eyelids. Soon they would spill over, drag slowly down her cheeks. These tears horrified her, suddenly. They were tears of self-pity for the seeming waste of her own life, her own efforts.

With that thought her eyes dried and she jumped up, heart pounding, wrenched into a sudden fury. She spotted the bright dot of Mashkiigikwe, now far off, opportuning someone else, and with a swift jog Agnes powered herself down the sidewalk until she drew up behind Mashkiigikwe. She grasped the old woman’s shoulder and swiveled her roughly so they stood face-to-face.

“Here,” Father Damien said angrily, pulling what dollars and quarters he had from inside pockets, smashing them into the old, brown hands. “Here and here. Take this! Ando miniquen! I didn’t put the bottle in your mouth! I didn’t make you suck the sauce!”

The old woman’s mouth had dropped wide open in astonishment, but now she closed it to a firm line and her eyes flickered. Her face unblurred and just for a moment her features composed into the real face of Mashkiigikwe, aware, intelligent, bewildered to find herself in hell.

“Who did it then?” she asked the priest. “How did it happen? For I don’t like to be this way, and yet, Father Damien, I am.”

20

A N
IGHT
V
ISITATION

1996

Now she was old, truly old, of an age she’d never imagined. Her skin was waxen and her brain flickered, dropped things, seized others. Still, she possessed a startling vigor. There were days she did her stretches and arm whirls and went out walking and nothing hurt—not the hip gouged by the bullet so long ago, not even her toughened beanbag of a heart. And she listened to confessions with more attention and stamina than she’d ever possessed.

One such evening, walking out of the church, in the half darkness, Agnes was suddenly afflicted by an unbearable thirst. Instinctively, she bent to the font at the entrance and steadily as a parched horse pulled water from the surface into her dry throat. The blessed water was mineral stale and soothing, and she stood after a few moments, wiped her face, and went on, refreshed. Straight back to her dinner of ham and pickled beets, then an immediate swoon of profound, dreamless sleep.

Having drunk so deeply of the holy water, Agnes woke in the middle of the night. Two things were happening. She was in the throes of a sense of overwhelming blessedness—from within. And also, she needed to relieve herself. She rolled over and swung her legs out over the cold floor. Gingerly, she touched down. Stood. She walked through the dark hallway to the bathroom, and then, returning to her bed where she planned to lie still and enjoy the interesting inner effect of the blessed water, she was suddenly directed elsewhere. When, many years past, the church had acquired the loud organ with pipes running to the ceiling, the door of her cabin had been enlarged and the Steinway moved inside. She found herself standing before the instrument, serenely lustrous in the dark.

Sometimes, now, at this brittle age, she buried her hands in a cast-iron pot of wet, hot sand for ten or fifteen minutes before she played. Tonight, she had no chance to set up the hot sand, so her fingers twitched on the keys. Still, as Chopin had been kind to aging musicians and written some particularly easy preludes of great beauty, she played. The piece she loved best was meditative and slow, aching of the world’s sorrows and fugitive joys. As she played, she gradually awakened. Her fingers loosened and forgot their age. She played on. Wondered. Had she the promise, could she exact one from the black dog’s muzzle, if the thing should appear to her again, dare she ask: Was there a good piano in hell? The music soared, her hands curved around an intricate series of trills. If there were a good piano in hell, would she play this well once she got there? Her music, inaudible to all the sleeping reservation, spilled through the little house, uncurled beneath her hands like smoke. For an hour, two hours, almost three of her waning life, Agnes lived fully and intimately in a state of communion.

THE MIGHTY TEMPTER

Agnes felt it in her bones when the wind came up—a freedom in which she imagined, sleepless, springing from the narrow bed. She was sleeping very soundly, so heavily, in fact, that she lost track of the current of her life. Waking in the dark, she surprised herself. Old again! A priest! She did not move. She could not move. She wondered what had awakened her. Then she smelled under the fugitive breeze the low and maggot-quick, rich, warm, fish-gut breath of dog.

“Where are you? Show yourself!”

She tried to struggle up on one elbow, but a weight of air pinned her in the sheets. There was a panting and a lolling. A dogness surrounded her. The dog itself walked heavily up her legs and stood there in the dark, one paw on her heart and the other on the green scapular she wore under her nightshirt. Faintly, Agnes hoped. Might the scapular offer some protection? But her voice box rusted shut and bitter anxiety zipped down her windpipe.

“Get off!” She tried to say it, willed it. The visitor slouched massive on her chest, and then it spoke in a cloud of foul whispers.

“
Wie geht’s?
How’s my little priestette?”

Dug scraggly claws into Agnes’s frail skin and settled full length. Stretched its legs along hers. She sensed fleas shooting off her nemesis like popcorn. Felt the soft plop of the dog’s heavy balls between her knees.

“Open that black door in your chest,” rasped the dog, “I’m hungry.”

“Never!” Agnes’s brain squeaked.

“Oh,” the dog whined, “for a taste of nice fresh heart!”

A racking dryness. A hacking, lung-wrenching cough sent needle-fine pains shooting through her lungs, warning her not to move a muscle, a hair. The pinching pains radiated from each breath, from her center, like pulses of the sharp light depicted in paintings of the sacred heart. Now, at last, Agnes was horridly awake; her mouth went sandpaper dry and her esophagus shut.

“Talk to me,” said the dog, and its voice was insufferably gentle.

Agnes gritted her teeth against the longing, sharp and sudden, for she knew that her only refuge lay in categorically not giving in to the false compassion in the dog’s tone.

“Get thee behind me,” she managed to croak. “I’m not ready to go.”

“Still, I will take good care of you.” The dog settled its lanky, bony haunches. “I am very loyal.”

“You want me to die.”

“You are tired, and you want to die, too.”

“I don’t know anymore,” said Agnes, wearily. “Is there a good piano in hell?”

“The devil owns all of the finest makers of musical instruments,” the dog said. “That darkness, that blood of sorrow in the most expressive woods, where do you think that comes from?”

“Suffering,” said Agnes.

“Causing it,” said the dog.

“I want an angel, a real dog, a good dog! I’d like to have a dog to protect me,” Agnes blurted out.

“I will not let her, it, whatever, live,” said the black dog. “Just as I can kill every person you love, I will kill whatever dog you love.”

Agnes’s heart thudded to the very end of her gut and she pleaded.

“Leave me.”

“I can’t,” said the dog, wheezing with a sly and malevolent sympathy. “I am yours, and don’t think I enjoy my work! Watching over you has been infuriating, though it had its moments. I did enjoy tickling Berndt with those bullets, and Gregory with the black knives of cancer. Recall when you made love how dutifully their hearts beat under your hand—how steady and warm? I stopped them. I shut their dear eyes . . .”

Agnes started to tremble.

“. . . just as I shut the black eyes of Napoleon via the rosary in the hands, the very hands of the nun . . . how could you forgive those two, and others, the worst of sinners? Your forgiveness has opened many a door to me, old friend.”

It was then that Agnes was assured that her Father Damien had done the right thing in absolving all who asked forgiveness, and the realization filled her with a sudden and bouyant strength. Here it was—the reason she’d been called here in the first place. The reason she’d endured and the reason she’d been searching for. This was why she continued to live. She shut the dog out and drew strength from the massive amounts of forgiveness her priest had dispensed in his life. She saw that forgiveness as a long, slow, soaking rain he had caused to fall on the dry hearts of sinners. Father Damien had forgiven everyone, right and left, of all mistakes and shameful sins. All except for Nanapush, who had never really confessed to any sin, but had instead forgiven Damien with great kindness for wronging him and all of the people he had wanted to help, forgiven him for stealing so many souls. Nanapush!

“You were not able to silence Nanapush!” laughed Agnes. “He sneaked past your two-way road onto the road of life. He’s probably gambling day and night, eating berries without getting the shits, telling stories with old friends and enjoying his many wives. You had no power over Nanapush!”

There was a pause before the dog responded.

“Who could silence that talker?” But then a slinking insinuation. “So you did love him. Yes, I knew it. Oh, you little priestette, you loved him, you lusted after him, you kept this secret from me, didn’t you? Yes, but now I have it. I have your memory.”

“No, you do not!” Though weakening, Agnes was indignant. “You will never have my memory. Even I don’t have it all, you rotten hound. You stole it in the form of the Actor and in the person of the gun. You took my memory, and I have spent my whole life gathering it back.”

Agnes shut down, closed her eyes, imagined herself a bulwark, a wall. “Of course I loved Nanapush,” she went on, impatient. “The old man was my teacher, my confidant, my priest’s priest, my confessor, my friend. Plus, he was funny and you don’t get funny much in this life. God, how we used to laugh! Even his funeral was hilarious—I miss him. There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin.”

“That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer?”

The dog ranted—it had never liked the composer, it turned out it was jealous—but Agnes didn’t notice anymore. She fought. She gathered every memory and prayed starting from her center and radiating outward. Called every ancestor, blood and adopted. The aadizokaanag, spirits. Bent her thoughts on Nanapush. Asked for the old man’s help. Filled herself with every good that had been done to her and every caring act she’d known. Cried out for the young, strong spirit of Mashkiigikwe. For Chopin. Sucked with thin threads of air the ravishing stillness of the ghost note that lingers after each chord of Chopin’s three repudiated posthumous nocturnes. Went further, back into the folds of brain that hid and held in their recesses such memories as she had of her childhood, girlhood, lost messages. Gathered in her strongest molecules the urge to live and the strength to snap shut her knees, suddenly, clasp with viselike ardor and squeeze with Catholic ferocity the testicles of the black dog.