Louise Erdrich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Blessed One, I now believe in that river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new. Memories resurfaced. Berndt’s square hand in mine. The careful baritone of his warm voice. Perhaps, soon, I would join him. Then again perhaps I would live. The latter prospect suddenly intrigued me. I looked at the banks as I swept by and I wondered why Agnes was sad in such a strange world. Things look different from the middle of a flooded river. In the flow, time is erased. I had new eyes. Branches of toppled trees and upended roots. Houses split. The banks undercut and caving. Cows. Horses. Cows.

I took the groaning roar that widened before me to be the mouth of a great white drop, and yet I stayed calm. I moved on faster, faster. But it was not tangled white foam rapids that met me. Instead, it was a drowning herd of cows, hundreds of cows. Wedged in trees, they had made a floating bridge so compact that I stepped, half frozen, onto it like a raft, stumbled across to the bank, fell off there to firm ground.

Once my feet touched solid earth fear came over me. I went utterly weak; my strength drained. I sank upon the ground and knew nothing more.

MIRACLE THE SECOND

DIVINE RESCUE OF MISS DEWITT

1912

Knocked out by exhausted fear, Agnes slept. That cessation of awareness proved a bridge between her old life and her new life. Before she woke, she was one who believed without seeing, felt spiritual emotion without experience of its source, kept an orderly faith and haphazard observance without the deepest marks of conviction. Creation had spoken to her in ways she could encompass — in the splendor of sexual love, the grand Dakota sky, the arcane language of cramped, black musical notes. Yet her God had never sent a spirit, never spoken to her directly, never employed a visible shape or touched Agnes with a divine hand, unless you believe that God’s hand was Berndt’s and nudged the wrist of the Actor, causing the bullet to plow a shallow groove instead of to burrow deep. She had believed in her music. Now she was to lose that. But that loss would be replaced.

She woke later, who knows how much later.

It was night. Lamplight, a glowing glass, a roof over her, four walls. Agnes found that she was lying on a bed, covered with a quilt and a sheepskin. The air was heavy and warm with the smell of cooking venison and she was hungry. Beyond all measure, starving! She was young, barely a woman, and never full. A spoon was held to her lips. She moved toward it, lured like an animal, and she tasted a broth of meat that brought tears to her eyes. Then she saw a man’s hands held the spoon and the bowl. She slid her gaze up his strong arms, his shoulders, to his broad and open face.

Kindness was there, sheer kindness, a radiance from within him fell upon her and it was like a pool of warm sunlight.

Instantly, she remembered the river.

“Who are you?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer she grabbed the bowl and drank its contents with such a steady greed that it was only when she’d reached the very bottom that she realized several things all at once: they were alone in the tiny hut, no woman had prepared the soup, and she was naked in the bed.

The sheepskin dropped away from her body, and she felt the slight breeze of his breath along her throat. He stroked her hair, smiled at her. She felt warmth along her thighs, hovering elation. Bands of rippling lightness engulfed her when he moved closer. And then his hand, brutalized and heavy from work, fell gently as he held her arm and took away the empty bowl, the horn spoon, and wiped her lips. She felt his rough hair as he leaned closer, as he moved his length alongside her on the creaking boards, as he slowly turned her toward him. His breathing deepened, he relaxed. She lay there, too, spent and comfortable, curled against a sweetly sleeping man, a very tired man who smelled of resin from the wood he’d chopped, of metal from the tools he’d used, of hay, of sweat, of great and nameless things that she’d known, as in a dream, in her human husband’s arms.

She lay her head beside him, and although she remained awake for many hours in that beautiful stillness, listening to his even breath, eventually she, too, fell asleep.

Morning dawned with rain on the wind, the sky a sheet of gray light. Agnes remembered where she was, turned, and found that he was gone. Not only that, but she was lying in no comfortable settler’s shack, but in an empty shell of a long abandoned hovel with the wind whipping through, swallows’ nests in the eaves, no sign of the man, no bowl, no track, no spoon, no sheepskin covering or blanket. Only her nightclothes fit back onto her, dry, still smelling of the river. She stood in the doorway for a long while. As she stood there, she gradually came to understand what had happened.

Through You, in You, with You. Aren’t those beautiful words? For of course she knew her husband long before she met Him, long before He rescued her, long before He fed her broth and held Agnes close to Him all through that quiet night.

Dear Pontiff,

Since then, through the years, my love and wonder have steadily increased. Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death? How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend Him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships.

Modeste

THE EXCHANGE

Disoriented, Agnes walked farther north instead of south, for the river’s flow was mixed up in swirls and futile commotions now and there was no clear sign of the current’s force. The sky, too, was a low ceiling of thick gray through which the sunlight diffused evenly over the flooded landscape — no direction to be gathered. So Agnes walked and in walking she saw too much. A tangle of rats. Skeletal twisted machinery from tattered farms. A baby carriage with no baby in it. Pieces of houses. A basket of eggs afloat. A priest hanging on a branch.

Not far up the river Agnes DeWitt came upon poor Father Damien Modeste, whom she freely admitted she disliked even as she pitied him now. The drowned man was snagged in a tree, gaping down at her with a wide-eyed and upside-down quizzicality. The wreckage of the rectory auto was already sucked upstream, if he had taken the auto. She didn’t know. Perhaps he was on foot. For a long while, she sat near the tree with the body, considering. She prayed for a sign — what to do? But she already knew. Once she was ready, she acted. She dislodged the priest with a branch that she used like a hook, pulling him down. His body, weighted like a sand-filled sack, shook the loose roots of the tree as it struck the ground. The man was green-white, and in his death more powerful than in life, more severe. Agnes had no way of digging him a grave but to use her two hands. The ground beneath was so soft, so saturated, that she was able to scrape out a rough hole to fit him, though it took her the day. All the time that she worked, the certainty grew.

It was nearly twilight before she rolled him in. Her heavy nightgown was his shroud. His clothing, his cassock, and the small bundle tangled about him, a traveler’s pouch tied underneath all else, Agnes put on in the exact order he had worn them. A small sharp knife in that traveler’s pocket was her barber’s scissors — she trimmed off her hair and then she buried it with him as though, even this pitiable, he was the keeper of her old life.

She could think of nothing to which she was required to return. In fact, as though the cold water had flooded her brain, her memory, again, was a distressing patchwork of eroding islands. Berndt was gone, she knew that, and she remembered that she had loved him, she thought. Also gone: the blue horse, her lovely lattice dress, her leather boots, and even her chickens were probably drowned, too. She could at least recall the chickens in reassuring detail, each of them particular and opinionated. The hens made such a proud fuss over each new egg. Even in the muck, covering the dead priest, she nearly laughed, thinking of her chickens. Then she breathed out, troubled.