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

On the Eve of St. Dismas, once again. At some late hour.

Dear Holy Father,

It is with a sense of gratitude and excitement that I address you tonight, largely in order to praise and give thanks for the notice denied me by your predecessors, but also, if I may be so unworthy, to lodge a small complaint. Although you’ve no doubt dispatched a priest deemed competent by his superiors here in the Middle West of the United States, I feel it my compelling duty to sadly inform you that not only is Father Jude Miller an obvious amateur at interviews, but he seems to have in coming here some agenda ulterior to that which he is dispatched to learn. In short, master of my vocation, I think he’s something of a dud. With false intentions to boot. I cast no aspersions upon those who chose him for this task. Your cardinals did, of course, check his credentials, but with the explosion of technology these days it is so easy to present an impressive paper face to the authorities when in actuality the subject lacks…

Useless ploy. He smelled the ashes of fever, the scent of wormwood and roses, tinctures of blessed oil. Here it came. Father Damien’s vision sank inward, into the past.

THE ARRIVAL

1912

Just as in a dream or under extreme duress, we make plans and decisions that panic us with their force and strangeness by the light of day, so Agnes shocked herself. The first morning that she woke on the train heading north, in disguise, she reeled with her own foolhardiness and thought of leaping out of the caboose. The train was slow enough, but was traveling through a waste of open land in which only rarely could she pick out the slightest human feature. Surely she’d die of exposure out there. And then the train stopped at a small board shack hardly bigger than an outhouse.

She spent the night there, curled around the lukewarm flanks of a rusted stove. Tomorrow, she thought, I’ll get rid of this cassock and be Agnes DeWitt again, formerly Sister Cecilia, who has lived enough for two women and two nuns already, let alone a mission priest. She imagined that she’d find some way of trading clothing or if all else failed come clean with the nearest sane person in North Dakota. But she was alone. And considering what she’d just done, probably no judge of sanity. The next morning, she waited miserably for the driver who, it said in a tattered note nailed to the wall, would transport the priest to Little No Horse. By the time the wagon arrived, Agnes was so famished with hunger that she had dipped into a sack waiting next to her and chewed some raw, dusty oats. Though in a daze of passivity, when she found herself climbing into the seat of a rough wagon drawn by winter-shagged horses and driven by a man still rougher than the whole lot, her heart clenched and the urge again took her to bolt back into the skin of Miss DeWitt. But how could she? Perhaps once the wagon stopped, once they’d arrived, she’d seize a chance.

They started out for the reservation in the wake of a killing sickness, on the eve of St. Dismas in the gain of the year. March, Onaabani-giizis, it is called. Crust-on-the-snow moon, for the angle of the sun strikes just so, enough to melt and refreeze the surface while the snow lies beneath. Ever after that day, Agnes was to mark St. Dismas upon her calendar because it was the first day of her existence as Father Damien, the first day of the great lie that was her life — the true lie, she considered it, the most sincere lie a person could ever tell.

Agnes was a person of deep curiosity, and so even in extremity she couldn’t help observing all around her that was new. She rode along with interest, even though her brain was half frozen and she suffered stabs of intense cold. On the way to the reservation, she found intriguing correspondences with her old life. The river was flooding three hundred miles to the south because to the north its mouth was still frozen. So in a way, she thought, the region had conspired with itself to bring her north, to dump her from her house into the current where she was rescued and where she changed clothing with the priest — ah, the priest’s clothes! That was another thing. Even now, the driver treated her with much more respect as a priest than she’d ever known as a nun. He was deferential, though not uncomfortable. Agnes was surprised to find that this treatment entirely gratified her, and yet seemed familiar as though it was her due. Robes or not, I am human, she said to herself. So this is what a priest gets, heads bowing and curious respectful attention! Back on the train, people also had given Father Damien more privacy. It was as though in priest’s garments she walked within a clear bell of charged air.

Priest or not, the rain fell, wetting and then filming the road with a dangerous slick, coating her face and icing the goods crowded into the loaded wagon. She hunched underneath a powerfully dusty old buffalo robe, shook miserably, and then warmed as the ride bumped her forward, into her strange new life.

Kashpaw was the driver’s name. He was the first Indian she’d ever met and he would be one of the first she’d bury, come that summer and the feast of saints. He was dark and in the cold his skin took on a purplish cast. Dressed as he was in a French red wool capote with a swirl of hot yellow turban cloth and weighted by moosehide leggings, great mitts made of wolves’ fur, velvet shawls, and another curly buffalo robe thrown on besides, he was a mountain of texture and sharp color. He spoke, of course, no German, only some English, and his French was of a vintage extremely valuable were it only wine. In addition, that eighteenth-century trapper’s French was knocked aside or disarranged by words only to be guessed at — probably the language spoken by Ojibwe. And yet in spite of their language problems, Agnes couldn’t help questioning Kashpaw eagerly. Something new was at work, she could feel it, an ease with her own mind she’d never felt before, a pleasure in her own wit she’d half hidden or demurred. As Agnes, she’d always felt too inhibited to closely question men. Questions from women to men always raised questions of a different nature. As a man, she found that Father Damien was free to pursue all questions with frankness and ease.

On the long drive north, she learned all of the polite Ojibwe she could cram into her brain — how to ask after children and spouses, how to comment on the weather, how to accept and appreciate food. These last phrases, unfortunately, would be useless until there actually was food on the reservation.

The road was slick, frozen muck under the hooves of the wild, tough horses, so Kashpaw halted the wagon. From under the seat he took eight snugly made straps that fitted neatly around the horses’ pasterns. He fixed onto the bottom of their hooves sharply studded contraptions that enabled them to grip the ice. Along they went, then, more secure. As they traveled, Kashpaw laboriously made known further details of the situation Father Damien would face. There was starvation, but with luck the thaw would end its grip. In addition to the priest, Kashpaw had picked up eighteen sacks of horse-grade oats. This rough slurry was to be distributed among twice as many families and would make up their diets until the false winter entirely broke — the snow and ice still looked to have a strong hold on the land.

“What can be done?”

Kashpaw looked shrewdly at Father Damien. He took in the open, girlish earnestness, the curiosity, the restless hands tapping patterns on the robes, the intelligent regard. At last, he decided the priest was both harmless and worth challenging.

“Some say, go back to the old ways.”

“And what do you say?”

Kashpaw narrowed his eyes at the ice road, snapped the reins lightly on his horses’ rumps. When he smiled to himself, his huge soft face rounded in gentle humorous curves that Agnes found compelling. The only Indians she’d known were pictures in a book — in her part of Wisconsin, they were hated and cleared out. Once she had escaped her family, entered the convent, and taken up music, of course, there was very little to see or know of the outside world. So this new sort of human next to her, his self-possessed knowledge, upset her with an intense wish to understand everything about him.