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

“Here’s what I say,” he answered at last. “Leave us full-bloods alone, let us be with our Nanabozho, our sweats and shake tents, our grand medicines and bundles. We don’t hurt nobody. Your wiisaakodewininiwag, half-burnt wood, they can use your God as backup to these things. Our world is already whipped apart by the white man. Why do you black gowns care if we pray to your God?”

All that he said was strange to Agnes, and again she had to question him on each point. The half-burnt wood referred to half-breed people. Nanabozho was someone she would hear of often — a god, a story figure. The sweats and the shake tents were houses where Ojibwe ceremonies took place. All of this, he took his time to patiently explain. Agnes watched him closely, memorizing him, feeling in her heart he was so certain of himself that he would be impossible to convert. The great firm slabs of Kashpaw’s cheeks were pitted with dark pocks. As she found out later, he had survived that particular killing scourge only to lose many of his family. The abyss of loss had led him to his present complex marital situation — a problem with which Father Damien would presently become involved. For the time, as they endured the miles, Kashpaw’s openhearted ease was reassuring. Between the two, there grew a pleasant, thoughtful, silence. The space around the wagon, boundless and gray, serene and cold, changed only subtly as they passed through on the nearly invisible road. Suspended in the whiteness, they could have been traveling in place. The wheels moved, the wagon jounced and rocked, but nothing changed. The land rolled on in bitter white monotony.

The cold bit down, harder. Kashpaw maintained a politely fixed expression while his thoughts turned. He was a shrewd man, and he sensed something unusual about the priest from the first. Something wrong. The priest was clearly not right, too womanly. Perhaps, he thought, here was a man like the famous Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife, where he had lived until old, well loved, as one of the women. Kashpaw himself had addressed Wishkob as grandmother. Kashpaw thought, This priest is unusual, but then, who among the zhaaganaashiwug is not strange?

The two fell deeper into private thoughts, and let the screeching and knocking of the wheels take over until at last the horizon grew, upon its distant edge, a deeper set to the filmy pearl, then a definite gray patch that slowly gained detail. There were hills now, covered in bare-leafed oak, and soon there were houses among those hills, small and modest little cabins neatly plumed with smoke, for a windless, icy seizure gripped the settlement and woods beyond. The wind of the great plains dropped off in this complex shelter, diminished by windbreaks of earth and mixed forest. They passed into the hills, through a town that centered around a modest trader’s store, seeing only one or two Indians at a distance. The people were dressed in farmers’ clothes, some in thin swaths of cloth and some heavily jacketed in wools.

The road to the settlement at Little No Horse led up, gently at first, but there was in those days a fierce, ungraded climb near the end. At last, the ice became too smooth for even the strong horses — their heavily feathered fetlocks and thick necks showing draft blood along with Sioux war-pony fleetness and nerve. One nearly slipped to its knees. Kashpaw stopped the wagon and wished Father Damien bonne chance in climbing the rest of the way on foot.

All alone, then, bearing on her back the thinly strapped bag, Agnes slipped and toiled, smashing continually through the snow’s glassy crust. The sharp ice pierced the crude leggings she’d made of a rough stole found in the priest’s bag and bloodied her shaking calves. By the time she clawed and scrambled to the hilltop, she was exhausted to the point of nausea and lay down to gasp for breath.

There was stillness, the whisper of snow grains driven along the surface of the world. It was the silence of before creation, the comfort of pure nothing, and she let herself go into it until, in that quiet, she was caught hold of by a dazzling sweetness. In the grip of this sudden, sumptuous bloom of feeling, Agnes rose and walked toward a poor cabin just behind the log church. Entering this new life, she felt a largeness move through her, a sense that she was essential to a great, calm design of horizonless meaning. There was the crooked-built church, the cabin silent as a shut mouth, the convent painted a blistering white — the scenery of Father Damien’s future.

Silence held.

In that period of regard, the unsettled intentions, the fears she felt, the exposure she already dreaded, faded to a fierce nothing, a white ring of mineral ash left after the water has boiled away. There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here. The true Modeste who was supposed to arrive — none other. No one else.

DEATH ROBES

All great visions must suffer the test of the ordinary, and Agnes’s was immediate. She unlatched the door of the small tight-built cabin, her first rectory, and stood in the dim entry adjusting her eyes to the sadness. Just here, Damien’s predecessor, Father Hugo LaCombe, tough and well trained, one of the first, had died of a sweating fever. Upon the cabin’s floor a scatter of stiff photographs. Agnes picked up the card of a woman, perhaps a sister of Hugo’s, wearing a floral hat. His brother, cradling a gun. These people stared out, frozen in a bad dream. She stacked the pictures on the table. Touched an extra folded cassock, underclothing, a silver holy medal on a nail driven into the frosted gray wood next to the window. The bed made of sagging willow poles was covered with heavy quilts and buffalo robes, stripped beneath. Had someone at least taken out the linen? No, there it was, balled in a corner, rusted with the blood of poor Father Hugo and, even in the cold, smelling of shit and gall.

Father Damien didn’t want to pray. Nevertheless Agnes went down on her knees and spoke earnestly aloud. There was no answer but the howl of wind rattling shingles, the mice drifting in the eaves. There was no wood for a fire. No water but ice. Enough, she thought. Wearily, she climbed into Father Hugo’s deathbed. She wrapped herself tightly into the death robes, slept.

She dreamed first of black nails driven through the tender bloody sac of her heart. Dreamed second of Berndt’s trusting gaze. In a third dream, which lasted the rest of the night, Agnes ate and drank at an endless table. Boiled carrots. Foaming milk. Fresh, buttered potatoes in their jackets, thick stews of meat and onions. She woke more desperate with hunger than ever in her life, her stomach gnawing, pinching, her mouth still working on the rich imaginary meal. Some Catholic on the train had given her a bit of jerky, which she chewed still huddled in the quilts. There was no need to dress, as she’d slept in Father Damien’s clothes for warmth. There was no washbasin. She reached out, rubbed her teeth and face with a handful of snow sifted onto the sill of the ill-fitting window. She combed the tatters of her hair back with stiff fingers, swatted strings of dust from her arms and chest. She then bundled on the dead priest’s heavy black wool cloak and walked out.

MIRACLE OF THE MEAT

The nuns lived in a small white frame building of two rooms, one for eating and one for sleeping, pitilessly cold within. There were no sisters in sight, but on the rough board table Agnes spied a pot of tea steeping lukewarm on a towel. She drained it from the spout, then opened a cupboard and found a poor rock-hard bit of bread beside a thimble’s worth of raisins. The meal, however paltry, gave her the strength to walk over to the church, where the six nuns had dragged themselves to say their morning prayers.