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

“Father,” said Hildegarde, “you must go visiting with the sacrament. The poor Indians are dying out. Now is a good time to convert them! They live like wretches anyway, and then the sweating fever takes them. Some are gone in only hours once the illness sets in, so you must be quick. Some wait for death to walk down the road. They just sit patiently, singing, drumming, and prepare to get sick. You could easily baptize them while they’re tranced.”

“What cures this fever? Who is our doctor?” Agnes ignored the nun’s avidity regarding souls. Yes, she thought, Father Damien was bound to baptize. But she must read up because she couldn’t remember much of anything about the ritual or the words. She pursued the subject of the illness itself.

“We have no regular doctor, but the cure is plain. Food, warmth.”

“Simply that?”

“It is possible, with skillful care, to nurse even a weak subject through this fever. We could have saved Father Hugo, had he only come to us!”

“Why didn’t he?”

“Father Hugo wouldn’t endanger us, and so hid his condition. Barred himself inside of his cabin. He was sick to death by the time we broke in. And then, of course,” she said with hurt pride, “you found the place in sad repair. We hadn’t any notion you would stay there but had a place for you with a pious family. You see, we have not entered to clean for fear of the fever… only the Puyat doesn’t fear most illness. She was supposed to have cleaned.”

“The one at the Mass this morning?”

“That one.”

“No need,” Agnes said, anxious even then to avoid contact with the girl. “I’m trained to keep my surroundings in good order.”

“Oh,” Hildegarde was a bit surprised. “Very unlike poor Father Hugo!”

Poor Hugo. With a powerful thrust, a scene stabbed into Agnes’s mind. She saw the priest laboriously sinking, taking leave of the world alone, speaking his good-bye prayers. She struggled to gain control of her exhaustion. The walk from the river had been endless, the train smoky and jolting, the miserable wait in the foul railroad hut a foretaste of hell. The drive with Kashpaw was encouraging, but Agnes had hardly slept the previous night and now could not battle the pressure of tears and more tears. She tried to lean on last night’s certainty, tried to keep her faith with the Christ who had fed her broth and taken on a human shape to give her comfort. She must follow through with the original plan, the vision. But to find herself here, in the midst of another’s vocation, was shockingly difficult. What had she supposed? Father Damien was in charge of these souls!

“I am nowhere near as strong as the confidence Christ has placed in me,” she said to Hildegarde Anne, who sighed.

“None of us is.”

Agnes was tempted, next, to confess the specifics of her identity, the nature of her calling, to this good nun. After all, she looks much more capable than I, she thought with a certain faint hope. But Sister Hildegarde, perhaps sensing the despair of her tormented self-sympathy, squeezed Agnes’s hand in hers so hard she cracked the knuckles.

“I prayed for a priest just like you,” she said, “young, with a tough, fresh faith!”

So Agnes shut Father Damien’s mouth on that revelation.

“Show me all you know of this place,” she demanded instead, steadying Father Damien’s voice and stilling the quaver in her heart.

Sister Hildegarde drew out a path with the stub of a pencil. “This bisects the land they call ‘their’ reservation,” she said. “The place is shaped roughly like a house with a square beneath and one slanted roof, a jutting outpost like a chimney. They’ll lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan. Yet, it’s going constantly into private ownership and already they are selling out to lumber interests. Father, your poor charges cannot read the documents they sign.”

Here, Hildegarde was obviously distressed — she hated a bad business deal. “The government is not so much our problem,” she blurted out. “It is the thieves that surround us!”

She showed every path and road, labeled cabins on the reservation, pointed out where certain of the most faithful parishioners lived.

“Here, here, and here”—she pointed at nearly every spot—“the sickness has taken someone. Here, it took them all.” She stabbed out several places upon her map. Seeing the nun’s finger smash down, Agnes’s heart was touched with horror. The still cabin. The huddled forms. The unspeakable loneliness. Tears flashed again and Hildegarde, seeing this, slapped a dish towel on Father Damien’s arm.

“No use for that,” the nun grumped. “Now here, here, here, and here all died but two, I’ve heard — a stubborn girl, an old man. They live out there yet.”

“I must go to them.”

Sister Hildegarde agreed, but looked a bit worried. “Father Damien, they live way out in the bush, if they’re living at all yet. The older man is a stubborn, crafty, talkative sort, much resistant to conversion. The vile things he says, the reprobate! He had a big old toot with my communion wine two years ago. Sneaked it from my cellar cask. He’s too tricky to die, him. And the other, that Fleur. Truly the daughter of Satan, so they say. The two of them, almost the only ones to survive from their respective families, are rumored to have special powers.”

As the nun spoke, Agnes breathed in deep drafts to gather control of her sorrow, and when she had, she took on the studied authority she’d mustered in private.

“I’m always intrigued with special powers,” she said mildly. “What sort of skills do you mean?”

Hildegarde shrugged, dismissive. “The usual. Drumming their drums. Singing until it breaks your ears. Shaking stuffed skins, rattles, and bones, so I’ve heard. All ineffective against the slightest of colds.”

“I see.” Though Agnes did not see. “What else?”

“They are the last of their families, as I’ve said. I think that gives them some sort of conjuring skill. There are magicians among them, of course, cheap tricksters. They throw their voices and levitate. They scare the gullible to death and are said to wing balls of fire toward their enemies at night. We’ve seen a few, you know, whiz by us up here! Unimpressive!”

“So you believe in their skills.”

Hildegarde looked sharply at the priest.

“Believe, why yes, just as I believe it is possible to hide coins and pebbles behind the ears of small children and draw these objects forth to delight them. It is easy to mystify children. Their conjurers employ just such means to prey upon the gullible. That is all.”

I am sent here, thought Agnes, to accept and to absorb. I shall be a thick cloth. Therefore, she nodded and said nothing in answer, but only thanked the nun for speaking frankly.

Some Rules to Assist in My Transformation

Make requests in the form of orders.

Give compliments in the form of concessions.

Ask questions in the form of statements.

Exercises to enhance the muscles of the neck?

Admire women’s handiwork with copious amazement.

Stride, swing arms, stop abruptly, stroke chin.

Sharpen razor daily.

Advance no explanations.

Accept no explanations.

Hum an occasional resolute march.

A parishioner had left a Sears catalog near the door of the church, and Agnes rifled through it secretly, as much to revisit the clothing, the china, the unfamiliar feast of powders and perfumes, as to scheme a way to purchase Dr. Feem’s Scientific Programme of Muscular Expansion, a kit that involved a set of dumbbells, a book of directions, and one muscle tonic that promised to improve the tone of the entire upper body and another bottle that worked on the half below.