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

1912

The reservation at the time was a place still fluid of definition, appearing solid only on a map, taking in and cutting out whole farms sometimes on the say-so of the commissioner, or the former agent Tatro, and other times attempting to right itself according to law. It was a place of shifting allegiances, new feuds and old animosities, a place of clan teasing, jealousy, comfort, and love. As with most other reservations, the government policy of attempting to excite pride in private ownership by doling parcels of land to individual Ojibwe flopped miserably and provided a feast of acquisition for hopeful farmers and surrounding entrepreneurs. So the boundaries came and went, drawn to accommodate local ventures — sawmills, farms, feed stores, the traplines of various families.

Many did sell for one simple reason. Hunger. As the government scrambled for the correct legal definition of the land, any fluctuation meant loss, any loophole was to the advantage of the thieves, boosters, businessmen, swindlers, sneaks, Christians, cranks, lumber and farm dealers, con artists, and reprobates of all types who had drifted to the edges of reservations hoping to profit from the confusion.

Into this complex situation walked Father Damien, with only the vaguest notion of how the ownership of land related to the soul.

THE LOSS

She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that she finally defined as the loss of Agnes. Ah, Agnes! She lived at night in the shelter of bedclothes. Disappeared in daylight, bandages wrapped as when she had been a nun. As she left the cabin, her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts. Her voice his voice, which deepened as his stride lengthened and grew bold. Agnes’s speech had always been husky and low for a woman. Father Damien’s voice was musical, for a man. There were gestures left over from the convent, and also from her life as a woman in love. In the convent, she’d been taught to walk with eyes downcast. Now, Father Damien tipped his chin out and narrowed his gaze, focused straight ahead. As a farm wife, Agnes had leaned out with a hand on her hip, carried things on her hip, nudged doors open and shut with her hip. Men didn’t use their hips as shelves and braces. Father Damien walked with soldierly directness and never swayed. Nor did he touch a finger to his tongue and smooth his eyebrows, or glance at himself in mirror surfaces. Sternly, he nodded up and down when he listened instead of tipping his head to the side.

Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?

Now and then Agnes recalled a tiny portion of her encounter with the Actor, and she came to understand it as a sure prefigurement and sign of what was to come. The Actor had influenced the quality of Father Damien’s disguise, for when Agnes was held by that rope-tough arm against the car door she’d felt remote enough, from blood loss, to marvel at and assess the Actor’s change in personality from priest to robber.

Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? Wasn’t he robbing all who looked upon him? Stealing their trust? Shameful, perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought only gave her satisfaction. She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.

NANAPUSH

Agnes said Father Damien’s office early and long one morning, with extra fervor because she was still in bed. She needed the strength. She had decided to visit the reprobate Nanapush, who survived marginally in the bush somewhere with the young woman named Fleur. The air deeply chilled her and cold stabbed up through the icy boards. She put on every stitch of clothing, even Father Hugo’s. Still, she trembled walking out into the bitter air. Longing for the sad warmth of her predecessor’s willow-pole bed, imagining the comfort of burrowing under the leaden quilts and buffalo robes, she ate a sorry breakfast of cooked potato skins and tea. Such food, now, only worsened the stab in her stomach. She was comforted by the news that the roads were open and there would soon be supplies, enough for everyone. Six wagons would be arriving with relief.

She wrapped her blistered and frost-burned feet in several layers of the nun’s dish towels, pulled on her boots, then she took from Sister Hildegarde the scratchings of a map. Before she could think about what she might encounter, or change her mind, she started off, walking into the bush.

Her trek began on a road of packed ice that turned to snow that turned to unpacked snow that turned to nothing, so that she would have sunk to her knees at every step, were it not that Sister Hildegarde had insisted that she sling Father Hugo’s snowshoes across her back. She tied them onto her feet and then, in shelter of the trees where the crust on the snow was tough, she was able to maneuver with an almost galloping swiftness. Physical elation filled her. She made her way through wild throngs of birch, skirted the cracked, sere slough grass, pushed through thickets of red willow. The sun was high and bright, but the air was cold and bubbled in her blood like sleep. Several times, sitting down to rest, she imagined curling up in the snowy bays underneath the trees, but she always forced herself to her feet, kept moving.

At the time, she still possessed an untested belief that, having survived the robbery, the chase, the bullets, and the flood, then transformed herself to Father Damien, she could not be harmed. That inner assurance would make her seem fearless, which would in turn increase the respect she won among the Anishinaabeg. So complete was her faith that on the journey to visit Nanapush she ignored the hardship and even danger she might encounter if she lost her way.

What occupied Agnes was the misery of concealing the exasperating monthly flow that belonged to her past but persisted into the present. As she sprang along on the clever winglike snowshoes, she occasionally asked the Almighty, in some irritation, to stop the useless affliction of menstrual blood, so she could more confidently pursue the work cut out for an active priest. Her requests were heeded, for she definitely felt a lessening and then a near cessation. The heavy cramping faded until, stopping to change the cloth that she buried deep in snow, she found it barely spotted with darkness. No sooner had the evidence vanished than she felt a pang, a loss, an eerie rocking between genders.

The sun was sweet, the air liquid. Kneeling in the momentary warmth, she washed lightly with a handful of fresh, wet snow. She shivered with shock and a lost sensation gathered, swept through her, and was gone with a shimmer of musical notes. She closed her eyes, tried to make the physical climax into a prayer, but her mouth dropped and she cried out in a quiet voice, feeling the ghost touches of her lost lover.

When at last she returned to the present, stood again to make her way, Agnes consulted the angle of the sun, the trees, the careful map Sister Hildegarde had drawn, anxious not to lose the new priest. It did not take her long to arrive at the place. It looked ordinary enough — a low cabin made of silvery logs with a split-plank door, the spaces between the logs tamped with a fine cracked yellow-gray gumbo. There was nothing about the cabin to suggest it was the home of a serious miscreant, a guzzler of communion wine, an unregenerate and eager pagan who gave Sister Hildegarde such trials. The place was quiet. There was among Father Hugo’s papers a crude calendar, which sometimes included notes on the Indians he’d baptized — the day and hour. One day there were the words “Baptize Nanapush.” Under that self-command the exclamation “ Folly! ” Agnes took a step forward. It was said that Mr. Nanapush had excellent command of English as a result of several years with Jesuit teachers. It was also said that the old man had stubbornly retained and deepened his Ojibwemowin and that he wrote and thought in his language and conducted the very rites and mysteries that Kashpaw had mentioned.