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

“Boozhoo! Aaniin!” Agnes called out the various greetings she’d learned from Kashpaw. She stood shifting uneasily from foot to numb foot. No sound came in answer, no stirring from inside. Up and down the side of a nearby tree, a tiny gray-capped bird zipped, uttering a sharp complaint. Some curled brown leaves, still attached to the nodes of an oak tree, ticked together. And then the wind stopped. Everything stopped. The stillness was profound.

In that cessation, Agnes DeWitt was flooded with uneasy agitation. A prickle touched on the back of her neck, and she gave her head a shake. A low unease struck her. A voice cried out. She whirled. No one. Now a piping child’s voice, laughing, but again no source. She felt a mutter of presences, rustling and arguing on all sides, and she froze in place as their voices, speaking incomprehensible words — only a few of which she knew from Kashpaw’s talk — crushed toward her.

The voices merged with her senses, filling her head. She tried to regulate her breathing, not to panic, but a vast weakness swallowed her and she thought she heard, maybe knew, could not be sure — were there spirits beyond the experience entrusted to her so far?

“Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”

She waited, increasingly disturbed, for long moments, until finally there was nowhere to go but in. Making the sign of the cross, she burst through the door of the lonely cabin into the stink of ghosts.

Two beings, hollow and strange, stared quizzically out of the shadows at the priest, who gaped at them in return. One frowned in dignified hauteur at the crack of light within which the priest was caught, there in the doorway, hand on his throat and eyes wide in snow-blind shock. Another blinked and passed its hands across its bone features. Agnes stepped closer, pity flooding her as well as a curious horror at their condition. At first, she could not tell the old man from the young girl. Their faces were pale smears, porous and frail as birch-bark masks. Their hair burst out, ferocious, alive with sticks, mud, lice, tangled in intricate bushes on their heads. Their eyes glittered from deep in gray pits. They moved as though they’d break apart. As though their bones were brittle reeds. They were shells made of loss, made of transparent flint, made of the whispers in the oak leaves, voices of the dead.

THE LIVING

When the new priest burst into the cabin door, causing that great crack of light to interfere with death, the girl and old man were annoyed. That they were abandoned by their families who took the four-day journey into the sun-going-down world was bad enough. That some of the dead came back and waited outside the door, urging them to follow although their bodies clung to life, that was hard. And now, just as they had weakened and slid into a state somewhere between death and life, a drifting torpor from which they saw far ahead down the road and also marvelously lived vivid scenes from the past, here came this priest.

The light dazzled, the dark spun. The priest’s pleasant interest was both irritating and surprisingly powerful. Fleur felt a faint impulse stirring in her to melt snow, or fetch water, then make tea, which meant a fire must be kindled, which seemed impossible and then imperative. She was sure that she was mostly dead. She hadn’t moved from her corner for days, maybe weeks. But somehow on stick legs she lurched out the door into blinding radiance. Light stabbed into her brain, subsided gradually to show the world in whirling shapes. A crust had formed across her mouth. She put a handful of snow on her lips, to unseal her tongue, and allowed a trickle of water to pass down her throat. Then the painful knowledge that now she would rejoin this life, which was only loss after loss, caused her heart to catch in a sob that became a snarl, and she struck out wildly at the air, behind the house, in the deep, warm snow.

As for Nanapush, he still blinked inside the cabin like an owl and whispered bewildered answers to the priest’s awkward questions in his language. Finally, in English, Nanapush said, “That is enough from you, my friend, quite sufficient. Now for a moment you must be silent. The master calls and I must go out and have a shit.” Then, holding his pants up with both hands, the old man toddled from the cabin and did not return for quite some time.

Fleur brought in wood, sticks, some rolls of flammable bark, and quickly brought up a blaze in the rusty can used as an indoor stove. Outside, as the sun was at its height, they could hear the dripping of snow water from the trees. They could hear the clumps of snow sliding down the mud-pole sides of the house. Water dripped from the soaked sod roof down the inside walls. The ice was retreating, but not inside of Fleur. She hated priests. The priests had brought the sickness long ago in the hems of their black gowns, in their sleeves, in the water they flung on people to make them holy but which might as well have burned holes in their skin. All these things, and more. She’d like to stab the priest’s heart, pull it out of his body. She’d look into his face as he died and take satisfaction from his anguish for all her loved ones, her little brother and sisters, her beloved father, her mother who had died last of all.

Who should see such things?

“What can I do to make you feel better?” asked the priest. “Gigaa minwendam i’in?” he tried in Ojibwe.

In spite of herself, she almost laughed. What he actually said was, Can I make you feel good? Which was easy to take as sexual. Mistakenly, the priest took the smile for encouragement and earnestly tried out a little more Ojibwe, which now made her hold her hand up to her mouth to stifle the laugh that almost emerged. What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could. She banged a can of water on the stove and went out. She could not be around the priest. He stank. Or she stank. She would fire up a blaze to heat stones for a sweat and purify herself. She would smoke her clothes with sage. Burn sweet grass to clean the cabin’s air, sweep the sad litter out, the chewed twigs, the nests of hungry mice. Then she would know it was not she, but the priest, who stank. And the old man. He could use a sweat and a good wash, too. For sure, she hated priests. As she left the cabin, voices surrounded her, airy hands plucked at her sleeves, but she shook them off. She pushed snow away from the stones, the grandfathers, gathered last summer when no one knew what killing sorrows this winter would bring.

As for Nanapush, he entered the door and pleasantly announced to the priest, “I have accomplished my end.” When the priest looked amused, instead of chastising Nanapush, the old man was sufficiently interested to want to live just a little longer in order to shock the priest. He rubbed his numb hands, his feet, and thought perhaps he would tell this priest the story of the inquisitive mouse rained on by the big vaginas, and how the mouse reported to and described these beings to his friends down in the holes that had filled with piss and nearly drowned them out. Or maybe the story of how Nanabozho got his penis changed from smooth to knobbed on the end when a clam he tried to fuck closed tight. Or maybe he would just proceed in his best English to tell the priest the many and specific ways he had made love to his wives, all of whom he’d outlived, but then the thought laid his heart down. He couldn’t breathe for the sorrow. He sat in the blankets, speechless. For a long time, he tried to gather himself out of his despair and perhaps the priest sensed this, which was good, for Father Damien maintained a neutral, kind, meditative watchfulness that had in it no hint of impatience.