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

Kashpaw shrugged. What did it matter, his frown said, but one of the wives did step up.

“Niin sa!”

It was Margaret, her red hat bobbing. Beneath it her tough face was carefully cut as though with fine tools. Her thinning hair still rose fiercely off her brow and was collected in braids. Her mouth, both sweet and treacherous, now twisted sarcastically. Perhaps, thought Father Damien, she would have been beautiful — if there was any softness to her. Her voice was sharp as thorns. “I forced him to take the Eucharist and then we were joined by Father Hugo.” She looked furiously from side to side, as though someone would challenge her.

“Kashpaw says they scrap like badgers,” said Nanapush. “The other wives send them from the house when they fight. She bit him once.”

Kashpaw displayed his arm, a short, thick white scar.

“Right to the bone,” said Margaret in satisfaction.

“Have you confessed your sin?” Father Damien asked, irritated by this woman’s smug ferocity.

“What sin?” she answered. “He deserved it.”

“Dispensing punishment is God’s task and right,” Damien went on. “In all ways a good spouse is gentle.”

“And slow,” said Nanapush solemnly to Mashkiigikwe, “and takes his time where it counts, and…”

She turned away and hummed, as though suppressing a yawn.

“If the priest won’t say it,” Nanapush lost patience at last, “I will say it. Kashpaw! You have too many wives. You’ll have to get rid of at least three!”

Kashpaw probably expected this outburst, for now, with a dramatic pause, he concentrated on his pipe, drew it from its case of red cloth and fitted its bowl to the carved stem. Once he had done this, everyone around him fell silent and in the vacant quiet the coals of the fire hissed and flared. He loaded the rose-red bowl with pinches of tobacco, then proceeded to light the pipe and to draw meditatively on the stem, emitting two thin streams from the corners of his mouth.

At last, he set down his pipe and looked reproachfully at his visitors. His expression slowly registered convincing bewilderment. “Wives?” he said. “Who is calling these fine ladies my wives?” Craftily, he feigned insult, knowing that he could be considered in violation of certain laws, not of his tribe’s making, but of the government’s. “I offer shelter to these women beneath my roof.”

“And I,” said Nanapush, unable to contain himself around Mashkiigikwe, turning to her, “I offer shelter to you in my bed. And since my cabin has a leaky roof, I’ll offer to lie down over you to keep the rain off.”

He looked directly at Mashkiigikwe, who pressed her lips together in pretend fury and then covered herself with indifference.

Kashpaw ignored this absurd sweet talk and addressed the priest. “I am still interested in this god who kills off his favorites, wipes them from the earth. I would like to know”—here he eyed Damien with frank curiosity—“what makes you walk behind this Jesus?”

This question of great simplicity caused the priest’s thoughts to wheel together like a flock of startled birds. What indeed? What cause? All Father Damien could do at first was contemplate the pattern of the flock out of which the great logos of his passion was written.

“It is love,” he said. “That is the sole reason. Love.”

The others looked uncertian. In the Ojibwe language the word does not exist in the same sense — there is love out of pity, love out of kindness, love that is specific to situations or to the world of stones, which are alive and called our grandfathers. There is also the stingy and greedy love that white people call romantic love. This love of Christ, this love that chose Agnes and forced her to give up her nature as a woman, forced Father Damien to appear to sacrifice the pleasures of manhood, was impossible to define in Ojibwe.

The boy named Nector ducked into the lodge, sat down next to him, peered at the slight new priest with curiosity. The boy was well dressed, extremely neat, and even wore an expensive-looking, smart, plaid cap. His father finally spoke.

“I am going to send my boy here, this Nector, to your church. He will investigate,” said Kashpaw. “He will tell me if this spirit is any good. If there is something to this god, I’ll come see for myself.”

There was a mutter of protest and consternation from the women in the tent, then, and Mashkiigikwe pounded the earth with her feet.

“Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?”

Father Damien, whose task it was to steal even the intangible about the woman beside him, had no answer.

KASHPAW’S PASSION

Kashpaw sat on the ground with his sacred pipe before him on a flat pale rock. Gizhe Manito, tell me what to do, he prayed. His heart was so dark and heavy that when he bent over to take up his pipe, it felt like it might tumble from his chest. For all of his power, right now he felt like a frail container. So much conflict was stuffed inside him that his skin seemed too thin to contain it. This young priest’s arrival had disturbed everything. Margaret, his one church-married wife, lambasted the others. Pushed past her limit, Mashkiigikwe threatened to brain the older woman. Fishbone drooped quietly and poor Quill, whose mind was sensitive, desperately clung to her older sister and begged Mashkiigikwe not to leave.

“The time for this arrangement is long over,” said Mashkiigikwe, “even the other full-blood families are starting to laugh at us. Now that this priest listens to old Nanapush, who as we know is only fishing for a leftover wife from Kashpaw, we’ll have no peace.”

Kashpaw pressed his knuckles to his eyes. A man’s heart was generous, giving, like a skin that could hold more and more water. But there was always a limit, the last drop, a sorrow that could burst it. Thinking of parting with Mashkiigikwe, of not hearing her bold call as she entered the clearing with good news of her hunting, that was unthinkable. Not to laugh at her jokes or wonder at her kindness to her sister, Quill, whom she had begged Kashpaw to marry in order to save her from facing a situation in which her peculiarities of mind were exploited. No, he could not grasp what would happen if Mashkiigikwe were to leave. And yet Fishbone, pregnant, could not be the one to leave either. Vulnerable as she was, and helpless, she must surely stay. She had no family to return to. Kashpaw tried not to allow the vision of her calm grace to sway him, or his wish to curve her against him at night, to feel the heat of her gravid body. He tried not to think of her long fingers or the sadness in her hidden smile. Fishbone, he greatly loved. And he loved Margaret as well. Her acid humor pleased him and the times she allowed him near, unexpectedly, her startling inventiveness and bold behavior overwhelmed him with admiration. Besides, she was the first of his wives, and they had come to each other very young and as virgins. He could not forget those nights and how they had been the teachers of one another. Their children came one after the next, and each was stronger and more intelligent than he had any right to wish. No, Margaret could not leave. Impossible.

The leaves rustled inconclusively. His thoughts turned back and forth in the wind. First one side then the other, quick as popple. This young priest possessed a surprising power, one he seemed unaware of, which made it all the more effective. The young priest had calmed Quill and made her happy. His mere presence had affected the change. After his visit, Quill fell to her knees whenever her mind swelled. By striking her breast and crying out in her own words a message to the priest’s god, she emptied her mind of the deadly thing that possessed it. Nothing else, no doctoring, had helped. But the priest, she liked.