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

So that was the first of several arguments Kashpaw’s mind put up. He didn’t listen to the self-serving evidence that his covetous friend Nanapush laid out before him. Even thinking of Nanapush’s transparent scheming, Kashpaw had to laugh. If Mashkiigikwe ever got her hands on the old dog, she would break him like a twig. And Margaret, he doubted anyone but himself could survive the ravages of Margaret’s love. Yet what could he do? It was clear that things must change, only he didn’t have the ability to make a decision. Each loss was impossible. Each solution meant destruction. If he did nothing, would his land be seized? Margaret mentioned that, but was she inventing the possibility for her own purposes?

Kashpaw grasped his pipe tenderly and touched the warm red bowl of the stone to his forehead. Why did a man have to love so much? The stone cooled in his fingers while he let his mind wander through all of the sorrows of possible answers.

*

Agnes tried to tell herself, later, that it was not one thing or another that broke up the Kashpaw family and set chaos into motion. Yet she could not ignore the fact that Father Damien started it with his visit. Later, when she was able to reflect upon the fall of events, Agnes pictured a tornado descending, one composed of political gusts and personal fabrics of wind, a twister in the eye of which rose Pauline Puyat, later to become Sister Leopolda, nemesis and savior.

Father Damien knew all that happened through the boy with the plaid cap, for Nector Kashpaw did show up, at first to stand uneasily within the nave, and then later to become an altar boy. The boy served Holy Mass each Sunday with great seriousness and precision, a contrast to his increasingly desperate home life, which he recounted to Father Damien over the post-Mass rolls and meat, tea and dried apples that Damien provided and Nector ate with strict intensity.

The violently independent Mashkiigikwe left her little sister, with Kashpaw’s promise that Quill would be the one wife he kept. Mashkiigikwe left at night, knowing that Quill would howl and clutch to her skirts. She took her gun and pack and disappeared onto her trapline. Kashpaw’s next youngest son, Eli, was already gone. That left Kashpaw another gun short and in want of hunters to feed the group. Fishbone’s baby was stillborn; she fell ill and could not be moved from the cabin. During spring sugaring, her older child crawled into the fire, and for days his screams and whimpers rang the little clearing. Margaret finally struck the child, silencing its cries to bewildered gasps. Kashpaw, sore over Mashkiigikwe, struck Margaret fiercely in return and didn’t even care to follow her when she hobbled off in fury to complain to Nanapush.

Who fell in love with her.

Nector didn’t tell this last development to Father Damien. The priest found out himself, and the situation provided him with much to consider. So it was Nanapush who threw the Kashpaw household like a pile of sticks into the air, in the night, and waited blindly underneath to catch what fell, or who, and wasn’t it a well-deserved and sad piece of luck that the one he caught was Margaret?

During the months that followed, it was apparent that Nanapush wasn’t over his first infatuation with Mashkiigikwe. He often thought about her, spoke of her great hunting skills with bashful adoration, spread his hands one way to show the size of her feet to Father Damien, spread his hands differently to show the weight of her breasts, threatened to follow her with gifts of love.

Gradually, though, and with increasing ardor, his attention turned to placating Margaret Kashpaw. She was composed of a shrewd toughness that intrigued him. Her features communicated regal scorn. She was surprisingly light on her feet and could easily run a dog down and whack the rabbit from its teeth. Nanapush had seen it. She could chop wood, haul water, drop a wild goose from the sky by clipping off its head with one shot. Nobody bested her and nothing intimidated Margaret. She was a challenge that Nanapush could not resist.

QUILL’S MADNESS

Without her older sister, Quill lost her bearings, for it was Mashkiigikwe who always told her what to do. Mashkiigikwe had soothed her and carefully unwrinkled the pain that crumpled her mind. She had stroked her younger sister’s face and sung an old song about the clouds lifting off the surface of the lake. Then she fed her tidbits from her own fingers and lightly pulled on Quill’s braids, as though to guide her back to the living. Eventually, Quill would respond slightly, and then Mashkiigikwe would know that once more she’d succeeded in reaching her. And she had wanted desperately to reach her sister, guide her back, for on this side of the spirit world Quill had a daughter who was turning out to be as massive as her father, but very shy, and needed a mother’s attention.

Mashkiigikwe had also kept things running smoothly, along with Margaret. There was always food, always wood, always water. Now, all Quill did for hours each day was chop, haul, gather. A frail sapling, her shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the family. Taking care of all the children including her own daughter, and the burnt boy, enduring a lack of food and the nerveless despair of her husband, Quill imagined that she had bent to the ground and been rooted by the ends of her fine, black hair. When she pulled herself upright, earth rained down on her and her thoughts were weak as dust.

Quill sat hunched on pukwe mats while her daughter, whom she’d just named Mary after the female whiteman’s god, combed through her hair with her fingers, then the clever brush. Mary divided off the hair strand by strand and removed from the hairs louse or egg of louse or husk or sign of such a creature. Lately, Quill had come to abhor these intimate vermin and to believe that they were biting her to disturb and to disarrange her thoughts. From time to time, her daughter dipped her fingers in a little can of kerosene and pinched off a louse. Quill’s thoughts burned. Temptations flared. A harsh volatility depleted her. Quill imagined that if Mary should purse her lips and blow on her head it would burst into flame like a candle. She slapped off her daughter’s hands, jumped up, started working.

Quill wove pukwe angrily, not half as well as Margaret. She moved the reeds between her fingers so quickly that they blurred, but the mats were uneven, the edges loose and sloppy. Who cared? One mat, another, appeared. When she stopped, her strength faded and her eyes rolled back, white around the iris. Her breath came short. A strange fear rode in her, and the only way to keep going was to keep working. Faster. Harder. She knit an extra mat and tossed it aside. Another materialized. The mats kept collecting until the reeds were gone. Yet her heart would not be still.

In the center of the day, she abandoned everyone, left them howling for her, crying for n’gah, n’gah, weakly asking for nibi or soup. She stood and walked into the bush, hiked her skirts and peed standing, frowning distractedly at the moving reeds onshore. Mashkiigikwe had always helped her drive away a spirit that annoyed her, a wild old skeletal woman who kept visiting her and putting evil thoughts into her mind. Suddenly, here the old thing came, scratching her way along through the undergrowth until very suddenly she was right next to Quill, invisible, fingering her skirt, lifting her blouse, touching her legs, laughing at Quill’s slow tears of fright.

At first Quill resisted. As always, once the old witch operated on her with her words and torture, Quill eventually agreed to accomplish the cruel tricks that the matchimindemoyenh laid out in her mind. When she returned to the lodge, Quill stuffed earth into the mouths of her children. She poured earth into the barrel of her husband’s rifle, flung earth into the soup pot, and tamped earth into her vagina. She sat grinning at the world, holding a great makak of dirt. Eat, she said to her husband, offering it when he returned.