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

DOCTORING QUILL

They tried the sucking bones again and they tried the old remedies but always, halfway through the procedure, Quill rolled over with an alert cry and darted her arms in the air beseeching them to fetch the priest. Perhaps, by then, she had seen too many die too young, too soon, and Quill’s nervous mind could not accept this. She’d had only her sister left. Many people went mad to protect themselves from the grief of witnessing the wreckage. Perhaps the old woman with the white hands and black face, hissing in her mind, was the cause of Quill’s agitation. The priest, Father Damien, had given her assurance without really knowing how to help her.

Desperate to bring her mind back, Kashpaw brought Quill into Holy Mass. He led her to the front of the church and placed her in the seat beside him, holding her two arms like a large, temporarily docile doll who might at any moment come to life and lash out. Next to them, their great strong daughter gazed impassively upon the altar. When Father Damien raised high the body of Christ, Quill’s body went rigid and her eyes crossed in ecstasy. She fell sideways onto Kashpaw’s lap and could not be roused until the Blood of the Lamb met her lips. Then she wept, sadly and with copious hunger, for God or for her many precious dead who could say. Father Damien, who sat with her long after Mass was over and who listened to her outpouring with great sympathy but limited comprehension, for it was all in Ojibwe, was shocked when she suddenly changed the cast of her features, laughed low in a harsh unconscious tone, bit down, and ripped the flesh from her own finger.

Rock of the True Church,

I very much wish to know how I am to treat the cases of irregular connection that abound on this reservation. There are some who have remarried in the Church without annulment — can their unions be regarded as a natural bond? Which woman may a man keep who has had several and must be married to one?

My other question is as follows: How far am I permitted to enter into the political picture? At present, I am regarding it from the vantage point of an observer, though I have gathered information. In what ways is a priest allowed to protect the interests of his parish?

The opinion of Your Holiness on these matters is absolutely vital to me.

Modeste

JOHN JAMES MAUSER

One name appears and reappears among the papers that I handle , wrote Agnes in a hand that she had adapted only slightly. She had never written in a particularly feminine hand anyway. Now she stiffened her letters and stacked the words together with a neat solidity that matched, she hoped, the toughness of the priest she was becoming.

“John James Mauser,” she wrote in Father Damien’s daybook. “I have now begun to conduct a methodical search for information, and found that John James Mauser is a man whose actual person, if not identity, is mysterious. From a news story and engraving, I have determined that he is a tall, curve-lipped, and jut-nosed son of eastern mill barons and shrewd New York socialites. He is a restless man who got his lucky start by correctly guessing where the Northern Pacific railroad would cross the state line.

“John James Mauser bought the land that, in what seemed a matter of weeks, became downtown Fargo. He went from land speculation into lumber, minerals, quarries. He now purchases areas lost to the continual census that shows a dwindling number of Indians. He buys the land tax forfeited. He buys the land by having the Ojibwe owners declared incompetent. He buys this parcel and the next and the next. He takes the trees off. He leaves the stumps.

“New legislation passes. Is reversed. Mauser prospers with every fumble. His hands are always open, ready to receive. He denudes all holdings as they come his way, though sometimes he waits for certain special parcels that produce, as do one series of prime allotments on Little No Horse, oak trees of great density, beauty, and age that will never again be seen in this region.”

Agnes threw down the pen and rubbed her face. A desperation gripped her, an irksome anxiety. She took up the pen, twisted it, bit the end, continued.

“Many people think of the papers that Mauser offers as a treaty. He has taken interpreters and ribboned officials with him to meetings. He himself gives out bolts of cloth, old-time kettles, and twists of tobacco. Though he speaks of and counts the government’s agents as his friends, he is careful never to claim them. Up until this time the only agreements that Anishinaabeg have signed have been with the government, and John James Mauser is not government. He is a single man who wants trees, in general, and a particular set of trees also, and to get them he offers what seems a vast sum of money to each head of household, so much money that it seems unthinkable to turn it down.

“A great many sign and take the money. It must seem they can surely buy land somewhere else. But then the winter drags out, children need to be fed, old people buried, and the craving satisfied that never quits. Thanks to Mauser, ishkodewaaboo, the smooth fire that takes their land money, is tidily available just across the reservation line….”

1912–1913

Seating himself on an overturned cream can at the cooking fire of Alexandrine and Michel Destroismaisons, the latter a well-respected canopy bearer for the Host, Father Damien accepted a cup of strong, black, sugared tea. There was a clash of pots and the rich smell of bannock, pork, oats, more tea, and makade-mashkikiwaaboo. Gratefully, he drained the first cup. Sipped the next. He was just about to ask Alexandrine to press her children into service picking wildflowers for the altar, when, across from where he sat, a strange apocalyptic figure reared.

The Puyat — dressed in her own homemade habit — staggered past, her arms piled with buffalo skulls. Jutting from the veil, raw and planar, her face, like another of those skulls, stared out with deep, unseeing, hollow eyes. Her complexion was bone white and her gaze held a withering power. Gaunt and spectral in her thin height, she stalked through the shallows like a heron, sharp beaked, ravenous. She passed behind Alexandrine and Michel, and was gone. Turning his full attention back to the Destroismaisons, Damien resumed conversation, but with an inner disturbance that he recognized only later not as the effect of the strong hot tea but as an agitation of the heart produced by those great, dead, appalling eyes.

The day continued mild and glorious, and as the sun’s light strengthened the Catholics fell in line behind the cart bearing a borrowed statue, for the parish hadn’t one of its own yet. As they passed along, men fell to their knees in the dust of the road and women raised a trill — a high-pitched tongue of wild joy, a sound that never failed to tighten Damien’s throat. Kashpaw’s washed, white horses pulled the wagon with nervous alacrity, rolling their eyes and starting suspiciously at the supplicants. The newly baptized and morose Kashpaw drove it, with Quill sitting just alongside him.

White scarf alight in the sun, Quill sat bolt upright, stiff in her abashed fear. She threw back her head from time to time, eyes rolling, and laughed. Mary Kashpaw, huge in a white dress, crept to her mother and stroked her hand. Quill swiped her daughter’s hand like a fish from a stream, madly tore at it with her teeth, continued to laugh. Her daughter winced at the bite, but did not cry, just turned and hunkered low in the back of the wagon with her cousin and the borrowed statue.

The poor, chipped Virgin wore an expression of distaste, but she was decked brightly with wreaths and a crown of wild lilies and arum. At her feet, the two girls sat and threw the petals of prairie roses, pink and blushing, from baskets made of willow withes the red black of old blood. Damien stepped on the petals as he walked behind them, bearing the Sacred Host.