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

“No use, my friend, it is borne on the wind,” Kashpaw answered.

“And you…” Quill whispered to Father Damien, who was still kneeling beside them, far gone in stunned confusion at the mystery. “How…”

“I stumbled,” said the priest wretchedly. “I beg your pardon, I tripped on the beauty of the day.”

“And now we must die for it,” said Kashpaw, his voice accepting and almost marveling at the strangeness. “Not you, but the Puyat, she is the cause. Life is leaking out of us now, priest. All because of the Puyat.”

Pauline Puyat then, with an audacity that spoke both the boundless arrogance and violent compassion of her nature, approached them. With no leave, she knelt beside the sufferers. Freed of the skulls, her back torn, and in a state of pain herself, she stared nakedly into their faces. Her eyes were molten and her face calm with an immense and soothing pity. Wordlessly she dipped a cloth into a bowl of water that she held and allowed a trickle, just the right amount, to pass Quill’s lips and then Kashpaw’s. She murmured as she bathed their temples, their brows, their chins, their eyelids, and when she was finished with Quill, the madwoman’s eyes fixed on the Puyat’s face and they exchanged, Father Damien saw it, a look of tenderness and sweetness that would have astounded him then if everything was not already so far beyond acceptance or belief. Quill’s face cleared. Her eyes focused. She smiled with pleasure to feel a sudden and poignant sanity, and she squeezed her daughter’s hand. The gentle firmness of her touch calmed the big girl’s agony. When Quill spoke, it was with the old voice, the soft and compelling tones she had used before the onset of her affliction.

“Hear me,” she said. “Come near, for I have something important to say to you all, here on the reservation.”

A silence enfolded all, and many knelt to listen.

“Lazarres and Pillagers should eat from the same kettle,” Quill said, “join together for strength against the truer threat which is not each other but the damn chimooks robbing every straw from the fields and stealing even the lice from our heads and the tongues from our mouths and the shit from between our butts and the little sense we got left in us after the liquor. Stay together, you families, don’t let the land and money divide you!”

Her prophecy was right to the mark, said many, and they went away repeating it — that is, until they saw an enemy Pillager or Morrissey, Kashpaw or Lazarre.

Astounded with joy to hear the sensible quality of his wife’s words, Kashpaw gasped, moving the core of wood in his chest a fraction, which completely killed him.

The girl fell senseless, then, still holding her mother’s hand. Quill, mercifully, was soon too far gone to notice her husband’s absence on the ground beside her, or see the animal anguish of her child. She merely closed her eyes, drifted, came to no shore, drifted farther, until she was somewhere new.

QUILL’S DAUGHTER

Even the nuns were heard to say that Christ took such pity on the girl’s suffering, so like his own, that she should never have the cause to weep again. She grew phenomenally, put on weight and bulked up like her father, Kashpaw. And she toughened. During the next, desperate, winnowing winter she avoided every illness, even though she went without mittens or shoes. She would flourish while other girls coughed tubercular blood, increase her strength and quickness until she could wrestle down any boy. The trick of her quiet would help her hide from trouble, too, for after the accident, she seldom spoke.

Quill had a cousin named Bernadette Morrissey, a bony and bleak-spirited woman who took in children to help work the land she kept with her brother, Napoleon. Immediately after Quill’s death, Bernadette requested of Sister Hildegarde that the girl live with her. Bernadette took the daughter of Quill home, but soon reported that she regretted her charitable impulse. The big girl apparently turned violent. Unexpected rages shook her like freak storms. Once, she struck Bernadette, and worse, Napoleon seemed to tap some vice in her. If the big man came within arms’ reach, she set upon him with claws and teeth. The family soon called the priest to their allotment, where he experienced a fearsome sight.

Mary Kashpaw had left off attempting to destroy her caretakers, and instead took out her frustrations on their land. On the day of Father Damien’s visit, she was moving earth with a careening fury. She had already raised mounds of dirt and created a confusion of deep and irregular holes and ditches through the yard and woods. She could not be stopped. Not even a grown man like Napoleon dared step within reach of her shovel, and no word from any woman or girl pierced the intensity of her concentration. She hadn’t eaten, hadn’t slept. It looked as though she was determined to dig until she dropped to her death.

For a time, Father Damien watched. It was a dry spring day and the crust of the earth was waking and softening. He thought perhaps the girl would hit frost but apparently the dirt was warmed as far down as she cared to dig. A shuddering fear ran through him as he recalled Kashpaw’s vision. Was his daughter digging those two hundred Anishinaabeg graves? The holes were the shape not only of graves, but worse, of many interconnected and searching graves.

Since it was useless to remonstrate with her or ask questions, Father Damien took up a shovel. Alongside the huge mad child, where no one would go, he then began to dig. One shovelful after another, careful ones, a heap of dirt to the side. It was not an unpleasant task. In fact, he found, there was much in it immediately that calmed and soothed. Before the girl even recognized or took the slightest notice of the priest, then, Father Damien was digging along in a state of agreeable oneness with his work.

After a while, Mary Kashpaw did notice. She didn’t stop, but she did turn to regard the priest as her arms rhythmically swung. A spasm, not a smile, crossed her face, a wave of nerves, and then she more powerfully relaxed into the current of her labor and dug, unceasingly, with renewed strength. Dug to the east for a time, then casually reversed and carved a long pan into the ground heading west. At random moments, she quit her trajectory. Inspired by some other spot, she crossed to the place and sank her shovel. A northerly foray twisted like an eel and then veered counterclockwise until she’d swung directly south. And through the day, through the long afternoon, hands bound with rags on the handle of the shovel, Agnes dug, too.

The desolation of the great child shook Agnes to the core. The girl reminded her of herself. There was no doubt about it. Grief has its own rules and power. Agnes sat with Mary at the table by the stove, where the girl wolfed down huge chunks of bread sopping with gravy-grease. Eyes glazed, Mary Kashpaw gave herself over to eating, chewed with grand solemnity. Her massive jaws crushed and pulverized the food, and she seemed to have no other purpose or interest.

“Your mama and your deydey are not in the ground anymore,” said Father Damien in a firm voice, hoping to stop the digging. “They have been taken up into the sky.”

Mary Kashpaw frowned, lowered her face like a bull, and walked out the door. It was a fair day. The sky over them was massive and blue with random clouds. Perhaps, thought Agnes, Mary would catch a glimpse of their faces or invent the imprint of their smiles in the vapor. Perhaps she would experience some comfort, but no. Mary Kashpaw raised her eyes and gazed with fixed gravity upward, upward, scanned the brilliance and then turned her gaze onto Father Damien.

“You can’t see them,” he tried to insist, “but they are up there. They love you.”