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

Pauline seethed with irritated fury. She knocked hard.

Behind the door, Agnes bit the back of her knuckles. Although Pauline was difficult, she also had her allies, for the novice had a persuasive way of speaking in a whining slur. She had, in fact, extracted a surprising amount of money from one particular and quite saintly woman of wealth. Enough to build a proper kitchen, sink a new well, plumb the interior of the convent. There were enough nuns who knew they had the young hopeful to thank for the fact that the outhouse, freezing and miserable in winter, now held rakes and hoes and wasn’t needed for low purposes. That was a major piece of work. Such a good raiser of monies was immensely rare. Even Sister Hildegarde hedged with Damien when he attempted to persuade her that Pauline Puyat’s place was elsewhere. After all, during the influenza, Pauline had saved her life.

“Father, may I have just one small word with you?”

The girl’s false humility was a stale grease Agnes could taste, but she opened the door unhappily and allowed the girl to enter.

“You’ve visited me four times today, always with exactly the same request.”

“Forgive me, but—”

Damien raised a hand.

“Yes, Father.” Again the inward gulp of amusement, the visible attempt at pursing her dry lips and rounding her starved eyes.

“Father,” said Pauline softly, “I have heard that Nanapush is still living in sin with a baptized Catholic. If you haven’t the care to let me lay siege to his soul, at least have a care for hers.”

“Aren’t you needed to supervise the play yard?” said Father Damien, again, “surely Sister Hildegarde—”

“Oh no, Father, please don’t worry!” Now Pauline lighted with an artificial jollity. Her skull’s face glowed, and she trembled, racked with zeal. “Sister Hildegarde will now be giving the children special instructions in hygiene. It is her pet project this month. And as she has them occupied, I thought I might attempt once again, to… oh, I know how tiresome you find me, but once again I would like to beg your indulgence… I need to confess.”

“This evening,” said Father Damien.

“Now,” said the Puyat in a low and stubborn voice that chilled Damien in some interior and fathomless place for which he had no guard or defense.

“All right,” he sighed, making the sign of the cross over her, “proceed.”

And so she began, avid, eager in desperation to spill. She knelt beside his desk. Although he tried to remain detached, the pitiable trembling of her hands clenched in prayer touched him. Clearly, she was in a state of grave inner agitation. In her confession, some nameless man appeared a trimmed French mustache and flat, dark lips. It was a hot close afternoon, the day it happened. He pressed on me in a blinding darkness. Crushed me to a powder and spread me across the floor. Snapped me in his beak like a wicket-boned mouse.

“Stop,” said Father Damien, repelled now by her sly excitement, “you are absolved, say no more.”

He drew back, not like he was finished with me, Father, but like a dog sensing the presence of a tasteless poison in its food. Then went on, which he should not have done.

“Peace, my child, let yourself be calm, you are not forsaken.” Her wildness shook him, her insistence on strange details, her description of her own nakedness and that of her rapist or uncle or even someone she half allowed… he could not tell for sure, and then, her face narrowing and her voice hushed, she confessed the child.

I swelled so tight, Father Damien, that I could hardly lift my arms and every breath was forced, fought for against that baby’s weight. I felt my bones give, the bowl of my hips creak wide, and between my legs there was a soft and steady burning.

“The child was born…”

Yes, taken from me, born, however you put it, there was no stopping it, no—

“Where is that child now?”

Silence.

“Where is that child?”

The silence now held, now stubborn.

Again, his blood pounding, Father Damien asked and this time she answered, hasty and alarmed at the conclusion that her silence was forcing him to draw.

Dead, Father Damien, I did not touch it. Born dead!

Agnes waved both hands in the air, lapsing, horrified as if swiping away hordes of stinging flies. Pauline began to weep now, a dry sound like the scratching of a spent record on a phonograph. Beating her breast, she begged for forgiveness. Agnes caught herself. Gasped out Father Damien’s standard absolution, but was unprepared to give, or invent for Pauline, the proper penance.

“The penance, Father, what shall be my punishment?”

A trickle of spit collected at the corner of her mouth, her eyes were red with the exhaustion of having wrestled many sleepless nights with the violence of her past. Her gums bled from her continual fasting. Her ingratiating smile was frightful to Father Damien and hoping to get rid of her he manufactured an attack of sudden kindliness.

“You take on too much for your strength, my dear. You were violated and that could not be helped. Now rise… you will say two thousand Hail Marys — no, four thousand Hail Marys, and, as well, you will—”

“Thank you, Father, yes!”

With a sudden energy Agnes lurched around the chair and in a flash she hoped would take the other by surprise, raised the woman by the elbow. She was propelling Pauline out the door, when, with a false step the girl lurched and fell against Agnes, twisting as she went, clutching at the priest’s chest. Agnes had the instinctive wit not to catch Pauline but to step precisely backward so that the girl fell full length. She landed hard enough to knock the wind out of her body and she gasped, dry, fought for air. Even after Pauline picked herself up, Agnes could almost feel the thin claws and sense the cold clutch of Pauline’s hands as they raked the air, so close, reaching for her bound breasts….

THE VICTIM SOUL

Shortly after that disturbing confession, Pauline Puyat was found in a state of collapse, naked, prostrate before the altar, covered with muck and raving, but as Hildegarde picked her up and hid the extent of her strange condition, it was some time before the full report leaked down from the convent on the hill. It was said that Pauline Puyat took upon herself an extraordinary penance. In her cell, covered in no more than a sheet, no pillow, sleeping on the bare floor, she maintained a rigorous fast and a strange concentration. Father Damien came to sit with her, and supposedly, to hear her confession or deliver the Eucharist. The moment he saw Pauline Puyat, however, he knew that he’d come into the presence of a darkness not to be assuaged by common means.

Light fell pale gray through a set of curtains pinned together at the center of the tall rectangular window. A searching blade of radiance struck through the slight gap between the pins and fell in a strict golden slant across Pauline Puyat, who refused a bed and lay upon the floor. She would not accept a single comfort, kicked off anything but one thin sheet, yet she spoke lucidly in making her wishes known, saying that she was atoning for a desperate sin and pleading to be allowed to continue her restitutional fast. When Father Damien refused her request, she clamped her lips shut. Her jaws had locked and the muscles of her throat knotted into pull cords. She spoke through her teeth with difficulty, but her words were still calm and sensible.

“Forgive me, Father, for this is what I must do.”

Her face, as she gazed upward, was womanly and open, her forehead bronzed by the seeking light. She seemed intent within, very still, as though listening for faint but vital instructions. Reaching across to draw her sheet around her shoulders, Father Damien’s hand brushed the point of her chin, alabaster white and cold. Her hands, rigid in fisted knots, were stone smooth, alarmingly bloodless and heavy, clenched around thick bandages that hid her unexplained wounds. Impossible to change because of their clawlike rigidity, the gauze had begun to exude the cloying reek of infection. Hildegarde told Father Damien that she had called for iodine and carbolic soap, water, salts to soak her hands and feet. With her gray skin and deep, black, ravaged eyes Pauline was a figure set to rest on a tomb, a grave’s image.