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

“It is a sin,” said Father Damien gently, “to chastise yourself too forcefully. You will receive a blanket. You will sleep upon a mat. You will drink water and light broth; later you’ll eat food.”

“Ah,” said Pauline Puyat, her eyes slowly filling with the loss of her ability to suffer, “please, Father, let me have my penance. It is everything and it is all I own.” She spoke through clenched teeth and a shut jaw, but her speech was plain enough. Father Damien felt himself soften with pity, knowing the truth of what she said was profound.

“What you confessed to me was not your fault,” he assured her.

The girl looked into Damien’s face with a grimace of sorrow, or perhaps self-hatred, for her face slowly turned golden red with a strange shame. Then the red flooded back toward her heart, and she drained to a terrific, nearly translucent, dead white.

“There is more,” she said wretchedly, and the veins in her temples jumped with the strength of her emotion.

“I will listen once you are healed,” said Father Damien. His sympathy enfolded him in spite of himself, but he determined, then and there, if she lived he would send her off the reservation, down to Fargo, down to Argus.

Her face was ratlike, her teeth stood out, her nose was a severe bone centered like a keel. She shook her head, tried to speak, but at last could not and merely closed her eyes. The shut lids sealed like a hatchling’s. She was gone into her thoughts, her prayer, whatever sustained her agony.

She was worse, said Sister Hildegarde, the next day, and so much worse the day after that she fetched Father Damien herself, though she had no way of warning him sufficiently, or preparing him for the bizarre sight that he would witness. On entering her room he was immensely struck and confused. Pauline had bent in the middle. Still more strictly rigidified, her legs were stiffened and raised, her torso also, so that she existed in a kind of permanent V shape, which the sisters had propped up with pillows and blankets, although she held it on her own. Slowly, she was bending in two. Sister Hildegarde, in her practical way, had snaked a flexible piece of rolled wet rawhide tubing down Pauline’s throat before the depth of stiffness sank into all of her limbs and froze Pauline’s voice box and throat. So it was that, although she fasted, the girl was given water and broth through the tube and was fairly well sustained. Except for the terrible rigidity, her vital signs were excellent now. As much as they could, they left her to peaceful silence.

News travels immediately, mysteriously, on the reservation. Soon it was out that Pauline was seized by spirits. She had left her body to visit in the world beyond this everyday life. Her body had turned wooden, they said, her tongue to stone. Slowly, she was lifting herself into the air, straining toward the sky world, arrowing her spirit toward the west. She was doing it for her people though she was of and not of them, though she was a betrayer and yet, too, betrayed by her raging Puyat mother. Though she was the half sister of a medicine man gravely feared and the rumored mother of a child raised by dog Lazarres, she was holy. Anybody can be holy, even a Puyat, that proved.

People drew near. People gathered. They came by car and wagon, they camped by the door to the convent house. They brought their sick ones, the mad, the dishonored. They brought their too quiet, ancient, dreaming children, their screaming new babies. They brought their old ones, farseeing through eyes cataracted over with isinglass scales. They brought their nerveless husbands, their foolish and silly teenagers, their ailments and failures, and they laid them on the steps of Pauline’s door.

Zozed Bizhieu asked Sister Hildegarde to place in Pauline’s bed a red-painted stick, which represented a request for help of a sort she wouldn’t specify. Danton Onesides asked to see her, and when turned away, begged the good Hildegarde for threads from the saint’s death blanket. She was not going to die, Sister Hildegarde told him, determined now that she would see to it herself that the girl survived, not only because that would discharge something of the debt that Hildegarde owed after the great flu, but also so that the Puyat could clean up the mess her disquieting illness was causing all through the convent. Sister Hildegarde fumed, threw up her hands. Who, did the people outside think, who took care of these holy martyrs, these self-indulgent saints? She could tell them, she knew. She struck her chest, an act for which she was immediately contrite. Still, it was true.

Linens must be bleached, scrubbed, hung on lines to dry, ironed smooth. They must be folded and set into the closets. Soon, removed from their shelves, the sheets would return to be stained, discarded, and go through the same tedious process. Food must be mashed up, pulverized, fed through the tube — invalid’s food. Pillows stuffed and restuffed. Pastes and poultices manufactured for the soothing of limbs. These cleanings and boilings required kettles, pots, spoons. And then there was the grinding of meticulously gathered herbs (and the grinder was most difficult to wash and clean). Buckets, mops, a constant correction of the floors, the state of which Hildegarde was most fierce over. The continual visitors meant someone must tend to the gate and door at all times. Not only that, but someone must keep more or less orderly track of the gifts and petitions with which the girl was now deluged.

Yes, the Puyat would live. She owed Sister Hildegarde a lot of work!

The Bizhieus brought smoked fish. The second Boy Lazarre asked something secret, whispered his request into a small, clean, empty baking powder can, quickly tapped the lid on, and gave it sternly to Sister Hildegarde to let out beside Pauline’s ear. From all corners of the reservation, now, pilgrims advanced, asking for assistance in every possible conundrum and affair. As she closed like a jackknife, more people arrived to camp. More notes and objects were brought, baskets and tobacco twists began to clutter the hall and entryway. No matter how forcefully Sister Hildegarde insisted to each visitor that Pauline could take no requests, no matter that a nurse came, pronounced on the case, and left, no matter that people kept dying or living to suffer their copious duties, onerous lives, no matter. Belief is belief. Faith is purely faith. Even when a doctor came all the way from Grand Forks, sounded Pauline’s entire body with small wooden blocks and a metal hammer, then spoke briefly to Father Damien, who nodded, but said nothing, knowing what he said would be meaningless to the people camped outdoors. No, no matter. In desperation, they made a saint. They made a saint because they had to, in those times, in that swale of loss.

1996

Father Damien sipped coffee to clarify his mind — the stuff was burned, as always, by Mary Kashpaw. He was used to the metallic taste. Father Jude wasn’t, and his jaw dropped in shock at the first sip of what she poured. They sat at the kitchen table of the small book-stuffed house where Damien had lived since the beginning. Mary Kashpaw set out milk, spoons, packets of sugar, and she turned away in a powerful indifference that was almost contempt. Then she turned back, frowning down upon the two men. Her eyes rested appraisingly on Father Damien, assessing his strength. The glare she held softened to exasperated worry. Her cheeks flamed with distress. She pulled her fingers, but the men took no notice. Gradually, she backed away.

“Please go on,” said Father Jude, still unnerved by the presence of the great, brooding housekeeper.

Father Jude Miller leaned forward to better concentrate. He was tired, too, but his was the exhaustion of a physically active person forced to the confinement of a passive task. He yawned, shook his head to clear it, and then as Father Damien was obviously not ready to proceed, he decided to make a quick drive down to the local café to buy a cup of coffee that would not lacerate his stomach. So the first time that his downfall, his comeuppance and destiny, showed herself in the yard of Father Damien, he missed her, missed Lulu.