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

She descended, quite by coincidence, as soon as Jude was out of sight. Old but not old, laughing as always at the world the way she had ever since a child, she pulled Father Damien’s hand into hers and spoke teasingly.

“Mekadewikonayewinini majii ayaan’na? Hihn! Niminwendam gegahwabamayaan, in’gozis. You’re coming with me to the bingo tonight. I need your luck.”

“What luck?” Father Damien was instantly alert, pleased with his visitor. “You have all the luck you need. You have too much luck! Maybe if you lost once in a while you’d stop gambling. Besides, I’m sure you skew the odds in your favor and it’s hard for others to lose so often just to keep up with your winnings!”

“My winnings go to a very good cause, as you know.”

“I do know that,” said Father Damien, holding her hand tighter, lovingly, “and even if you were the stingiest lady in the world I would forgive you. How are your boys? How’s Bonita?”

The question, as always, elicited an extremely complex list of their doings, and an analysis of their probable future doings as well as a comprehensive survey of grandchildren and their doings and all of her pride and complicated plans. When she had finished with her report, she made a swift exit. And so it was that she, too, avoided a certain portion of her destiny.

Father Jude emerged from his car bearing a plastic lidded cup in its cup holder and a bag, already showing grease marks, containing three rounds of hot fry bread.

“You missed her, missed Lulu!” said Father Damien, as soon as Jude sat down to eat the fry bread. It was still hot, soft as butter inside. Father Jude had sprinkled a little salt on the golden crust, and he didn’t much care whom he’d missed. He just wanted to eat.

“Lulu doesn’t let me use salt,” sighed Damien, watching the other priest’s enjoyment. “She is afraid it will affect my heart.”

“She worries about you.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Damien. “I worry over her. And our sisters, too. You know that tired old joke about hearing nuns’ confessions, like getting stoned to death with popcorn? Not the case, not here. My sisters are robust women. Full of juice.”

“There have been scandals?” Father Jude asked.

Father Damien took this question very seriously. “I prefer to call such incidents,” he reflected, “profound exchanges of human love. Mary Kashpaw was one, in fact, whom love did call. She acted upon her passion. After all, we live on earth. We are created of the earth. The Ojibwe word for the human vagina is derived from the word for earth. A profound connection, don’t you think?”

“Do you condone such irregular behavior, then?” Father Jude leaned forward, wiping his lips, disguising his surprise at the old man’s casual use of a term most priests of his era entirely avoided.

“I do not condone,” said Damien. “It would be more accurate to say that I”—here he paused to choose the word—“cherish. Yes. I cherish such occurrences, or help my charges to, at least. Unless they keep them safely in their hearts, how else can they give them up? I tenderly cherish such attractions the way I look fondly upon a child’s exuberant compulsion to play. There is nothing more important, yet it is insignificant. God will still be there when the child is exhausted, eh?”

“And the attraction? The fall? The sin?”

“Cherish, as I said.”

Father Jude shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

“You have never loved?” Father Damien asked.

“In the sense I gather you imply? No,” said Jude.

“You are only half joking,” said Damien. “You find my lack of moral outrage somewhat strange.”

“Somewhat appalling,” said Father Jude. “To put it another way, I wonder whether living so far away from Fargo hasn’t diluted your principles?”

Damien looked at the younger priest as though he were a marvel. “Truly!”

Jude raised his eyebrows and smiled to dismiss his remark, but as he spoke his gaze still rested curiously on Damien.

“I don’t mean to imply that Fargo is a stronghold of virtue, it is just that certain norms of behavior are taken for granted. Right. Wrong. These are simply distinguished. Black is black and white is white.”

“The mixture is gray.”

“There are no gray areas in my philosophy,” said Father Jude.

“I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.”

“Our job is to make it less so.”

“Our job is to understand it.”

“And in understanding”—Father Jude looked severely troubled—“to excuse immoral actions?”

“Never those that hurt people.”

“Sex hurts,” said Father Jude, simply.

“Have you seen a doctor?” said Damien.

The two paused, their breathing sharpened, surprised that they had so quickly fallen into such a pleasurable dispute.

“I was not speaking from personal experience,” Father Jude affected an irritation he did not feel. He hid a slight smile. “I should have put it more directly. Intercourse outside the boundaries of marriage hurts the order of things. Creates disorder. Breaks traditions, vows, families. Creates such… problems.”

Father Damien shifted in his seat and frowned. “That is true. Anything, though, of a large nature will create problems. The more outré forms of religious experience, for instance.”

“Mystical experiences?”

“Exactly.”

“So we have come around to that.” Father Miller leaned forward and looked expectantly, with sudden openness, into Father Damien’s face.

“May I suggest,” said Father Miller, “that I set up the tape recorder?” He opened a plastic briefcase, displayed the small box hardly bigger than the palm of his hand. Father Damien peered over his glasses at the box, which Jude Miller arranged with a careful flourish. The older priest cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, and then fell silent as Father Jude pressed a button. Listening to the faint dry rasp of tape turning on a wheel, he stared into the intimate puzzle of leafless branches outside the window.

“Let’s get right down to it,” said Damien suddenly. He rubbed his hands together. Sat up alert in his chair. “What have you got? First give me the source, then the story.”

“All right.” Father Jude leaned forward, fingers in a thoughtful curl. “There was in your convent a Sister Dympna Evangelica who served with Sister Leopolda and witnessed, as she said in her testimony, a case of stigmata bestowed by Leopolda upon a young protégée or novice.”

“What?”

Father Damien started, fell back in his chair, wiped his hands across his face and then, as though to smooth away some inner hysteria, wiped again. Still, he could not contain a wild bark of disbelief.

“This postulant… named Marie?”

“Yes.”

Damien had trouble forming words around his tongue, which seemed suddenly in rage to have swollen inside his mouth. He could only whisper, “Marie, Marie, Star of the Sea! She will shine when we’ve burned off the dark corrosion.” Damien tried to contain his reaction so that he could properly explain the trauma of the event, which he knew well, having been a confessor to that very Marie. His voice suddenly cracked out, angry.

“She bore wounds all right, appropriate and cruel. But they were not created by the prayerful intercession of Leopolda!”

“What then!” Jude was caught up in the drama.

“Leopolda took a fork and stabbed the girl!”

“Impossible!”

“I have”—looking suddenly chastened, Damien pressed his hand to his lips—“just violated the secrecy of the confessional.”

“There may be an extenuating…” Father Jude ruffled his notebook, clicked his pen. “Sister Dympna says that she was there—”