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

“Oh Dympna”—Father Damien waved his hand in despairing disgust—“never had the brains of an egg.” His breath caught in his throat and he began to pant, sweating. A watery weakness came over him. “I have seen what I have seen,” he declared. “I have heard the truth.”

Trying not to prompt him, lest he influence the story, or again call Father Damien’s scruples about the confessional’s privacy into question, Father Miller maintained silence and kept his eyes downcast. He was rewarded by a charged burst of information, laid out in staccato.

“It was during my early years on the reservation that I heard her confession. Marie. She slammed into the confessional. Had a way of doing that. Father, forgive me for I have sinned , she said, my last confession was such and such ago. Then hesitated. I said, ‘Of course, what is it my child?’ thinking it was hard to tell me. But she was just gathering her words. She had a peculiar habit of expression. Overly mature. Maybe even bizarre. When I went there , she said, I knew the dark fish must rise.

“ ‘Went where? What fish?’ I asked.

“She continued on, putting it in colors and flavors, you know, like a mad person. Making pictures of what she saw as a monumental undertaking. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard .

“ ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said, ‘I know you’re very devout.’

“ I was going up the hill with the black-robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I’d make a saint. They never had a girl from this reservation they had to pray to. But they’d have me. And I’d be dressed in pure gold.

“ ‘My dear,’ I gently said, ‘to be a saint is more than wearing pretty clothes.’ That set her off.

“ You can’t tell me nothing , she raged. Now listen. She’s a bitch of Jesus Christ , she said. You’d better hear about this nun.

“ ‘Of whom do you speak?’ I asked gently. Her response was loud and brutal.

“ Leopolda , she yelled at the carved screen between us.

“ ‘Leopolda!’

“I jumped up, hit my head. I suppose my sudden interest must have shocked her, for she quieted and in a low voice continued her story with an intensity that I remember to this day. Threw me in the closet with her dead black overboot, where he had taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe. She was, you see, speaking of the devil. This girl had understood before anyone, perhaps more deeply than we now can see, the true nature of Leopolda’s faith.”

“And what was that?”

Jude Miller had asked his question too soon, however, for Father Damien was still in the past, in the close embrace of the confessional.

“Marie Lazarre was cast from Bernadette Morrissey’s care into an ill-concocted family of drunks. Still, she’d turned out pious and developed a special bond with the nun in question. As a result, she was asked to come and visit the convent, to stay there as a postulant if she so chose, under the special tutelage of Leopolda. Later, in my confessional, she described the ascent up the hill. Once she entered the convent, there was apparently no special notice given to her by the other sisters. Leopolda put her straight to work, baking bread, and then there was the incident of the cup. The poor girl, all nerves, dropped a cup. When it rolled underneath the stove, she went down on the floor to get it.

“ Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker. What happened next was this: Leopolda held this girl down on the floor with her foot and poured scalding water on her back, telling her not to make a move or a sound. I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep, by filling up your ear. ”

Father Miller winced, shifted in his chair uncomfortably, made a slight sound of protest, but Father Damien kept talking.

“Sometime after that so-called lesson, the two were removing loaves of bread from the ovens when some sort of argument occurred in which the girl, who by now had good reason to hate and fear Leopolda, called her down, as they say here.”

“Called her down?”

“Challenged her. Bitch of Jesus Christ! Kneel and beg! Lick the floor! That was when our candidate for sainthood stabbed the girl’s hand with the fork and cracked her head with the poker, knocking her unconscious!”

Father Miller looked aghast, but also skeptical.

“Was this witnessed? Documented?”

“Unfortunately, your witness, Dympna, entered just after the blow, while Marie was unconscious. Dympna was apparently persuaded by Leopolda’s story. Our holy woman told the other sisters that she’d prayed for the girl to receive the holy stigmata as a sign of God’s love, and that the girl had swooned when that first mark appeared. Marie woke confused, but soon understood the gist of things and went along with it until she could make her way out of the convent. She returned to her home, married not long after, has been known ever since as a solid and even wise member of her community. Marie. Star of the Sea. Marie Kashpaw.”

The two men sat quietly together, the tape recorder humming between them. Jude Miller put his hand out to turn it off, but then withdrew his fingers. The windows were halfway open and the storms pulled up already, the screens down. In the gooseberry thicket just outside, a bird’s whistle sounded, piercingly sweet. The breeze shifting through the screen was thin and dry. Father Damien now reached forward and punched off the tape recorder. Relieved, exhausted, he slumped in his chair. Closed his eyes. Before Father Miller could comment in any way or question him further, the old priest sank into a sleep so profound it looked like death. Father Miller watched intently until he saw telltale movements — a tiny twitch of Father Damien’s eyelid, a slow wheezing intake of breath. He worried about the open window, but apparently the old priest liked fresh air, so he quietly covered Father Damien with a light blanket. Then Jude Miller continued to sit, watching over his elder, wishing for a cigarette, though he had quit twenty years before. He wanted to replay the tape, form queries, ask everything that needed to be asked, for the troubling story raised more questions than it answered.

An early gnat landed on the old man’s nose and swatting at it, Damien roused himself enough to quit his sleep. Father Damien frowned, annoyed when he realized he’d fallen asleep in the presence of the other priest. Standing, Father Damien waved assistance aside, and took high, tiny childlike steps into the hallway of the house of his old age. He was heading for his tiny bedroom. Just before entering, he turned to the younger priest in a crack of darkness from the doorway. He waved his fingers, beneficent, as though dispensing drops of holy oil.

Father Jude blinked. In that instant a strange thing happened. He saw, inhabiting the same cassock as the priest, an old woman. She was a sly, pleasant, contradictory-looking female of stark intelligence. He shook his head, craned forward, but no, there was Father Damien again, tottering into the comfort of his room.

The rectory was made of the same whitewashed brick and thickly slabbed on interior plaster as the convent and church. Entering, after a long walk through the grounds of the church and the cemetery, Father Miller paused — the place held the tranquil mouse-nest scent of all rectories in Jude’s experience, an odor composed of male sweat and sweet deodorant, cabbage-y cooking, Old Spice, and the faintly sour breath of sexual loneliness. Someone had thought to build the place with tall rectangular windows — these admitted at late dusk a singular golden light that rose, as though emitted by the prairie town beneath the hill, and flooded through the entire house in a wave. The gift of that radiance would quickly be followed by darkness, noise, the rev of slow truck engines circling below, and the throb of sub-woofers on the faintly moving air.