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

Oh God, forgive me, the Superior prayed. She considered humunculation, but then rushed down to the piano room, and with all of the strength in her wide old arms gathered and hid from Cecilia every piece of music but the Bach.

After that, for some weeks, there was relief. Sister Cecilia turned to the Two Part Inventions. Her fingers moved on the keys with an insect precision. She played each as though she were constructing an airtight box. Stealthily, once Cecilia went on to Bach’s other works, the Mother Superior removed from the music cabinet and destroyed the Goldberg Variations — clearly capable of lifting into the mind subterranean complexities. Life in the convent returned to normal. The cook, to everyone’s gratitude, stopped preparing the heavy rancid goose-fat-laced beet soup of her youth and stuck to overcooked string beans, boiled cabbage, potatoes. The floors stopped groaning and absorbed fresh wax. The doors ceased to fly open for no reason and closed discreetly. The water stopped rushing continually through the pipes as the sisters no longer took advantage of the new plumbing to drown out the sounds of their emotions.

And then, one day, Sister Cecilia woke with a tightness in her chest. Pains shot across her heart and the red lump in her chest beat like a wild thing caught in a snare of bones. Her throat shut. Her hands, drawn to the keyboard, floated into a long appoggiatura. Then, crash, she was inside a thrusting mazurka. The music came back to her. There was the scent of faint gardenias — his hothouse boutonniere. The silk of his heavy, brown hair. A man’s sharp, sensuous drawing-room sweat. His voice, she heard it, avid and light. It was as though the composer himself had entered the room. Who knows? Surely there was no more desperate, earthly, exacting heart than Cecilia’s. Surely something, however paltry, lies beyond the grave.

At any rate, she played Chopin. Played in utter naturalness until the Mother Superior was forced to shut the cover to the keyboard gently and pull the stool away. Cecilia lifted the lid and played upon her knees. The poor scandalized dame dragged her from the keys. Cecilia crawled back. The Mother, at her wit’s end, sank down and urged the girl to pray. She herself spoke first in apprehension and then in certainty, saying that it was the very devil who had managed to find a way to Cecilia’s soul through the flashing doors of sixteenth notes. Her fears were confirmed when not moments later the gentle sister raised her arms and fists, struck the keys as though the instrument were stone and from the rock her thirst would be quenched. But only discord emerged.

“My child, my dear child,” comforted the Mother, “come away and rest yourself.”

The young nun, breathing deeply, refused. Her severe gray eyes were rimmed in a smoky red. Her lips bled purple. She was in torment. “There is no rest,” she declared, and she then unpinned her veil and studiously dismantled her habit. She folded each piece with reverence and set it upon the piano bench. With each movement the Superior remonstrated with Cecilia in the most tender and compassionate tones. However, just as in the depth of her playing the virgin had become the woman, so the woman in the habit became a woman to the bone. She stripped down to her shift, but no further.

“He wouldn’t want me to go out unprotected,” she told her Mother Superior.

“God?” the older woman asked, bewildered.

“Chopin,” Cecilia answered.

Kissing her dear Mother’s trembling fingers, Cecilia knelt. She made a true genuflection, murmured an act of contrition, and then walked from the convent made of bricks with the secret word pressed between yellow mortar, and the music, her music, which the Mother Superior would keep from then on under lock and key as capable of mayhem.

MISS AGNES DEWITT

So it was Sister Cecilia, or Agnes DeWitt of rural Wisconsin, who appeared before Berndt Vogel in the cavern of the barn and said in her mother’s dialect, for she knew a German when she met one, that she was hungry. She wanted to ask whether he had a piano, but it was clear to her he wouldn’t and at any rate she was exhausted.

“ Jetzt muss ich schlafen, ” she said after eating half a plate of scalded oatmeal with new milk.

So he took her to his bed, the only bed there was, in the corner of the otherwise empty room. He went out to the barn he loved, covered himself with hay, and lay awake all night listening to the rustling of mice and sensing the soundless predatory glide of the barn owls and the stiff erratic flutter of bats. By morning, he had determined to marry her if she would have him, just so he could unpin and then from her breasts unwind the long strip of cloth that bound her torso. She refused his offer, but she did speak to him of who she was and where from. In that first summary she gave of her life she concluded that she must never marry again, for not only had she wed herself soul to soul to Christ, but she had already been unfaithful — her phantom lover the Polish composer — thus already living out too grievous a destiny to become a bride. In explaining this to Berndt, she merely moved her first pawn in a long game of words and gestures that the two would play over the course of many months. She didn’t know, either, that she had opened to an opponent dogged and ruthless.

Berndt Vogel’s passion engaged him, mind and heart. He now prepared himself. Having dragged army caissons through hip-deep mud after the horses died in torment, having seen his best friend suddenly uncreated into a mass of shrieking pulp, having lived intimately with pouring tumults of eager lice and rats plump with a horrifying food, he was rudimentarily prepared for the suffering he would experience in love. She had also learned her share of discipline and in addition — for the heart of her gender is stretched, pounded, molded, and tempered for its hot task from the age of two — she was a woman.

The two struck up a temporary bargain and set up housekeeping. She still slept in the indoor bed. He stayed in the barn. A month passed. Two. Each morning she lighted the stove and cooked, then heated water in a big tank for laundry and swept the cool wooden floors. Monday she sewed. She baked all day Tuesday. On Wednesdays she churned and scrubbed. She sold the butter and the eggs Thursdays. Killed a chicken every Friday. Saturdays she walked across the bridge into town and practiced the piano in the grade school basement. Sunday she played the organ for Mass and at the close of the day started the next week’s work. Berndt overpaid her. At first she spent her salary on clothing. After she had acquired shoes, stockings, a full set of cotton underclothing and then woolen, too, and material for two housedresses — one patterned with twisted leaves and tiny blue berries and the other of an ivy lattice material — and a sweater and at last a winter coat, after she had earned a blanket, a pillow, a pair of boots, she decided on a piano.

This is where Berndt thought he could maneuver her into marriage, but she proved too cunning for him. It was early in the evening and the yard was pleasant with the sound of grasshoppers. They sat on the porch drinking a glass of sugared lemon water. Every so often, in the ancient six-foot grasses that survived at the margin of the yard, a firefly signaled or a dove cried out its five hollow notes.

“Why do so many birds’ songs consist of five?” she asked idly.

“Five what?” said Berndt.

They drank slowly, she in the sprigged berry dress that skimmed her waist. He noted with disappointment that she wore a normal woman’s underclothing now, had stopped binding her breasts. Perhaps, he thought, he could persuade her to resume her old ways, at least occasionally, just for him. It was a wan hope. She looked so comfortable, so free. She’d taken on a hardiness. Though still thin she had lost her anemic pallor. She had a square boy’s chin and a sturdy, graceful neck. Her arms were brown, muscular. In the sun, her fine hair, growing out in curls, glinted with green-gold sparks of light and her eyes were deceptively clear.