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

When it came right down to the end, though, the Frenchman had the stronger kick and the winkte , losing by a toe, swiped his dress neatly from the grass and simply kept running, across the broad plains, into the hills. Those who wished to start after him were detained now by Father LaCombe, who, though slow to understand the outcome of the wager and the sequence of events, launched forth a God-inspired tirade that cowed the Michifs and brought them to their Catholic senses. As a result, they did not chase the fleeing Bwaan but grudgingly agreed with the priest’s diplomatic statement that the race had been an exact tie. No blood should be spilled.

Yet the Bwaan woman would have satisfaction for her relatives. Lunging forward with one arrowing blur of movement, she slipped her skinning knife beneath the ribs of the Frenchman, Pauline’s father, and drew a sickening arc so that he found, quite suddenly, he was kneeling in prayer, his intestines slowly popping into his hands. And then his daughter was before him trying gently to stuff them back in their exact mysterious intricate folds, but failing even as he crumpled. Leaning sideways, he spilled about himself. Dying, he looked into his daughter’s face and said to her in the clarity of last vision that she must kill her mother.

It was imperishable, the command of the father imposed upon the daughter. And no less the will she had to carry it out. Her intention was forged in the heat of grief and tempered in its freezing aftermath. Though young, the girl now harbored a blade of certainty that waited calmly in her for its chance. Pauline’s mother knew. That is why, one day, with no warning and no word but a filthy cry, she dragged the girl to the shit pile and forced her snarling child face-down and said in a deadly voice, “This is where you’ll be if ever you go against me.”

A mistake, on the mother’s part, to challenge one so like herself.

Ever after, the stink of waste reminded the girl. Her mother pushed Pauline into the fire, next, and so that, too, became an unforgettable piece of the promise. The burns of hot coals on her skin were markers of her duty. As was the soup her mother would not feed her — a bitter absence in her stomach. And the sticks of wood that broke against her legs and over her back. The air that tore open her chest each time she breathed with the broken rib, and bloody snow. The only thing her mother let her eat one winter when the meat was scarce was the bloody snow beneath the death of the animal or its butchering.

Yet the girl survived on that. She grew fast on the blows that didn’t land and even faster on the ones that did. She flourished in twisted energy and grew taller than her father and meaner than her mother until one day, as her mother lay weakened by fever in a brush lean-to, on the trapline, the daughter brought a horn of foul boiling stew of bark and diseased rabbit and a mole that an owl must have dropped. Although her mother clawed at her, she held the woman’s mouth open and poured the boiling stuff straight down her gullet so that her throat was seared, her mouth severely blistered, and all she could do was gasp, in her agonized delirium, for three days, the name Pauline.

That girl sat as far as possible from her mother, by the fire, surrounded by warm blankets and skins. With satisfaction, she watched the woman who bore her shake and chatter her teeth like a turtle rattle and weep as the fever alternately scorched and froze her. Recovering, the woman lost one side of her face. The nerves destroyed by inner heat, her flesh sagged in a bizarre leer that made her suddenly frightening to men so that, though she could still run, there was no one to catch her.

At the same time Pauline, who had inherited none of her mother’s grace and all of her father’s squat, exaggerated pop-eyed vigor, suddenly became irresistible to men. She was courted famously by love flute. She tried her lovers out across the tent, while her mother burned in dark nothingness. Men brought Pauline shells, miigis, a dress of red calico that reflected fire. They offered her trade silver cut and stamped in the shapes of owls, turtles, otters twining, bears, and horned frogs. They brought her meat so that she never went hungry. A necklace of brass beads appeared, hung beside her door by a night visitor. A very good kettle. Cakes of maple sugar. She wanted for nothing. Men sought her, although they were befuddled by their fascination. Was it her slim long waist, tight in the red calico? Maybe it was the way she looked so boldly at a man, then shyly away. It was not her face, or maybe it was, for her childhood ugliness had become something else: a ferocity, a sexual charm partaking of no sweetness, a look that registered and gloated over everything about a man. A hunger.

The young girl’s appetite became a famishment and then a ravenous emptiness that she found men, for very short amounts of time, were capable of solving. Still, even though she had her pick of them, she was restless. The terrible fact was this: In creating the emptiness, the mother disallowed her the means to fill her void. Pauline could not love or be loved. She had been robbed of her capacity either to give or receive anything so profoundly good.

Her mother’s face sagged until her tongue froze. Her brain locked. She finally died, removing the burden of her doom from Pauline. Freed, the girl married four times. With every marriage she experienced the beginning as a wicked and promising intensity that grew unbearable and then subsided into indifference. She bore her first child, a boy called Shesheeb, very early in life. Upon him, she raggedly doted. Twenty years after that first child, she bore a daughter. Her children were very different: the boy fathered by a full-blood and the girl by a Polish aristocrat visiting the wilds of Canada. The name of the latter was unpronounceable to Pauline, plus he was no more than a strange encounter during one dry northern summer. She forgot him and named the daughter after herself. Pauline Puyat, once again.

That child, born in her mother’s age and raised in her purified bitterness, was the Pauline Puyat who became Sister Leopolda and sponsored, we do not know how, such things as miracles. I relate what I know of this history in order to explain the slow formation of certain seductive poisons in the personality that both slow and require severe judgment. This killing hatred between mother and daughter was passed down and did not die when the last Pauline became a nun. As Sister Leopolda she was known for her harsh and fearsome ways. And her father, the Polish man with the title and the golden epaulets, who went back to his lands with marvelous paintings and strange stories, who was he? What unknown capacities, what secret Old World cruelties, were thereby tangled into her simmering blood?

If you know about the buffalo hunts, you perhaps know that the one I describe, now many generations past, was one of the last. Directly after that hunt, in fact, before which Father LaCombe made a great act of contrition and the whirlwind destruction, lasting twenty minutes, left twelve hundred animals dead, the rest of the herd did not bolt away but behaved in a chilling fashion.

As many witnesses told it, the surviving buffalo milled at the outskirts of the carnage, not grazing but watching with an insane intensity, as one by one, swiftly and painstakingly, each carcass was dismantled. Even through the night, the buffalo stayed, and were seen by the uneasy hunters and their families the next dawn to have remained standing quietly as though mourning their young and their dead, all their relatives that lay before them more or less unjointed, detongued, legless, headless, skinned. At noon the flies descended. The buzzing was horrendous. The sky went black. It was then, at the sun’s zenith, the light shredded by scarves of moving black insects, that the buffalo began to make a sound.