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

Margaret Kashpaw, shrewd and sour, kicked the misery to life.

Some said that Margaret should not have shown her face at the funeral, given that the man who chased after her was the holdout Nanapush. She had the nerve to show up in bright clothing, and wore the garish red hat that made some call her Old Lady Cardinal and others mutter that it was a pointed mark of disrespect. You never wore that color near the dead, as it confused their spirits, attracted them back to the living. But apparently that did not bother Margaret. Margaret only said that she came because it was her duty as a member of the tribe and parish. Her words were met with scorn, right at the doorway.

“So you came to gloat.” Bernadette greeted her with ugly irony. What she actually said in Ojibwemowin was that Margaret had come to make herself fat on the sorrows of her enemies. Then she added that Margaret already was quite fat enough and should go home.

“Go fuck the old longhair in your dead husband’s blankets,” she advised, again in Ojibwemowin, a phrase lost on Father Damien, who was standing near to greet those who’d come to pay their final respects. He did catch the word blankets, waabooyaanan, and using his pocked mental lexicon he made the association between blankets and honoring gifts. Thinking Margaret had been uncharacteristically generous, he at once clasped Margaret’s hand and began with a nervous passion to thank her. Caught between the sudden insult and the copious gratitude, Margaret rocked back. Just for an instant, though. She quickly discarded the priest’s clumsy praise and prepared a barrage of killing wit, which she was unable to deliver. A crush of sorrowing Morrisseys now swept protectively around Bernadette, and simultaneously pinned Margaret Kashpaw in the center of the back pew, so that she had to scramble over the top of the bench to gain her freedom.

This small woman, though of some age, could move with strength and economy. Before anyone could knock her down, Margaret Kashpaw wove through the mourners. Quick as a weasel, she popped up right before Bernadette. As she moved, her mind was working, so that by the time she confronted the Morrissey she had discarded her crude witticisms in favor of a bitingly sweet form of address.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, in your pitiful condition. I loved your brother as my own brother. You should remember how he came to chop wood for me when my own husband was out on the trapline. And don’t you recall”—Margaret spoke with brilliant inspiration, lies jumping to her lips—“how your brother so generously gave up his horses and bought my dead husband’s team for a good price after he was killed?”

Of course, Bernadette now recalled her brother bragging how he’d cheated the widows and taken advantage of the fact that, as Kashpaw’s death was the result of his team’s panic, nobody in the family felt right with the beasts. They traded them to Napoleon so cheaply that he couldn’t stop talking about his bargain.

“Ishte, Bernadette, your brother was a good man,” said Margaret, sopping away fake tears. “He was so good to your niece-girl, the one who dug the dirt. Even, he took in that skinny Puyat who now wears the black gown. Oh yai, he used to bring that virgin to that old shack on Kashpaw land where he—”

Father Damien now freed himself of other hands and again clasped Margaret’s, giving her his most profound attention, which worked out perfectly, for all Margaret had wanted to do was lay the foundation of suspicion for Bernadette to stand on, and shade her eyes, and look this way and that. Which she did, thinking surely no one else knew what evil Napoleon did to the Kashpaw girl? And the Puyat? And even if someone knew, at least that Puyat was alone, wasn’t she, no family members around to… but no, and here Bernadette’s mouth gaped open. Perhaps there were people on the reservation who knew about Napoleon’s crime. She’d sent Marie to the Lazarres to avoid a repetition. Maybe there were relatives she hadn’t considered, vengeful ones. He was dead, wasn’t he? Dead by the hand of someone strong and capable. Although she mourned him for the blood he was, Bernadette had no illusions about the character of her dead brother.

He had taken advantage of her too. Recalling this, quite suddenly, Bernadette’s face went dark with unshed emotion. She suddenly shook off the maudlin comfort of her family and strode to the front pew, where she brooded with great intensity on what he really was. What he really did. What he left her with. She brooded so hard and cracked her big knuckles so loudly that the other members of her family feared that she was disoriented by grief. But no, her thoughts were properly directed by Margaret’s truth. That was the problem.

All through the painful service that Father Damien conducted, her oblivious mutters sounded. Napoleon had tried to cheat her of her own land and left her nothing but a spalted horse and his clothing, the acrid smell of himself in the cloth. She’d burn them now. He’d brought loose women to the house and drank with them. He drank anyway, alone, and sometimes… ah, she pushed away the pictures, glad to the bone that he was dead. Maybe she would stand up and kick his coffin. Maybe she would rage at heaven. No longer could she hold it in! She leaped up suddenly, but men were ready. They held her back, from joining her brother in death, they thought, but in reality she wanted to rip his pickled body from the box.

That she went strange in her behavior after talking to Margaret was not lost on her relatives.

“It’s her,” cried one, totally disrupting Father Damien’s attempt to forge ahead with the service. “That damn Margaret Kashpaw put a powder on her!”

The whole church of Lazarres and Morrisseys and those on their side now turned to look upon Margaret, who was perhaps the only woman living anywhere, in all the Anishinaabeg territory now chopped into states and provinces, who could glare back with such authority. More than all of them put together. Her peaked red cap stood up, erect. Her eyes blazed and her bearing was of the old ogitchidaa-ikwe stance, too powerful to resist. For such a small, sharp woman, her voice carried. It rolled out of her. She put one hand up before she spoke and turned to each direction.

“We will see it coming soon,” she cried, her voice echoing in drama, “more deaths out in the woods. The trees strangled the Morrissey because he spoke of selling them all for timber and getting rid of our land!”

In the confused silence that greeted this preposterous statement, she walked out, leaving behind her a massed political war council of those determined not only to cut a deal with the lumber people but also, now, to avenge their martyr, and others scratching their heads and saying, the trees? The trees? Bernadette, pinned to the pew by the excitement of her rage, now sobbed and ground her teeth and begged to be carried out of the church. It was most unlike her, this impulsive weeping, this charging forward. Bony and elbowing, her arms slashed the air. As she was in fact a powerful character by reason of her influence upon the government agent, her agitation acted as a catalyst to further uproar.

Father Damien, now fearing they might burn down his church in their frenzy, patrolled inside nervously, then outside. What else could he do? This was a test. Agnes stopped, put her hands on her hips, rallied her wits and her strength. Was her priest to be driven from his own church? She rocked on her heels. Listened to the mass of would-be mourners argue and shout. She clenched and unclenched her fists, and at last threw her power into the voice and demeanor of Father Damien. Strode back inside.

At first, the muscled backs and shoving arms and jutting chins of the arguers barred him, but he persevered until he gained the altar. Gathering up his courage, he suddenly vaulted up onto the coffin, which sat on a sturdy table. He stood there with fists on his hips, at which point the mourners shut up and gaped at him in mass reproach.