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

“Bekaayan,” he ordered them. “Bizindamoog! You think I am disrespectful to stand full square upon the dead? No different than what you are doing! Be gone! Get out! This is a place of the Lord!”

Father Damien then had the glad luck to spy a strong whip coiled on the front pew. Bounding to the floor, he grabbed it and then commenced wielding it all around, right and left, so that the shamed mourners drew back and scattered. Stumbled through the door, and left. Father Damien emptied the place, and then stood panting near the holy water font, a bowl on a log, and cut the air in the sign of the cross.

Scrawny Mr. Bizhieu crept back in and begged Father Damien to return his whip. His rage leaped high and Father Damien launched it at Bizhieu like a lance.

“Miigwetch,” said the whip’s owner in admiration.

Soon it would be told all through the reservation and the land how the young priest drove false worshipers straight from God’s holy presence with a scourge just like the adventurous Jesus whipped the zhooniya men in the temple. And further, the story embellished, how those touched by the whip itself were saved and could not help creeping back to the church with confessions, while others were cured of goiters, sore eyes, rheumatism. And the whip itself was proudly displayed by the Bizhieus. Only Father Damien felt shame at his loss of temper, and resolved to be pragmatic from then on.

He would conduct two separate Masses for the enemies, so that they would never meet and defile the holy presence with their disputes.

BERNADETTE

After Bernadette came to her wits, she realized that she could do a lot more for her side of things than agreeing with Margaret. Even now, she was the one who made calculations on each parcel of land, the one who figured for the land company and government too, and for the lumbering operation co-owned by John James Mauser. She was the one who accidentally, by virtue only of her skill with small numbers, suddenly acquired an undeserved power over the fates of her neighbors and tribespeople. A half-blood, she called herself French and despised the old ones. She was mirthless and ruthless, and she decided that she would use her brother’s death to cast suspicion on the one whose mind no money would affect.

“Nanapush,” she told all who would listen. “He and those Pillagers killed my brother because he wanted to sign!” She thrust out her skinny neck. “The backwards ones, the holdouts. They threw his poor body in the bush and went on with their ceremonies!”

Once she said it the first time, her theory was repeated to every listener. Napoleon was killed, horridly and thoroughly, by the full-blood blanket Indians, she called them, who couldn’t understand that the money offered for the land and lumber came around once and once only. She asserted that, as a horse trader, Napoleon Morrissey had known a good deal. In no time, she had quite a number convinced that it was useless to do anything but go forward, live forward, take the money in their hands, and find a new place to put their hearts and their feet.

NECTOR KASHPAW

The tension ran so high that Father Damien was relieved he’d had the foresight to conduct two separate Holy Masses for the rancorous families. Their arguments split the reservation, and from then on they would contend for control of everything from jelly recipes and secrets of hide tanning to land and political say-so. The Morrissey and Lazarre camp, aligned with the company owned by Palmer Turcot and John James Mauser, took the early Mass. The Masses were widely spaced apart so that there would be no overlap, no meeting of the enemies in the innocence of the churchyard. Kashpaws, including Nanapush and those in sympathy with Pillagers, came walking to the late Mass. At first, there was complaint from the Morrisseys when Nector Kashpaw returned from government school and served at their Mass, too, but he was still a boy so they forgot about it.

That was a mistake.

For Nector Kashpaw would be the one who would count who was there and who wasn’t, the one who would make himself small and very quiet, the one who would eventually hold the power of the pen over Bernadette.

PENMANSHIP

As great towers are by the underpinnings weakened and overthrown, so the seeming insignificance of Nector was the key to the eventual downfall of the Morrisseys. Nobody knew of or saw the quick intelligence at work behind the holy-boy shutter of his face. No one thought to wonder what he learned at the hands of the nuns or from Father Damien. All the time that he was not trapping, hunting, attempting to dig and plant in accordance with the government wishes, and all the time that he was missing from the camps of his elders and the company of the medicine people and their wisdom, Nector was learning to read zhaaganaashimowin and to write the language of the conquering officials and the land companies in the beautifully flowing and elegant script that Sister Hildegarde Anne taught with painstaking love from two books — Merrill’s Modern Penmanship and the classic Graphic System of Practical Penmanship were her bibles.

It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life. That and hygiene — but though the hygiene just had to be adequate, the writing had to be exquisite. So she worked with her readiest pupil, Nector, until, using a pencil kept pin-sharp, then graduating to a precious, borrowed pen, he could form letters that rivaled the illustrations in the penmanship books. Soon his writing approached even Sister Hildegarde’s own for purity and consistency. His words were in their execution indisputably grander, firmer, and more controlled than the written words of Bernadette Morrissey, who corresponded with the government.

During this time, and while he was getting his growth, other extreme events occurred. The Lazarres and Morrisseys became still more bold and insulting to those who did not agree with their views. Earlier they had gone so far as to kidnap, threaten, and even shave the head of Nector’s mother, Margaret. The revenges that followed were distinct to the Pillagers. Fleur killed with fear, Nanapush used piano wire, Margaret flayed her enemies to nothing with the bitter blade of her tongue.

Nector got even by the use of penmanship.

After he returned from government school, he positioned himself carefully by pretending to be neutral. His bland, blinking, new-grown handsomeness caught the eye of Bernadette, who hired him — though that was a fancy word for a job that paid in grease, potatoes, and an occasional dime. He was to assist her in putting into operation an order from the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. That order was this: the administrator at each agency was to mend, classify, and flat-file all of the old files. In this case, the files dated back to well before the birth of Nanapush.

Bernadette thought she could trust young Nector Kashpaw because he’d been exposed to the withering light of the government school. She thought he couldn’t hurt a system so snarled that she herself couldn’t account for where land or inheritance papers went and what happened to commodities ordered from various crooks. She was tired of the stacks of mail to answer, of the loss of landholdings personal to clans other than her own, tired of trying to account for these losses in words that she couldn’t invent fast enough to please the Chief of Methods Division. In Nector, so bright and obedient a boy, she thought she had a malleable, sensible son who understood that the time of the old traditions was accomplished and over, a boy who wished a clean sweep and progressive future, if he wished anything at all yet, for his people. Not that Bernadette Morrissey, cow hips jutting, face long and exhausted, eyes weak from doing money sums, had a vision. She didn’t. She only wanted what was most comfortable. What was secure.