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

As though reading his mind, Nanapush asked just exactly why his uncle had allowed his nephew the use of such a prize possession, at which point Makoons admitted the truth. Nanapush brightened then, his thoughts clicked into place.

“Ah, my boy, this is good news! And tell me, did anyone witness you boys driving around the reservation to show off this car?”

At this, they well could answer that only Zozed Bizhieu…

“Who is unreliable,” said Nanapush.

… and Father Damien…

“Who is oblivious,” crowed Nanapush.

… had seen them riding in the Model T touring car.

Then Nanapush put both hands out and gestured with his pipe.

“Young ones,” he said, “I am supposed to be old and wise. So I can’t tell you what I would do. All I can say is nobody saw you take the car, nobody saw you drive the car, and nothing would have happened had you not encountered the Lazarres. And as you lived, I don’t see why you boys shouldn’t end up heroes instead of punished for a Lazarre crime. Now, once again, who took the car?”

Makoons’s mouth dropped open, puzzled, and he was ready to say, “Well I did, you know that!” Nector hushed him.

“No, cousin,” he gently said, patting Makoons on the shoulder, “think harder. Wasn’t Adik Lazarre at the wheel when you entered your uncle’s yard, and didn’t you round us all up to go and chase him, and didn’t he”—now Nector gestured at Johnny Onesides—“didn’t he head for Matchimanito and then, as we came rushing after the Lazarres, looking for revenge and to take back your uncle’s car, didn’t they overpower us, tie us in the car’s seats, and nearly drown us as it plowed into the lake?”

The boys paused only slightly before every one of them agreed that it was so, and then Nanapush sat back, very satisfied, and finished his smoke.

1913–1919

Agnes’s fingers ached. They moved ceaselessly in patterns that raged up and down the desk and table. The ghostly language that her hands spoke sharpened her longing. Perhaps, she thought, she had been deaf at one time and learned to speak in signs. The utterances of her fingers were complex — whole speeches, whole poems, whole books. She began to think that they knew something she did not. Sometimes she watched her hands, as from far away. Arched, veined with somber blue, the fingers delicate but square tipped, tapping. They tapped wherever they landed, struck the surface of table, desk, basin, paper, with forceful rococo skill. At last, though exhausted, to distract herself and to give her hands a ready focus, Agnes began the task of sorting and organizing the packets of correspondence, the papers and documents, the scrapped plans of Father Hugo.

The other priest had not the thrill for organization that she had developed since her affliction of memory. Before the shooting, as far as she could tell, Agnes was apt to file bills by stuffing them in lard cans. After, and without her shadowy Berndt, Agnes, and then Father Damien, gained a passion for setting small things into a rigid order. Perhaps it was a way of compensating for the loss of events. Perhaps it was a way of gaining back the person she was, or inventing this new one.

At any rate, Agnes tackled Father Hugo’s piles with a singular desperation close to happiness. She vowed to finish an incomplete Ojibwe grammar and dictionary. She found church plans of a fascinating nature. She found old bills of lading and a letter from a disappointed woman. She found pitiful mementos of unknown moments — buttons, flags, a dead watch. One day she was pleased to find a crumpled set of sketches and plans for a printed letter, one that Hugo hoped to deliver to a list of subscribers in the Fargo diocese and beyond.

Father Damien called the letter Notes from the Mission at Little No Horse. In it, he described the piteous effects of the most recent illness. The ravages of hunger. The moral effect of land loss and the deep thirst he had already experienced among the people — a thirst for the spiritual drink, curiosity, a hunger for the food of the heart. He did not describe Kashpaw, or the difficulty regarding the question whether to pare down the number of his wives. He did not speak of Agnes’s own bitter guilt over trying to enforce such a thing, or the pitiable events after Quill went mad, nor did he repeat the jokes of Nanapush. Father Damien strongly expressed his belief that certain hungers could be assuaged and souls brought to Christ through the consolatory application of money.

Father Hugo had compiled a list of names and addresses. There were four hundred. Father Damien gave to himself the task of copying two letters each night after peace fell, and sending them as a packet at the end of the week. When they were all dispatched, Agnes began each night to direct the letters in her prayers. She asked intercession with each letter, prayed to her personal guardian, whom she believed she remembered as St. Cecilia. She imagined Father Damien’s words in the hands of others, begged for a spark touched to a generous fire. Her fingers itched and stung.

Some money arrived, a dollar here and there for which she was profoundly grateful. Then a short deluge of junk. Bales of clothing were unloaded from an army truck — moth-chewed gray blankets. Jackets and pants of drab wool. The entire reservation took on a military air. One thousand cream cans arrived, a windfall. They were used as chairs, storage, canoe floats, anchors when filled with sand, and even by some of the more ambitious farmers, cream. Dozens of yardsticks. Harpoons and lobster traps, though the sea was half a continent away. Finally, a battered green-black upright piano arrived, painted and then scratched down to the white of the wood.

The thing sat before the church. It was floridly carved. Bunches of grapes decorated the sounding board. The feet were claws. Was it a lion or an arbor? Even the metaphor is mixed, thought Agnes with amused interest. The instrument had seen rain, warping humidity, and the sands of a scouring wind. Its keys were black as bad teeth. She touched the keyboard curiously and raised a tone, questing and off key. To Sister Hildegarde, the donation was spectacular.

“The carving, such workmanship!” The nun ran her fingers over the balled grapes, the flowing vines and leaves. Unloaded from a dray cart, the instrument seemed to crouch. Halfway into the church, it rested heavily on the threshold.

“Take it back!” cried Agnes all of a sudden, shocking herself.

A reasonless emotion resembling panic gripped her. She felt too large for her skin, the priest’s collar tightened around her throat, and her hands began to move with their own life. She tried severely to check their motion by winding them in Father Damien’s cassock.

“Absolutely not!” Sister Hildegarde thought Father Damien was perhaps too diffident to accept such a generous gift. She began to lecture him on having the humility to accept what God sent. As she launched into an attack on his pride, Father Damien regained some measure of control and stopped her, raising his freed hands in surrender.

“All right!” He lowered the curved and recessed keyboard lid and then, with a key that fit within one of the clawed feet, locked the lid. All at once, Agnes felt more secure, although she could not imagine why and shook her head quizzically to clear it as she walked away. It was as though the keyboard itself were a giant set of teeth. As though the instrument were capable of devouring her!

Sister Hildegarde took charge and applied herself to cozening three heavyset parishioners to move the awful wooden creature. She brought them tea and thick chunks of lard on bread. Flattered them into setting the groaning weight here, no there, Entschuldigt, back to the first again . She agonized over the exact placement and hoped that Father Damien would commission a statue, at last a real statue for the church at Little No Horse. Such a thing would need a place of honor near the piano, where it could be seen and adored.