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

PRAYER

Four times a day — on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed — Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed. He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction — those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.

LULU’S BAPTISM

Father Damien baptized a bear and the baby in the woods on the wrong side of Matchimanito, and all because of Margaret Kashpaw. She sent his altar boy, Nector, to fetch him one day. Father Damien went along eagerly, swinging his arms through the bush that seemed to close instantly behind them. Very quickly, Father Damien grew disoriented and then lost. When at last they got near enough to the lake, a slim track that petered out and resumed and buried itself again, Nector pointed where Father Damien should go, then vanished. Agnes stood bereft for a moment, uncertain, then plunged on.

Keeping to the way was exhausting, but soon she could see, as long as she stayed near the shore, the outline of Fleur’s cabin. Resting, she took off the pack in order to check the contents and make certain she had included, in haste, all that was needed. She had just removed the vial of holy water when a gunshot sounded from the vicinity of the cabin. Startled, she splashed herself, then crossed herself at the sound of violent crashing, snapping, muttered grunting. In moments, the source of noise was before her, though lightly screened. And then the bear ripped aside the leaves.

Bear and priest gaped at each other in astounded dismay. The bear blinked its weak eyes, its intelligent nostrils rigid and glistening with inquiry. Agnes behaved by perfect instinct. As the holy water was immediately to hand, she dipped her fingers in and made the sign of the cross, giving the bear a tiny splash. Flinching as though shot, the bear jumped away and was gone. The bush closed over. Agnes was left to whack her way forward until she came to the cabin, at last, and stood panting in the clearing.

“Piindigen, Father!”

Margaret Kashpaw rushed out of the cabin and grabbed him so he spun with a jerk and was dragged to the doorway, into which she disappeared, tiptoeing back out with a baby in her arms. Stealthily, she asked Father Damien to baptize the infant.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have. It went against his very grain, he later thought, to baptize in secret, but when he saw Fleur’s newborn baby something happened to him — or to Agnes, what did it matter? The tender damage was done. Barely one day old, Lulu was the first newly born child he’d held in all his life. His other baptisms had been months or more usually years, often many years, old. Calm, deliberate, focused, serene, this new being stared at him with eyes that still knew the face of unbeing. In the long drinking gaze that grew between them, Agnes experienced a protective adoration that shook her to the bone.

“May I hold her?” Father Damien’s voice was hoarse.

Margaret gave the baby over, transferring the frail, floppy head and tight limbs, the exquisite pinch of buttocks and updrawn red knees. Agnes felt immediately natural holding her, as though her tiny goodness set off a charm in her brain. Father Damien laughed, delighted, baptized her with a slow enchantment and only reluctantly gave her back to Margaret. Agnes was still absorbed in the primal sweetness of the experience when Nanapush decided to walk back with the priest, and Father Damien was still lost in marveling when he returned to his own cabin and withdrew, from his desk, the certificate traditionally written out and kept for each new member of the parish. It was perhaps the imprint of the tiny body against his own, the connection that still lingered, a dreaminess, that caused him when he signed the certificate to add his own name, twice, mistakenly and along with Nanapush, as both priest and father.

Father Damien began to visit more often once the baby was born, for in the child’s presence, Agnes could temporarily forget the burden of half-realized memory and the load of suspicion that she carried through her days. Lulu was a touchy, lively charmer, precocious and fearless, curious and sincere. She was easy to please; anyone could rock her to sleep in her tikinagan of ash and cedar, the covering intricately beaded with flowers and heavy vines. Watching her drowsy lids fall, her delicate lip quiver with surrender, Agnes’s heart lifted. She was overcome with strange contentment, not maternal so much as fully human. During those visits she became a connected being.

Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. Nanapush of course, as teacher and friend, was the first she knew well intellectually. But Fleur, too, accepted the priest fondly. The moments when Fleur’s rare smile burst out were stunning pockets of light, and Agnes looked for them and courted them with an eagerness she hoped was not too obvious. Margaret, kindhearted and sour-tongued, loved Father Damien in spite of herself — he felt it in her grumpy embrace. He was always surprised when she showed anything at all besides the dour scorn her family inspired. Their love for him, in return, pained him and soothed him. He was thrilled and touched with sadness, he was hungry, and he was practical. He was lonely; he was a priest.

COLLATERAL

John James Mauser appeared, not in person but in the persons of others — in the local commissioner and the tax collector general. Payment-due notices arrived, which nobody understood. In the fine print, it said collateral would gladly be taken. Collateral wasn’t birch-bark baskets or buckets of just picked berries. It wasn’t a side of venison, a pack of furs, maple sugar, wild rice, dried currants, tanned hide, or anything else that by hook, crook, luck, or grueling work or desperate hoarding anyone was able to get. Collateral was land.

Sister Hildegarde had seen it coming, but she and Father Damien had been battling the spirit of disease, and then, absorbed in raising their church, they’d lost track of land acquisitions and foreclosures. They’d left off filling in the map whose boundaries changed drastically day to day. Father Damien’s despair had robbed him of awareness, too, so it was with a tremendous sense of self-castigating helplessness that they both, in stymied dumb surprise, regarded the papers in the hands of Nanapush, papers that transferred the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and to Nanapush himself into the hands of the lumber company.