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

Father Gregory Wekkle walked up the hill quite alone, apparently having come in much the same way Agnes had originally. As she was striding across the crisp new dusting of snow on the church grounds, she saw him waiting at the door of her cabin, a small rounded suitcase and a wooden toolbox at his feet. Father Wekkle was of medium height and form, but gave the impression of being a bigger man, animated by a complex and slightly awkward energy. He moved eagerly, and had an open and friendly look about him, a disarming lack of polish or priestly grace. His hair was brown as a monk’s robe, his eyes a muddy Irish hazel. His smile was a great flash of light. Agnes sighed. There was a sweetness to the man she couldn’t have expected, a quality of taking pleasure in his own being. She decided that he had to be harmless. She underestimated, as she often did with men, his intelligence. Already, she imagined his developing into the kindly, rotund sort of priest who dispenses easy penances and excellent reassurances. What did he need from her?

She grasped his hand anyway, and shook it — a hard-palmed warm workman’s hand. She looked down at his box of tools and then the heat from his heavy palm flowed up her arm into her heart. Surprised, she took the jolt of his goodness almost painfully and tried to control the sudden flood of happiness that filled her with terror.

“Come in. Let’s set things up. Let’s make you comfortable, Father…?”

“Wekkle. Gregory Wekkle.”

Agnes mustered the stern and kindly formality of Father Damien, and nodded him through the door. His presence startled her into an objective look at her house, and the clutter of it suddenly dismayed her. There were books everywhere. Books she had begged for in her newsletter, intending to set up a library. People from surrounding parishes now gave her books, tried to sell books to her, laid them on the church doorstep. Father Damien had become known for his avidity and was the first one people thought of when a book, any book, became useless. Thus she had a stack of the last century’s Godey’s Lady’s Books , as well as Lutheran hymnals, but also treasures. Thomas Aquinas in an endless indestructible leather-bound edition with Italian marbled endpapers and a gold-embossed title on the spine. A complete set of Dickens.

The two proceeded to make way through stacks of books into the tiny cabin. Out of the stacks of books, they made separate rooms. They stacked the books two by two, then crosswise, like bricks, into a wall. Then Father Wekkle was given a bedstead by Sister Hildegarde and the two priests placed it on the other side of the wall. They used blanket dividers, hung them from the beams. As they worked, they spoke, though Agnes tried to remain cool. Father Gregory Wekkle was young, but not as young as Agnes had expected, not that she had expected. They were the same age, a peril, as she’d have his questions. Fortunately, Agnes had memorized information from the newsletters sent to Little No Horse by the original Father Damien’s seminary. She was able to speak very generally of other priests they might know in common. To her relief, Father Gregory did not pursue their histories except as a polite gesture. He was much more interested in the present, and in learning from Father Damien all that he could before taking up a reservation post — he knew not where, not yet.

He was pleasant, he was congenial, he was both shrewder and more innocent than she saw at first. Already, that night, drifting into sleep behind her woolen blanket curtain, Agnes prayed that something would call Father Wekkle away immediately, that he leave precipitously, anything but risk again that jolt of pleasure in the immediacy of his presence.

The first deep snow isolated the reservation from the rest of the world and sank the cabin in a swirl of white drifts. The roads were blocked until the horse-drawn sledges would pack down the snow, or until the plow tore laboriously through the high snow pack down to the train station in Hoopdance. Still, there were rounds to be made. Communion to bring to the sick and the very old. Children to teach their catechism. Nanapush had taught Father Damien how to make bear paw snowshoe frames and lace them with moose guts and sinew. Now Agnes was teaching Gregory Wekkle.

“Make the fire extremely hot,” she said.

He’d brought logs in to feed the stove, and he stuffed its belly with dried birch until the iron glowed pulsing red. She had already split the ash and now she showed him how to heat it and bend it into a circle. In a pail by her foot, she’d covered fresh moose guts with water. Slowly, she smoothed each one clean between her fingers, forming a pile of moose-chewed water lilies on the table.

“Some people eat this,” she told Gregory. “It’s like salad with a dressing of moose digestive juices.”

“Unknown, as yet, in the fine St. Paul restaurants.”

Agnes laughed and asked him when was the last time he ate in a fine St. Paul restaurant.

“Before I came here, my parents had a farewell party.”

“Do you miss your family?” Agnes strung a loop of intestine between the sides of the hoop, fastening it tight.

“I do,” said Gregory. “They’re coming up to visit in the spring.”

Agnes’s heart jumped and sank at the same time. Would he stay here that long? It was too long. It was not long enough. The heat from the overfed stove rose in her cheeks. “No!” she roughly said, grasping the new priest’s wrists to help him bend the wood properly. “You do it like this.” A mistake. Close, she smelled the wood heat on his skin, the washed soapy scent of his neck, the scorched wool upon which he must have used a too hot iron, and sweat. A faint, low, clean, and intensely sexual workman’s sweat. Agnes felt herself leaning into the air around him.

“Damn,” said Gregory in a low voice as the heated wood popped from his hands. He laughed in derision at himself and crossed the room to retrieve the piece of half-bent wood. He lingered on the cool side of the cabin, and breathed deeply, disturbed at his own physical reaction to the proximity of Father Damien.

*

They traveled to the deep bush on those snowshoes, brought communion to Zozed Bizhieu and her troublesome daughter, visited Nanapush. When they traveled, they carried blanket rolls tied onto their shoulders, and a pack of bread, dried meat, raisins. Gregory Wekkle brought a flask, always, of his favorite whiskey, for he didn’t see anything wrong with a drop now and then. And although Agnes observed there were a good many nows, and a huge number of thens, she nonetheless drank with him a drop, or two, or maybe more than that. It became very pleasant while out on their visits to stop on the way back, build a fire, sit there with the whiskey and the bannock and the raisins, until it was time to go back to the parish cabin.

“Father Damien,” said Gregory one night, as they laughed over some clumsiness, “why don’t we stay out here?”

“I believe we’d worry Sister Hildegarde” was Damien’s answer, and he quickly dumped snow on the fire. As they tramped the miles back, Agnes felt a sting of wishful desire. Nanapush had taught her how to build a brush shelter to conserve the heat of the fire, and the night was warm and starry. The whiskey gave her the temporary illusion of gliding power. She was on the verge of stopping there, making a new camp, and she even paused, turned, and opened her mouth to speak.

There was Father Wekkle, struggling behind her with a hopeful, bearish serenity. After he barged forward, he would stop, breath on his fingers, arrange his scarf, shrug, and surge forward again. He worked his way along in a comical intensity, and Agnes felt her heart squeeze at his endearing earnestness and cheer. Often, even in his snowshoes, he managed to break through the crust of snow. He had a start-stop kind of steadiness about him and kept on lunging forward. She saw the white flash of his teeth when he grinned at her, and she turned back onto the path, mumbling to herself, Be sensible!