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

So they returned, propped their snowshoes against the sides of the cabin, rekindled the fire that Mary Kashpaw had banked and left, and rolled into their beds. For a while she slept, but then, waking in the dark, a fury of discomfort seized Agnes, as though her skin was being stung with red-hot needles. She prickled all over, and she prayed for help in wrestling with her thoughts. By dawn, most of them were subdued.

Most, not all.

She had to touch him. There was no help for it. There was a faint, sweet, brown to Father Wekkle’s skin, a fading suntan, almost golden. His hands were broad, sensitive, well-padded, with wide, spreading, generous thumbs. He was good with a hammer, and one of his most winsome qualities was his sunny energy for carpentry work. He cleaned and oiled and sharpened the contents of his tool chest every few days. Agnes struggled for a while longer, angry and despairing of her need just to touch him by accident, just once! Be sensible, she told herself whenever her thoughts lighted on his hair, brown and wavy, growing out of its cut in swirls.

She was sensible until the night the books fell.

There were times she woke too early, and so as not to wake Father Wekkle, she read the spines of her side of the double wall of books stacked between them. Among others, she had given herself the Russians, all of George Eliot, her beloved Aquinas, Augustine, St. Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle , and a two-volume set of the lives of the saints. This last was to atone for the other volumes, only four, of Colette — though, after all, François Mauriac had said that her voluptuousness led the soul to God. She had covered those books in butcher paper and changed the titles to Latin. She also kept the strange assortment of donated books to read through and decide upon — accounts of personal voyages were popular among them, as well as outdated medicinal or fashion advice. Mauriac was on Agnes’s side and also Proust, William James, and others she was confident of displaying. Stendhal, Hugo, and all of the Greeks were stacked on Wekkle’s side. Plus the histories of states and provinces and the mesmerizing horrors of a collection of Jesuit relations, which had once belonged to Father Hugo.

She knew the wall of books by each title. After the lantern was out, at night, she put out her hand and traced the stamped letters on the spines and the embossed ridges. Some of her newer books were very plainly bound, but she loved to run her fingers over them, too. Their heavily woven cloth covers were of a texture pleasingly dry and soft to her touch. Even when she was exhausted, each night she brushed the books between her bed and Father Wekkle’s, and she held her palm upon them until the books warmed to her touch. It seemed to her, listening to the other priest’s calm breath, that the books between them were a third, sympathetic, entity. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged. Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinements, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. Hers was merely what it was, and her aches over it as well, but in all of the books that composed the wall between the two priests, and in all of the stories she’d ever read, she never had come across the exact example of what she contemplated doing to Father Wekkle. Nor could she imagine his reacting to her touch with anything but mystery and horror. Therefore, she took her hand away from the wall.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Father Wekkle was a sleeper who thrashed. He slept in a moleskin robe that his mother had sewn for him and insisted he wear up north in the bitter wild. Every night he put it on with mixed gratitude and embarrassment. As he was sensitive to the cold, its warmth made him thankful. At the same time, as his mother could not bear plain things and had sewn it with a ruffle, he made very certain that no other human ever saw him in it. As he slept, he warmed, and as he got warmer, he flailed in the moleskin gown and kicked away his covers, tossed and muttered. Also, he dreamed, and his dreams were always action masterpieces. All he’d left undone or half done during the day, he’d finish. More than that, he’d start new projects or he’d make parish visits, leaping high in his snowshoes and skating, even flying, to the rescue of those stranded from the presence of the Host. All that he imagined, he acted out and he had, many times, awakened Agnes. He’d also kicked or struck the book wall, making it lean so perilously that it sometimes had to be rebuilt by Father Damien, who could not help remember Agnes’s convent days as Cecilia and the careful construction of the birdbath containing only the brickworks word, Fleisch, and now again the wall she made containing thousands, perhaps millions of words, and still in her mind only that one word.

The moleskin robe stuck to Father Wekkle when he sweated, twisting around his hips so that he sometimes dreamed erotically. He had, in fact, that night, been the victim of a most intense and mysterious veiled female whose lips, only, were revealed by a small, round hole in the cloth. Her lips moved, mouthing the words Be sensible , words that require the most seductive motions of the lips. The advice aroused him and he lunged for her impatiently and in his sudden movement toppled the books.

In the stillness of the night, they were a skidding avalanche. One struck Agnes full in the face and she started awake, heart pounding. Groping around herself in panic, she touched him. His hand grasped hers. They didn’t move. The collapse of books had also torn down the blanket divider, so the moon-pale light from the window on Gregory’s side of the cabin washed across their beds. Raggedly breathing, hearts quickened, blinking, hands touching, they poised. If either had simply withdrawn a hand they would have laughed, rebuilt the wall of books. But they continued, in their staged paralysis, to search each other’s dim-lighted faces. Both were desperate for clues — what was to happen? At the same moment, both imperceptibly leaned forward. Brightness from the full moon rested evenly upon their hair, but their faces were in shadow so that, as Gregory tipped his chin questingly forward into that final space, he felt that he ducked into a cave. Once he entered that half sphere of shadow, he was lost. She was lost. They lay down together among the scattered books. Into Gregory’s mind, there surged the awful and appalling joy of knowing he was one of those whom the Church darkly warned against, the ones who lay with men as with women. The sin he would commit would be equal to the sin of murder, one of those sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.

In Agnes’s mind, a willing despair to be discovered. Her nipples burned against the cloth and her body slipped its boundaries of skin. Darkness sifted through her and she rose toward him, light, powerful, and calm. Gregory touched her breast through the night shift, and in a dreamlike reversal of who he feared he was, he held her like a raft in a torrent. They spoke now, their whispers incoherent. They undressed each other slowly, with formal innocence, shocked into foolishness at the pleasure of each discovery. Gregory had no experience at all of a woman’s nakedness, and the final sight of her, strong and unbound, washed in silver, astonished him so that he could merely sit with her for a time and touch her as one might a fabulous animal before suddenly, at her gesture, he spread her thighs open and entered the shadow between.

In surprise, once they began to move, they sighed in relief and smiled, delighted and aghast, to find themselves utterly safe and at peace. That was the strange and unexpected component of their passion — how safe, how ordinary, how blessedly normal it felt. For the next few days they lived in a daze, but nothing changed. In their work they were more zealous, more dutiful. They drove themselves harder than before. Secure in the night, they took no chances in the day and were remote but friendly with each other. Weeks accumulated in which neither spoke of what was happening. Only, in the depth of the night, with the window curtained, they made love with a charged tenderness that left them faint and weeping. Before falling asleep, they set things straight and returned to either side of their wall of books. Each whispered good night to the spines, the massed pages, then lay still underneath the heavy patched wool of the quilts of army blankets.