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

The snow melted into the earth and they walked now, through mud and swollen mashkiig, to bring communion to the laid-up devout, to instruct for various sacraments. Returning one cold spring day, they paused to rest on the soft old winter-dusty grass. They sat down silently. Gregory tore off a piece of the bannock given to them, and Agnes accepted the bread from his hands and ate. The massed reeds in the slough were a scorched and radiant yellow. The sun shot down from a half-gray sky, picking out the birch with a fierce light.

“I belong to you,” said Gregory to Agnes. “I love you.”

When she said the same to him, the bread went dry on their tongues and they felt spreading from those words a branching fury of impossible difficulty.

BERNADETTE’S CONFESSION

As Father Damien hustled across the yard to hear confessions, he saw that the nuns had frozen their pump again and were using Mary Kashpaw as their beast of burden. He watched her as he walked, saw her stagger as she rounded the corner to the back door of the convent, a great pole laid across her shoulders, two buckets hanging down from either end. He made a note to stop the sisters from overusing the girl’s strength, and passed at once into the church. There were a few parishioners hunched in contemplation near the jerry-built box of boards and blankets in which he heard confessions. He sat in the middle box, on a small cushioned stool, and bent to the muslin shadow. A discreet cough. The sinner spoke.

“What is it when you know of a sin and do nothing?”

“That is a sin of silence.”

“So it is a sin.”

“Yes.”

“Then I must confess it,” said the woman unwillingly.

In a few sentences, then, the woman whose voice was familiar to Damien — it was Bernadette’s — confirmed the truth of what he had long ago suspected of Napoleon Morrissey. He heard the rest of her confession in a numb, unfused state of tension. He absolved Bernadette, heard the other confessions. Once they were all finished, he continued to sit in the little booth, in his lap the soft, old, battered breviary that had belonged to Father Hugo. At last, he believed he knew the murderer of Napoleon Morrissey, and he pitied and loved the killer — his own Mary Kashpaw. According to Bernadette, Napoleon Morrissey had forced himself on Mary Kashpaw, most probably raping her. It followed in his mind that Mary Kashpaw had the strength to have strangled Napoleon with the cunningly wrought necklace of thorns. As for her hands, they were tough as leather mitts, scarred, and roped with calluses. If the barbed-wire rosary tore her palms, it was impossible to tell anymore. And yet, why would Mary Kashpaw construct such a dark-spirited artifact?

Agnes put her fingertips to her eyes, kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She thought of Mary Kashpaw digging, digging, and her heart went hollow. Yet she was so tired that she could feel only a pale, exhausted pity for the angry confusion of that violated girl. Perhaps too much feeling had withered her heart and now it was a frail, paper husk. Whirling with frustration, she jumped from the confessional and walked back to the cabin. There, she began to work, cleaning with a mad zeal similar to Mary Kashpaw’s. She shoveled ashes out of the stove, then fetched a pot of blacking and painted it, opening the doors to let the spring air carry off the sharp odor of the paint. She worked on her papers until between her hands she snapped a pen. Then she cleaned up the spilled ink, dusted her books. Muttering and on the verge of weeping, she suddenly flung herself onto the bed. In a moment, she fell into a well of thick unconsciousness.

She was still asleep when Father Wekkle and Mary Kashpaw returned from a wood-hauling trip. Mary stamped down the snow for him too, broke the trail. Sometimes he teased her, called her Mary Stamper, and the big girl flushed, although whether she liked it or was embarrassed by the name there was no telling. While Father Wekkle went back to the church to set it all to rights and lock it for the night, Mary Kashpaw quietly drew near to Father Damien. For a long moment, she looked down at him with solemn watchfulness. Then she pulled a rough blanket from the back of a chair, shook out the folds, and secured it around the sleeping priest’s body with awkward, firm, tucks. Lastly, she plucked loose the laces of Father Damien’s boots and stealthily eased them off and then stripped the socks from the priest’s long, narrow, tender white feet. She set the boots beside the bed, hung the socks over each toe. She tucked the end of the blanket over the vulnerable feet, and then blew out the candle before she walked out to sleep upon the broken bales of hay, within the questions of the owls and the tremble of mice, and behind the barred door of the shed.

THE CLOUD

“How many ways are we damned?” said Agnes into the black air.

Gregory pushed his hands over her face, smoothing her features up into a smile he could feel with his fingers. Then he stretched full length alongside of her and tucked her close to him. His throat pinched shut with raw sadness, and he could not answer. He had started to become a priest when he was only nine years old. He had never questioned or doubted his vocation, and he had never been tempted beyond the usual ways boys are tempted, by thoughts and dreams. But it was as though he’d saved his whole life so far for this one outrageous test. What happened with Agnes was as direct a piece of knowledge as when he knew his calling. There was no way to question its truth, and veracity was for Gregory Wekkle the essence of his soul. One particular volume from the stack between the two priests had fallen into his hands one night and Gregory, though not a violently greedy reader like Agnes, read it again and again. The book was a mystical work called The Cloud of Unknowing. In it, the author had said that to know God one must first know oneself. One will know God in oneself. Gregory knew himself and knew his love for Agnes was a good love, filled with tenderness and light. He tortured himself in his prayers to find evil in his actions, but knew only harmony and righteous peace. Nothing, none of this, fit doctrine.

“How many ways are we damned?” asked Agnes, again.

“Every way possible, I imagine,” said Gregory lightly, though his heart was squeezing shut. “Have you counted?”

“Let me,” said Agnes. After a moment, she put up her hand and gravely ticked off her fingers the types of sins she taught children in catechism. “We have sinned mortally of course, although our sin is so grave there isn’t an exact definition for it.”

Gregory shook his head. Willfully drowsy with a kind of lazy despair, he mumbled as if by rote, “I’ve done this with the full consent of my will, and clear knowledge of the act.”

“The wages are eternal punishment,” said Agnes. They held each other closer and he breathed along the curve of her collarbone.

“We’ve sinned against the Holy Ghost,” he whispered. “I feel deliberate resistance to the known truth because, Agnes, I know the truth. It is in me and it tells me to love.”

Agnes silently stroked his hair, smoothed her hands along his temples and down his jaw. This truth was hers, too, the kernel at the center of all she did in the blackest night was an unwilled simplicity. Her desire was one with a kind regard that felt both sinless and irresistible.

“We’ve sinned by omission,” she said, thinking of it. “We’ve sinned by silence, since we’re responsible for giving each other up to the authorities, reporting. We haven’t committed the sin of Sodom.”

“That’s something.” Gregory could not help imagining the act, all of a sudden, but the whole catalog now struck him as ridiculous. “We haven’t committed murder, buggered each other, or oppressed the poor.”