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

“Sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.”

“We’ve done Actual Sin, Formal Sin, Habitual Sin.”

Gregory kissed her forehead and cupped his broad hand around her face. The way the curve of her face fit into his hand took away his breath for a moment, and then he took a painful gulp of air and laughed.

“I hope Dante was right about hell,” he said. “I don’t think I would mind so much whirling in that dark wind with you forever.”

“Cut off from God.”

“If we are cut off from God by sinning,” he said, low, “why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud?”

THE LETTER

In the lucid green blush of early summer, Agnes wrote the letter. Not until autumn could Father Damien bear to mail it.

Reverend Bishop,

I have instructed the good Father Wekkle to the limits of which I am capable. He is an honorable priest and devoted to his calling. Please make your assignment of his new post known to him as quickly as possible.

She had to write the letter so that, when he received the one that would arrive in reply, the sight of him reading it wouldn’t kill her. It didn’t come by return post. Not for many weeks. But when it did, she knew. The envelope had no weight. It was only a paper rectangle set into her hand with such a light touch, nothing. Yet when she bore it to the cabin the paper was so heavy that it drove her to her knees. Her legs went out from under her. Mute, she handed it up to him and then sat like a stunned child on the floor until he raised her up and, very kindly now, said to her, “Agnes, why won’t you say it? It is so simple to me. Why can’t you say it? We must leave. We have to leave together. We’ll go north, go west, be a couple married legally and happily. We’ll have children, a life. Why can’t you say it? Why won’t you?”

Agnes shook her head, dumb with shock. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she was nerveless, bereft.

“Say it,” he pleaded. But she could only look at him. Already he seemed smaller and farther away. An hour, two hours passed in which he talked himself hoarse to persuade her, and only then, at the last, could she even say the word no. That word inflamed him, set him beside himself and he argued with the two letters. They argued long into the night, not loudly, but with such fervor that Mary Kashpaw knocked on the cabin door and when Agnes opened it, said nothing. Just stood there eyeing Father Wekkle with a look of baleful intelligence.

“Izhah,” said Agnes, her tongue finding these words easily, “mino nibaan, n’dawnis.”

Only with great reluctance did Mary Kashpaw move away.

Deep in the night Agnes found another way to say it. “I cannot leave who I am.”

In wild hopelessness Gregory now blurted the thing they’d said between them with physical eloquence only.

“You are a woman .”

The word seemed large in the dark cabin, its vowels voluptuous and thick with the burden of secret life. Both were silent but the word hung between them like a great flesh doll. They closed their eyes and the word spread open between them, hot and red. Gregory sank his head into his hands and tasted the word and there was nothing like its exalted spice. He wanted her in his mouth. But then she spoke, and said, “I am a priest.”

The four words rang down Gregory’s spine, and then, at last, between wanting and despairing of her, anger surged up with a force that weakened him, sent a cold shiver through his gut. Rage shook in his voice.

“Agnes,” he grabbed her shoulders, his voice rose and cracked and fell, “a woman cannot be a priest.”

“I am a priest,” said Agnes calmly, again. She had left the body they shared and for this moment she existed only in a spirit sad with knowledge that could remove his hands. “This is what I do. Without it, if I couldn’t say the Mass…” She held her hands out, tough with work and empty. Nothing.

“You’re sacrilege,” said Gregory, his voice beyond all hope. It was the worst word he could summon, and he knew it, but he wanted her so much he’d even shame her into coming with him. “Sacrilege!” he cried again, more hesitantly, almost plaintive.

Agnes stepped backward, as if to let the word fall at her feet.

“No,” she said, looking at him with her heart tearing, helpless against the simplest truth. “I am nothing but a priest.”

AGNES’S PASSION

Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn’t shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn’t stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.

He sent her letters. She sent them back. He sent them again. She burned them. What else was she to do?

Awful questions appeared in Agnes’s mind. Am I right? Can I bear this? Have I invented my God? Is God my yearning? Is my yearning God? She fell asleep with questions thrumming and woke with more blaring. She chewed questions over with her breakfast food, salted her dinner with the day’s uncertainties. She prayed over the questions until it hurt to think, until her brain felt too tight in her skull. She then craved silence. Into her lover’s absence crept compulsion. She thought obsessively of shedding the priest’s clothes and donning a frilly hat, a gown of figured lilac, a flowered wash dress with buttons of mother-of-pearl. Imagined walking to the parish of Gregory Wekkle, for some reason eating ice cream with him. And then they would leave and find a new place where he could tenderly stroke the hungry expanse of skin that covered the body that housed two beings. Father Damien’s thoughts nagged, Agnes’s temptations stung. Or maybe it was the other way around. Sometimes at night her body moved as if over the waves of a dark lake and she woke wet with tears and burning heavily between her legs.

Talk to me! Talk to me! She angrily prayed to the Christ who’d saved her from the river, to the God who’d brought her here, to the Holy Ghost who had sustained her through the great influenza and yet betrayed her by allowing the dog to visit her and to set before her Gregory. Since the damage was done, she prayed to see her damage again.

Mary Kashpaw sat stonily through this at the entrance to the cabin, snapping beans, glaring at the white dust rising off the far roads. If only, thought Agnes, she could again see the divine in Mary Kashpaw, maybe that would help. But the girl hardened and retreated. Each Mass that Father Damien said was duller than the next, and he dreaded genuflecting before the crucifix — a stamped piece of brass, two strips of tin, and the suffering Christ, a contorted lie.

Fountain of Hope,

I find to my distress that I suffer from an inner complaint before which all my skills and strategies fail. I cannot name what it is, exactly, I can only say at times it feels like something so wholly other to the ground of my being that I’ve entertained the fear that I may be possessed.

I tell you this in childish trust. No doubt, were the leaders of my diocese to learn of my condition, I would be yanked from my post straight into a sanatorium. Kept quiet under lock and key. Father, not only am I certain that would do no good, but I also cannot, must not, will not, desert my people here.