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

Many of the Indians (they call themselves the Anishinaabeg, the Spontaneous or Original People) have come to depend upon me. There is really no one else I feel can take my place, no one so committed to their well-being or engrossed in their faith — I am becoming one with them so as to better lead them into the great Corpus Christi. And the closer I draw, the more of their pain do I feel.

Still, what eats me is something composed of my own weaknesses and sins, I am sure.

Have you any spiritual anodyne or comfort, any small practice that might assist in my travail? Good Father, I cannot sleep…

Not quite of the body, yet not entirely of the soul, pain closed like a trap on Agnes and held her tight. Some nights it was a magnetic vest drawing blood to swell tightly just under her skin. Agnes wanted to burst from the cassock in a bloody shower! Other nights a shirt of razors slit and raked her and left no mark. Her womanness crouched dark within her — clawed, rebellious, sharp of tooth.

No amount of calm pleading moved the steady anguish. Some nights, she tried to slide the pain off her body like the husk of a spent and sleeping lover. She tried to breathe calmly and evenly to loosen the pain by degrees, but it stayed clapped on.

A mourning dove called from a tree, a small oak in the graveyard behind the cabin. The vowels of its inquiry floated to Agnes one eternal dusk and she went into herself to strike a hopeful bargain. What do you want of me? she asked. But her pain had no needs, so there was nothing to offer or trade. She attempted with the deepest resolve to ignore it, but its grip on her chest intensified and she felt the iron seizing to her ribs. She wondered if she could scare it out. She sat up, gathered her breath, began screaming. There was no one to hear, the cabin was chinked so tight and the nuns asleep, calm at a safe distance. So night after night, she screamed in the darkness. Huge jagged rips of sound tore out of her but the pain was not impressed.

Only Mary Kashpaw, curled in the rough bench bed of the sleigh, stared into the great dark and listened.

Agnes woke with tiny veins broken in her eyelids. She tried again the next night. Again, the next. Finally after nearly a week of sleeplessness, beyond all weariness, agitated to the death, she rose in the dark, lighted a candle, and walked out of the cabin. She let herself into the school infirmary to search for some remedy. Without acknowledging her mission openly, she knew that she wanted the means either to cure the pain or to put herself to sleep forever.

With the brass key marked from her ring of keys, she opened the door and then lighted a lantern. She unlocked the white wall cupboard that Hildegarde bartered for with the government office, who contracted for these items to be sent every year. They had little use for them without a doctor. There, on the shelves, was an array of possible anodynes and comforts.

Agnes examined the bottles carefully. Tartar emetic in a green paste. Perhaps she could puke it out? Strychnine sulfate, a carefully sealed black jar — there was her last resort. Atropine in an innocent clear flask. Digitalin, tiny pills. Ginger and ergot. Belladonna with its own eyedropper. She shook the bottle and the clear stuff turned cloudy with promise. She tucked it into her pocket. What was this? Glycyrrhiza. Pure carbolic. Boracic powder, which she thought was for the eyes. Cocaine hydrochlorate, 1/ 6grain, twenty-five tubes of etched glass with red rubber stoppers at the ends. She took ten. Benzoic acid. Charcoal in a blue jar. Compound of gentian in a square bottle with a long wax-sealed neck. Myrrh and nux vomica, in identical rusting tins. Clove tincture of opium. Agnes sighed, frowned. Only one bottle and so obvious it would be missed. Still, she took it. Pepsin for the stomach. Oil of Ethereal Male Fern. Quinine. Cod liver oil. Sulphate of morphia set far back in the cabinet and very dusty. Four 1/ 8-ounce bottles of clear deep-brown amber glass. She took them also and shut the case.

FATHER DAMIEN’S SLEEP

For one delirious month, the anguish was survivable. It was Sister Hildegarde, of course, who dispatched herself to the priest’s cabin when he did not show up for morning Mass. She knocked, she prayed, she knocked again, prayed some more. After a while she went to the window, peered through, and saw that Father Damien was sleeping. Or was he dead? Crossing her breast, she entered the cabin. Drew near to the priest apologetically, put her hand to his lips and was satisfied. Yes, sleeping! But what a deep sleep. Likely, the good priest was ill or exhausted beyond illness, and Hildegarde took pity. She tucked the robe just underneath the chin of the priest and was turning to go when a great moon-black shadow fell across her.

Mary Kashpaw did not acknowledge the presence of the nun, but fixed her attention on her priest. Across her powerful features, as she stepped into the cabin, there stole an unlikely expression of protective gentleness. It was a look that certainly had not been seen before on her person by Hildegarde. The girl bent over her priest, and with huge compassion she brushed her fingers on the old buffalo robe she’d dragged from a trunk to warm Father Damien. Then she sank to the floor beside the bed, composed herself, and refused to leave. Mary Kashpaw stayed day and night with the priest from then on, keeping watch. She lighted his glass kerosene lamp and kept it going.

For although he appeared to be lying inert in one body, heavily sleeping underneath the burly brown robe, Father Damien was, in truth, wandering mightily through heaven and earth. He was exploring worlds inhabited by both Ojibwe and Catholic. And had Mary Kashpaw not kept that beacon going, he might, in his long and rambling journey, have become confused or even got lost. For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.

DAMIEN’S INNER TRAVELS

Mary Kashpaw watched how his hands pierced the air, always moving. Fingers rippling on the covers, he smiled, humming endless, complicated, unrepeatable music that went on all night and made Mary Kashpaw sigh with radiant emotion.

All the while that the priest was traveling, she stayed at the side of his bed, first crouched on the floor and then, a great womanly boulder, on a chair that she had made of peeled logs hacked to planks. Motionless, rapt as an ice fisherman, she watched. Gazing into Father Damien’s shuttered face, she hummed or rocked slightly on the uneven boards. From time to time, as though she were burning off a bit of surplus energy, she shuddered all over. Then she bit her lip and leaned to peer closer as if gazing into a deep pool ruffled on the surface by a stray breeze. Sometimes she left off staring at his face and frowned heartily at the wall, as if maps of Father Damien’s current whereabouts were posted there. Eyes closed, she traced the imaginary paths, the roads of rivers. At last she came to wonder why she saw no whiskers and recorded no beard growth on his chin.

Other white men had them, these whiskers, and in truth she was curious to see them sprout. On Damien, none showed. On the third day of his sleep, Mary Kashpaw put her hand out and, with one finger, lightly stroked his chin. She drew her finger back and continued to sit, thoughtfully, staring like someone who has glimpsed the shade and outline of a larger picture.

Every morning after that she heated a kettle of water, readied the mug of shaving soap, dipped in the brush, stropped the razor, and was seen, ostentatiously, to be putting these things aside just as Sister Hildegarde arrived.

The practical Sister Hildegarde was in fact pleased to see how carefully Mary Kashpaw cared for Damien, and she tried to say so in signs, for she never did quite accept that, although Mary Kashpaw refused to speak, she understood everything around her perfectly. Hildegarde nodded at the carefully damped or blazing fire in the tiny metal drum of the stove. Gestured approvingly at the shine on the windows and the urgent cleanliness of Mary Kashpaw’s floor. The big girl scrubbed with an artificial madness of intention. The floor smoothed and the wood settled underneath her punishing hands.