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

Watching her zeal, one day, Hildegarde was sobered to observe a mechanical strength, as though her body were able to operate without the direct guidance of her mind. Bending before Mary Kashpaw, the nun passed her hand rapidly before the girl’s eyes and sure enough, she got no reaction. Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance. So, she thought, scrubbing floors! As well as who knows what! Hildegarde had seen her eat, too, with just this sort of blank fixity. These were actions Mary Kashpaw did in her sleep.

SLEEPERS

The sleepers traveled deep into the country of uncanny truth. Mary Kashpaw scrubbed floors in her sleep while, on the low bed above her, through dense thickets Father Damien plunged onward. He soon became thoroughly and miserably lost. Having strayed off the dream path leading to the house of his friend, Nanapush, he made the mistake of continuing — after all, dusk was nearly on him and he didn’t want to spend the night in the woods, even though it was a dream woods. That, however, is exactly what happened. Damien sat against a tree, drunk with exhaustion. After a short period of electrified panic, he felt a dim fuzz stealing over his brain.

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed. And so it went from there, a series of dreams, tunnels of brilliance snaking and tangling into the low hill, then out, then farther back — through unknown swamps and broad lake fields high with sweeping reeds and farther yet into the great many islanded lakes with their powerful, secret rock paintings. Impossible to say how many dreams within the dream before he met the one who followed him in to guide him back: Mary Kashpaw.

It was good she found the priest. For if Damien had dreamed himself much farther into that overgrown country how could he ever have returned? Who is to say this isn’t exactly how, one morning, people wake up mad? They have simply dreamed themselves down too many paths and at each turn or pause, as they attempt to travel back, they are swept up in the poignancy of being. Except it is another dream that they unknowingly inhabit.

THE SACRAMENT

Father Damien walked through the woods in a state of pleasant resignation, his satchel full of strychnine. For a while he pretended to wander in a meaningless attempt to lose himself, so that he could die with no bother to anyone else, but he had to admit finally that he was on his way to Nanapush. Well, why not? Why not say good-bye to the person who had been most kind to him and most understanding of all Anishinaabeg. Besides, out of a sense of pride and rightness he had inherited from his predecessor, he hadn’t told Nanapush of what he suffered. The way Damien understood it, he was to help, assist, comfort and aid, spiritually sustain, and advise the Anishinaabeg. Not the other way around. Still, when he entered the familiar yard that afternoon, heart full, the pleasure and kindness in Nanapush’s face somewhat eased his certainty. In that moment of relaxation, he showed Nanapush the poison and admitted he had come into the woods to die.

Nanapush gently took the bottles from Damien’s hands. Miserable with relief at his admission, Damien dragged himself to the side of the yard, lay down in a patch of grass, on a blanket, and fell into a sudden and childlike sleep that lasted for most of the afternoon. He came swimming to consciousness and was vaguely aware that there were several men working in the yard, then he passed out again. When he came to the second time, the world was dark and Nanapush was sitting next to him with his pipe lighted, blowing the smoke over Father Damien in a faint and fragrant drift.

Father Damien sat up, embarrassed at himself. As though he’d upset some inner water level, tears filled his eyes. He looked at the ground, his hands trembling.

“We put up a sweat lodge for you,” said Nanapush. The glow of a huge, steady fire lighted his features. Nanapush took the priest’s hand, then, and led him to the entrance of a small, domed hut, gestured for him to crawl inside. He did, entering on all fours. Then Nanapush himself followed and crouched next to Damien. “Give me your robe,” he said, and Father Damien removed his heavy cassock, but kept on the light black shift he wore beneath. The shadowy presences of men surrounded him and he could see their faces by the light of the glowing rocks that soon were brought in a pitchfork and lowered into the pit at the very center.

Every so often, someone would make a little joke. Otherwise, they were calm with expectation.

“This is our church,” said Nanapush.

Hunched in the pole hut and sitting upon bare tamped ground, Agnes at first smiled wanly at the irony. But once the flap was closed and the darkness was complete, once the glowing rocks were splashed with water, then sprinkled with sharp medicines that gave off a healing smoke, once Nanapush started to pray, addressing the creator of things and all beings to every direction and every animal, Agnes knew that Nanapush had spoken truthfully and without double wit, and that this was indeed her friend’s true church, which held him close upon the earth and intimate with fire, with water, with the heated air that cleaned their lungs, with the earth below them, and with the eagle’s nest of the sweat lodge over them.

Straining to make sense of the rapid prayers, her Ojibwemowin at the level of penetration at which words made sense a beat or two beats after she heard them and puzzled out the meaning, Agnes surrendered. According to Church doctrine, it was wrong for a priest to undertake God’s worship in so alien a place. Was it more wrong, yet, to feel suddenly at peace? It wasn’t as though she made a choice to do it — Agnes simply found herself comforted.

That night, stretched out in blankets beside the fire that had heated the stones, Agnes lay peacefully alert. For the first time since the pain had gripped her, she felt a deliciousness of honest sleep close down. Not weariness or exhaustion, those things Father Damien strove toward in his work to try to outwit the grip of insomnia, but the luxuriant stretching of an utterly relaxed spirit.

After returning from despair, Father Damien loved not only the people but also the very thingness of the world. He became very fond of his stove — a squat little black Reliance with fat, curved legs. The stove reminded Agnes of a cheerful old woman who had given her bread as a child, and raw carrots, when she’d been hungry and there was nothing to eat at home. The old woman had pulled the carrots from the ground and held them under the spout of her pump until the dirt flowed off and they glistened. Then the old woman, whose fat legs ran straight down from her knees into her shoes, sat Agnes on a stump in her yard.

The gold secret tang of sweet marigolds was on the woman’s hands. She had put the bread in Agnes’s lap, soft and fresh, and the carrots, and a clear glass shaker of salt. Kindly, she’d left her to eat. Agnes could still taste the crisp juice of the carrots, the buttery interior whiteness of the bread, the salt bringing them together on her tongue, when she looked at the stove.

Thus was her salvation composed of the very great and very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. The bread of life. The gold orange of washed carrots and the taste of salt.

1922

Just behind the log church, a long, flat slab of rock rose abruptly at a steep angle into a craggy cliff. Father Hugo’s dream had been to build upon that floor and against that rock. Now Agnes continued to work the idea into reality. The vision absorbed her, it was nothing she’d ever done before. She took measurements, observed the fall of the sun, used a level and compass and pencil to sketch. She lighted a lantern, spread out her papers on the table, and drew long into the night, planning, driven by a sudden and engulfing force of practicality. She fell into it as a way of not thinking about Gregory, and then the idea took on its own life. Soon she could fully imagine the church — it was a most absorbing vision.