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

THE PIANO

Once the memory of the music unknit in troubled and ecstatic skeins from her hands, Agnes remembered. In recalling, she wept for her drowned Caramacchione, played now only by fish, and the strange cruel river that had utterly changed her life. With the outline of new memories, interior bits of the puzzle emerged. Fortunately, there appeared in these new visions a windfall. As she regained more of the past, she recalled the source of the money she’d wakened long ago to find in the lining of Agnes’s jacket. She’d deposited that money in a bank in Fargo, under a false name. Cecilia Fleisch, she remembered it.

She wrote down the sum and the secret number under which it was deposited, and then decided how to use it. Perhaps in this decision Agnes ignored certain moral implications. The money was, in fact, stolen. But hadn’t Agnes suffered and hadn’t Father Damien? And would the anticipated use of the money constitute a form of justice? For Agnes must have a piano — not just any piano. A real piano.

Perhaps, truly, Father Damien could have bought food or medicines, blankets, pots, necessities of all sorts, seeds and seed grain. Perhaps he could have purchased a bell with a far more pleasing toll than the hollow clang of the one bought by the diocese for Little No Horse. Certainly, he could have purchased comforts and warmth for the sisters, who routinely suffered deep chills, or the old people, who were in great need, but he didn’t. Not as Damien. Not as Agnes. Not as priest and not as woman, not as confessor and not as the magnet of souls, consoler, professor of the faith. When it came right down to it, she acted as an artist.

TIME

Once Nanapush began talking, nothing stopped the spill of his words. The day receded and darkness broadened. At dusk, the wind picked up and cold poked mercilessly through the chinking of the cabin. The two wrapped themselves in quilts and continued to talk. The talk broadened, deepened. Went back and forth in time and then stopped time. The talk grew huge, of death and radiance, then shrunk and narrowed to the making of soup. The talk was of madness, the stars, sin, and death. The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who took out a small bound notebook and recorded words and sentences.

In common, they now had the love of music, though their definition of what composed music was dissimilar.

“When you hear Chopin,” Father Damien asserted, “you find yourself traveling into your childhood, then past that, into a time before you were born, when you were nothing, when the only truths you knew were sounds.”

“Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don’t sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman.”

“This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can’t think. You become flooded in the heart.”

“Powerful. Powerful. This Chopin,” asked Nanapush, “does he have a drum?”

“No,” said Damien, “he uses a piano.”

“That great box in your church,” said Nanapush. “How is this thing made?”

Father Damien opened his mouth to say it was constructed of wood, precious woods, but in his mind there formed the image of Agnes’s Caramacchione settled in the bed of the river, unmoved by the rush of water over its keys, and instead he said, “Time.” As soon as he said it, he knew that it was true.

“Time. Chopin’s piano was made of time. What is time in Ojibwemowin?” asked Damien.

Nanapush misunderstood then, and did not give the word but deeply considered the nature of the thing he was asked to name. When he spoke his thoughts aloud, his voice was slow and contemplative.

“We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time.”

“What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.”

“Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.”

Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

“A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.”

“Into the water?” asked Damien.

“No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time.”

Father Damien waited for Nanapush to explain, but after he’d lighted his pipe and smoked it for a while, he said only, “Let’s find something to eat.”

Agnes brushed the rich ebony rectangles, the black keys of the extraordinary piano on which she’d spent the bulk of the stolen money. A grand, exquisite and important, not a Caramacchione, but a new Steinway. The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim.

Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal. They were part of the art of Father Damien’s Mass, as were the vestments — an extraordinarily ornate and meticulously worked chasuble in green, for hope, a less ornate one in passion red. A plain silken stole embroidered only with a cross, but in gold, and a maniple to match. His alb and cincture had been Father Hugo’s, and he accepted from Sister Hildegarde a rough amice that he donned with great devotion and seriousness at every Mass. It was his symbolic helmet and he wore it to repel the assaults of the devil. Rotten mutt! Better yet, he commissioned Margaret to add beadwork anywhere that it would fit on the vestments. She covered every bit she could — each robe weighed upon him like a shield, like armor.

Agnes bought deep blue paint for the ceiling of the church, as well as metallic gold, a special gilding from Chicago. That was the only paint that would do for the stars she envisioned upon that blue. And last, with the spurt of money left at the bottom of the pile, the money which had nearly fallen from Agnes’s fingers clumsy with terror, she bought urtext music, stacks of it from foreign publishers — Masses, choral pieces, sensuous rhapsodies and pieces beyond her capabilities, as well as Easy Pieces for Small Fingers, for she had determined to teach. She also commissioned a statue from a maker of religious artifacts up north, bought it sight unseen.

THE MADONNA OF THE SERPENTS

There lived in Winnipeg an old mangeur de lard who had put down his paddle and taken up the tools of a wood-carver and a statue painter. He made cigar store Indians and mannequin shapes, shop signs, and carousel horses, but statues of a religious nature were his specialty. For those, he used a secret recipe of plaster. He had in his workshop special molded blanks for Joseph, the Blessed Mary, Baby Jesus and adult Jesus, for Saints Anne and Theresa, for Saint Francis, and a few others especially popular in the region. These raw white forms spoke to him sometimes, especially when he worked late into the night. The shadows, he claimed, moving in the light of flames, often inspired him. One particular night he began to work on a special blank and found that he couldn’t stop. This statue, commissioned by a church just south, he’d determined to finish as soon as possible in order to finance a lengthy drunk he anticipated commencing, soon, to celebrate the proud fact that, at age seventy-five, he was to be yet again a father. Though he’d bought the woman’s favors, she was inexperienced enough to have gotten pregnant. She would have to marry him now!