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

He thought about her as he worked on the plaster in the flicker of candles. Yes, she was fat and her chin ran into her neck in a way that made him think of a snapping turtle. Her nose was a bulb. Her teeth were all crooked. She was a good person, though, and her eyes were very beautiful, sad and kind. Extremely beautiful! He thought of her eyes. What good were they in a face so cunningly wrought to inspire a man to wince and look away?

Those eyes made him happy. They nearly brought tears to his own eyes.

“A son,” he prayed. If the boy inherited her features, he would at least be a man, though just why that should make such a difference he couldn’t say. He worked carefully, carving folds into the gown, the robe. He took special care with the snake she crushed, refined the moon, painted the scallops of her toenails a delicate pink. He worked out the proportion of the face and then refined the features and the hands, so complicated that he just curled the fingers up and thought, Be done with it. Yawning, he touched paint to the masterpiece and just before dawn tumbled into his rough rope bed.

The next morning, when he squinted at her in the light, he saw that he had made her ugly. Just the same as his bride-to-be, however, her eyes were both kind and extremely alive. He would have taken up his chisel, he could have removed the paint, he could have changed her. Somehow, all that next day, just when he was about to get started, every time, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared at her, shaking his head.

“Forgive me, Saint Joseph,” he said out loud, at last. “I like her this way. There are advantages, see? I’ve lived, and in my life I have had many women. I would not choose a beautiful wife ever again, oh no, I would choose for myself a pair of kind eyes over the most magnificent breasts. Difficile! But Saint Joseph, you poor God-fucked cuckold, if you’d chosen a woman nobody envied you for, you would have had many children of your own. You would have died a happy man surrounded by his own children, just as I will.”

With that, the old voyageur put his tools down, patted the Virgin’s rump, and began to whistle as he constructed a shipping case to send her straight down to Little No Horse.

On a pure fall day the statue arrived, packed in golden straw inside a wooden crate built around it, perhaps not so much to protect as to contain the features. The nailed, heavy crate was pulled along in a wagon. Father Damien and the sisters and the wagon driver wrestled the crate off the bed of the wagon, prized open the boards that protected the statue, pulled down the wads and sheaves of golden straw, and at last brushed the dust off the features of her face. They kept brushing, for as soon as her eyes and nose and lips came clear, she startled, she fascinated, she elicited some repugnance, she evoked sorrow in one heart and derision in the next and in still others peace and loving quiet, so that she needed to be touched to be believed and for many hours stood outside the doorway of the church.

“Send her back” was Sister Hildegarde’s immediate judgment, but Father Damien disagreed, much as Hildegarde had regarding the piano. The other sisters mainly disagreed, too, saying that the Virgin’s eyes were remarkable.

“The carver had a strange talent,” Damien pronounced, “and his vision was of this face. Who is to say among all creation God should choose only a beautiful human mother for His son?”

“I suppose there is a lesson in this.” Hildegarde’s voice was a bit sour. She narrowed her eyes at the statue, suspicious. The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.

THE SERMON TO THE SNAKES

“What is the whole of our existence,” said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, “but the sound of an appalling love?”

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given — children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps — we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes — those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends…”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

1923

Surely it was delirium, thought Agnes, looking at the peaceful scene of twirling popple leaves and new-growth maple. Beside her sat Nanapush. He wore the huge plaid wool jacket Margaret had brought home from the sisters, and his hair, long and gray, was pulled back and tied with a reed. I was not really visited by the terrible dog, thought Agnes, nor did I nearly poison myself out of love and then despair. Her terrible abyss of mind seemed impossible now.

“Do you believe in the devil?” Agnes abruptly asked her friend.

Before he spoke, Nanapush gazed keenly at Father Damien through his little, round, wire eyeglasses. He tilted his head, considering. Damien lighted a cigarette, put it in his hand. Nanapush thanked the priest, his mouth pursed.

“Not yours,” he decided.

Father Damien waited for more.

“We have our own devils,” Nanapush said piercingly, all at once. “And our devils are not all bad. Ours are sometimes capable of showing pity, that is, if you can think of the right thing to say.”

“What, then, would be the right thing to say if you met up with a devil?” Damien leaned forward intently, eager.

“You would have to be clever about it,” said Nanapush.

“Say, for instance,” Damien decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

Nanapush leaned toward him, thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot out of my soup bowl!’ ”

Father Damien frowned, doubtfully. “And then?”

“If it took its foot out, you would know it had understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

Nanapush settled back into his chair.

“It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”