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

“Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark!”

“I don’t understand…”

“In order to confuse it.”

“I see. I would pretend to be a dog…”

“You already have a collar around your neck,” Nanapush pointed out.

Father Damien didn’t tell his friend about the conversation he’d had with the spirit, or about the sacrifice that he had made for Lulu, or about the painful temptation that followed. Instead, he took out the chessboard, an occupation that currently absorbed the two, and the playing of which they owed to a priest of a past century, Father Jolicoeur.

That young and largely unhistoricized eighteenth-century Jesuit had carried with him, into the unknown, a chessboard. He used it as an excellent means both to convince the natives of the superiority of a Catholic god who could design so perplexing and glorious an entertainment, and as a comfort to himself. Though he was uncertain whether his native guide and companion had the capacity to play such a game, he nevertheless made an attempt to teach the rudiments. Jolicoeur’s foundation belief in the innate superiority of himself was shattered when, to his amazement, in the space of just nineteen minutes the Indian trounced him in a match. Father Jolicoeur played again, hoping to recover his pride, but was the more severely beaten, causing him to put away his arrogance.

The fever for chess shook the Indians with the likeness of another epidemic, and they simply re-created the board and pieces to their own ability and began playing among themselves, often for deathly stakes. Long after Father Jolicoeur’s bones were cracked by wolves and cleaned by ravens in some lost corner of the wilderness, another lone adventurer, believing himself the first to gain a path into the uncharted glory of the west, was astounded when he accepted an invitation to a chief’s lodge only to be confronted with a chessboard properly laid out on a deerskin and his opponent waiting in eager anticipation of a violent game of wits. Of course, the stakes being, as they usually were, life or death, the trader wisely opted to pretend total ignorance of the game and used his evil queen, potent spirits, to bribe his way out of an encounter. It saved him then, but he was never the same in the estimation of the chess-playing Indians, for they did not count him a true man and took their peltries and tanned deerskins and bales of dried fish elsewhere, to another trader, who had learned the confounding game at his mother’s knee.

Father Damien now set the board up carefully on the level stump before Nanapush, the wooden pieces comforting to the touch, the ritual of putting them into order a small pleasure. Nanapush laid down his pipe, his hands careful among the pieces. Choosing white in the toss, he opened with a hopeful gambit that did not fool Damien. The afternoon was golden, the mosquitoes bearable in a light breeze. The sounds of birds accompanied their thoughts. Some time went by with little but the motion of their hands, and then Nanapush suddenly spoke.

“What are you?” he said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his bishop’s trajectory.

“A priest,” said Father Damien.

“A man priest or a woman priest?”

Agnes’s hand froze, pinching the knight, and her mental processes collapsed. A hollow roaring noise began around her, swirling, a confusion of sounds. Her mouth opened but no word emerged and slowly, very slowly, she drew back from the table and raised her eyes to Nanapush, who was simply looking at the priest as though that was not the one question in the world that would most upset Father Damien. The priest’s terror and confusion immediately registered on the older man, who leaned forward, frowning with perhaps too calculated a concern. Agnes still couldn’t answer, though now some little choking noises emerged. She tried to right herself, pretending she was heartily surprised at such a question but taking it as a joke. Agnes tried to laugh, but a spasm of sorrow cut the laugh in two. She found, maddeningly, that her eyes were spilling over with tears.

“I am a priest,” she whispered, hoarsely, fierce.

“Why,” said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn’t answered, to put the question to rest, “are you pretending to be a man priest?”

So then it was out between them, and the fact of it out in the open was tremendous. The tedious balloon, pressing inside of Agnes day after day so tightly, now floated out of her mouth, up into the air. She was instantly lighter, so light that when she took in a breath she felt she would lift from her chair.

“We used to talk of it, Kashpaw and myself,” Nanapush went on, “but when we noticed that you never mentioned it, we spoke of this to no one else.”

“So it is that obvious?”

Nanapush shrugged. “Nobody else ever said anything. But still, it is a question maybe just in my mind why you would do this, hide yourself in a man’s clothes. Are you a female Wishkob? My old friend thought so at first, assumed you went and became a four-legged to please another man, but that’s not true. Inside that robe, you are definitely a woman.”

Later, she understood it was the simple recognition, that level and practical regard that moved her to weep with relief. Nanapush was sorry, very sorry to make the priest cry, but he said anyway, abruptly, “Your move.”

Agnes moved her piece in a blur. Nanapush moved again in short order, and it was up to Agnes, who paused, moved her piece miserably, and answered her friend’s question all at once, trying not to cry for the relief of talking, trying to behave with a clarity and goodness that she did not know or feel. Nanapush, of course, waited to make his next observation until Agnes finally returned to the game and was deep in thought over her next move.

“So you’re not a woman-acting man, you’re a man-acting woman. We don’t get so many of those lately. Between us, Margaret and me, we couldn’t think of more than a couple.”

Something struck Agnes, then, and she realized that this moment, so shattering to her, wasn’t of like importance to Nanapush. In fact, she began to suspect, as she surveyed the chessboard between them and saw the balance tipped suddenly in her opponent’s favor, that Nanapush had brought it up on purpose to unnerve and distract her. The next move, in which Nanapush made an unexpectedly suave play and removed the bishop she protected for so long, convinced her. She looked sharply at the man to whom her defenses had fallen.

“Ginitum,” said Nanapush with relish.

The old man had used the subject in a sly bid to undermine his opponent’s concentration. And it had worked. There was at last no way to recover from the lapse and Father Damien let go now of piece after piece under the driving craftiness of Nanapush’s strategy.

“I’m losing,” Agnes muttered. “You tricked me, old man.”

“Me!” said Nanapush. “You’ve been tricking everybody! Still, that is what your spirits instructed you to do, so you must do it. Your spirits must be powerful to require such a sacrifice.”

“Yes,” said Agnes, “my spirits are very strong, very demanding, very annoying.”

Nanapush nodded in sympathy.

“Check,” the old man said.

Infallible Eminence,

My hand is a human hand. My heart a human heart. My feet walk the earth to which our bones return. Directed by His voice, His hand, by the prompting and guidance of His spirit, what else was I to do?

1996

Rain, time, Emeraude, silence, fried onions. Their first meeting was an explosion of the ordinary and the vast unknowable, the pure and the underhanded, all Lulu. Father Jude sat in the cave of an old-fashioned brown recliner and Damien dozed in the deep crevice of a sagging purple couch covered with star quilts and pillows. Their unfinished plates of onion-slathered fried liver cooled on a coffee table set carefully with napkins and shakers of salt and pepper. In the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw alchemized her unspeakable coffee. They were digesting their early suppers, waiting for a new burst of energy to go on in their work, when the crackle of slow tires on gravel announced a visitor.