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

“Jesus insisted that Mary Magdelene be incorporated into the holy body of his church and it is said by some that in her hands there was celestial music. Her heart clearly contained the divine flame — and she was loved and forgiven.”

Therefore, every morning Miss DeWitt played the church organ. She of course played Bach with a purity of intent purged of any subterranean feeling, but strictly and for God.

ARNOLD “THE ACTOR” ANDERSON

Only a short time into their happiness, the countryside and the small towns were preyed upon by a ring of bank robbers with a fast Overland automobile. This was before small towns even had sheriffs, some of them, let alone a car held in common to chase the precursors of such criminals as Basil “the Owl” Banghart, Ma Barker’s Boys, Alvin Karpus, Henry LaFay. The first, and most insidious, of these men was Arnold “the Actor” Anderson.

The Actor and his troupe of thugs plundered the countryside at will, appearing as though from nowhere and descending into the towns with pitiless ease. The car — the color of which was always reported differently: white one time, gray the next, even blue — always pulled idling into the street before the doors of the bank. The passenger who emerged was sometimes an old man, other times a pregnant woman, a crippled youth, someone who inspired others to acts of polite assistance. A Good Samaritan would open doors and even escort the Actor to the teller, at which point the object of good works would straighten, throw off his disguise, shout to his gang in a ringing voice, and proceed to rob the bank. It would all be over in a trice. Sometimes, of course, there was resistance from a bank official or an intrepid do-gooder, in which case a death or two might result — for the Actor, who took on the disguises and masterminded the activities of the gang, was entirely ruthless and cared nothing for human life. It was said that he could be quite charming as he shot people, even funny. Eight people in the past two years had perished laughing.

One clear but muddy spring day Miss DeWitt removed her egg and butter money from the crevice between two stones in the root cellar. She told Berndt that she was walking to town to deposit the money against the mortgage payment. He agreed, absently. Touched her arm. They’d had a breathless week of sex. Some mornings the two staggered from the bedroom disoriented, still half drunk on the perfume and animal eagerness of the other’s body. These frenzied periods occurred to them, every so often, like spells in the weather. They would be drawn, sink, disappear into their greed until the cow groaned for milking or the hired man banged and swore on the outside gate. If nothing else intervened they’d stop only out of sheer exhaustion. Then they would look at each other oddly, questingly, as though the other person were a complete stranger, and gradually resume their normal treatment of one another, which was offhand and distracted, but with the assurance of people who thought alike. Even when they fought, it was with impatient dispatch. They were eager to get to the exciting part of the fight where they lost their tempers and approached each other with a frisson of rage that turned sexual, so that they could be slightly cruel and then surrender themselves to tenderness.

He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him. Just as he unbuckled his pants to enter her, though, she shoved him off balance, ducked from under his arm, and ran out the door laughing at his awkward hops and shouts. She slowed and picked her way along the ruts of the muddy road, breathing in anticipation of their night. Their night in which she would not refuse him. The huge canopy sky threatened gray-blue in the northwest, but the weather was far away and the wind desultory, the air watery, clear, the buds split in a faint green haze. The first of her tulips were pink at the green lips, ready to bloom. Under the tough grama and side oats, the new shoots of grass were strengthening and gathering their power. She thought of Berndt’s head tossed back, the cords running taut from the corner of his jaw. The way he nearly wept as he threw his famished weight into her again and again, and the way he glanced sideways, hungrily, after, until they began once again. Her need to touch him moved through her like a wave and she stopped, distractedly, passed a hand over her face, almost put her errand off, but then moved on.

The bank was a solid square of Nebraska limestone, great windowed with deep blond sills and brass handles on the doors. The high ceiling was of ornate, white, pressed tin set off by thick crown moldings and a center medallion of sheaves of wheat. In the summer great fans turned the sluggish air, and the velvet-roped lanes and spittoons, the pink and gray mica-flecked granite countertops, and the teller’s cages seemed caught in a dim hush of order while outside the noise of the town continued, erratic. The relationship between the getting of money, a scrabbling and disorderly business, contrasted with the storing of money, an enterprise based on the satisfactory premise that human effort, struggle, even time itself, could be quantified, counted, stacked neatly away in a safe.

Outside, on the day Miss DeWitt walked swiftly into town, the streets seemed unusually quiet and orderly. Even the bum sleeping against the side of the young elm had his arms neatly folded, and the one automobile parked, idling, was an elegant car of the sort — well, yes — she thought, oddly, that a bishop would use. Sure enough who but a priest should remove himself from the back seat kicking to the side his black soutane. With a meek and tentative squint at the bank, through tiny rimless eyeglasses, he made his way up the walk and steps. On the way, he bowed to Miss DeWitt, who followed him respectfully. As they walked together up the roped path in the lobby she said to him, loudly and clearly, in an amused tone of voice, “Sir, why this pretense? You are not a priest!”

Whereupon the stooped old man straightened, magically broadened, and waved a hand across his face very much as she herself had, in the road, to erase her thoughts. Only he erased his character. He removed his glasses and from beneath his robe drew a snub-nosed pistol, which he pointed straight at Miss DeWitt’s forehead.

“Righto,” he said.

There was no other perceptible signal, but all of a sudden another male customer held a gun out as well, first at the chin of a florid redheaded woman teller and then at the broad chest of the other teller, a young dark-haired bristling man. This young former baseball star’s heart filled immediately, then swelled. He wanted to be a hero, but was struggling with the how of it. Foolish! Foolish! Miss DeWitt wanted to tell him. But it was clear from the beginning that he had just the right amount of stubborn stuff in him to be killed. Which he was. When he fell down dead behind his cage of iron, mouth open to catch the punch line of a joke, the money was harder to get. The red-haired woman was handed a canvas bag, called upon to open his drawer, and instructed not to trip the alarm. When she did anyway, the eighteen customers, including Agnes, were all instructed to gather in one corner behind the velvet rope. Exactly, Miss DeWitt thought, like a flock of blank-eyed sheep. There was a shout outside. It was the sheriff, Slow Johnny Mercier, who really was slow and clumsy, and his deputy with him, pistols drawn. They stood just outside the door yelling for the robbers to come out.

It was clear, then, to Miss DeWitt and probably to the others that their sheriff was an amateur and that the professional involved was inside the bank. For the Actor continued gesturing to the red-haired teller to add to the bills, add more and add more. Then, in his dull black robe with its give-away wrinkles, creases that no self-respecting Catholic lay or nun housekeeper would have allowed him to don, and his ridiculous brown Episcopalian shoes, he sprang to the bunched people swift and graceful as a wolf, chose from just behind the rope Miss DeWitt.