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

Jude didn’t capitalize on the reference to the vile stuff in his ceramic mug, but weighed what the old priest proposed very cautiously in his mind before he spoke.

“Does the eventual outcome neutralize the circumstance? The peaceable conversion of Quill? The lifelong devotion of her daughter to the fixtures of the church? The runaway was unplanned, an accident, Father Damien. It wasn’t as though she deliberately set out to spook the beasts.”

“Of course she did! You’re indefensibly naïve,” Father Damien observed, sitting back in his chair. “Willfully ignorant. That’s dangerous.”

“So is sitting back too far. You’ll fall,” said Father Jude dryly. Damien righted himself with some difficulty.

“I repeat, she spooked the horses with the specific intent to cause a runaway.”

The younger priest waved his hands. “All right, fine, suppose I even give you that! Even so, what bearing does it have on her eventual consideration—”

“Why, character, Father Jade. Spooking horses to cause a dangerous runaway is hardly a mark of heroic virtue.”

“No, you are right. However, since we have established that her purpose was also to rescue the consecrated Host, and even, perhaps, that was her primary, maybe only purpose, her sin once again is the overzealousness of one who burns with the Holy Spirit.”

“Oh, she burned, all right,” said Father Damien. “She was a regular spiritual arsonist.”

Father Jude couldn’t help but smile, and the old priest took advantage of his momentary diversion.

“The whole convent suffered. These are hardworking women and when one of the sisterhood is incapacitated for whatever reason, an extra burden falls upon the community. Even if that reason is, say, a visitation from God — say God is having an intimate and passionate spiritual interaction with someone who must strictly attend to it — the circumstances into which the other women are put… to say the least, difficult! The others had to take on her chores and duties, not to mention wait on her hand and foot. Things were hard to hold together, quite as if the greater work of the church was sabotaged by one member’s… well, I’ll say it, piggish involvement with God.”

“And when did this all take place?”

“She had countless episodes, or bouts, or visitations. Whatever you want to call them, they were sicknesses that confined her to bed. Of course, in her later years she received many petitioners. It was known as her bed of intercession and her suffering was considered a form of physical prayer. She referred to herself as a sacrificial victim.”

“A victim soul.”

“Exactly. She regarded herself as one chosen to sacrifice her health, her happiness, after the example of Christ crucified, for the advantage of the Church and the general good of her people.”

“Whom — and this is important, Father Damien — would you say that she loved? She loved her people?”

Father Damien shook his head. “The love of a mixed blood for what is darkest communion in her nature, both the comfort and the downfall, source of pain and expiation, a complicated love. She loved her people but she had no patience with them. You’ve heard of Louis Riel, a métis who went to the gallows for his convictions on the political rights of his mixed-blood people. She, too, went to the gallows in an effort to free her people from what she saw as spiritual bondage. Their gods had not, in recent times, served the Ojibwe well. Of course, gods are not required to be consistent — in fact, gods aren’t required to be anything at all. There are no requirements for gods,” said Father Damien a little wistfully.

“And you,” Father Jude asked curiously, “do you believe as Sister Leopolda believed?”

“That conversion would bring about redemption?” Father Damien seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Oh no, I believe we were wrong!”

Father Jude stopped the recorder, folded his arms, gathered himself. Although he had, on some level, expected what he heard, yet to have it out in the open demanded some response from him.

“If you think that, how could you go on?” he asked.

“Well, of course, at first I didn’t think we were wrong. Everything seemed clear. It was only after the epidemic that I knew. There was no doubt…” He trailed off. “By then I was so knit into the fabric of the damage that to pull myself out would have left a great rift, a hole that would have been filled by… well, others perhaps less in sympathy. I’ll name no names. And I believe even now that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy, Father Jude. That’s why I stayed.”

Father Jude took this in with a certain degree of sympathy: to not believe in what one did, but to persevere out of duty to the practical desperation of the situation — in a way it was no less than a quiet heroism. Or idiocy, was his next thought. And then he felt a pang of irritated pity. What a waste to live your life without the assurance of faith. No sooner had he thought this than admiration for the old priest gripped him once again. Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love. Sacrifice had been his rule. He’d put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need.

Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith? Father Jude had been sent here to gather knowledge, but the more he learned, the more he thought, the less certainty he grasped. And too, his fundamental self-assurance was put in jeopardy by this bewildering attraction to a woman whose presence he ached for. Idiocy indeed! Lulu. Before her name rang twice in his mind, he was already putting away his notes and preparing to go and find her. By way of simply getting near to her, he would ask her to talk to him. He would question her about the woman, Fleur, who so preoccupied the old priest’s memory. He’d sit across from her, inching closer, fiddling with his tape recorder, hoping she could not intuit his yearning fascination and confused hope.

What I never forgot, what I’ll always remember, was my mother stroking the soles of my feet. She woke me gently that morning. I hated her for it later. She was tender, yet she knew just exactly what she was doing. The only way I could keep from despair was to hate my mother’s rough hand, the sinewy palm, hard as rawhide, the fingers of steel, grace, and lies. A mother’s hand should not be like that, Father Jude. A mother’s hand should never lie to a child.

We put thick slices of cold bannock in our pockets and started out. “Aaniindi gi-izhamin ina?” I asked. My mother just frowned, and when she did that, I never prodded her for more. She wasn’t the kind of mama you could beg things from, Fleur. The trees were deep and just beginning to sigh in the first breath of the day. Oh, I love that, Father Jude, have you ever seen the leaves click together and break up the sun in circles? My mother put tobacco beside the trail, and still said nothing to me. But I had my freedom in that moment and didn’t care.

“Maybe she couldn’t,” Nanapush told me later, “maybe her heart was too full, maybe she hurt too, did you ever think about that?”

“Of course I did,” was my answer. “But she was my mother, she could have chosen differently. Grandfather! Fleur had the choice of saving me, her daughter, or having her revenge.”

She chose revenge.

I choose to hate her for it.

That was the day it started.

She took me by the hand when the path was broad, I dropped behind when it narrowed. I liked walking behind so I could watch my mother’s makazin heels as she stepped down and the hem, so even and careful. I watched the movement of her old majigoode as it flopped ever so lightly against her moving calves. I remember that dress like it was before me now — a print skirt of old greenish purple, deep and muddy with tiny cream-colored flowers that glimmered from the dusk of a slough.