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

She ain’t my mother.

You ain’t my mother.

I allowed myself four words, exactly four and those only. As long as I stuck with them, I was safe enough. Six visits into the year, the principal took the paperwork and shoved it at Fleur.

“I’m satisfied,” he said. “Whatever the reason for her denying it, she is indeed your daughter. You may withdraw her.”

Now he was talking about me like a library book.

I closed myself tight as a book then.

“No.” My mother’s voice. “I won’t take her unless she wants to go. I won’t force her, she’s too much like me. Daga,” she said for the thousandth time, in a voice of great longing, “daga, n’dawnis, ombe. Gizhawenimin. Izhadaa.”

I felt the pull very strong then, it almost pulled me over, and I knew if she had just taken my hand I would have gone with her then. But she couldn’t, and I righted myself, walked out of the room. Outside, alone in the hallway, I fell on my knees as if shot. Then I picked myself up.

So it was, always, with me after that. You can go up to a certain point with me and I with you, giving, giving, but then the line might snap. My loving goes very deep unless you cross that boundary, do to me what I will not tolerate. I am not an all-forgiving person, not Lulu. Even when Nanapush and then Father Damien went to work on me shortly after, in regard to my mother, they had no success. The line had snapped. I had no interest. Even if I love you, the way I am, Father Jude, if you hurt me, I’ll turn cold on you. Turn away like a cat.

1921–1933

Word by word, I trudge closer, stumbling through the underbrush of sound and meaning. Agnes bit the end of her scarred fountain pen, switched back to English, As I understand the place of the noun in the Ojibwe mind, it is unprejudiced by gender distinctions. That is some relief. Yet there occurs something more mysterious. Alive or dead. Each thing is either animate or inanimate, which would at first seem remarkably simple and sensible, for in the western mind the quality of aliveness or deadness seems easy to discern. Not so. For the Anishinaabeg, the quality of animation from within, or harboring spirit, is not limited to animals and plants. Stones, asiniig, are animate, and kettles, akikoog, alive as well. In the sweat lodge, red-hot stones glowed with a power upon which she’d once gazed full on and scorched her eyeballs. For a day or two, everything she saw was surrounded by a halo of warm frost. Amid the protocols of language, there is room for individual preference, too. Some old men believe their pants are animate. Nanapush had sometimes chastised his baggy trousers.

Perhaps it is fortunate after all, she wrote , that Ojibwemowin is a language lean in objects. That leaves its bewildering wealth to reside in the storm of verbs and verb forms, which, heaven help us, require the literal extension of divine assistance for the novice speaker to comprehend.

Agnes set aside her carefully kept pen. Most often she cleaned it with a toothpick and alcohol before retiring it, but tonight she was agitated with thoughts and sensations. The little cabin was too small a container. Outside, the strong cold air of Gashkadino-giizis, the freezing moon, lay still as iron on the ground. The reservation was suspended in its grip, snowless and icily tranquil. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars. She took up her pen once more and composed, instead of the rest of her article, a letter.

My Lord Bishop,

I am writing to inquire, on rather a long shot, whether you have any knowledge of a woman in your diocese who is widely rumored to have moved to Minneapolis. Although she is a woman yet adhering to the non-Catholic ways of her people, she has been in close contact with members of our mission here at Little No Horse. Fleur Pillager is her name. Perhaps one of your mission priests, someone running a charitable clothing dispensary for the indigent or perhaps providing free bread and soup, has knowledge of her whereabouts.

If so, we would be most glad for the information, as I am anxious to tell her news of her daughter.

Father Damien Modeste

Soon there arrived an answer.

Dear Father Damien Modeste,

It was with great interest I received your letter, and I am happy to report to you that I do have knowledge of a woman by the (former) name of Fleur Pillager. She is, however, anything but in want of either bread or soup. I myself performed a marriage ceremony between this woman of our soil’s natal blood, and a prominent member of our community (whose marriage was annulled on grounds of the wife’s insanity resulting in lack of consummation). Having entered the Mount Curve Avenue household as a domestic, Mrs. John James Mauser is currently presiding over household affairs at that same address and she is received, not without some ironic curiosity, in the highest society here. She is known for her good works among the people of her background in Minneapolis, who roam the streets.

I hope this information serves your purpose and helps you in your quest.

Every month or so, after his first letter, Father Damien wrote to Fleur, or, it would be more accurate to say, he cast a letter to the winds in her direction. She could not read the letters but must finally have got someone to translate them for her. At long length, a package of red cloth arrived with her Mount Curve return address embossed on the box. Gorgeous red cloth. Brocade. Obviously meant for a priestly robe. No writing to accompany it, and only, as the years went on, that one package. Similarly, Margaret and Nanapush received goods Fleur shipped: blankets, a great cast-iron stove with blue enamel doors, crates of oranges, a fat doll with golden hair and eyes that shut, bags of hard candy, more cloth, tobacco. And money. She certainly had money. Still, they heard nothing from her, no word, not even when Nector borrowed Father Damien’s fountain pen and paper and wrote her to say that Lulu was home.

All they heard of Fleur was from newspaper clippings sent by city relatives. Fleur ate with so-and-so. Visited so-and-so. Motored to Wayzata. Motored to the banks of the St. Croix River. Picnicked. Vacationed. Bore a child. All they saw of her were three or four printed photographs, her figure slim and unrecognizably dressed, a round hat shading her face. Her hair was long again, held up in a chignon in one photograph. In another, she wore a slender, white, scandalous, gravity-defying gown. Next to her, and everyone puzzled about him, her husband stood. He was dressed to match her — formal, complete — every detail of his getup observable and described in print too, right down to the cuff links. Gold nuggets. John James Mauser had invested in the Black Hills gold that Custer coveted and died in an attempt to secure. His face was taut, strained, soulful. Even in that grainy society-page photograph, it was quite clear that Fleur’s husband was different from the jowled and coarse-whiskered bankers in whose company he smoked. Of course, he had to be in order to fall in love with such a dangerous woman. The photograph had caught him midglance. He looked sideways at her. She was poised in the white gown, standing before a dance floor as though she’d alighted and folded her feathers. She gazed upon the array of St. Paul society with an eagle’s unconscious ferocity. Her husband’s look held something any man anywhere could understand, or any woman, or for that matter any priest.

He would kill for her, thought Agnes, the poor man suffers a wrenching passion. When she witnessed the insanity of love, Agnes made upon her breast the sign of the cross, the emblem to her of protection and pity. Thoughts of Gregory or Berndt were usually acceptable features of her history now, yet there were other times, in her dreams, when old feelings assailed her with a sudden and crippling sickness of emotion.