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

The moon vanished and retrieved itself. Vanished again. In those years, a great want descended upon the nation, and the Ojibwe were no longer the only vagrant and hollow-eyed beggars on the plains. There were others. Farmers. Those who had stolen and plowed the earth were upended by the earth, buried in dust. Yet in the scrap of reservation, the lake remained, the woods, the poor cabins with no more than a streak of grease to wipe across the bread. Winter did in the old people and the young died of rotted lungs. Most people forgot about Fleur, or gave her up to the city. But of course there came a day, it was inevitable, when Fleur finished with the man in the beautiful tuxedo, and returned.

Spring brought her to the reservation in a tumult of wild birdsong. Agnes sensed it the way an animal knows low pressure in its bones. There was a spring storm approaching. A dark cloud. Behind it, a full and aching, female, swollen, hungry moon. Sure enough, it was Fleur. Not only that, but as though to present an opposing force, Pauline Puyat was sent back as well from Argus and the exhausted community where she had finally professed her permanent vows and become Sister Leopolda.

Father Damien kept to his breviary, tried to attend to his daily office and his predictable rounds. But he could feel the wary energy of people at Mass. Fleur’s return, and the Puyat’s, were the subject of tense whispers. In the watery weight of air and the burgeoning light, people talked.

FLEUR’S CHILDREN

At first, no one thought that the boy Fleur brought back to the reservation could possibly be her son. He was so white, so soft, so strange. But then, said the old women, in the land of the chimookomanag she’d probably forgotten all the things that a pregnant Anishinaabekwe must do — for instance, never to roll over in her sleep. Had she twisted the boy up inside of her somehow? And when it was born, did the men of the father’s chimookoman dodem make loud noises to frighten off evil and give the boy courage? It did not appear so, nor did the women think Fleur had kept him long enough in the tikinagan — not that there was anything visibly crooked about him. Yet he did not look straight, either, so perhaps the crookedness came from the inside. Had she remembered to rub him with bear grease? with goose oil? to bathe him in strong cedar tea? Had she sung the old songs to him before and after he was born and had she done the right thing and introduced him to the drum? They doubted it. Some even came and whispered to Father Damien. It was the flesh of the boy — too pale and soft, like risen dough, that upset them. And the eyes. Sometimes blue, sometimes black. As if his whole being could not make up its mind, which gave them the answer, at last, to what was wrong.

They had seen it before in a child whose indis was lost, or even worse, thrown away. Maybe by a nurse in the chimookoman hospital. Maybe the father, who did not keep Anishinaabe ways. For the boy seemed both clever and foolish, huge and weak. Had Fleur dried the boy’s birth cord in tobacco, then wrapped it in sage, and sewn it into a bag made of fine skin? If not, the boy would be hunting for it ever after. And he did appear to be looking too hard at everything, the people thought, maybe searching, but with such a quiet oddness that it truly seemed to them he must have lost the center of himself. Anyway, who knew if she was ever a good mother, seeing her own daughter would not speak to her anymore? Fleur didn’t treat her son with affection, never set her hand upon his hair, never even told his name to anyone. Perhaps he didn’t have one. Nameless, then, the boy trundled after her, begging, always, for sweets. More sweets. They called him Sweets for a time, and then someone looked into his eyes. That name was dropped.

Of course, from the newspaper record, his origin was known. Here was the son she had borne with John James Mauser. This was the son of the ravenous man in the tuxedo suit, the one who had stolen her land. The truth came clear. Upon that Mauser, it appeared she had taken her revenge, an idea. This son she brought home was the visible form of that revenge. So was he, or was he not, human? Was he then not something concocted of a bad form of medicine, or at the least, her purpose gone wrong?

The mother and son went back to their land and camped there, even though it was a place nobody liked to go. She put on men’s overalls and tied her hair back, bought an ax and a few other tools, then the two started building out by the ruined shores of Matchimanito. Some said she returned her parents’ bones to the ground. Dodem markers soon appeared, thrust upside down into softened earth. If so, there were still more reasons to avoid the place. More ghosts. A reunion of the dead.

As for the great trees, over which Fleur’s force was narrowed, then stilled, they were gone forever. But although the son and mother could not bring back the trees which, quarter sawn and polished with beeswax, composed the stylish foyer of the grand house Mauser built on a tranquil ridge in Minneapolis, the peace of which Fleur destroyed, there were other trees. Fresh green saplings had grown in Fleur’s absence. Kind trees, popple trees, flourished on her land, enough for her to construct a neat cabin of poles and mud. Once she was living in her new popple-pole house, she sought out her daughter Lulu once again. But in her adamant refusal of her mother, the girl would not change.

As soon as he knew Fleur was there and settled in her cabin, Father Damien walked out to Matchimanito. The old ladies constructed invisible webs of signs of crosses when they saw Fleur passing near, but Father Damien felt simple eagerness to see her, friend of his first years, and he walked the grown-over paths eagerly. That first visit, as though she’d taken on some city ways, Fleur was surprisingly talkative. It was only once he’d gone that Father Damien realized she’d told him nothing. City ways again. After that, she grew increasingly quiet and the boy, tanned and suddenly fond of daily fishing and hunting, stomped in and out of the house in silent concentration. Father Damien found the quietness of Fleur reassuring, not threatening or even mysterious. Often, they sat in silence and considered that period of absence of talk a good visit.

Fleur was usually waiting when Father Damien arrived, for he had never learned to walk with any degree of discretion. Sticks snapped beneath his heels and he cheerfully blundered this way and that, making a zigzag harvest of berries or mushrooms along the way. He always showed up with something: once a tremendous fluted oyster bracket, tender and fluttering, pulled off a tree; another time a dead bird of a brilliant and iridescent blue so intense the color caused tears to start into his eyes.

As he gave the bird to Fleur, he was surprised to experience the sudden sensation that he was traveling swiftly through the air. The blue of its feathers seemed to span the spectrum of emotion. Fleur regarded the bird with her usual calm, though her eyes grew uncommonly gentle. He brought her hazelnuts, ears of fresh corn, old army blankets and heavy coats to piece into quilts. He brought her strings of cut-glass beads, sewing needles, tins of good tobacco. Fleur accepted these offerings with an artless pleasure. They were little enough, thought Father Damien, considering that he couldn’t help her to obtain Lulu. The girl, now a young woman, was stubborn as a rock.

That day, Fleur took her beading out and worked in the sun while Father Damien worried the concept of a word, jotting notes on a tiny pad of paper, asking her for confirmation. Suddenly, he stopped what he was doing and looked at her, watched her as though from far away, thought about her life and their connection. She had a fierce intelligence and nothing slipped by her, so he accepted that she’d known his secret from the beginning, and it hadn’t mattered. Not because she was so tolerant, but because certain details of other people’s personhood were not worth her notice. She simply didn’t care. Nor did she care about other things people usually found essential. The good opinion of friends and family were useless — she had none and lived with a son whose character would not have relieved loneliness. Or loneliness itself — if she ever did experience such a thing, and Damien was quite sure that she did not — she made no mention of it, even where Lulu was concerned. She never said she missed her daughter, she never asked where Lulu was, she did not even say Lulu’s name. And yet, there was no doubt she loved Lulu and yearned after her, for he knew that many times Fleur had tried to see her.