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

Before Father Damien left, she set a pair of beadworked makazinan into his hands. They were lined with the softest rabbit fur, the uppers were of a beautiful smoked hide. The flowers were worked of the finest grade of beads and flawlessly put together — except for the tiny black bead on the edge, the spirit mistake done on purpose so as to allow any bad spirits that may have been trapped in the foolishly arrogant perfection of the work itself a chance to escape. There was no question for whom these makazinan were intended, and Damien took them with a heavyhearted smile.

The gift was evidence of the bewilderment in Fleur’s mind, the confusion. She did not understand the reflected substance of her own revenge in her daughter. It was up to Father Damien to try to explain. But what can be explained when the stone meets the stone, when the earth mixes, when water flows into water? You are alike, he wanted to say, alike in your stubbornness. One will not ask forgiveness and the other will not forgive. What use is that? You sent Lulu to the government school and Lulu will never forget.

“The best thing to do is ask Nanapush to talk to your daughter, ask him to lay it out plainly. That is the only way.”

Fleur raised her eyes to Damien in a moment of unusual openness, and he gazed into their reflecting depth with an ease that he’d never known. Her sharply cut eyelids, so fine and enigmatic, were only enhanced by the dark upward sweep of two lines that had appeared in her age. Her skin was still perfect, taut, of a gold so deep it seemed the tawny cover of a fabulous metal. And her straight nose, the nostrils so artfully flared, and the charged symmetry of her mouth, all were unchanged. If anything, deepened. Her beauty had ceased to intimidate Father Damien, though some had forgotten and were awed by it all over. When she’d first appeared on reservation ground, wearing her immaculate and tailored white suit, she’d been taken for a film star or singer strangely dropped from the new movie screen in Hoopdance. Now, clearly, the suit, hat, and heels stored carefully away, the makeup washed off, the fancy car she’d arrived in sold, here was Fleur again — her fate to chase one thing to lose another. She had regained her land, but lost her daughter.

And the son, what of the son, Damien wondered.

“He will stay with me,” Fleur said.

But Damien could tell already that the boy would not.

LULU’S CANARY YELLOW

It was Agnes’s practice to try to control her irritations, to monitor her horror of certain dishes made by Mary Kashpaw — the strangely acidic pea soup, the leather venison, the weird maltish cake and soapy oatmeal. But sometimes she couldn’t help exclaiming over the strangeness of the food, or recooking it herself. At those times, Mary Kashpaw glowered and stomped off, yet she herself did not partake of the loving and sometimes nearly lethal feasts that she prepared for Father Damien. Sister Hildegarde’s picayune frugalities also upset Agnes. Why must she remember to collect old scraps of soap in a sock? As for socks, would the priest ever have a new pair, smooth, without the bumps and ridges of impatient darning? And then, there were more serious, heart-sinking times she believed that the black dog’s bargain was real. At those times, she could not help her pettiness from surfacing. Not only was Lulu’s practiced avoidance of her mother tiresome, but Agnes couldn’t help wishing that, as long as she had sacrificed her soul and was facing eternity in hell, Lulu would behave with a modicum of thoughtful decency.

It’s not that I’m a prude , thought Agnes, I can’t have changed that much, it’s just that Lulu is so careless with her charm, so bold. Can any good come of it? True enough, Lulu became a noticeably sensual young woman. She curled her hair with a permanent wave. She laughed with an irresistible intensity of mirth, shot jokes at people, tempted, and rejected. Returning from an off-reservation town, where she had paid a white woman to poison her hair , as the old ladies said, she was the talk in the church vestibule. People hushed when she entered, her curls tightly wound, glossy, rippling along the side of her head. After Mass, she was the centerpiece of a crowd of women who poked at the spirals, wondered, pinched their noses at the chemical smell. She wore face paint, too, and carried a little brown pocketbook. Her shoes were shocking. Toeless, heels like railroad spikes. Her shoes caused men to lick their lips and women to marvel at the odd, sharp tracks she left.

Her transformation presented Agnes with a small clutch of embarrassing resentments. Seeing the young woman’s tight-skirted sashay, she brooded on the distinct possibility of her soul’s entrapment all in order to save the very thing Lulu seemed intent on tarnishing. At last, she vowed to have a talk with Lulu.

“Bring her to the back of the church right after Mass tomorrow,” Father Damien directed Margaret one day.

The next morning, having fortified himself with Saint Augustine, who in his youth had stolen pears, who had gone to fleshpots of Carthage, Father Damien sat in back of the church, waiting. These last few pews, empty and quiet in the morning, were where Father Damien had many a long discussion with troubled members of the church. Saint Augustine, Nanabozho, whoever can hear me, give me a little help now , he prayed. The saint would have condemned the young girl’s self-display, and the notorious Nanabozho would have taken advantage of it. Such were Damien’s sources. His bedrock now was aggregate. The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books. Still, he was determined to help guide Lulu Nanapush. It was his duty to her mother, not to mention his old friend.

Just as he composed his purpose, Lulu entered and disarranged it. She wore a blouse of canary yellow that dazzled the eye. Her shoes had pieces cut from the sides and heels, and her skirt, though an appropriate length, was immodestly snug. She jingled a little memento bracelet on her wrist as she sat down beside Father Damien in the pew. Excitedly, she greeted him. He could feel immediately such a mild and innocent warmth that he was tempted to hug her as though she were a child. But she was most emphatically a woman, and lovely, so smiling and fresh that Father Damien’s irritations melted. Even with her lips stained the glossy purple of wild plums, she looked completely without guile. Father Damien took her hand and held her painted fingertips in his own.

“You have dipped your nails in the blood of the damned,” he sighed, hoping she could not tell that he admired the color.

“It’s called Happiness.”

From time to time, little things of this sort still pricked through the long years of Damien’s subterfuge. Even in his age, he was charmed by pure harmless feminine vanity. He knew immediately that she spoke of the color of the polish. He took hold of himself.

“Lulu, my child, that is only a label on a pot of lacquer. Happiness is more complex, as you know.”

Lulu nodded. The smile dropped abruptly off her face, and Father Damien now learned that this young woman he had known mainly as a child had inherited her mother’s lack of compromise, Margaret’s sharp sight, Nanapush’s unbiased curiosity, and perhaps his own natural sympathy.

“You are happy, I think,” Lulu said simply. “Without someone else.”

Her earnestness demanded that he truly consider an answer, not give her some pat ecclesiastic’s line. He put her fingers down gently and held his folded hands to his lips, as though praying.

“I have loved,” he said softly, “and yet the happiness of love is not the only thing. It is not even the most important thing. It is momentary, ungraspable, impermanent as the paint on your fingers, though I suppose the stuff is advertised as long-lasting.”