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

“Oh yes,” said Lulu, smiling sunnily again. “I think that I already know something about myself… it’s very sad.” She made an unconsciously flirtatious mockery of sorrow. “I am very bored with men. I get tired of them quickly. For a short time, I am insane, I can’t stop thinking about one or the other. And then, all of a sudden, I don’t want them around me. Just when I decide that I wish to do without him, any him, that one becomes most attached, Father Damien, and won’t leave!”

The color of her blouse, Father Damien thought, that blithe yellow, was the outward manifestation of the careless cheer and stubborn sensuousness of Lulu’s character. He immediately foresaw, indeed, exactly what came to pass in Lulu’s life. A series of passionate but inconclusive liaisons. Fatherless pregnancies. Children without support. He did not envision the number — eight sons, one daughter. Had he done so, he might have collapsed right there before her. Alarmed at what she told him, he turned practical. He had learned one truth in his work — there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.

“You need a profession,” he decided. “One that will support you here, for it appears you do not want to move to the Cities. And if you are as bored with men as you say, you will not marry one for long, no matter what the Church advises. You need an honorable profession,” he repeated. “What will it be?”

Partly as a consequence of Damien’s pragmatic approach, Lulu became a self-sufficient woman. Father Damien helped her from the beginning, so she didn’t falter. She survived the fires in her heart by using all of the skills she had developed — sewing, which she’d learned at the government boarding school, as well as knitting and beading, the making of gauntlets and makazinan, and feather bustles. She created quilts, dolls, vests, shirts. Sold eggs, bartered chickens, even horse-traded on occasion. As she could add and subtract quickly in her head, she left her children with a friend and worked for the trader’s market. A few pennies here, a dollar there. She leased out some land. Kept a cow and shot her own deer, dressed it efficiently just like her mother. Taught her boys to hunt, work in the fields, pick rags, bead and sew as well as she could. It was in fact a surprise she had any time for men at all. Where did she fit them in? people wondered. The old hens and dried-up roosters gossiped in the sun.

A short time with men went a long way with Lulu. She liked the thrill of not-having, became impatient with their daily presence, as she’d confessed. One hour here on the way to work, another well after dark in her private room, the boys arranged in the rest of the house on roll-aways and sound asleep. She collected and she discarded, she used and she tossed. So Father Damien’s weak attempt at counseling her succeeded only insofar as he was able to help her support the one real true romance of her life — her children, to whom she was devoted.

Father Damien’s talk with Lulu did yield one other good, perhaps, for Lulu was never herself scourged by the evils of drink. It was a subject they discussed, though Father Damien was not sure at the time how he had come out of their small debate.

He asked her, point-blank, if she imbibed. He spoke suddenly, and rather forcefully, hoping to catch her by surprise. She did look startled by his penetrating tone.

“Why, yes.” Half-ashamed, she glanced down at the wood grain of the pew.

“You mustn’t.”

“Why not?” She raised her graceful head, looked Father Damien in the eye with her bold and gleaming gaze. “Christ changed water into wine in Cana, at the wedding. He could have changed it into water or milk, something else. Is a taste of wine so bad, Father? You drink it every day…”

Father Damien opened his mouth to answer, but she went on.

“I’m not like some, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t drink any more wine than you yourself at the Eucharist. No more than a swallow, now and then a glass.”

Father Damien looked at her chastisingly. Still, she had a point.

“You cause talk,” the priest said softly to her. “You would sadden my friend, old Nanapush.”

“That’s what you think.”

She laughed, her voice a rushing sound of snow-melted water, of summer leaves in high wind. Her eyes sparked with a sweetly wicked glance.

“Nanapush hardly ever touches the bottle, it is true, but he gave me the money to buy these shoes. Remember when I was little, how I almost froze my feet off in a blizzard? He saved my feet with old-time medicine, and he likes me to show off the good work he did.”

She lifted her foot a little, rotated her ankle, wiggled her toes, in light stockings, through the open wedge.

“I suppose that I can’t argue,” said the priest grumpily. “I’m only thinking of your soul.”

Father Damien was thinking of his own soul, that was the truth of it. He resented anew the indifference she showed to her salvation, manufactured though it might be behind the scenes.

Lulu cast her eyes down. Her lashes were long and feathery. Realizing that she probably had no intention of taking his advice, Damien turned away from Lulu. Frustrated, intrigued, helpless with love for this young woman, he gazed steadfastly at Our Lady of the Serpents, whose hands were outstretched even as she balanced on a writhing snake and a slivered moon.

“Pray to her.” He pointed to the statue, but his voice was hoarse and a little desperate with the sympathy he felt for Lulu.

Those who clucked over Lulu were also fond of sighting the actual devil. One visit spawned others; there were periodic rashes of hysterical reports, each more creative than the next. The devil entered and possessed the body of a cow, which gave pitch-black milk. A hairball was found in that same barn. It contained a jagged tooth. The cow was heard, later, mumbling a curse. Every so often, the black dog made his rounds, barring the path of Mrs. Pentecost and her daughter as they walked to Holy Mass. A man in elegant dress sauntered through the woods, seducing women on the paths to church.

These eager visions broke Agnes’s patience. Ridiculous! Was she mad? Fevered? Overwrought? She examined the memory of the conversation with the dog who’d interrupted her meal, and wished she knew. Each night Agnes looked into the sky, for it comforted her to see the dancing of the northern lights, the spirits of the departed. Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last , Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed — the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.

Agnes also continued, every so often, to wake feverish and panicked. Where was God in all of this? Where was justice? Why did the devil reportedly put on flesh and walk among the people, while God remained silent, producing only the false miracles of Sister Leopolda, never deigning to speak again to Agnes personally, no matter how deep the darkness in which she waited?

One picture salvaged the dubious bargain. One scene from Lulu’s life.

1945

Lulu’s house was small, an old-fashioned pole and mud cabin with a tamped dirt floor. It had been Nanapush’s once, and Lulu had taken it over once she left the Morrissey whose child she was large with now. She lived on the money from the wild, mean chickens she raised. They scratched and complained in the yard, flew toward Agnes with menacing cries. She shooed them off, laughing, as she once had her own dominickers. Lulu’s older son hauled water up from the tiny lake behind the house. Then, though he could hardly lift an ax, he began to split wood.

“Go on in,” he pointed to the cabin. “My little brother’s in there.”