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

Agnes pushed open the door and there, before her, spinning in the dark air, the baby hovered. She stood motionless, astonished, gazing into the child’s brown eyes as the pecking chickens rushed in around his feet. The baby laughed at Agnes and held out his small, padded hands. His pale robe glowed, his face was all excited pleasure. Gently, Agnes touched him, found the harness that fit cunningly around his chest, fashioned from scraps of old leather. The child was attached by the harness to a rope that in turn was threaded through an iron ring set into the roof. The rope ran through the hook and down to a knothole in the door. When the door was opened, the child rose into the air, out of reach of the fierce, sharp-beaked chickens. When the chickens were thrown out and the door was closed, he played safely on the ground, tethered away from the hot stove.

Agnes swung the child. He laughed, kicked the air, touched his hands. She felt a rush of lightness. Peace. Her heart trembled and beat low. The glowing robe, the way the child hovered — an angel. She believed in the essential angelic nature of that tiny boy, even though the baby grew up and went to prison, even though Lulu saw so many sorrows, and even though Agnes continued to wake in the night overpowered by spiritual dryness. Often, when she suffered from an aridity of faith, one of her comforts was to hold fast to the picture of that laughing, swooping child.

LEOPOLDA’S LAST CONFESSION

Abruptly, without knocking, Sister Leopolda entered Father Damien’s cabin. “Sister Hildegarde Anne says that I must have your permission to wear a potato sack.”

Father Damien glared at her, disturbed, and consented with a flap of his hand. He did what he could to avoid the nun, and still she continued to creep up on him in his refuge. Her presence disturbed his equilibrium, forced a wary and combative stance he disliked maintaining. Even now, he suspected her visit contained some challenge and he went back to his work hoping to discourage her. But Sister Leopolda did not leave. Instead, she knelt with a creaking flourish and abruptly stated that she required absolution.

“Visit me in the confessional, as your sisters do.”

“Father, I cannot,” she said impatiently.

“Sister, you must.”

Father Damien stared at his desktop, toyed with his pen. Had she finally gotten around to it? Was she, at last, ready for this confession he had long avoided? He knew that Sister Leopolda waited to explain the meaning of the scars in her palms. He had seen those long ago. He didn’t want to hear their cause, any detail of it. What earthly good was it, now, and why thrust her ancient guilt his way? Because she could not bear it? Unlikely, after all these years. More probably, she wanted to force some knowledge upon him. To plague him with a morbid responsibility. For he did know. He stole a glance at those palms, and the spurs of the tinkered rosary raked into his mind. It had not been Mary Kashpaw, after all, who killed Napoleon. Beyond that, Father Damien wanted to hear nothing. Desperate not to receive her story, he turned away. He wanted to bless her and be done with it. But he had vowed that he would carry out his priestly duties to the very letter, so he set his forehead in the cup of his hands and gestured for her to speak, at which point, after an audibly muttered inner struggle, Leopolda began, with a bitter and oily enthusiasm.

I am told in my dreams I must atone for what I did and what you know I did, though at first I didn’t know it was him, for when I seized him and forced myself upon him, grew around him like the earth around a root, held him still, I believed he was the devil!

“Go on,” muttered Damien.

I strung the noose around his neck and counted each bead in my fingers as I tightened the link. The joyful and the sorrowful mysteries, Father Damien, and him pounding and thrashing under me and taking his good time choking so I went dizzy with the effort of holding him. God held those beads along with me, his strength the grip of lions. My fingers closed like hasps of iron, locked on the rosary, and wrenched and twisted the beads close about his neck until his face darkened and he lunged away. I hung on while he bucked and gagged and finally fell, his long tongue dragging down my thigh.

Father Damien squeezed out a low croak, waited, gathered all of his wits, and finally spoke to her softly. “You confess to the murder of Napoleon Morrissey.”

“I confess to strangling the devil in the shape of the man!”

Father Damien set his face harder in his hands, felt a fuzz of sleep overtaking his brain, a protective shield of drowsiness. He tried, though his thoughts were listless, to imagine what he should do with the nun kneeling to one side of him. His first duty was quite clear.

“You must offer yourself to the authorities. Your penance is to appear before the law.”

“Ah,” said Leopolda quite readily. “That I cannot do.”

“Explain please?” Damien’s head was heavy and his hands felt thick and cold. He spoke gently, buying time, wearily perturbed that he and not the sheriff should have this question set so baldly before him.

“If I am locked up for my crime, I will not be able to pursue my work among my people. I cannot serve God as well in jail.”

“You must go there anyway,” said Damien.

“That I cannot do,” the nun replied with sly regret.

Father Damien’s head began to pound with a loud pain.

“Do you sincerely repent of what you did?”

Sister Leopolda did not answer. Instead, she began to rock in agitation, and she laughed that low secret and uncanny jeer he’d first heard the day he said his first Mass on Little No Horse.

“I know,” she hissed. “You are considering how you can turn me in yourself. I wish to be absolved, and you will take my sin away! I know what you are. And if you banish me or write to the bishop, Sister Damien, I will write to him too.”

Slowly, with nightmarish calm, the priest turned toward the nun and regarded the starved and shrunken lips, caved cheeks, the monkeylike bared teeth. There was a ready poison in her deep-set eyes. She seemed very far away, to exist almost in another dimension from his own. How had she become this frightful creature? By what means? Had the murder, no matter how justified, worked on her over all these years like an inner caustic, burning away all human joy? The nun was such an awful spectacle of fascination that what she said, though threatening enough, failed to excite any degree of concern in the priest. He listened in a frozen trance.

“You love writing to the Pope,” she spat. “Well, I can write too. I have beautiful handwriting. I can write to the bishop.”

The nun pointed to her eyes, set a sharp bony finger on each cheekbone.

“You have the voice of a priest, true, but these eyes are not fooled! You are mannish, unwomanly, yet your poor neck is scrawny. Too chicken skinny for a man’s neck. It is obvious to me you wrap your chest. Apparent that you haven’t a man’s equipment, though that is useless anyway upon a priest. I am not as stupid as the others. I have waited outside your window after the ox, Mary Kashpaw, is snoring in the ironing shack. I’ve seen you undress.”

Momentarily, the words struck deep and Agnes went a furious red, embarrassed at the thought of Sister Leopolda peeping in. Her face bloomed hot, and she had to keep herself from patting her cheeks. But she rallied her dignity and decided that her only hope was to remain firmly within the boundaries of the deception.

“You flatter yourself.” With an actor’s skill, Agnes pretended to struggle with a manly ego. Craftily, she assumed an air of tragic dignity. “You are not as perceptive as you might imagine. True, I am not Herculean, but I am all the same a man. If you do not believe I was ordained and sealed as a priest and bound by the duties of my calling, why have you come to ask me for a priest’s absolution? What good would it do your soul to obtain the empty blessing of an impostor?”