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

The nun shrank back, narrowing her eyes until they were two dashes of black rage in her mask-pale face. Father Damien’s voice strengthened. He stood up in a sudden outrage manufactured to hide the shaking of his knees.

“Leave me! You’ll get no absolution here, murderess. Not until you turn yourself in to the tribal police!”

She crept away. As soon as she was able to bolt the door behind Sister Leopolda, Agnes collapsed into her chair. She made her mind up immediately to purchase a thicker gauge of material for her curtains and never to let the moonlight fall through.

Eternal Father,

The bond sin creates between the absolver and the confessing sinner — I have no guidance as to its nature or its quality. Having recently learned that the perpetrator of a pardonless crime is a member of my sisterly flock, I am left with the responsibility to contain the strangeness — this knowledge is a form of violence. I exist with this forlorn sense of horror. Forlorn because it is my solo cup. None may drink it for me, none may spill it from my grasp.

Except you.

Modeste

The next day, Damien unhooked from its nail deep in his closet the rosary found by George Aisance. He carried the rosary over to the convent. Knowing that Leopolda had responsibility for cooking that day, he went to the kitchen. He held out the rosary, hoping to drop it into her hands, to get rid of the dirt of the confession and the tired old killing. It felt as though he were carrying drops of bad blood — acid, lethal, black. He was chagrined not to find Leopolda. Disappointed to the bone, Damien took the rosary back into his cabin and replaced it on the nail. He knew he would not have the impetus to get rid of it again.

So Agnes could not jettison the poisonous ring of stones. And the threat of exposure nagged her. She could not bear the prospect of Damien’s uncovering. The word happiness, a nail color, poked at her now. For Agnes realized that her happiness was composed of a thousand ordinary satisfactions built up over a life lived according to what might seem to others modest and monotonous routines. As a priest, as a man, after the long penitential years and the challenges of her own temperament, she was at ease. As Father Damien, she had blessed unions, baptized, anointed, and absolved friends in the parish. In turn, Father Damien had been converted by the good Nanapush. He now practiced a mixture of faiths, kept the pipe, translated hymns or brought in the drum, and had placed in the nave of his church a statue of the Virgin — solid, dark, kind eyed, hideous, and gentle. He was welcome where no other white man was allowed. It was apparent, to the people, that the priest was in the service of the spirit of goodness, wherever that might evidence itself. Were he exposed, were he known to have fooled, deceived, and hidden his most fundamental nature, all would be lost. Married couples Father Damien had joined would be sundered. Babies unbaptized and exposed to the dark powers. Deaths unblessed and sins again weighing on the poor sinners. And, if in spite of her own fears, Sister Leopolda should expose him and cause him to leave, there would surely be no one who would listen to the sins of the Anishinaabeg and forgive them — at least not as a mirthless trained puppet of the dogma, but in the spirit of the ridiculous and wise Nanabozho. Anxious, unnerved, Father Damien played his music, begging for the mercy of sleep. Or he wrote, late into the night, feverish, cramped letters and reports.

Your Holiness, etc.

According to your faithless servant Voltaire, Louis XIV and de Brinvilliers went to confession as soon as they had committed a great crime. They confessed frequently, he said, “as a gourmand takes medicine to increase his appetite.” I ask you, in light of such cynicism, would it be improper to suggest that a murderer’s confession sometimes serves as a salt to the food of evil? And I have also read that Pope Gregory XV, in his papal bull of 30 August 1622, ordered confessions to be revealed in certain cases. Would the situation I have described in my most recent reports qualify as a “certain” case? I await, as always in the darkness, your answer.

Modeste

1940

No one stays long on the reservation without somehow coming by a name. Since Fleur would not say it and nobody dared ask the boy with the dead eyes himself, he was named by invisible consensus. Awun, he was called, the Mist, for he was silent as mist and set apart from others, always, by his impenetrable Pillager ways. He hired out on farms surrounding the reservation. When he bulked out and thickened, Awun lost his nimble touch, but retained a fixity of unknown purpose. Awun was either very simple or so deep and devious that his mask could not be penetrated. What was he? From a childhood in a stone-floored mansion to a youth in a poor, pole cabin by a lake, and his mother would tell him nothing. Did she love him? Was he more than the child of Fleur’s revenge and restoration? He was a Pillager, he was Awun, so of course he became something other than a function of her will. He became will itself, unpurposed, set loose on the world, and looking as all great weak things do for a stronger counterpart.

Brooding on the trick of his identity, Awun worked his way through farm after farm, splitting wood, cords and cords of it, toward the first woman who could match him stroke for stroke. Still, Mary Kashpaw might never have come within his range, his span, but for the sisters. And so perhaps blame for all that happened should be placed where proper: at the nuns’ square toes. For it was Sister Dympna who raised the request for Awun to haul wood from the Kashpaw family’s lot for Mary Kashpaw to cut. In her restlessness the woman had already chopped too many birch trees near the convent and the sisters now feared for their apple orchard.

One morning in slow July, the son of the wealthiest man in Minneapolis threw on his shirt of a worn blue so vaporous it embodied his name, ate his kettle of oatmeal, and hauled a wagon load of wood into the churchyard. When he had finished unloading the wood, he then stood behind the church in lilac shadow. The thin shade reached only to his waist. No trees near the wood lot were tall enough to conceal him. His hair was the brown of winter grass, turned back in wind, his shirt’s whitened threads were the blue of his washed-pale eyes. His face bore the complex gloom of his German father leaded over with the Pillagers’ old, frightful calm. He stared at Father Damien, his hands buckled around the chains, and one after another he began to drag the logs across the road into the bare yard just planted with young trifling oaks. Across that piece of ungrassed dirt, Mary Kashpaw waited, eager to reduce them to stove lengths.

Awun did not notice her at first, busy as he was with the hauling. He fitted the great leather glove of his hand around the chains and pulled as Father Damien supervised and joked and speculated about why the nuns wanted all the wood so deep into summer. Even as he set the logs to ground, Mary Kashpaw took up her eager ax. Once she began to work, the regular strokes fell with such a precise rhythm that the sounds did not at first intrude upon the men’s conversation. Only when she stopped to sharpen the edge of her blade with slow strokes of a file did Awun notice the ring of silence. His glance searched, and stuck.

Mary Kashpaw wore a man’s shirt with the sleeves ripped out. Her arms were bare — hard and roped as the turned legs on a table. Her long skirt hung crooked and her great, solid feet were planted with monumental firmness below the hem. She had used a grapevine to tie her heavy black hair away from her face. From beneath a notched leaf, she regarded the two men with the indifference of all powerful creatures. Then, the blade honed to her satisfaction, she turned with a light motion, rose on the balls of her feet, brought down the ax, and split the length with a natural blow.