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

Agnes noticed, with some suspicion, that the great draft-horse Pillager, this Awun, took a jagged breath when the blow landed. Next, his eyes lost focus and drifted like the mist of his name. But the young man was no more than a giant boy and Mary Kashpaw, though innocent, a fully grown and mature woman. It took more — a strangled cry from Awun, a hot breath, obvious panic — to inform Agnes. She turned a close eye on the situation, now suspicious. Awun’s eyes followed the inflection of muscles in Mary Kashpaw’s arms and shoulders as she continued her work, and now, to Agnes there was no doubt. She sighed, knocked her chin lightly with a fist, and tried to divert Awun in conversation. But the young man’s verbs exploded like the caps off bottles. Go! Stay! His voice was hoarse with bewildered agitation. He wouldn’t leave and would not be argued by the priest into a cup of coffee, or shamed into leaving. Awun preferred to stand in the fragrance of wood chips, waiting for Mary Kashpaw to finish her work.

When at last she paused to lean for a moment on her ax, Awun walked over to her, mumbling, stood before her with his great hands revolving a crumpled hat against his chest. Although she gave no sign of awareness, she did not drive him off. Perhaps, as he was so much younger, he seemed harmless, beneath her notice. Awun was all the more taken with her unconcern. Being so large and grim, he had never found a woman at ease with him before. The fact that Mary Kashpaw did not notice him with surprise or suspicion charmed his heart. When she left him there, alone, he still did not move and stood waiting as the light went out of the day.

She walked straight past Awun on her way to the convent kitchen, but paused at the door and shrugged hugely, in distress. Some sense of his interest at last pierced the armor of her self-concentration. As though she’d passed a source of intense heat, the marks where the wagon nails were drawn from her flesh burned.

She entered the dim cooking space. Carefully, she washed her great face in water already darkened from the cleaning of potatoes. The silky brown water gave back a face so calm it seemed at once dead and ecstatic. She kneaded bread with rounded thumps, her arms dusted with flour, and then she set out plates for the nun’s table. At her own place, in the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw ate quickly, surreptitiously, as much as she could manage, and then she poured boiling water over the big kettles and began to scrub. It was dark by the time she left the pots drying on six meat hooks, and darker in the shack where she slept, sitting up in the sleigh. Most nights, she would have paced in the mosquito-haunted yard before settling, breathing cooler, fresher air and whittling twigs to whistles. Tonight she laid her ax beneath the seat and barred the double doors.

THE MIST

Mary Kashpaw did not pray aloud, but every night gazed upward into the dark of the lathe-and-tar-paper roof with a fixity that slowly became sleep. As always, once she dropped off she slept heavily, profoundly, and very loudly. Sinking immediately into her dreams, she groaned and spoke aloud as if, drugged unconscious, all the unspoken words of the day suddenly flew from her relaxed mind. Awun’s name was not among them, not that he could distinguish anyway, though he listened hard from his place, in the corner of the shack, where he’d crawled, crouched, and covered himself with bales of scorched ironing.

THE RIVER OF GRASS

The grass was long that year and slippery from rain. That is why it was possible for the Pillager boy, once he’d carefully unbarred the double door from inside, to harness himself to the sleigh that carried the sleeping Mary Kashpaw, and to tow it across the yard and along the margin of the road. This was before reservation lands were entirely fenced. He found it a simple matter to continue along the grass paths that led through the woods from slough to slough.

In a clearing where he paused, sword grass tall and iron black, Mary Kashpaw finally woke.

Awun jolted forward down an incline and his bounds gathered. Mary Kashpaw found herself traveling over grass, as in a dream, in a sleigh pulled along by a man with hair white in the moonlight. She looked to either side at the ghost arch of pale birch and the press of adamantine oak beyond. She breathed the slough’s low reek, the sweet grass, gulped again the summer rose air, and saw the laboring back of the man who pulled her, powerful as a draft horse, over ground, through the bending reeds, deeper into the tangle of the world.

And all of a sudden her amazed cry, her thoughts, the cast of her mind, her heart, as she lifted the ax.

AWUN AND MARY

When she carelessly regarded him from under the picture-puzzle leaf of a bloodroot plant, then turned, lifted on the balled muscles of her monumental feet, and split a stove length down the center with one dropping swift blow, Awun was lost to Mary Kashpaw. She seemed, to him, to connect the heaven of her leafy-haloed head to the earth in which her blade buried to the top of the shank. He didn’t know, of course, her history or how she had been stolen many years before, as a girl with a basket of roses, by horses muscled like himself. So when he took her from the shed in the sleigh, it was with an oaken innocence in which he could not hear the screams of panic or the branch surging through Kashpaw’s breast. Mary Kashpaw, of course, felt the thunder of fear and heard the shouting from all sides, just as she had as a child, only this time, unlike her father, she managed to cut the lines.

So it happened, many years later in the green of summer once more, Mary Kashpaw managed to sever the lines that her father’s hatchet had only scraped across. And once she did and Awun kept moving, walking, out into the sloughs and woods and farms that would gather to towns and disperse, like a spill of child’s marbles here and there across the plains, she too was set free.

An hour passed, during which she brooded on the sleigh bench. A world of consideration passed through her mind. She pictured Father Damien, though she had no words for an attachment so complete it was like breathing in and breathing out. Her heart stabbed and her brain hurt at the prospect of leaving the priest. She felt a great dullness, an iron heaviness settle into her limbs, and she decided she would remain still forever. So she sat in the sigh of slough grass, the resonance of searching owls. And then there was a curious pull. Was it the moon, or were the lines not really cut, but invisible? Was she still attached? Tugged behind as the Pillager walked? A thrill of anxiety gripped her, an anger to be with him, suddenly, coupled with despair at leaving the priest. Fear leaped in her and then a sensation of painful joy.

Mary Kashpaw jumped out of her cradling sleigh, took her bearings, and loped after Awun. She chased him down, came at him from behind in the dim moon’s surcease. He turned around in a weak wonder and she pushed at him like a boy in play. He pushed her back. She pushed him again, but this time the push was in quality slightly different, a leading give to her arms, perhaps on the far edge of barely coy. Awun took her broad shoulders under his broad hands, and then the two peered into each other’s steady eyes. Found there a mutual wariness, a nervous calm.

The ease of two equally matched beings came over them and they walked together into the night groaning, frog-quick dark. There, they began work on a tiny baby boy who would one day in their future drop from Mary’s body like a plum, and she hold him, hardly knowing what he was, so infinitesimal and severe and demanding. She would care for him until he was taken from her and she went mad, or perhaps she went mad and he was taken from her because of it. Who knows, who can set this straight? The weaving of this great woman was so crooked to begin with that no one would wonder when, ten years later, brain shocked and bearing the nerve deadness of confinement, she came walking back from the disastrous marriage with empty arms to care, as she always had, for Father Damien.