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

“You don’t look well,” said Mary Martin. “Please come, sit down.”

His skin was dead-white, gray around the deep-set eyes, his lips were baked and cracked. His hands shook so badly that the water in the jar rippled.

“No, thank you,” he said, backing to the door.

He pushed out into the yard with his shoulder and Mary Martin grasped his elbow and helped him to balance. The wind had risen. His hair, caked with a clay of sweat, dust, and oil, remained secure and stationary, but his dark suit flapped.

The man pointed at the low rebuilt cabin where Father Damien lived, and asked if he lived there still. When Mary Martin said yes, but that just at present he was hearing confessions, the man started off eagerly, striding in a rapid uncontrolled stagger. She stared after him in amazed concern and didn’t think to look into her hand until he had passed beneath her gaze. Not until she turned to enter the convent did she open her fingers. Then she found that she held a piece of paper money folded into a tiny square, a quarter, a penny, a sodality club button, and two car keys on a small aluminum ring.

FORGIVENESS

Even though a younger priest lived in a brand-new rectory and said the Mass every day and shared the confessional, most who practiced faithfully preferred to visit Father Damien. Something in the quality of his forgiveness really made people feel better — his human sympathy, or his divinely chosen penances. He was in demand. Therefore, Father Damien studiously kept confessional hours.

Father Damien rubbed his stiff knees until they loosened, slid to the side of the bed, climbed out, then with a careful bow entered the cassock he’d hung as always on his bedroom door. Clothed, Father Damien peered around the door, looked to both sides. He’d been ill lately and the nuns were infinitely solicitous, loving, a nuisance. He stepped out and then sped straight to the back of the church and sidled through the entry, from there to the cabinet, where he kissed his stole as he donned it. He sneaked along the wall. Panting, he fell into the priest’s box of the confessional. His head spun a bit. He took deep breaths and counted them waiting for his first customer.

A slight rustle, and Father Damien opened the screened shutter. The voice, a low rasp, was familiar. Yet this was not one of his regulars or even, as far as he could ascertain, a parishioner. He strained to understand the heavy clunk of words. Low distress in the breathing. There was a long, then longer pause after the preliminaries.

“Are you still there?” said Damien at last. His voice was gentle, for it seemed very possible that this was a sinner who had borne his guilt for years, until it ate away his resolve, at which point the poor sinner finally, belatedly, had come in to be forgiven. Damien took pity on such people. Their sins weren’t usually even terrible — just the worst in their own minds. Infidelities, usually, or shameful little thefts.

“Go ahead,” urged Damien, compassion flooding him, “you will be forgiven.”

“I…” said the petitioner, “I…” The man could not continue.

“Do not be afraid,” said Damien, but the sinner lapsed again into a miserable quiet.

“I will wait with you,” said Damien, tenderly. “I will sit with you here until you have the courage to speak.”

“I am…” Again, the sinner could not complete the sentence, but then he didn’t have to because Agnes knew. Sudden ice. Frozen, breathless, Agnes sat motionless and then she panicked. Threw her trembling hands up to her face.

“Oh God, forgive me,” she prayed silently, her heart in her throat. “This man I cannot absolve!”

GREGORY

As they regarded each other across the uncertain band of dim space just outside the confessional, a thrill of self-consciousness washed over Agnes. Father Damien was not beautiful. Agnes wanted to touch back her hair and bite her lips. The mere thought of such gestures made her cheeks flame red. Then she wanted Father Wekkle to leave, immediately, to leave her to the simple contentment she’d nurtured to replace the great drama of human love. Get out of here! Get thee behind me! she wanted to yell at him. The urge passed and she only blinked hard at the apparition. Her vision cleared and she saw that he was ill.

Not just poorly, but seriously ill. His racked, dry body told her this as soon as she was a foot away from him. As she walked him to the cabin, she noticed the dazed and careful way he stepped, like one uncertain of his tenure on the earth. She ducked her head and let him into her house. When she closed the door, and they were inches apart, pausing before they crushed together and there was no space between them, she was positive that he was dying.

Father Gregory Wekkle had continued, by slow means and over many years, to outrage his liver with hard drink, and now the cancer accomplished what he had begun. He was in a silent period of remission, he knew it, and while he had the strength he had driven straight from Indiana intending to throw himself at Agnes’s feet, but he had stopped midway up the final hill and sat there on the side of the road, sat there not quite knowing why. Afraid of many things — perhaps Father Damien was dead, or if he lived, perhaps his side of the cabin was occupied, perhaps books had filled the space, perhaps a dozen or two dozen outcomes were possible, but only one was capable of causing that dusty paralysis. Driving onto the reservation, Gregory Wekkle was struck by the recognizable ordinariness of all he saw, which caused him suddenly to fear that all he’d felt in his youth for Agnes, and all that he had suffered since, was an illusion.

For two days, he took stock of his memories and questioned the reality of each touch, each act, each recognition on his part and on hers. Finally knowing that there was no way for certain to understand what she felt, but positive he had felt what he did, and moreover, sick with thirst, he moved.

“So here I am.”

He sat in the ruins of a chair he remembered, and he allowed a sudden weakness to drain him and to ice his blood. He shivered in the awful heat and Agnes brought a blanket. Practice had perfected her masculine ease, and age had thickened her neck and waist so that the ambiguity which had once eroticized her now was a single and purposeful power that, heaven help him, he found more thrilling. She sat before him and held his hand, just as both of them had done with so many of their own ill, and merely waited.

“Is it too much to ask?” he drank in the new version of her face the way he’d drunk to forget it, with a voracious calm.

It was too much, truly, but she couldn’t say it. Agnes put her hands out and bent slowly until her forehead touched his knee. She sighed and rested it there. Holding on to his knee like a rock, she breathed in the dust he brought while he stroked her short, man’s hair. In the dark beneath his hands, in the dark of her mind, while she simply breathed and existed, she absently put out her tongue. She tasted the cloth of his pants. Tasted grit in the weave. Tasted his medicinal sweat. Tasted soap and the burnt, tarry odor of his death, and her own death, and at last the cavernous sweetness of their old lust.

Over the years, the log walls of Father Damien’s cabin had been plastered over, then Sheetrocked and Sheetrocked again, wallpapered, rewallpapered, painted and painted over, then bookshelved, so that the little house was now thickly insulated as a bear’s den. It was painted white on the inside, but contained a sweeping array of intensely colored beadwork and Ojibwe paintings. A gorgeous dress of white buckskin, fringed and set with blue-and-gold designs, hung off a hook in the wall, next to a cradle board decorated with tiny miigis shells, dreamcatchers, cutouts made of birch bark. The low tables were covered with quilled baskets and rattles, and set around with stacks of books. The shelved walls were darkened with lettered book covers and spines. The books were neatly shelved by category and then alphabetized all through the house, even in the kitchen.