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

From the first, Father Wekkle was comforted by the order. He weakened quickly — the trip seemed to have exhausted his temporary gift of strength, and it was clear that his remission was only a short touch of grace. For weeks, to begin with, they talked long into the night and there were even — tremendously secret, shrouded, final — nights they entered the exquisite and boundless quietude of the body. And then those nights stopped. He relapsed into the illness, and spent his days on the fold-out couch, watching birds at a feeder through a large plate-glass window cut into a small addition. From the window, he could see a bright wedge of sky and several branches of the tall pines and thicker oaks that had been striplings when he first knew Agnes.

He prayed, as he gazed into the soft wash of needles, to Saint Joseph, the keeper of the happy death. More than anything now, Father Wekkle hoped for a serene deliverance. He prayed to die before the window, in the night, peacefully and with no trouble to Agnes. But of course that did not happen.

In she came, striding big, with a tray of food. She set it down beside the couch on a little table and uncovered the simple dinner — mashed potatoes, beans, chicken, an oatmeal cookie. He regarded it dubiously, but when he ate some of it he felt better. The sky was darkening, the sun was a deep gold haze in the pines. The diffused radiance lighted the sides of trees and when the small birds popped from the bird feeders the undersides of their wings flashed red. Fire tipped the needles and then slowly bled to purple.

“Gregory,” she shook him slightly, “do you want to sleep here or walk to the bed?”

Agnes’s face glowed a deep sere on one side, and Gregory reached out to touch it. She put her hand over his hand, and held it there without smiling, looking into his eyes.

“I think I’ll stay right here,” he gently said. “For now.”

Until the air was entirely pitch-black, she sat next to the couch, on a chair. Later on, in the music of cicadas and crickets, she took a short walk around the grounds of the church, to calm herself and to release the strange collection of feelings — some noble, she supposed, some unworthy — that his presence engendered. It made her uneasy to have him here, an embarrassing outcome after all she’d wished and felt! And the difficulty wasn’t even the disease or his dying, or the years they had not been together, and how much of each other’s lives they’d missed. The difficulty was that Father Wekkle subtly condescended to her. He was unaware of it, but in all worldly situations, where they stood side by side, he treated her as somehow less. She couldn’t enunciate the facts of it, but of what she experienced she had no doubt. She wondered, Had he patronized her way back then? Had she noticed? Or had he learned this? Did she patronize women too, now that she’d made herself so thoroughly into a priest? It was never anything that others might note, but when they were together, he spoke first, took charge even when he felt most ill, took information from doctors regarding his disease and translated it for her into terms, simpler, he thought she would understand.

And there was another thing: that tone in his voice when they were alone. An indulgent tone, frankly anticipating some lesser capacity in her — whether intellectual, moral, or spiritual, she could not say. The most difficult thing was, however, something that was really not his fault. Again, when they were alone, he called her Agnes. But for so long now she had been the only one who called herself Agnes, that for him to say it made her anxious, as though he’d stripped out and revealed something much more private than that part of her anatomy but having to do with some irreducible part of herself that only she was meant to possess. That Agnes. Agate. That stone made translucent by pressure. That was absolutely hers.

Out of the mystery of one dark pine tree, an owl called as she walked along. Nimishoomis, she said, grandfather. Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls. Agnes hooted back, giving a sleepy, hollow call. There was a pause, and then with some interest the owl answered, and again Agnes asked the question, and the owl did too, and for a while they asked together into the black night. That was what it was, she thought now, to love someone else’s body in the darkness. It was to ask that same question, while knowing that the answer would not be given. The owl flew down to look at her, launching on wings feathered so softly that its flight was soundless, ghostly. It came so close she felt the wind of its movement along her neck.

There was a park near the hospital in Fargo, and after Gregory died, Agnes went there. The grass was studded with acorns and fat squirrels busied themselves in the wealth. Mothers walked by with strollers and carriages, dressed in pink, aqua, lime. There was a wading pool at some short distance, and from the bench where Agnes sat, she could hear the faint splashes and cries of children and the hysterical notes of gathered crows. The air moved over her quietly, with a city exhaustion, like a half-spent breath. Agnes really didn’t know how to feel at all — she wasn’t devastated or even terribly sad. Those feelings were for when Gregory had wrestled with pain, struggled to get free from it, to throw it off. Now that he had, there was a lightness, a numb pleasantness, a newness, to everything she did. It was while she examined this curious state of mind that a figure, approaching from across the coarse green blanket of grass, caught her eye.

A huddled shape, it lurched forward then slowly tottered back, then threw itself forward again just a pittance, as though it were fighting a great wind. As it got closer, she could see that the person was dressed fantastically in a church-basement assortment of sagging clothing, a vibrant dress over men’s plaid pants, a filmy blouse of fairy-pale floating polyester, a green man’s hat, and thick unmatched shoes. An old Indian woman. Hunched, drunk, half collapsed. The woman stumbled closer and peered at Father Damien, then put her hand out and asked for change. Her voice was ragged and her cheeks sunken. She had lost all of her visible teeth but the two sharp incisors, and her eyes were covered with a dull, scratched film, but Agnes recognized her and rose, now taller than the stooped old lady, and took the gnarled claws of her hands in hers.

“Mashkiigikwe!”

The woman reeled back a bit, suspicious, at the sound of her own name, and snatched away her arthritic paws.

“It’s me. Father Damien.”

“Could you help me out with some pocket money?”

“Mashkiigikwe,” Damien tried again.

“What are you calling me by the old name for?” said the old woman in English. “Left that one years ago. Do you have money?”

“I am the priest from Little No Horse. Father Damien. Don’t you remember me?”

Shaking her head, ruffling her fantastic costume, Mashkiigikwe started away from the priest, mumbling half under her breath, throwing her arms out in erratic little gestures.

“How did you get here? Where are your children? What’s your name now?” Damien tried again, following her along just a few steps. The woman laughed, suddenly lucid.

“Winos don’t have names, priest. Go back and save the others like you saved me.”

Then she let her lip drop and shambled off with surprising speed. Agnes sat back down on the park bench and looked at the shined black tops of her shoes. When she closed her eyes, the color of emptiness assailed her. She gazed deeper into the color of that absence and slowly, for the first time in many years, remembering those first years and Kashpaw, the round children and that woman’s strength and skill, Agnes felt tears gather behind her eyelids. Soon they would spill over, drag slowly down her cheeks. These tears horrified her, suddenly. They were tears of self-pity for the seeming waste of her own life, her own efforts.