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

With that thought her eyes dried and she jumped up, heart pounding, wrenched into a sudden fury. She spotted the bright dot of Mashkiigikwe, now far off, opportuning someone else, and with a swift jog Agnes powered herself down the sidewalk until she drew up behind Mashkiigikwe. She grasped the old woman’s shoulder and swiveled her roughly so they stood face-to-face.

“Here,” Father Damien said angrily, pulling what dollars and quarters he had from inside pockets, smashing them into the old, brown hands. “Here and here. Take this! Ando miniquen! I didn’t put the bottle in your mouth! I didn’t make you suck the sauce!”

The old woman’s mouth had dropped wide open in astonishment, but now she closed it to a firm line and her eyes flickered. Her face unblurred and just for a moment her features composed into the real face of Mashkiigikwe, aware, intelligent, bewildered to find herself in hell.

“Who did it then?” she asked the priest. “How did it happen? For I don’t like to be this way, and yet, Father Damien, I am.”

1996

Now she was old, truly old, of an age she’d never imagined. Her skin was waxen and her brain flickered, dropped things, seized others. Still, she possessed a startling vigor. There were days she did her stretches and arm whirls and went out walking and nothing hurt — not the hip gouged by the bullet so long ago, not even her toughened beanbag of a heart. And she listened to confessions with more attention and stamina than she’d ever possessed.

One such evening, walking out of the church, in the half darkness, Agnes was suddenly afflicted by an unbearable thirst. Instinctively, she bent to the font at the entrance and steadily as a parched horse pulled water from the surface into her dry throat. The blessed water was mineral stale and soothing, and she stood after a few moments, wiped her face, and went on, refreshed. Straight back to her dinner of ham and pickled beets, then an immediate swoon of profound, dreamless sleep.

Having drunk so deeply of the holy water, Agnes woke in the middle of the night. Two things were happening. She was in the throes of a sense of overwhelming blessedness — from within. And also, she needed to relieve herself. She rolled over and swung her legs out over the cold floor. Gingerly, she touched down. Stood. She walked through the dark hallway to the bathroom, and then, returning to her bed where she planned to lie still and enjoy the interesting inner effect of the blessed water, she was suddenly directed elsewhere. When, many years past, the church had acquired the loud organ with pipes running to the ceiling, the door of her cabin had been enlarged and the Steinway moved inside. She found herself standing before the instrument, serenely lustrous in the dark.

Sometimes, now, at this brittle age, she buried her hands in a cast-iron pot of wet, hot sand for ten or fifteen minutes before she played. Tonight, she had no chance to set up the hot sand, so her fingers twitched on the keys. Still, as Chopin had been kind to aging musicians and written some particularly easy preludes of great beauty, she played. The piece she loved best was meditative and slow, aching of the world’s sorrows and fugitive joys. As she played, she gradually awakened. Her fingers loosened and forgot their age. She played on. Wondered. Had she the promise, could she exact one from the black dog’s muzzle, if the thing should appear to her again, dare she ask: Was there a good piano in hell? The music soared, her hands curved around an intricate series of trills. If there were a good piano in hell, would she play this well once she got there? Her music, inaudible to all the sleeping reservation, spilled through the little house, uncurled beneath her hands like smoke. For an hour, two hours, almost three of her waning life, Agnes lived fully and intimately in a state of communion.

THE MIGHTY TEMPTER

Agnes felt it in her bones when the wind came up — a freedom in which she imagined, sleepless, springing from the narrow bed. She was sleeping very soundly, so heavily, in fact, that she lost track of the current of her life. Waking in the dark, she surprised herself. Old again! A priest! She did not move. She could not move. She wondered what had awakened her. Then she smelled under the fugitive breeze the low and maggot-quick, rich, warm, fish-gut breath of dog.

“Where are you? Show yourself!”

She tried to struggle up on one elbow, but a weight of air pinned her in the sheets. There was a panting and a lolling. A dogness surrounded her. The dog itself walked heavily up her legs and stood there in the dark, one paw on her heart and the other on the green scapular she wore under her nightshirt. Faintly, Agnes hoped. Might the scapular offer some protection? But her voice box rusted shut and bitter anxiety zipped down her windpipe.

“Get off!” She tried to say it, willed it. The visitor slouched massive on her chest, and then it spoke in a cloud of foul whispers.

“ Wie geht’s? How’s my little priestette?”

Dug scraggly claws into Agnes’s frail skin and settled full length. Stretched its legs along hers. She sensed fleas shooting off her nemesis like popcorn. Felt the soft plop of the dog’s heavy balls between her knees.

“Open that black door in your chest,” rasped the dog, “I’m hungry.”

“Never!” Agnes’s brain squeaked.

“Oh,” the dog whined, “for a taste of nice fresh heart!”

A racking dryness. A hacking, lung-wrenching cough sent needle-fine pains shooting through her lungs, warning her not to move a muscle, a hair. The pinching pains radiated from each breath, from her center, like pulses of the sharp light depicted in paintings of the sacred heart. Now, at last, Agnes was horridly awake; her mouth went sandpaper dry and her esophagus shut.

“Talk to me,” said the dog, and its voice was insufferably gentle.

Agnes gritted her teeth against the longing, sharp and sudden, for she knew that her only refuge lay in categorically not giving in to the false compassion in the dog’s tone.

“Get thee behind me,” she managed to croak. “I’m not ready to go.”

“Still, I will take good care of you.” The dog settled its lanky, bony haunches. “I am very loyal.”

“You want me to die.”

“You are tired, and you want to die, too.”

“I don’t know anymore,” said Agnes, wearily. “Is there a good piano in hell?”

“The devil owns all of the finest makers of musical instruments,” the dog said. “That darkness, that blood of sorrow in the most expressive woods, where do you think that comes from?”

“Suffering,” said Agnes.

“Causing it,” said the dog.

“I want an angel, a real dog, a good dog! I’d like to have a dog to protect me,” Agnes blurted out.

“I will not let her, it, whatever, live,” said the black dog. “Just as I can kill every person you love, I will kill whatever dog you love.”

Agnes’s heart thudded to the very end of her gut and she pleaded.

“Leave me.”

“I can’t,” said the dog, wheezing with a sly and malevolent sympathy. “I am yours, and don’t think I enjoy my work! Watching over you has been infuriating, though it had its moments. I did enjoy tickling Berndt with those bullets, and Gregory with the black knives of cancer. Recall when you made love how dutifully their hearts beat under your hand — how steady and warm? I stopped them. I shut their dear eyes…”

Agnes started to tremble.

“… just as I shut the black eyes of Napoleon via the rosary in the hands, the very hands of the nun… how could you forgive those two, and others, the worst of sinners? Your forgiveness has opened many a door to me, old friend.”