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

It was then that Agnes was assured that her Father Damien had done the right thing in absolving all who asked forgiveness, and the realization filled her with a sudden and bouyant strength. Here it was — the reason she’d been called here in the first place. The reason she’d endured and the reason she’d been searching for. This was why she continued to live. She shut the dog out and drew strength from the massive amounts of forgiveness her priest had dispensed in his life. She saw that forgiveness as a long, slow, soaking rain he had caused to fall on the dry hearts of sinners. Father Damien had forgiven everyone, right and left, of all mistakes and shameful sins. All except for Nanapush, who had never really confessed to any sin, but had instead forgiven Damien with great kindness for wronging him and all of the people he had wanted to help, forgiven him for stealing so many souls. Nanapush!

“You were not able to silence Nanapush!” laughed Agnes. “He sneaked past your two-way road onto the road of life. He’s probably gambling day and night, eating berries without getting the shits, telling stories with old friends and enjoying his many wives. You had no power over Nanapush!”

There was a pause before the dog responded.

“Who could silence that talker?” But then a slinking insinuation. “So you did love him. Yes, I knew it. Oh, you little priestette, you loved him, you lusted after him, you kept this secret from me, didn’t you? Yes, but now I have it. I have your memory.”

“No, you do not!” Though weakening, Agnes was indignant. “You will never have my memory. Even I don’t have it all, you rotten hound. You stole it in the form of the Actor and in the person of the gun. You took my memory, and I have spent my whole life gathering it back.”

Agnes shut down, closed her eyes, imagined herself a bulwark, a wall. “Of course I loved Nanapush,” she went on, impatient. “The old man was my teacher, my confidant, my priest’s priest, my confessor, my friend. Plus, he was funny and you don’t get funny much in this life. God, how we used to laugh! Even his funeral was hilarious — I miss him. There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I’m going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin.”

“That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer?”

The dog ranted — it had never liked the composer, it turned out it was jealous — but Agnes didn’t notice anymore. She fought. She gathered every memory and prayed starting from her center and radiating outward. Called every ancestor, blood and adopted. The aadizokaanag, spirits. Bent her thoughts on Nanapush. Asked for the old man’s help. Filled herself with every good that had been done to her and every caring act she’d known. Cried out for the young, strong spirit of Mashkiigikwe. For Chopin. Sucked with thin threads of air the ravishing stillness of the ghost note that lingers after each chord of Chopin’s three repudiated posthumous nocturnes. Went further, back into the folds of brain that hid and held in their recesses such memories as she had of her childhood, girlhood, lost messages. Gathered in her strongest molecules the urge to live and the strength to snap shut her knees, suddenly, clasp with viselike ardor and squeeze with Catholic ferocity the testicles of the black dog.

Death. That was its name. That’s what she dealt with and she knew it, dreaded it, hated death’s intimacy and the strange greed with which it pursued every living thing. Agnes screamed, bent her fingers into wire hangers around the mange-bald throat, locked her knees, squeezed harder, harder, harder, until the dog yelped, gave up, and disappeared.

THE WINES OF PORTRARTUS

Most High Eminence,

I remind you, we both exist in the compassionate dream of an unseen God. Please send me an answer…

“Are you that answer?”

Father Damien peered hard at Jude. Morning. Or maybe early afternoon. Father Damien spread his hands resignedly upon the tray and tilted his chin back to accept a solicitous towel pat from his visitor, the one who’d brought him his breakfast. Damien had wakened groggy, and was annoyed to have been restricted to his room by Sister Mauvis.

“I’m not entirely feeble.” Damien suddenly clawed the napkin from the younger priest’s hands.

“I know you’re not,” said Jude, “it’s just that you had a bit of oatmeal stuck to your chin.”

“There. Satisfied?”

With one sharp movement, Father Damien swiped at his chin once more and sat back in bed.

“They insist upon this, periodically.”

“Bed rest,” said Father Jude, sympathetic.

“Confinement!”

Father Jude tried to soothe the outraged and frail man before him. “I’m sure it is rather demeaning, in a way. But you see, they weren’t able to rouse you this morning.” His voice took on the chiding parental quality that vigorous, impatient people sometimes use with the elderly. “It seems that, last night, you were just a little… tipsy.” The younger priest’s voice was suddenly prim.

A cunning, soft, puzzled expression crept over Damien’s face. “Tipsy!” he mocked, his voice lilting. “Do you mean to say, drunk?”

“More or less.”

“Loaded, shkwebii, pinned to the leather, purpled, pumped, schnockered?”

Father Jude didn’t smile. He found no humor in these words, none whatsoever. Oh yes, he had seen the misery of alcohol’s effect and believed such words were not just words! His reply was stiff. “They found no sign of a bottle, but yes, you were sloshed.”

“No sign of the bottle, you say?”

“None,” said Father Jude, leaning close. “And you didn’t particularly smell like wine, or what have you. Yet last night you were distinctly intoxicated.”

“And no bottle?” Father Damien’s voice grew in intensity. He fixed Jude with a deep stare.

“None!”

“My house was searched?”

“Completely.”

“No explanation? No clue? No cause?”

“Not that your good Sister Mauvis could discover, or any of them for that matter. But you can trust me with the knowledge.” Father Jude leaned very close to Damien, smiled in conspiratorial sympathy. “Tell me, where on earth are you hiding your stash? We took the cupboards apart, the closet, the woodpile. What’s your explanation?”

“Explanation? Obvious!”

Father Jude waited.

“It is a miracle.”

Father Jude laughed at the joke, but the old priest maintained a dignified calm and lightly stabbed a leather bone of a finger at him.

“I have only to refer you to the early saint Portrartus.”

Father Jude looked indulgently blank, and Father Damien persisted stubbornly. “While tending sheep in the mountains, our Portrartus manifested a profound drunkenness in spite of the isolation of his flock. There was no tangible source of intoxicants. Like Portrartus’s, my drunkenness is not of this world.”

“Ohhhh?” Father Jude reacted with exasperated amusement.

“I do not”—here Father Damien grew intense—“require the fruit of this earth in order to experience an exaltation of the spirit. I have only to think back and consider my life. Soon, I find myself in a state of delirium, which, I understand, resembles the less rarefied behavior exhibited by—”

“Habituated winos,” Father Jude cut in, his patience lapsing.

“Last night I was also visited both by musical manifestations of the Holy Ghost and, I am sorry to say, of the devil himself.”

“These manifestations, they consisted of…?”

Father Damien put a trembling hand in the air now, and appeared much troubled.