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

The men of the law stopped close upon the robbers and gingerly stepped toward them, guns drawn.

“You’re done for,” shouted Slow Johnny.

“Halt, you jackass!”

Crouching so that his body was shielded by the car door and his gun level with the head of Miss DeWitt, the Actor warned off the sheriff.

“Back! Back!” Berndt signaled to Johnny.

“I’ll shoot her, yes by damn I will,” called the Actor.

At a great distance from herself, Agnes felt her mouth open and words emerge. She spoke to the Actor, who cried out, warningly, again. Slow Johnny, though, was hard of hearing as well as slow and he kept walking forward. Berndt saw the thumb of the Actor lift off the hammer of the gun. He struck him just as the gun went off, so that the last Agnes DeWitt saw of the Actor was his unflinching look at her. The last thought she had about him was amazement that he did not regard her words or her life as important or even useful at all, or have a moment’s hesitation about ending all of the thousands of hours of tedious intensity of musical practice, ending the rippling music that her hands could bring into being, ending the episodes of greed and wonder in the arms of Berndt, and the several acts she’d learned to do that men paid whores great sums to perform and that she enjoyed, and further back, ending her time of devotion in the convent where her sisters had already unsewn, pressed, and restitched her habit for another hopeful. None of which was of any consequence. Not even the mountains of prayers for the souls so like his or the vivid attempts beseeching Mary to intercede. Nothing mattered. None of that. And beyond that, to her childhood and the tar roofs of the homestead and the alien bread of her mother’s cruel visions and her father’s terrifying gestures of love and all the precious jumble of her littleness, her thoughts, her creamy baby skin, her howls and burbles, all of this was as nothing to his casual wish to kill her.

This fact smote her as a marvel and a sorrow, and she knew it was because of what she saw, straight on, in the Actor that she so fervently loved Chopin. And God. Now, she had to give herself entirely to God’s will, whatever that might be. And it was just as she wondered, indeed, if for her to die was that will, that the gun went off at her temple and blackness stormed behind her eyes.

While Berndt jumped to her side, the Actor neatly grabbed the reins and somehow pulled himself onto the table-broad back of the horse. He dug in his heels, gave a desperate kick to the horse’s belly, and they were off, though the horse slowed at once just as soon as they entered the vast horizon-bound treeless wet field of thick gumbo. Berndt, kissing Agnes in a strange roar of grief, then followed the Actor, leaving the other two bank robbers and Slow Johnny and the deputy shouting back and forth and leveling their guns but not knowing whom to shoot. Berndt walked straight on. Just as he had when the car sped past, he understood his advantage lay in the increase of distance. He knew how exhausted his horse was, and he knew, too, that he, Berndt, could bend over from time to time to clean off his feet, but his horse could not. Either the Actor would have to dismount, or the horse would eventually slow to a stop, repossessed by the dirt.

And so it was — a low-speed chase.

There in that empty landscape they were a cipher of strained pursuit — one man plodding forward on the horse, the other plodding after. They seemed on that plain and under that spun sky eternal — bound to trudge on to hell no matter what. The clods on the hooves of the horse were soon great rich cakes. Still, on and on, slower, they pressed. Then slower yet so that the Actor kicked in savage indignation until the horse’s flanks bled. Slower yet. Berndt kept coming. The Actor screamed straight into the ear of the horse. With a frantic ripple of muscles it attempted to undo itself from the earth. Only sank itself farther, deeper. Raging, futile, the Actor saw the horse was stuck, leaped off, and put the pistol to its eye.

The shot echoed out, a crack. Another thinner crack echoed, against the mirage horizon. By the time the echo was lost, the horse was dead. Berndt saw his horse kneel in the wet cement dirt the way the animals worshiped the Christ. Then, to Berndt’s grief and rage, there was added a contemptuous bewilderment, which made him capable of what he did next.

The next bullet that the Actor fired struck Berndt in the chest but went through without touching a vital organ. Berndt merely felt a stunning rip of fire. He staggered one step back and then kept moving. When the bullet after that struck him mortally, he seemed to absorb it and strengthen. Rising to the next steps, he skipped from the mud. The Actor’s face stiffened in green shock and he fired point-blank. The empty chamber clicked over just as Berndt clasped the Actor by the shoulders and spoke into his face.

“If you hadn’t shot my horse, you wouldn’t have to die now,” said Berndt, abstractly stating a fact by which he perhaps meant that he would have preferred to deliver the Actor to the terrors of justice, or perhaps that Berndt would have preferred to die in the place of the horse, or yet, that the last bullet would have been his own coup de grâce . As there was life left in him, Berndt set his hands with a dogged weariness upon the Actor’s face, put his thumbs to the gangster’s eyeballs, and pressed, pressed with an inexorable parental dispassion, pressed until it was clear the gangster’s aim would be forever spoiled. Then Berndt toppled forward onto the ground, into the nearly liquid gumbo, pinning the Actor full length.

It was hours before anyone got to the scene and in that time Arnold “the Actor” Anderson could not budge the dead man. Inch by inch, with incremental slowness and tiny sucking noises the earth crept over the Actor and into him, first swallowing his heels, back, elbows, and then stopping up his ears, so his body slowly filled with soupy, rich topsoil. At the last, he could not hear his own scream. Dirt filled his nose and then his tipped up straining mouth. No matter how he spat, the earth kept coming and the mud trickled down his throat. Slowly, infinitely slowly, bronchia by bronchia the earth stopped up each passage of his lungs and packed them tight. The ground absorbed him. When at last the first member of the reluctantly formed posse arrived, he thought at first the robber had escaped, but then saw how only the hands of the Actor, clutching Berndt’s arms and back like a raft, still extended above the level of the horizon.

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN

After she came to, nursed by her own former sisters in the hospital, a bullet crease shadowing her mind, did Agnes DeWitt sorrow in her bones that she had teasingly pushed Berndt away that morning? Did she dream all that month, while she hovered in and out of death, of his entering and her receiving him? Recall looking into his eyes pillowed close to hers? Long for the rough cup of his hand on her breast? No, not for a moment. Rather, she thought again of music. Chopin. The kind bullet that split and roped her scalp had remarkably fused her musical joys with all memories of Berndt.

She didn’t even recall, donning her jacket, how it came to be fitted behind the satin lining with an astonishing amount of money. Though she’d lost portions of her memory, she had not lost her wits, and she said nothing. Counted it in secret. Kept it safe in a Fargo bank. So she was well off. Berndt had written a will in which he declared her his common-law wife and left to her the farm and all upon it. There, she continued to raise rose-comb bantams, dominickers, reds. She played piano, too, for hours, and practiced more intensely than ever. She began to read. In the convent, she had not been permitted to read beyond her daily prayers and the lives of the saints. Now, with a town library full of volumes she’d never touched, she became a reader. A wolfish, selfish, maddened, hungry reader who let the chickens scream and peck one another to death, who ignored the intelligent loneliness of the pig and forgot to milk the groaning cow. She read or she played piano, did little else except that she did keep teaching. Only her toughest chickens survived.