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

“Would you like to take communion?” he asked her.

She shrugged at a chair. He sat, the case in his lap. Again, she just looked at him with those opaque eyes, and waited.

“Are you in a state of grace?” he asked.

Here, she smiled.

“Are you?” She threw her question back at him, and touched her gray forelock absently. “You shouldn’t,” she went on, “use the holy body of God as bait.”

Father Jude actually flushed.

“I know what you want.” Her voice was flat.

Now it was Father Jude’s turn to go silent. In what he now thought of longingly as his “regular life,” he was routinely in charge of every human exchange. He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease. He sighed, caught, and as he had some humility even as spoiled as he was by his authority, he set the case carefully aside on a metal tea tray, folded his hands in his lap, and said to Marie, “Yes, you read my intentions. I am sorry.”

And so she nodded. And so again the silence.

“I will tell you a few things,” she said to him at last.

So, of course it was fortunate that he happened to have carried along the tape recorder, which he now removed from within the soul-saving kit he’d brought. He set the recorder carefully between them, tested it by counting into the microphone, played it back. Now she was a little nervous. At first, as she began to speak, she stared at the tape recorder as though it were a separate consciousness. But then, as her memories collected, the picture shaped itself between them.

RED MOTHER

Marie Kashpaw

When you don’t have a mother, as I never did, you have to make one. Get yourself a piece of clay and shape in your fingers and the shape you always make will be a mother. Or press her together of mud and sticks. Sometimes a tree would do, gnarled around me. Bundles of reeds. I used a blanket rolled and bunched in the shape of her. Rags. Sometimes there was a little extra stew in the pot and I stole it and said to myself she gave it to me. Sometimes just grass, grass was all I needed. The warmth of it in the sun was her golden green smell and the soft brush of it her fingers, stroking my face.

You don’t have a mother, you make one up. That’s how I made mine and still she is standing where I made her, dark and red in the heavy woods.

What happened to me when I went up on the hill with the black-robe women is between me and my confessor, Father Damien. I came down with a broken head and a bloody palm wrapped in a pillowcase, with a raging spirit and a man who would be my husband. But that is not the story here. For I came down with an inkling inside me of what I knew. I later found that my instinct was true. There was something about that nun that drew me to hate her with a deep longing. How, you say, can that be? To long for that black scarecrow flapping for crows. She had a face like a starved rat and a taste for cruel games. But the worst thing of all was that Sister Leopolda loved me — I felt that like a blow.

It is hard to hate a person if they love you. No matter what they do. What you feel in return twists between the two feelings. Not one. Not the other. But painful.

At the time, I was kept by the Lazarres. But I was a dog to the Lazarres. So instead of going back to the Lazarres, or claiming my new husband right after the convent, I went to the woods. I aimed to live by myself in the old shack Agongos had died in the winter before. The place was deep in the birch, other side of a little pothole. Slough ducks came to land in there, turtles haunted it, muskrats made their twig-pile houses, and there was plenty to eat. I had decided just how I would support myself. Before I’d left the Lazarres, I stole two dollars, my life’s wages. I used it to buy two bottles of nameless brown-red whiskey. I knew where there was a heap of old bottles in the woods, and I polished up two empty ones. Then I added some slough water to the good stuff and made four bottles in all, plugged neatly with white strips from my nun’s pillowcase.

Those four bottles, I sold for twice the profit. I bought more whiskey. I kept on moving up. I was just a child, just a girl, but I was a bootlegger now. And I sold to the best and I sold to the worst. I bought a long steel hunting knife for when my customers got ugly. I bought a rib-skinny paint horse named Brownie, and fattened her on good sweet grass and boughten grain. I traded a stove off an old white farmer, and nails and boards to fix some shelves on my walls. Blankets. At last my winter store, a fifty-pound sack of flour, potatoes, onions, apples. I dried a load of berries for some winter sweetness, and I dug a deep pit behind my little house and lined it with slough grass. Into that pit, I set a cache of whiskey, precious bottles. Each wrapped in reeds like an offering. Then I covered it up and let the snow fall where it might. I was ready for whatever came to me, I thought. But I was not ready for the truth of my beginnings.

One day, I returned to find Sister Leopolda had come for me. She was a pillar of stark blackness praying in the yard.

“Come back,” she said. She put out her hands and they were pierced in the palms, like mine.

I let her stand there, and I stood to watch her in a dull trance. Sun turned through the yellow leaves, rippled across her one way, then rippled back. I thought lazily of all that black hate that boiled up in me back at the convent, but I could not catch hold of it. I guess it had steamed away with the water from the kettle. Nothing was left, not shame, not indifference, not even a numbness or a heaviness — although, for the first time in my whole life, I thought with interest of my whiskey. I never drank my profits before, but maybe I would start.

I left the nun standing where she was, her arms held out stiff. Maybe she would stand there all night. I went on my rounds. She was gone when I returned. I staked Brownie in the clearing, where he could stuff himself, and I fried myself a potato with deer meat, boiled up a pot of tea. Then I went outside and sat on the little stump I had put right beside my door. There was something so deep of a pain in me, Father, like the end of all things was drawing near. I didn’t think it over, I just picked up the bottle. As I drank my first whiskey, I watched the darkness collect.

It came peacefully out of the hearts of things. Bled from the leaves. The clouds sifted darkness out of them and it swirled into the air. I put my head back against the log wall, still warm, and I felt comfortable. I drank again, deeply. The stuff burned, then spread through me with a radiator comfort. Before me, as the dark was all of a piece, then, I saw my real mother rearing up. Even booze has a spirit. Yes, I said, it is the liquor who cares for me now. Alcohol is my red mother. She was fire, she was stupidity, she was light. She was all I needed. Her heart was a golden catchall of sorrows and pains. She told me that if I chose her, she’d stay by me and she used the word forever, which with her I could believe.

As I said, I was a dog to the Lazarres. I ate the scraps when there were scraps. The old dress I wore sagged off my shoulders. My shoes were hides I tied onto my feet and my coat was the blanket I slept with. Besides my own so-called family, my best customers back in those days were Morrisseys. If someone was on a long dirty bender and coming down slow, I’d bring the bottle to them on Brownie. We’d make special delivery of the booze to certain drunks like Sophie Morrissey, who was long ago, as a girl, in that house hit by the Virgin’s statue and found it almost impossible after that to manifest a drunk state, though she tried. Anyway, this Sophie returned the favor by telling me the answer to the origin of Marie Lazarre.