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

“That will cost the other bottle you got stuffed in your carry sack, plus a ride to Call the Day.”

We bargained back and forth. Call the Day himself was waiting for the bottle in my pack, so in the end I hoisted her up, held Brownie’s halter, and started to walk, as we’d agreed, her nursing her hope of drunkenness along now slow and easy from the back of my horse, until we reached Call the Day’s corner, where, after I had helped her down, she told me as we had agreed. She said my mother’s name:

“Leopolda, the so-called nun.”

I still remember the complete and upright stumped nature of my surprise. Sophie bawled at the house and Call the Day scurried out, a wizened young fellow afflicted with great picklish lumps on his face and neck. He gave me the money he’d raised, and I gave him the bottle. It was the last I was to sell. As he took it from me, the hand that gave it up burned, the center, the palm where I’d been stabbed by this very nun, this Leopolda, my teacher and my sponsor in the holy convent. My mother. From my hand the burning spread, flowed up my arm like a streak of blazing grease. Ringed my throat. Bloomed in my face. Spread until the whole of me flared. Then the lick of flame tweaked my brain and struck me as so funny that I laughed. I laughed until I screamed.

So that was who she was, Father Miller, this Leopolda was the Puyat who bore me in secret shame somewhere on Bernadette’s farm. It was the Morrisseys who passed me on to the Lazarres, whose dog I was until I got the power and they had to come to me begging for a drink. As I say, I quit that soon enough because I found, I got, I wanted to keep, and I did keep a man, Nector Kashpaw. I held on to him in spite of his own charms to himself and in spite of his mother. I stayed with him all his life. I married him, I buried him. I bore his children in between. And never did he know the name of my mother. And never did he know the name of my father. All he knew of me was that I was raised by Lazarres and escaped them. All he knew of me was what I let him know, and all he understood of me was that I was salt, not sugar. Salt, you’ve got to have to survive. Sugar, you can take or leave.

Oh, he had sugar too, Father Miller. Sugar by the name of Lulu. Lulu Lamartine. I see from your face that you understand about Lulu. Don’t blame yourself, don’t worry — a handsome man like you, wasted on the priesthood — you had no chance here, no chance at all.

1996

Father Damien looked even more frail the next morning than he had the day before. The smooth planes and knobs of his bones pressed out against his skin and his cheeks were sunburnt and his temples throbbing and drawn. During the night, the blood had surged to Father Damien’s heart. He sat up, dizzily, and he made the instantaneous and rough decision at last to tell everything, though it meant he was implicated in the cover-up, everything. Risk all, even the ultimate. No matter were he stripped naked and found out, yes, he must at last quash for good and ever any question of Leopolda’s consideration. He must lay out the plain and simple truth to Father Jude, who was too obtuse after all to grasp it any other way.

Haunted, strained, his eyes searched Jude’s face for questions.

“Father Jude, what if your candidate for sainthood was a murderer? Let us imagine it. I think you have.”

“No,” said Jude, shocked and then despairing at the abrupt statement. It had been quite enough to learn, the day before, that his saint was an abandoning mother. He had brought his own coffee and tried to hide his agitation now, carefully pouring out his first cup from a thermos he’d found in the rectory. Father Damien’s statement shouldn’t have rattled him. He should have understood by now that he understood nothing. Even so, he stammered. “I hadn’t, of course. Up until this moment… even now I have no idea what you’re talking about — and still, what evidence, what proof?”

“Incontrovertible,” said Damien, delivering to the younger priest a piercing glare.

“What now?” said Jude, faltering. The other priest was sly, extremely intelligent, and possessed of a hidden stamina that had foiled Father Jude’s imagination. He was truly taken off guard. Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. “What now?” he croaked again.

“We enter into the body of the conundrum,” Damien answered with some pleasure, gaining strength from the younger priest’s confusion. “We have established that there are miracles, real ones, solid evidence of good. Moral as well as physical miracles. Suppose, suppose. Suppose that in addition to her miracle working, however, your Leopolda killed a man with her bare hands? What weighs more, the death or the wonder?”

“The death,” said Jude. “Certainly. But again, where is your proof?”

Damien laughed, without mirth, without lightness. “It is part of the miracle.”

He sank into a silence so profound it seemed like death, stared at the toes of his shoes, closed his eyes. Jude Miller let the tape run on, scraping down the batteries, and was rewarded when, with a wild sleepwalking vigor, Father Damien Modeste sat up and spoke emphatically.

“I kept the barbed-wire rosary in a drawer all by itself, fittingly, and from time to time I looked at it and speculated on its use. One day, in frustration, I gripped it in my own hands and doubled it, then swung it around the post to my bed until the barbs nearly pierced my hands, went deep enough anyway to leave blue marks of bruises. Quickly, I drew diagrams of where those marks fit. Again, again, I practiced the murderer’s art, and each time I stopped I added a detail to the picture until I had a very good idea where the rips, the wounds, the marks, the damage would have occurred in the hands of the killer. The barbs were long. I believe they would have torn short seams, at least two, upwards into the curve of the palm like so…”

Here Father Damien brushed three marks up the inside of his curved old hands.

“I began to look, Father Jude, I began to observe. To my unsurprise, although many of my parishioners wore scars and marks, none were striped with the regularity of my killer. I proposed excuses and theories, became a reader of palms, made a continual nuisance of myself, let it be known that I had some peculiar medical reason for examining the inner landscape of people’s hands. Nobody matched, Father Jude, nobody matched until I took off my blinders and began to look where I had rather not — close in, right next to me, inside the shape of Christ’s body.”

The old one drew a troubled breath, disturbed even now to recall the scene. “Father Jude, I can see it clearly, the moment out of time when she opened her hands. In the beams of afternoon radiance, she implored me to allow her some penance or other. That’s when I saw that her palms bore the jagged white streaks, the raised scars, the triangular healed gashes where the barbs had cut into the flesh.”

The two men fell silent in contemplation, and then Jude remembered.

“The miracle,” he said to Father Damien, “you said that the proof was part of the miracle. What did you mean?”

A slow smile cracked Father Damien’s face, squeezed the fine wrinkles to careful sheaves. “Oh, I thought it would be apparent to you early on, my friend. I thought it was clear — the stigmata — the marks she insisted she wore as the result of the vision in which she was given Christ’s crown of thorns. Those marks were not made by thorns, but by wire barbs, of course. As for the sign and the wonder, hear this. The metal bore a bloody rust. The true miracle was this: the fast that our so-called saint soon endured, the amazing rigidity, the miraculous possession that gripped the imagination of the parish, was not the visionary trance her sisters supposed, but tetanus.”