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

The job of becoming Father Damien had allowed the budding eccentricities of Agnes to attain full flower. Thus the church that drew tourists, and her friends the snakes. Her rock-floored church, and the statue that Sister Leopolda had claimed wept quartz tears that melted in her pockets, and the slow-growing stunted oaks, the golden light, the lilacs. All these things would remain while she did not. How strange that her absence would have no effect whatsoever on the things of this world. Proving that they were not just things, she thought, proving that they were spirit surrounded by a shell of substance, just like her.

There were drums that refused to sound for any but the one who made them, and drums that got up and walked away in the night if they were neglected or felt lonely or cheated of attention. There were violins that wept for their original owners, cellos that groaned for a woman’s touch, guitars that responded only to men. Agnes thought now, with comfort, of her drowned piano. Their fates would match. She sorted her music and took her favorite pieces, thinking, I have never played the planted allées of Haydn or Brahms or even Schubert with the real devotion I gave the thick forests of Beethoven. I always went deeper into the crevasses, complicated the treatment of each note, brought up the minor and scoured the truth out of Bach.

Why could I not have lived more simply?

It would be suspicious for Father Damien not to take his music, so Agnes planned to burn it at her private good-bye party. These soft leaves of yellowed Chopin bearing her painstaking, hopeful self-notations, at least, should go with her! As for her refreshments, they were in the trunk of the car — an entire case.

On the dawn that Agnes prepared to leave, Mary Kashpaw appeared. She entered the yard so promptly that it was apparent she had been up for some time, waiting for her priest to make his move. As Agnes walked out to the car, Mary Kashpaw stood on the path in the swimming energy of the sunrise, its colors behind her. Her face was half shrouded in the blue pre-dawn light. She barred the way. Watching with a solid and hidden gravity, she extended her hand. In her palm, a book of matches.

“So you know, you understand,” said Agnes simply.

Mary Kashpaw’s face, illuminated by a sudden streak of new light, was cloudy and exhausted, her eyelids translucent, puffy, her lips bitten almost bloody. She stared blindly. Within her, like water set to boil on a stove, an emotion pressed for escape. It found her fingers, and her hands flapped abruptly as though they were two dishrags. Then her knees shook. A look of distress twisted across her features and she sank to a kneel. Slowly, she opened her embrace. With an intimate and grieving tenderness, she clasped her arms around Agnes’s knees and bent so that her broad sweep of forehead rested against her thighs. They were still for a long while, just breathing together. Agnes put her hand upon Mary Kashpaw’s great, gray head and stroked the whirlwind of hair at her crown. In its swirl, she saw the flourish of the ax, heard the runners of the sleigh traveling along the grass, saw, as she closed her eyes, how well Mary Kashpaw knew her and had kept her secret.

She took a coat from the mission store, a thing no one would recognize, a hatchet, the Ziploc bag of money, and another waterproof container of matches. Mary Kashpaw hadn’t trimmed Father Damien’s hair lately and it curled around her pate, a halo of white floss, so she brought a hairbrush. She threw in a heavy blanket, which she’d sink, and a nondescript pillow. She assembled all of these things and prepared for her trip as though for an adventure, which of course it was: death, the ultimate wilderness.

Rowing out to Spirit Island with cheese and crackers, candy bars, a bag of apples, and a case of wine, she stopped often to rest and to contemplate the easy chasing waves that rippled beside her. The wind was with her, so she corrected her drift and breathed the fire from her chest and the stinging emptiness from her muscles. The air was so pure and watery that it tasted like a tonic food. Her mind was phenomenally clear. Memories came back in waves, thoughts, passages of music, old songs Nanapush had taught her. They’d sing together once she reached the island. The trip took her most of the day, and it was dusk by the time she arrived, pulled up, and tied the boat to a tree.

The first night, all she did was start a tiny fire, curl up in the blanket, and eat crackers. Too tired even to uncork the wine, she gazed at the meek velvet tarp of the sky, the stars poking through, and she was visited in her drowsiness with a quiet intensity of happiness. Having unburdened herself of all that regarded her nemesis, she was right with the world. She had even forgiven Leopolda. The spirits of her friends, all those whom she’d loved, surrounded her. Gregory tumbling through the wall of books. His last, liquid golden stare, his hands cooling in her hands, his mouth set in an enigmatic half smile. She had parted lovingly with Mary Kashpaw and left off adequately with Father Jude. There was nothing left to torture herself over except, and this was inevitable, she didn’t want to die. And Lulu, she hated leaving her, especially in the middle of one of her flirtatious intrigues. And yet, she thought, with some hope, perhaps here on this island she would be protected from the black dog. Her soul might slip past the cur’s slimy teeth and sneak by the hell gates and pearly gates into that sweeter pasture, the heaven of the Ojibwe.

Next morning, she washed her face carefully in bits of broken sun. She took the hatchet to the boat and began to hack it apart, her arms so weak from the previous day’s exertions that she diminished it only by splinters. Bit by bit, however laboriously, she fed it to her new fire. The blaze gave off a warm friendliness that drew her to sit near. The day was cool and fresh. She ate an apple. A candy bar. At noon, she opened the first bottle of wine, toasted her surroundings, upended it, and drank to the dead.

“Make room,” she said cheerfully to the spirits in the sighing trees.

Dreamily comfortable, she planned. Her death would be simply another piece of the process, she would hardly notice it once the moment came. She’d be drunk, of course, but more than that, she’d be spiritually resigned and prepared. She would accomplish her own end as smoothly as all else. She would simply keep drinking until she got down to the last bottle and then, once she drained it, she’d put stones in her pockets and walk out where the water dropped suddenly to an unknown depth. She would open herself to the water, she would let creation fill her.

Not yet, though. Above her two eagles, a hunting pair, circled. Aloof, lethal, beautiful, they were like two gods who invented and now occasionally plucked their sustenance from the body of the world. She watched them intently, blinking into the whiteness of day. The fire sent shoots of sparks into the afternoon. She reviewed with hope the promise of slipping past the black dog into heaven, and drank, first keenly and then with numb greed, the pleasant blandness of the white Australian wine.

The end of the first bottle undid her. Complications arose. She was surprised how quickly her resolve shrank and how distinctly unpacified her thoughts and her feelings were. No matter what she’d done, no matter how many souls saved or neglected, no matter if she’d betrayed her nature as a woman or violated the vows of the long dead original Father Damien, her life was vapor, a thing of no substance, one note in the endless music, one note that faded out before the listener could catch its shape. Who was this Agnes, or this Damien, this overlay of leaves and earth? Her brain filled with a sound like the terrible jeering of sparrows in the eaves of the church. Her life was vast in its purposelessness, and yet confined to the narrow spectrum of her senses. She rocked beside the fire, her head in her hands.