The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Page 12

  The violently independent Mashkiigikwe left her little sister, with Kashpaw’s promise that Quill would be the one wife he kept. Mashkiigikwe left at night, knowing that Quill would howl and clutch to her skirts. She took her gun and pack and disappeared onto her trapline. Kashpaw’s next youngest son, Eli, was already gone. That left Kashpaw another gun short and in want of hunters to feed the group. Fishbone’s baby was stillborn; she fell ill and could not be moved from the cabin. During spring sugaring, her older child crawled into the fire, and for days his screams and whimpers rang the little clearing. Margaret finally struck the child, silencing its cries to bewildered gasps. Kashpaw, sore over Mashkiigikwe, struck Margaret fiercely in return and didn’t even care to follow her when she hobbled off in fury to complain to Nanapush.

  Who fell in love with her.

  Nector didn’t tell this last development to Father Damien. The priest found out himself, and the situation provided him with much to consider. So it was Nanapush who threw the Kashpaw household like a pile of sticks into the air, in the night, and waited blindly underneath to catch what fell, or who, and wasn’t it a well-deserved and sad piece of luck that the one he caught was Margaret?

  During the months that followed, it was apparent that Nanapush wasn’t over his first infatuation with Mashkiigikwe. He often thought about her, spoke of her great hunting skills with bashful adoration, spread his hands one way to show the size of her feet to Father Damien, spread his hands differently to show the weight of her breasts, threatened to follow her with gifts of love.

  Gradually, though, and with increasing ardor, his attention turned to placating Margaret Kashpaw. She was composed of a shrewd toughness that intrigued him. Her features communicated regal scorn. She was surprisingly light on her feet and could easily run a dog down and whack the rabbit from its teeth. Nanapush had seen it. She could chop wood, haul water, drop a wild goose from the sky by clipping off its head with one shot. Nobody bested her and nothing intimidated Margaret. She was a challenge that Nanapush could not resist.

  QUILL’S MADNESS

  Without her older sister, Quill lost her bearings, for it was Mashkiigikwe who always told her what to do. Mashkiigikwe had soothed her and carefully unwrinkled the pain that crumpled her mind. She had stroked her younger sister’s face and sung an old song about the clouds lifting off the surface of the lake. Then she fed her tidbits from her own fingers and lightly pulled on Quill’s braids, as though to guide her back to the living. Eventually, Quill would respond slightly, and then Mashkiigikwe would know that once more she’d succeeded in reaching her. And she had wanted desperately to reach her sister, guide her back, for on this side of the spirit world Quill had a daughter who was turning out to be as massive as her father, but very shy, and needed a mother’s attention.

  Mashkiigikwe had also kept things running smoothly, along with Margaret. There was always food, always wood, always water. Now, all Quill did for hours each day was chop, haul, gather. A frail sapling, her shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the family. Taking care of all the children including her own daughter, and the burnt boy, enduring a lack of food and the nerveless despair of her husband, Quill imagined that she had bent to the ground and been rooted by the ends of her fine, black hair. When she pulled herself upright, earth rained down on her and her thoughts were weak as dust.

  Quill sat hunched on pukwe mats while her daughter, whom she’d just named Mary after the female whiteman’s god, combed through her hair with her fingers, then the clever brush. Mary divided off the hair strand by strand and removed from the hairs louse or egg of louse or husk or sign of such a creature. Lately, Quill had come to abhor these intimate vermin and to believe that they were biting her to disturb and to disarrange her thoughts. From time to time, her daughter dipped her fingers in a little can of kerosene and pinched off a louse. Quill’s thoughts burned. Temptations flared. A harsh volatility depleted her. Quill imagined that if Mary should purse her lips and blow on her head it would burst into flame like a candle. She slapped off her daughter’s hands, jumped up, started working.

  Quill wove pukwe angrily, not half as well as Margaret. She moved the reeds between her fingers so quickly that they blurred, but the mats were uneven, the edges loose and sloppy. Who cared? One mat, another, appeared. When she stopped, her strength faded and her eyes rolled back, white around the iris. Her breath came short. A strange fear rode in her, and the only way to keep going was to keep working. Faster. Harder. She knit an extra mat and tossed it aside. Another materialized. The mats kept collecting until the reeds were gone. Yet her heart would not be still.

  In the center of the day, she abandoned everyone, left them howling for her, crying for n’gah, n’gah, weakly asking for nibi or soup. She stood and walked into the bush, hiked her skirts and peed standing, frowning distractedly at the moving reeds onshore. Mashkiigikwe had always helped her drive away a spirit that annoyed her, a wild old skeletal woman who kept visiting her and putting evil thoughts into her mind. Suddenly, here the old thing came, scratching her way along through the undergrowth until very suddenly she was right next to Quill, invisible, fingering her skirt, lifting her blouse, touching her legs, laughing at Quill’s slow tears of fright.

  At first Quill resisted. As always, once the old witch operated on her with her words and torture, Quill eventually agreed to accomplish the cruel tricks that the matchimindemoyenh laid out in her mind. When she returned to the lodge, Quill stuffed earth into the mouths of her children. She poured earth into the barrel of her husband’s rifle, flung earth into the soup pot, and tamped earth into her vagina. She sat grinning at the world, holding a great makak of dirt. Eat, she said to her husband, offering it when he returned.

  DOCTORING QUILL

  They tried the sucking bones again and they tried the old remedies but always, halfway through the procedure, Quill rolled over with an alert cry and darted her arms in the air beseeching them to fetch the priest. Perhaps, by then, she had seen too many die too young, too soon, and Quill’s nervous mind could not accept this. She’d had only her sister left. Many people went mad to protect themselves from the grief of witnessing the wreckage. Perhaps the old woman with the white hands and black face, hissing in her mind, was the cause of Quill’s agitation. The priest, Father Damien, had given her assurance without really knowing how to help her.

  Desperate to bring her mind back, Kashpaw brought Quill into Holy Mass. He led her to the front of the church and placed her in the seat beside him, holding her two arms like a large, temporarily docile doll who might at any moment come to life and lash out. Next to them, their great strong daughter gazed impassively upon the altar. When Father Damien raised high the body of Christ, Quill’s body went rigid and her eyes crossed in ecstasy. She fell sideways onto Kashpaw’s lap and could not be roused until the Blood of the Lamb met her lips. Then she wept, sadly and with copious hunger, for God or for her many precious dead who could say. Father Damien, who sat with her long after Mass was over and who listened to her outpouring with great sympathy but limited comprehension, for it was all in Ojibwe, was shocked when she suddenly changed the cast of her features, laughed low in a harsh unconscious tone, bit down, and ripped the flesh from her own finger.

  Rock of the True Church,

  I very much wish to know how I am to treat the cases of irregular connection that abound on this reservation. There are some who have remarried in the Church without annulment—can their unions be regarded as a natural bond? Which woman may a man keep who has had several and must be married to one?

  My other question is as follows: How far am I permitted to enter into the political picture? At present, I am regarding it from the vantage point of an observer, though I have gathered information. In what ways is a priest allowed to protect the interests of his parish?

  The opinion of Your Holiness on these matters is absolutely vital to me.

  Modeste

  JOHN JAMES MAUSER

  One name appears and reappears among the papers
that I handle, wrote Agnes in a hand that she had adapted only slightly. She had never written in a particularly feminine hand anyway. Now she stiffened her letters and stacked the words together with a neat solidity that matched, she hoped, the toughness of the priest she was becoming.

  “John James Mauser,” she wrote in Father Damien’s daybook. “I have now begun to conduct a methodical search for information, and found that John James Mauser is a man whose actual person, if not identity, is mysterious. From a news story and engraving, I have determined that he is a tall, curve-lipped, and jut-nosed son of eastern mill barons and shrewd New York socialites. He is a restless man who got his lucky start by correctly guessing where the Northern Pacific railroad would cross the state line.

  “John James Mauser bought the land that, in what seemed a matter of weeks, became downtown Fargo. He went from land speculation into lumber, minerals, quarries. He now purchases areas lost to the continual census that shows a dwindling number of Indians. He buys the land tax forfeited. He buys the land by having the Ojibwe owners declared incompetent. He buys this parcel and the next and the next. He takes the trees off. He leaves the stumps.

  “New legislation passes. Is reversed. Mauser prospers with every fumble. His hands are always open, ready to receive. He denudes all holdings as they come his way, though sometimes he waits for certain special parcels that produce, as do one series of prime allotments on Little No Horse, oak trees of great density, beauty, and age that will never again be seen in this region.”

  Agnes threw down the pen and rubbed her face. A desperation gripped her, an irksome anxiety. She took up the pen, twisted it, bit the end, continued.

  “Many people think of the papers that Mauser offers as a treaty. He has taken interpreters and ribboned officials with him to meetings. He himself gives out bolts of cloth, old-time kettles, and twists of tobacco. Though he speaks of and counts the government’s agents as his friends, he is careful never to claim them. Up until this time the only agreements that Anishinaabeg have signed have been with the government, and John James Mauser is not government. He is a single man who wants trees, in general, and a particular set of trees also, and to get them he offers what seems a vast sum of money to each head of household, so much money that it seems unthinkable to turn it down.

  “A great many sign and take the money. It must seem they can surely buy land somewhere else. But then the winter drags out, children need to be fed, old people buried, and the craving satisfied that never quits. Thanks to Mauser, ishkodewaaboo, the smooth fire that takes their land money, is tidily available just across the reservation line. . . .”

  7

  THE FEAST OF THE VIRGIN

  1912–1913

  Seating himself on an overturned cream can at the cooking fire of Alexandrine and Michel Destroismaisons, the latter a well-respected canopy bearer for the Host, Father Damien accepted a cup of strong, black, sugared tea. There was a clash of pots and the rich smell of bannock, pork, oats, more tea, and makade-mashkikiwaaboo. Gratefully, he drained the first cup. Sipped the next. He was just about to ask Alexandrine to press her children into service picking wildflowers for the altar, when, across from where he sat, a strange apocalyptic figure reared.

  The Puyat—dressed in her own homemade habit—staggered past, her arms piled with buffalo skulls. Jutting from the veil, raw and planar, her face, like another of those skulls, stared out with deep, unseeing, hollow eyes. Her complexion was bone white and her gaze held a withering power. Gaunt and spectral in her thin height, she stalked through the shallows like a heron, sharp beaked, ravenous. She passed behind Alexandrine and Michel, and was gone. Turning his full attention back to the Destroismaisons, Damien resumed conversation, but with an inner disturbance that he recognized only later not as the effect of the strong hot tea but as an agitation of the heart produced by those great, dead, appalling eyes.

  The day continued mild and glorious, and as the sun’s light strengthened the Catholics fell in line behind the cart bearing a borrowed statue, for the parish hadn’t one of its own yet. As they passed along, men fell to their knees in the dust of the road and women raised a trill—a high-pitched tongue of wild joy, a sound that never failed to tighten Damien’s throat. Kashpaw’s washed, white horses pulled the wagon with nervous alacrity, rolling their eyes and starting suspiciously at the supplicants. The newly baptized and morose Kashpaw drove it, with Quill sitting just alongside him.

  White scarf alight in the sun, Quill sat bolt upright, stiff in her abashed fear. She threw back her head from time to time, eyes rolling, and laughed. Mary Kashpaw, huge in a white dress, crept to her mother and stroked her hand. Quill swiped her daughter’s hand like a fish from a stream, madly tore at it with her teeth, continued to laugh. Her daughter winced at the bite, but did not cry, just turned and hunkered low in the back of the wagon with her cousin and the borrowed statue.

  The poor, chipped Virgin wore an expression of distaste, but she was decked brightly with wreaths and a crown of wild lilies and arum. At her feet, the two girls sat and threw the petals of prairie roses, pink and blushing, from baskets made of willow withes the red black of old blood. Damien stepped on the petals as he walked behind them, bearing the Sacred Host.

  Held visible in an intricate glass lunette, the wafer trembled before his eyes as he prayed. These days, Agnes and Father Damien became one indivisible person in prayer. That poor, divided, human priest enlarged and smoothed into the person of Father Damien. As though the unseen were a magnetic draw upon Father Damien’s spirit, his thoughts leaped like iron filings. His requests, sharp black slivers of metal, pierced the sun, and his praises melted in his ears. Now, in that rapt concentration, he moved along the road. Sometimes he held the Sacred Host aloft, feeling a soft power flow through his arms. Sometimes he held the Host before him at a more intimate level. With each step, gentle waves of air brushed around him as though the earth cheerfully flexed underneath each footstep. Each breath was sunlight. Green love surrounded him. Present on the hillside with the body of his Christ, he breathed an easy adoration. One step. The next. Sorrows, confusions, pains of flesh and spirit, all melted into the sweet trance of the moment.

  Then, he tripped.

  Agnes thought, later, how odd—odd or typical—that she should stumble in the full flow of the gift, in the radiant immediacy of pure grace. What happened next, and next, followed from the first misstep. Father Damien went down holding fast, but, as though an unseen hand yanked, the monstrance bearing the Host bounced upward, turning in the sun. The moment, fluid as he rolled over swamped in flowing vestments, could have been rescued. Had he jumped directly to his feet. Had only the procession halted. . . . But no, it appeared that he was part of something larger. Uncanny, the design. For now it happened. Just as he went to earth, the presence white as flowers and dead as bone, the Puyat woman with buffalo skulls and jackal face, emerged from a hidden spot. Barefoot, dragging the skulls on thongs fastened somewhere within her habit, she raised her arms in horror to see the Host defiled. She bounded forward just before the garlanded wagon bearing the brooding statue, the children, Quill, and Kashpaw. Her oversize habit flapped like a sail. She flung herself into the wagon’s path.

  The horses panicked and reared in their traces. They pranced, hopped, twisted away from the Puyat, then exploded with a wild energy. They shot down the path until they reached the bottom and could run cross-country. They tore pounding through tangled farmsteads. Through town. Men chased as they wheeled by, shouting, “Cut the lines!” But Kashpaw carried with him only one dull hatchet, and the best he could manage in the wild tumble were awkward scrapes across the reins. Rounding a curve the statue of the Virgin shot out like a torpedo. That, in itself, was an event that caused repercussions deep into the future. For her halo sliced right through an oiled paper window and the rest of the statue followed, straight into the house of seven of the most notorious drunks in Little No Horse, who lay groaning that very moment for whiskey.

  THE SEVEN DRUNKS br />
  Instead of a bottle, the Blessed Virgin flew through the window. Skidding across the room, she tipped upright so that, by the time the sodden ones looked blearily up, she stood tall. Her glance of disgusted sweetness shone down upon the four men and three women, including a much too young Sophie Morrissey and a couple of Lazarres. Their sore eyes pinned upon the Virgin, who stood directly in the square of light from the broken window. Of course, the drinkers all knelt, blessed themselves, wept in astonishment and converted—not to Catholicism, but at least to a much less potent form of alcohol: to wine. Henceforward, they were strict in their loyalty to the grape—even though, they claimed, no matter how much they poured down their gullets, they couldn’t get satisfyingly shkwebii anymore. And even as a result of their encounter with the Virgin, some were afflicted with a mild friendliness and industry.

  THE RUNAWAYS

  The children in the back of the wagon jounced along, thrilled at first, then shrieking. The fortunate little girl cousin popped over the edge of the wagon and landed safely in a heap of slough grass. Still, the vehicle flew, banging crazily behind the horses as they galloped toward disaster. It was over in an instant.

  The wagon approached a sudden fold in the land with ravenous ease. The violence of the drop broke the back of Quill. A low-branched tree speared Kashpaw. They were mortally wounded, though they lasted in their mutual agony for several hours. Their daughter survived in the overturned wagon box, dragged along until the horses came to the end of their terror. The men who found her deep in the bush had to pry away the crushed and splintered boards from the child. They later told their wives in low voices how she’d wept, as from her arms and her legs they drew the nails.