The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Page 15

  Her face was ratlike, her teeth stood out, her nose was a severe bone centered like a keel. She shook her head, tried to speak, but at last could not and merely closed her eyes. The shut lids sealed like a hatchling’s. She was gone into her thoughts, her prayer, whatever sustained her agony.

  She was worse, said Sister Hildegarde, the next day, and so much worse the day after that she fetched Father Damien herself, though she had no way of warning him sufficiently, or preparing him for the bizarre sight that he would witness. On entering her room he was immensely struck and confused. Pauline had bent in the middle. Still more strictly rigidified, her legs were stiffened and raised, her torso also, so that she existed in a kind of permanent V shape, which the sisters had propped up with pillows and blankets, although she held it on her own. Slowly, she was bending in two. Sister Hildegarde, in her practical way, had snaked a flexible piece of rolled wet rawhide tubing down Pauline’s throat before the depth of stiffness sank into all of her limbs and froze Pauline’s voice box and throat. So it was that, although she fasted, the girl was given water and broth through the tube and was fairly well sustained. Except for the terrible rigidity, her vital signs were excellent now. As much as they could, they left her to peaceful silence.

  News travels immediately, mysteriously, on the reservation. Soon it was out that Pauline was seized by spirits. She had left her body to visit in the world beyond this everyday life. Her body had turned wooden, they said, her tongue to stone. Slowly, she was lifting herself into the air, straining toward the sky world, arrowing her spirit toward the west. She was doing it for her people though she was of and not of them, though she was a betrayer and yet, too, betrayed by her raging Puyat mother. Though she was the half sister of a medicine man gravely feared and the rumored mother of a child raised by dog Lazarres, she was holy. Anybody can be holy, even a Puyat, that proved.

  People drew near. People gathered. They came by car and wagon, they camped by the door to the convent house. They brought their sick ones, the mad, the dishonored. They brought their too quiet, ancient, dreaming children, their screaming new babies. They brought their old ones, farseeing through eyes cataracted over with isinglass scales. They brought their nerveless husbands, their foolish and silly teenagers, their ailments and failures, and they laid them on the steps of Pauline’s door.

  Zozed Bizhieu asked Sister Hildegarde to place in Pauline’s bed a red-painted stick, which represented a request for help of a sort she wouldn’t specify. Danton Onesides asked to see her, and when turned away, begged the good Hildegarde for threads from the saint’s death blanket. She was not going to die, Sister Hildegarde told him, determined now that she would see to it herself that the girl survived, not only because that would discharge something of the debt that Hildegarde owed after the great flu, but also so that the Puyat could clean up the mess her disquieting illness was causing all through the convent. Sister Hildegarde fumed, threw up her hands. Who, did the people outside think, who took care of these holy martyrs, these self-indulgent saints? She could tell them, she knew. She struck her chest, an act for which she was immediately contrite. Still, it was true.

  Linens must be bleached, scrubbed, hung on lines to dry, ironed smooth. They must be folded and set into the closets. Soon, removed from their shelves, the sheets would return to be stained, discarded, and go through the same tedious process. Food must be mashed up, pulverized, fed through the tube—invalid’s food. Pillows stuffed and restuffed. Pastes and poultices manufactured for the soothing of limbs. These cleanings and boilings required kettles, pots, spoons. And then there was the grinding of meticulously gathered herbs (and the grinder was most difficult to wash and clean). Buckets, mops, a constant correction of the floors, the state of which Hildegarde was most fierce over. The continual visitors meant someone must tend to the gate and door at all times. Not only that, but someone must keep more or less orderly track of the gifts and petitions with which the girl was now deluged.

  Yes, the Puyat would live. She owed Sister Hildegarde a lot of work!

  The Bizhieus brought smoked fish. The second Boy Lazarre asked something secret, whispered his request into a small, clean, empty baking powder can, quickly tapped the lid on, and gave it sternly to Sister Hildegarde to let out beside Pauline’s ear. From all corners of the reservation, now, pilgrims advanced, asking for assistance in every possible conundrum and affair. As she closed like a jackknife, more people arrived to camp. More notes and objects were brought, baskets and tobacco twists began to clutter the hall and entryway. No matter how forcefully Sister Hildegarde insisted to each visitor that Pauline could take no requests, no matter that a nurse came, pronounced on the case, and left, no matter that people kept dying or living to suffer their copious duties, onerous lives, no matter. Belief is belief. Faith is purely faith. Even when a doctor came all the way from Grand Forks, sounded Pauline’s entire body with small wooden blocks and a metal hammer, then spoke briefly to Father Damien, who nodded, but said nothing, knowing what he said would be meaningless to the people camped outdoors. No, no matter. In desperation, they made a saint. They made a saint because they had to, in those times, in that swale of loss.

  8

  THE CONFESSION OF MARIE

  1996

  Father Damien sipped coffee to clarify his mind—the stuff was burned, as always, by Mary Kashpaw. He was used to the metallic taste. Father Jude wasn’t, and his jaw dropped in shock at the first sip of what she poured. They sat at the kitchen table of the small book-stuffed house where Damien had lived since the beginning. Mary Kashpaw set out milk, spoons, packets of sugar, and she turned away in a powerful indifference that was almost contempt. Then she turned back, frowning down upon the two men. Her eyes rested appraisingly on Father Damien, assessing his strength. The glare she held softened to exasperated worry. Her cheeks flamed with distress. She pulled her fingers, but the men took no notice. Gradually, she backed away.

  “Please go on,” said Father Jude, still unnerved by the presence of the great, brooding housekeeper.

  Father Jude Miller leaned forward to better concentrate. He was tired, too, but his was the exhaustion of a physically active person forced to the confinement of a passive task. He yawned, shook his head to clear it, and then as Father Damien was obviously not ready to proceed, he decided to make a quick drive down to the local café to buy a cup of coffee that would not lacerate his stomach. So the first time that his downfall, his comeuppance and destiny, showed herself in the yard of Father Damien, he missed her, missed Lulu.

  She descended, quite by coincidence, as soon as Jude was out of sight. Old but not old, laughing as always at the world the way she had ever since a child, she pulled Father Damien’s hand into hers and spoke teasingly.

  “Mekadewikonayewinini majii ayaan’na? Hihn! Niminwendam gegahwabamayaan, in’gozis. You’re coming with me to the bingo tonight. I need your luck.”

  “What luck?” Father Damien was instantly alert, pleased with his visitor. “You have all the luck you need. You have too much luck! Maybe if you lost once in a while you’d stop gambling. Besides, I’m sure you skew the odds in your favor and it’s hard for others to lose so often just to keep up with your winnings!”

  “My winnings go to a very good cause, as you know.”

  “I do know that,” said Father Damien, holding her hand tighter, lovingly, “and even if you were the stingiest lady in the world I would forgive you. How are your boys? How’s Bonita?”

  The question, as always, elicited an extremely complex list of their doings, and an analysis of their probable future doings as well as a comprehensive survey of grandchildren and their doings and all of her pride and complicated plans. When she had finished with her report, she made a swift exit. And so it was that she, too, avoided a certain portion of her destiny.

  Father Jude emerged from his car bearing a plastic lidded cup in its cup holder and a bag, already showing grease marks, containing three rounds of hot fry bread.

  “You missed her, miss
ed Lulu!” said Father Damien, as soon as Jude sat down to eat the fry bread. It was still hot, soft as butter inside. Father Jude had sprinkled a little salt on the golden crust, and he didn’t much care whom he’d missed. He just wanted to eat.

  “Lulu doesn’t let me use salt,” sighed Damien, watching the other priest’s enjoyment. “She is afraid it will affect my heart.”

  “She worries about you.”

  “Ah, yes,” sighed Damien. “I worry over her. And our sisters, too. You know that tired old joke about hearing nuns’ confessions, like getting stoned to death with popcorn? Not the case, not here. My sisters are robust women. Full of juice.”

  “There have been scandals?” Father Jude asked.

  Father Damien took this question very seriously. “I prefer to call such incidents,” he reflected, “profound exchanges of human love. Mary Kashpaw was one, in fact, whom love did call. She acted upon her passion. After all, we live on earth. We are created of the earth. The Ojibwe word for the human vagina is derived from the word for earth. A profound connection, don’t you think?”

  “Do you condone such irregular behavior, then?” Father Jude leaned forward, wiping his lips, disguising his surprise at the old man’s casual use of a term most priests of his era entirely avoided.

  “I do not condone,” said Damien. “It would be more accurate to say that I”—here he paused to choose the word—“cherish. Yes. I cherish such occurrences, or help my charges to, at least. Unless they keep them safely in their hearts, how else can they give them up? I tenderly cherish such attractions the way I look fondly upon a child’s exuberant compulsion to play. There is nothing more important, yet it is insignificant. God will still be there when the child is exhausted, eh?”

  “And the attraction? The fall? The sin?”

  “Cherish, as I said.”

  Father Jude shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

  “You have never loved?” Father Damien asked.

  “In the sense I gather you imply? No,” said Jude.

  “You are only half joking,” said Damien. “You find my lack of moral outrage somewhat strange.”

  “Somewhat appalling,” said Father Jude. “To put it another way, I wonder whether living so far away from Fargo hasn’t diluted your principles?”

  Damien looked at the younger priest as though he were a marvel. “Truly!”

  Jude raised his eyebrows and smiled to dismiss his remark, but as he spoke his gaze still rested curiously on Damien.

  “I don’t mean to imply that Fargo is a stronghold of virtue, it is just that certain norms of behavior are taken for granted. Right. Wrong. These are simply distinguished. Black is black and white is white.”

  “The mixture is gray.”

  “There are no gray areas in my philosophy,” said Father Jude.

  “I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.”

  “Our job is to make it less so.”

  “Our job is to understand it.”

  “And in understanding”—Father Jude looked severely troubled—“to excuse immoral actions?”

  “Never those that hurt people.”

  “Sex hurts,” said Father Jude, simply.

  “Have you seen a doctor?” said Damien.

  The two paused, their breathing sharpened, surprised that they had so quickly fallen into such a pleasurable dispute.

  “I was not speaking from personal experience,” Father Jude affected an irritation he did not feel. He hid a slight smile. “I should have put it more directly. Intercourse outside the boundaries of marriage hurts the order of things. Creates disorder. Breaks traditions, vows, families. Creates such . . . problems.”

  Father Damien shifted in his seat and frowned. “That is true. Anything, though, of a large nature will create problems. The more outré forms of religious experience, for instance.”

  “Mystical experiences?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we have come around to that.” Father Miller leaned forward and looked expectantly, with sudden openness, into Father Damien’s face.

  “May I suggest,” said Father Miller, “that I set up the tape recorder?” He opened a plastic briefcase, displayed the small box hardly bigger than the palm of his hand. Father Damien peered over his glasses at the box, which Jude Miller arranged with a careful flourish. The older priest cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, and then fell silent as Father Jude pressed a button. Listening to the faint dry rasp of tape turning on a wheel, he stared into the intimate puzzle of leafless branches outside the window.

  “Let’s get right down to it,” said Damien suddenly. He rubbed his hands together. Sat up alert in his chair. “What have you got? First give me the source, then the story.”

  “All right.” Father Jude leaned forward, fingers in a thoughtful curl. “There was in your convent a Sister Dympna Evangelica who served with Sister Leopolda and witnessed, as she said in her testimony, a case of stigmata bestowed by Leopolda upon a young protégée or novice.”

  “What?”

  Father Damien started, fell back in his chair, wiped his hands across his face and then, as though to smooth away some inner hysteria, wiped again. Still, he could not contain a wild bark of disbelief.

  “This postulant . . . named Marie?”

  “Yes.”

  Damien had trouble forming words around his tongue, which seemed suddenly in rage to have swollen inside his mouth. He could only whisper, “Marie, Marie, Star of the Sea! She will shine when we’ve burned off the dark corrosion.” Damien tried to contain his reaction so that he could properly explain the trauma of the event, which he knew well, having been a confessor to that very Marie. His voice suddenly cracked out, angry.

  “She bore wounds all right, appropriate and cruel. But they were not created by the prayerful intercession of Leopolda!”

  “What then!” Jude was caught up in the drama.

  “Leopolda took a fork and stabbed the girl!”

  “Impossible!”

  “I have”—looking suddenly chastened, Damien pressed his hand to his lips—“just violated the secrecy of the confessional.”

  “There may be an extenuating . . .” Father Jude ruffled his notebook, clicked his pen. “Sister Dympna says that she was there—”

  “Oh Dympna”—Father Damien waved his hand in despairing disgust—“never had the brains of an egg.” His breath caught in his throat and he began to pant, sweating. A watery weakness came over him. “I have seen what I have seen,” he declared. “I have heard the truth.”

  Trying not to prompt him, lest he influence the story, or again call Father Damien’s scruples about the confessional’s privacy into question, Father Miller maintained silence and kept his eyes downcast. He was rewarded by a charged burst of information, laid out in staccato.

  “It was during my early years on the reservation that I heard her confession. Marie. She slammed into the confessional. Had a way of doing that. Father, forgive me for I have sinned, she said, my last confession was such and such ago. Then hesitated. I said, ‘Of course, what is it my child?’ thinking it was hard to tell me. But she was just gathering her words. She had a peculiar habit of expression. Overly mature. Maybe even bizarre. When I went there, she said, I knew the dark fish must rise.

  “ ‘Went where? What fish?’ I asked.

  “She continued on, putting it in colors and flavors, you know, like a mad person. Making pictures of what she saw as a monumental undertaking. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard.

  “ ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said, ‘I know you’re very devout.’

  “I was going up the hill with the black-robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I’d make a saint. They never had a girl from this reservation they had to pray to. But they’d have me. And I’d be dressed in pure gold.

  “ ‘My dear,’ I gently said, ‘to be a saint is more than wearing pretty clothes.’ That set h
er off.

  “You can’t tell me nothing, she raged. Now listen. She’s a bitch of Jesus Christ, she said. You’d better hear about this nun.

  “ ‘Of whom do you speak?’ I asked gently. Her response was loud and brutal.

  “Leopolda, she yelled at the carved screen between us.

  “ ‘Leopolda!’

  “I jumped up, hit my head. I suppose my sudden interest must have shocked her, for she quieted and in a low voice continued her story with an intensity that I remember to this day. Threw me in the closet with her dead black overboot, where he had taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe. She was, you see, speaking of the devil. This girl had understood before anyone, perhaps more deeply than we now can see, the true nature of Leopolda’s faith.”

  “And what was that?”

  Jude Miller had asked his question too soon, however, for Father Damien was still in the past, in the close embrace of the confessional.

  “Marie Lazarre was cast from Bernadette Morrissey’s care into an ill-concocted family of drunks. Still, she’d turned out pious and developed a special bond with the nun in question. As a result, she was asked to come and visit the convent, to stay there as a postulant if she so chose, under the special tutelage of Leopolda. Later, in my confessional, she described the ascent up the hill. Once she entered the convent, there was apparently no special notice given to her by the other sisters. Leopolda put her straight to work, baking bread, and then there was the incident of the cup. The poor girl, all nerves, dropped a cup. When it rolled underneath the stove, she went down on the floor to get it.

  “Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker. What happened next was this: Leopolda held this girl down on the floor with her foot and poured scalding water on her back, telling her not to make a move or a sound. I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep, by filling up your ear.”

  Father Miller winced, shifted in his chair uncomfortably, made a slight sound of protest, but Father Damien kept talking.