The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Read online

  “Sometime after that so-called lesson, the two were removing loaves of bread from the ovens when some sort of argument occurred in which the girl, who by now had good reason to hate and fear Leopolda, called her down, as they say here.”

  “Called her down?”

  “Challenged her. Bitch of Jesus Christ! Kneel and beg! Lick the floor! That was when our candidate for sainthood stabbed the girl’s hand with the fork and cracked her head with the poker, knocking her unconscious!”

  Father Miller looked aghast, but also skeptical.

  “Was this witnessed? Documented?”

  “Unfortunately, your witness, Dympna, entered just after the blow, while Marie was unconscious. Dympna was apparently persuaded by Leopolda’s story. Our holy woman told the other sisters that she’d prayed for the girl to receive the holy stigmata as a sign of God’s love, and that the girl had swooned when that first mark appeared. Marie woke confused, but soon understood the gist of things and went along with it until she could make her way out of the convent. She returned to her home, married not long after, has been known ever since as a solid and even wise member of her community. Marie. Star of the Sea. Marie Kashpaw.”

  The two men sat quietly together, the tape recorder humming between them. Jude Miller put his hand out to turn it off, but then withdrew his fingers. The windows were halfway open and the storms pulled up already, the screens down. In the gooseberry thicket just outside, a bird’s whistle sounded, piercingly sweet. The breeze shifting through the screen was thin and dry. Father Damien now reached forward and punched off the tape recorder. Relieved, exhausted, he slumped in his chair. Closed his eyes. Before Father Miller could comment in any way or question him further, the old priest sank into a sleep so profound it looked like death. Father Miller watched intently until he saw telltale movements—a tiny twitch of Father Damien’s eyelid, a slow wheezing intake of breath. He worried about the open window, but apparently the old priest liked fresh air, so he quietly covered Father Damien with a light blanket. Then Jude Miller continued to sit, watching over his elder, wishing for a cigarette, though he had quit twenty years before. He wanted to replay the tape, form queries, ask everything that needed to be asked, for the troubling story raised more questions than it answered.

  An early gnat landed on the old man’s nose and swatting at it, Damien roused himself enough to quit his sleep. Father Damien frowned, annoyed when he realized he’d fallen asleep in the presence of the other priest. Standing, Father Damien waved assistance aside, and took high, tiny childlike steps into the hallway of the house of his old age. He was heading for his tiny bedroom. Just before entering, he turned to the younger priest in a crack of darkness from the doorway. He waved his fingers, beneficent, as though dispensing drops of holy oil.

  Father Jude blinked. In that instant a strange thing happened. He saw, inhabiting the same cassock as the priest, an old woman. She was a sly, pleasant, contradictory-looking female of stark intelligence. He shook his head, craned forward, but no, there was Father Damien again, tottering into the comfort of his room.

  The rectory was made of the same whitewashed brick and thickly slabbed on interior plaster as the convent and church. Entering, after a long walk through the grounds of the church and the cemetery, Father Miller paused—the place held the tranquil mouse-nest scent of all rectories in Jude’s experience, an odor composed of male sweat and sweet deodorant, cabbage-y cooking, Old Spice, and the faintly sour breath of sexual loneliness. Someone had thought to build the place with tall rectangular windows—these admitted at late dusk a singular golden light that rose, as though emitted by the prairie town beneath the hill, and flooded through the entire house in a wave. The gift of that radiance would quickly be followed by darkness, noise, the rev of slow truck engines circling below, and the throb of sub-woofers on the faintly moving air.

  Father Jude’s room was rectangular, too, with the window at its end and southern wall. He always liked south light, and the curtainless sky-filled panes of glass pleased him. He sat on the single mattress, bounced a bit. There was no comfortable reading chair or bedside lamp in the room. Apparently, no appreciation here of the intimate pleasure of reading in a pool of lamplight. Perhaps it was considered by the resident priest an indulgence, but for Jude the nightly reading was a necessary prelude to sleep. Without an orderly transition from consciousness, he was often subject to the tedium of insomnia. When so afflicted in his own surroundings, he read himself back to sleep, or, occasionally, if he was in an appropriate place, walked out into the night.

  His methods of whiling away those dreadful hours were not much different, he thought now, from the apparent routine of Father Damien. That was not surprising. He, Jude, still thought of himself as young although he had never really had a young man’s habits or inclinations. His combination of energy and reserve had originally attracted him to the priesthood. A loner, he had always felt unsuited to the company of his peers. As a priest, to his great relief, his refinement and discipline of behavior made it possible to live within the limitations of his profession. He was an excellent priest, practical and intelligent, without the restlessness that so often accompanied the vows of those who had chosen to stay with the Church through its most turbulent recent years. He wasn’t meek, but he was in his person deeply resigned to what he did. It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy.

  The night before, he’d been too tired to organize himself. Now, he carefully unpacked his clothing, hung up and smoothed each sock and hankie, refolded every T-shirt into a drawer. Everything was put away before he noticed how tired he still was, how graven his exhaustion. He climbed into the bed he’d occupy until he completed this report for the diocese. Father Jude turned out the lights and rolled gratefully between the covers. He lay stiffly on his back, relaxing only very gradually, and in the oily dark he mulled over the information he’d received from Father Damien.

  If it was true that his subject had struck a young novice and practiced subterfuge in regard to the deliverance of holy wounds, that invalidated her, he would expect. However, suppose these things were true and yet Christ had seen fit to reward and forgive the penitential vows of Leopolda by bestowing upon her the highest of bloody honors? The stigmata, or wounds resembling them, the hands that held the crown of thorns. Did he or any investigatory tribunal have the right to contradict such awesome signs of forgiveness? Obviously, the thing to do next was to interview the postulant. By now, she would be elderly, if she lived at all.

  Marie. What was it. Kashpaw? Star of the sea. She will shine when we’ve burned off the salt.

  Where did that come from? First thing next morning, he would track down this woman. Meanwhile, yawning, Father Jude shuffled mentally through files bound in pale manila. In what now he considered his hometown another odd occurrence—miracle, coincidence—documented, no less, with photographs taken by the subject herself. The face of Christ in a pane of ice, the cracks forming a gaunt visage with deep spiritual eyeholes in the skull. Shattered spikes, white and grim, a crown of frozen thorns. The photograph, reproduced in a clipping from the local newspaper and in a small pamphlet printed at the convent, had lost definition and smeared, yet the features of the face were marked clearly enough to resemble those bled into the famous Turin shroud. Those knifelike cheekbones, those pinched and painful brows. Sister Leopolda had been nearby when the cracks in the ice appeared. “The Manifestation at Argus”—title of the thin green pamphlet published by the local convent—noted her presence in the school yard. A child was the cause, or perhaps the catalyst that produced the icy features.

  Everything was connected, loop upon loop. That child was, in fact, someone known to Jude in his later life. There was no doubt in his mind that some greater power was at work. Already, he’d done an interview with her as well. A bold girl, she’d smashed down face first from a slick play slide. The cracked visage of Christ appeared where she landed. The miraculous portrait had been saw
ed out of the ice and carefully deep frozen, only to be lost in a summer power outage.

  There was, and more recently, a well-witnessed occurrence in which a local contractor had been struck into the earth by a statue of the Virgin Mary, the statue snapping its chains during unloading. Miraculously, some said, he had been spared. Due to a holy card stuck carelessly in his pocket? A portrait of the nun in question? Or due to a bed of sand that drove the man deep, stabilizing his limbs, and stopped the statue from landing upon him full force?

  Father Miller tried to disconnect his thoughts, and even proceeded in a mental exercise to stack the materials he’d gathered, pat the files into a neat stack. He composed his mind to deliver his evening prayers. He usually prayed on his knees, beside the bed, or if he was cold or exhausted, tucked underneath the covers. Tonight, he folded himself comfortably and wearily on his side and mumbled, exasperated and pleading. “God,” he said, “help me out, here.” Falling away from consciousness, he worked out the bones of a plan that would take him between the reservation and Argus. The mark of the smashed face. The marks of the nails. The contractor rammed into the earth but only dizzied. And yet, what good works? What kindnesses had Leopolda performed? The ordinary markers were the stuff he sought now, the shape of his subject’s daily existence. Among the parishioners here on the reservation, he decided, he would find those she had helped. He would sit with them as long as it took, get their stories, record every nuance, every word.

  MARIE KASHPAW

  Though in age her flesh had tightened and roped to her bones, as though to tether itself to earth, Marie Kashpaw was still a formidable mass. Her hair, dove gray and cut into a helmet, had grown down over her eyebrows, but she refused to trim it. She gazed from beneath her bangs as under a visor, and regarded Father Jude with an indifferent acceptance. They sat on fat, mildewed, easy chairs.

  “How come you’re here? What’s this for?” she asked, for she was a suspicious and brutally intelligent woman.

  Father Jude told her he was gathering material about Sister Leopolda. “Leopolda!” She nodded and laughed without mirth. She popped a sourball into her mouth and smoothed her powerfully withered hands across the patterned stuff of her dress.

  “What do you want?” she said again. Her eyes were round, hooded with wrinkles like a turtle’s.

  Father Jude explained in more detail the testimony he was collecting. He mentioned Father Damien, and a slow smile creased her face. He left out most of what was told to him by Father Damien, all that was imparted in the intimacy of the confessional.

  “Sister Leopolda Puyat?” Father Jude prompted.

  “I don’t talk about her.” Marie Kashpaw gazed down at the hidden swirls and leaflike gestures in the pattern of her dress material. Slowly, heavily, she frowned. She wore nylon anklets, neatly folded down. Her wide tan shoes appeared to be bolted to the floor.

  “I see,” said Father Jude. He allowed a deeper silence to cloak them. Together, they sat in the shabby sun. He smoked peacefully, wondering whether or not to tell her more. Finally he asked Marie Kashpaw, “Are you a discreet woman? Can you keep a secret?”

  “No,” she said.

  They lapsed once more into the voluptuous morning quiet. At last, he tried again, desperate to approach the subject.

  “Why won’t you, or can’t you, speak of Leopolda?”

  Marie Kashpaw looked bewildered, then annoyed, and once again drew into her stubborn shell. She refused to talk, but seemed, too, unwillingly drawn.

  “Because she . . .” Marie shook her head, putting it all beyond her. She looked momentarily distressed, trapped. She froze.

  “Because she . . .” Father Jude softly echoed.

  But Marie Kashpaw did not take the bait. They sat. It was remarkable, he thought, how long and with no comment they could sit in the peaceable lobby. The sun blazed through the windows, now. Captive, his heart rose.

  “Was she a good person, as the bishop sees it?”

  Marie shrugged. He tried again.

  “You are the only person who can tell us the truth about Leopolda.”

  She bobbed her head, hunched and neckless. Folds of tough skin came down over her eyes, and she rested within herself. Sitting in the lobby, waiting, Father Jude was overtaken by a midmorning lethargy. He wished for a sugared sweet roll, a Danish. Raspberry! he imagined. And strong, hot coffee. He could almost taste the combination, and he could definitely see it before him in his mind’s eye, in his dream. The delicious roll began to float, drifting, a vision. He climbed into it. Started the motor. Soon he was steering toward a tiny, rocky island. He went deeper, his breath caught, ragged. He began to snore. As he did so, with reptile slowness, like the visage of an idol, Marie Kashpaw opened her eyes, which had gone a deep and throbbing brown.

  AN ARGUMENT

  Embarrassed, Father Jude apologized to the quiet woman for dozing off in the sunlight. She nodded, smiled tightly, and appeared to keep thinking about some closed-off and vital subject, so he thanked her and left. A white dust had risen from the ground and floated in a light band across the afternoon landscape. It was a dry spring haze. The grass on the road’s margins was still gray with the residue of road plow and drifted particles of topsoil. Father Jude made his way back uphill to his room in the rectory. Quick with frustrated energy, he lifted a set of weights he’d brought in the trunk of his car. He played back a tape made years ago by someone else, an interview with a Sister Dympna, took notes. Then he located several boxes of files and records he intended to examine for clues to the shape of his subject’s life.

  As the afternoon lengthened, Father Damien met Father Jude in the yard. The older priest’s hair was slicked back with water and his eyes puffy from a nap. He regained vigor and made two rounds of the graveyard, walking with a light swiftness that surprised the younger one. And he spoke with intensity as though the movement generated mental electricity.

  “A certain concatenation of events upsets me. Fixed causes. Two martyrs. One lifelong victim whose pain I shelter to this very day. And Leopolda!”

  “You said that you were up thinking, remembering. There is a report here? A story?”

  “Oh, yes! The question is exactly how to tease it out of the events, Father Jude. For you see, it began with the statue’s procession, an occasion of joy, and ended in a howling disaster, and I am not prepared to say I understand, even now, the causes of the effects.”

  “Leopolda . . .”

  “Yes, Father Miller, before she was Leopolda. What I mean to say is this: She was still a Puyat during this event.”

  “Understood.”

  “Only if you understand the depth of what being a Puyat implies.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “Father Jude, each name you hear on this reservation is an unfinished history. A destiny that opens like a cone pouring out a person’s life. It took Leopolda a very long time to profess her perpetual vows, and during that time she was very difficult to control. She wore the habit and considered herself a nun, but she was a Puyat and there were difficulties from the first.”

  “Saints. Difficulties. Father Damien, I am beginning to agree with you, not that my opinion matters. I am here to gather information. But about saints. When are they ever simple cases?” Jude sighed and pressed his fingers on his forehead. “They seem by nature to foster problems, surprises, at best or worst, envy. As I read”—he consulted his notes—“our Puyat-Leopolda escaped the horrors of the great influenza and even provided some nursing or at least took care of the dead—that was her job in the traditional culture and it became her task in the life of a religious. She was counted as devout in the Catholic sense and the year after her return from Argus her increasing piety and her service to the nuns was noted. In that same year, she asked one of the sisters whether she might be considered a candidate. She was then invited to stay in the convent for a time. Her blood is at least half Polish, and for the most part she was considered a métis, Indian to some slight degree, if that, for she had appa
rently repudiated her own past and was eagerly engrossed in taking on every aspect of the Faith. It was not long after her visit began that she presented what became her usual problem, that of excessive zeal. She was found face-down on the floor of the church on an extremely cold spring night. There was some concern that she was hypothermic. She never quite regained the circulation in her extremities, it says. There is some cross-out here, as though the writer, Sister Hildegarde Anne, was uncertain whether to include some detail.”

  Waving his hand as though to take away the cross-out marks, Father Damien sighed with impatience.

  “Leopolda was found that night naked and bleeding,” he said, “and she was covered with mud.”

  Father Jude waited for more information, and indeed the old priest seemed to struggle in an effort to provide it—he began to speak once or twice and then fell silent, shaking his head. That was when, with a sudden flash, Father Jude intuited that the old priest was hiding information, secreting it away, and he was amazed and disturbed because he’d been certain that his informant was willing and even eager to divulge all he knew.

  “You know more about that night,” said Father Jude, sternly, but his older colleague firmly shut his lips.

  Frowning, irritated, Father Jude sat back in his chair. He stared at the other man and forced himself to behave with a patience he did not feel. As he watched Father Damien closely, that troubling sensation once more came upon him. It was a problem of perception. A distinct uncanny sense he could only name in one way.

  “Father Damien, if you don’t mind my asking, have you got a twin?”

  “I do not.”

  “Never mind.” Jude shook his head to clear his vision. Ran his finger along the pages of his notes. “Our Leopolda spent some time cared for by her sisters, I am told. Apparently, she experienced what we would call a nervous breakdown, fell into the grip of hallucinations.”