The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Page 3
Berndt looked at the three-quarters-moon bone of her ankle, at her foot in the brown, thick-heeled shoe she’d bought. He ached to hold her foot in his lap, untie her oxford shoe with his teeth, move his hands up her leg covering her calf with kisses, breathe against the delicate folds of leafy cloth.
He offered marriage once again. His heart. His troth. His farm. She spurned the lot. The piano. She would simply walk into town. He let her know that he would like to buy the piano, it wasn’t that, but there was not a store for many miles where it could be purchased. She knew better and with exasperated heat described the way that she would, if assisted with his money, go about locating and then acquiring the best piano for the best price. She vowed that she would not purchase the instrument in Fargo, but in Minneapolis. From there, she could get it hauled cheaper than the freight markup. She would take the train to Minneapolis and make her arrangements in one day and return by night in order not to spend one extra dime on either food she couldn’t carry or on a hotel room. When he resisted to the last, she told him that she was leaving. She would find a small room in town and there she would acquire students, give lessons.
She betrayed her desperation. Some clench of her fingers gave her away. It was as much Berndt’s unconfused love of her and wish that she might be happy as any worry she might leave him that finally caused him to agree. In the months he’d known Agnes DeWitt, she had become someone to reckon with. Even he, who understood desperation and self-denial, was finding her proximity most difficult. He worked himself into exhaustion, and his farm prospered. Sleeping in the barn was difficult, but he had set into one wall a bunk room for himself and his hired man. He installed a stove that burned low on unseasonably chilly nights. Only, sometimes, as he looked sleepily into the glowering flanks of iron, he could not help his own fingers moving along the rough mattress in faint imitation of the way he would, if he could ever, touch her hips. He, too, was practicing.
THE CARAMACCHIONE
The last grand piano made by Caramacchione had been shipped to Minneapolis, and remained unsold until Agnes entered the store with her bean-sock of money. She made friends with a hauler out of Morris and he gave her a slow-wagon price. The two accompanied the instrument back to the farm during the dog days. Humid, hot weather was beloved by this particular piano. It tuned itself on muggy days. As the piano moved across the table fields of drought-sucked wheat like a shield, an upended black thing, an ebony locust, Miss Agnes DeWitt mounted the back of the wagon and played to the clouds.
They had to remove one side of the house to get the piano into the front room, and it took four strong men the next day to do the job. By the time the instrument was settled into place by the window, Berndt was persuaded of its necessary presence, and proud. He sent the men away, although the side of the house was still open to the swirling light of stars. Dark breezes moved the curtains; he asked her to play for him. She did. The music gripped her and she did not, could not, stop.
Late that night she turned from the last chord of the simple Nocturne in C Minor into the silence of Berndt’s listening presence. Three slow claps from his large hands died into the waiting quiet. His eyes rested upon her and she returned his gaze with a long and mysterious stare of gentle regard. The side of the house admitted a great swatch of moonlight. Spiders built their webs of phosphorescence across black space. Berndt ticked through what he knew—she would not marry him because she had been married and unfaithful, in her mind at least. He was desperate not to throw her off, repel her, damage the mood set by the boom of nighthawks flying in, swooping out, by the rustle of black oak and willow, by the scent of the blasted petals of summer’s last wild roses. His courage was at its lowest ebb. Fraught with sheer need and emotion he stood before Agnes, finally, and he asked in a low voice, “Schlaf mit mir. Bitte. Schlaf mit mir.”
Agnes looked into his face, openly at last, showing him the great weight of feeling she carried, though not for him. As she had for her Mother Superior, she removed her clothing carefully and folded it, only she did not stop undressing at her shift but continued until she slipped off her large tissue-thin bloomers and seated herself naked at the piano. Her body was a pale blush of silver, and her hands, when they began to move, rose and fell with the simplicity of water.
It became clear to Berndt Vogel, as the music slowly wrapped around him, that he was engaged in something for which he would have had to pay a whore in Fargo, if there really were any whores in Fargo, a great sum to perform. A snake of dark motion flexed down her spine. Her pale buttocks seemed to float off the invisible bench. Her legs moved like a swimmer’s, and he thought he heard her moan. He watched her fingers spin like white shadows across the keys, and found that his body was responding as though he lay fully twined with her underneath a quilt of music and stars. His breath came short, shorter, rasping and ragged. Beyond control, he gasped painfully and gave himself into some furtive cleft of halftones and anger that opened beneath the ice of high keys.
Shocked, weak and wet, Berndt rose and slipped through the open side wall. He trod aimless crop lines until he could allow himself to collapse in the low fervor of night wheat. Sinking back, he bit off a tickle of kernels, chewed the sweet must. It was true, wasn’t it, that the heart was a lying cheat? And as the songs Chopin invented were as much him as his body, so it followed Berndt had just watched the woman he loved make love to a dead man. Furthermore, in watching, he’d sunk into a strange excitement beyond his will and let his seed onto the floor Agnes had just that afternoon scrubbed and waxed. Now, as he listened at some distance to the music, he thought of returning. Imagined the meal of her white shoulders. Shut his eyes and entered the confounding depth between her legs.
BLESSING
Then followed their best times. Together, they constructed a good life in which the erotic merged into the daily so that every task and small kindness was charged with a sexual humor. Agnes DeWitt was perhaps too emotionally arrogant to understand what a precious gift she shared with Berndt. She possessed, and so easily, a love most humans never know, yet are quite willing to die or go mad for. And Agnes had done nothing but find her way into the barn of a good man who had a singular gift for everyday affection as well as the deepest tones of human love.
Through fall and winter, Agnes DeWitt gave music lessons, and although the two weren’t married and Miss DeWitt, existing in a state of mortal sin, took no communion, even the Catholics and their children subscribed. This was because it was well-known that Miss DeWitt’s first commitment had been to Christ. It was understandable that she would have no other marriage, and also, although she did not take the Holy Eucharist upon her tongue she was there at church each morning, faithful and extremely devout. And, so, when the priest spoke from the pulpit, his reference was quite clear.
“Jesus insisted that Mary Magdelene be incorporated into the holy body of his church and it is said by some that in her hands there was celestial music. Her heart clearly contained the divine flame—and she was loved and forgiven.”
Therefore, every morning Miss DeWitt played the church organ. She of course played Bach with a purity of intent purged of any subterranean feeling, but strictly and for God.
ARNOLD “THE ACTOR” ANDERSON
Only a short time into their happiness, the countryside and the small towns were preyed upon by a ring of bank robbers with a fast Overland automobile. This was before small towns even had sheriffs, some of them, let alone a car held in common to chase the precursors of such criminals as Basil “the Owl” Banghart, Ma Barker’s Boys, Alvin Karpus, Henry LaFay. The first, and most insidious, of these men was Arnold “the Actor” Anderson.
The Actor and his troupe of thugs plundered the countryside at will, appearing as though from nowhere and descending into the towns with pitiless ease. The car—the color of which was always reported differently: white one time, gray the next, even blue—always pulled idling into the
street before the doors of the bank. The passenger who emerged was sometimes an old man, other times a pregnant woman, a crippled youth, someone who inspired others to acts of polite assistance. A Good Samaritan would open doors and even escort the Actor to the teller, at which point the object of good works would straighten, throw off his disguise, shout to his gang in a ringing voice, and proceed to rob the bank. It would all be over in a trice. Sometimes, of course, there was resistance from a bank official or an intrepid do-gooder, in which case a death or two might result—for the Actor, who took on the disguises and masterminded the activities of the gang, was entirely ruthless and cared nothing for human life. It was said that he could be quite charming as he shot people, even funny. Eight people in the past two years had perished laughing.
One clear but muddy spring day Miss DeWitt removed her egg and butter money from the crevice between two stones in the root cellar. She told Berndt that she was walking to town to deposit the money against the mortgage payment. He agreed, absently. Touched her arm. They’d had a breathless week of sex. Some mornings the two staggered from the bedroom disoriented, still half drunk on the perfume and animal eagerness of the other’s body. These frenzied periods occurred to them, every so often, like spells in the weather. They would be drawn, sink, disappear into their greed until the cow groaned for milking or the hired man banged and swore on the outside gate. If nothing else intervened they’d stop only out of sheer exhaustion. Then they would look at each other oddly, questingly, as though the other person were a complete stranger, and gradually resume their normal treatment of one another, which was offhand and distracted, but with the assurance of people who thought alike. Even when they fought, it was with impatient dispatch. They were eager to get to the exciting part of the fight where they lost their tempers and approached each other with a frisson of rage that turned sexual, so that they could be slightly cruel and then surrender themselves to tenderness.
He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him. Just as he unbuckled his pants to enter her, though, she shoved him off balance, ducked from under his arm, and ran out the door laughing at his awkward hops and shouts. She slowed and picked her way along the ruts of the muddy road, breathing in anticipation of their night. Their night in which she would not refuse him. The huge canopy sky threatened gray-blue in the northwest, but the weather was far away and the wind desultory, the air watery, clear, the buds split in a faint green haze. The first of her tulips were pink at the green lips, ready to bloom. Under the tough grama and side oats, the new shoots of grass were strengthening and gathering their power. She thought of Berndt’s head tossed back, the cords running taut from the corner of his jaw. The way he nearly wept as he threw his famished weight into her again and again, and the way he glanced sideways, hungrily, after, until they began once again. Her need to touch him moved through her like a wave and she stopped, distractedly, passed a hand over her face, almost put her errand off, but then moved on.
The bank was a solid square of Nebraska limestone, great windowed with deep blond sills and brass handles on the doors. The high ceiling was of ornate, white, pressed tin set off by thick crown moldings and a center medallion of sheaves of wheat. In the summer great fans turned the sluggish air, and the velvet-roped lanes and spittoons, the pink and gray mica-flecked granite countertops, and the teller’s cages seemed caught in a dim hush of order while outside the noise of the town continued, erratic. The relationship between the getting of money, a scrabbling and disorderly business, contrasted with the storing of money, an enterprise based on the satisfactory premise that human effort, struggle, even time itself, could be quantified, counted, stacked neatly away in a safe.
Outside, on the day Miss DeWitt walked swiftly into town, the streets seemed unusually quiet and orderly. Even the bum sleeping against the side of the young elm had his arms neatly folded, and the one automobile parked, idling, was an elegant car of the sort—well, yes—she thought, oddly, that a bishop would use. Sure enough who but a priest should remove himself from the back seat kicking to the side his black soutane. With a meek and tentative squint at the bank, through tiny rimless eyeglasses, he made his way up the walk and steps. On the way, he bowed to Miss DeWitt, who followed him respectfully. As they walked together up the roped path in the lobby she said to him, loudly and clearly, in an amused tone of voice, “Sir, why this pretense? You are not a priest!”
Whereupon the stooped old man straightened, magically broadened, and waved a hand across his face very much as she herself had, in the road, to erase her thoughts. Only he erased his character. He removed his glasses and from beneath his robe drew a snub-nosed pistol, which he pointed straight at Miss DeWitt’s forehead.
“Righto,” he said.
There was no other perceptible signal, but all of a sudden another male customer held a gun out as well, first at the chin of a florid redheaded woman teller and then at the broad chest of the other teller, a young dark-haired bristling man. This young former baseball star’s heart filled immediately, then swelled. He wanted to be a hero, but was struggling with the how of it. Foolish! Foolish! Miss DeWitt wanted to tell him. But it was clear from the beginning that he had just the right amount of stubborn stuff in him to be killed. Which he was. When he fell down dead behind his cage of iron, mouth open to catch the punch line of a joke, the money was harder to get. The red-haired woman was handed a canvas bag, called upon to open his drawer, and instructed not to trip the alarm. When she did anyway, the eighteen customers, including Agnes, were all instructed to gather in one corner behind the velvet rope. Exactly, Miss DeWitt thought, like a flock of blank-eyed sheep. There was a shout outside. It was the sheriff, Slow Johnny Mercier, who really was slow and clumsy, and his deputy with him, pistols drawn. They stood just outside the door yelling for the robbers to come out.
It was clear, then, to Miss DeWitt and probably to the others that their sheriff was an amateur and that the professional involved was inside the bank. For the Actor continued gesturing to the red-haired teller to add to the bills, add more and add more. Then, in his dull black robe with its give-away wrinkles, creases that no self-respecting Catholic lay or nun housekeeper would have allowed him to don, and his ridiculous brown Episcopalian shoes, he sprang to the bunched people swift and graceful as a wolf, chose from just behind the rope Miss DeWitt.
He chose her as though choosing a dancing partner. He did everything but bow—walked up to her and took her hand with a polite but peremptory firmness, so that it would not have been out of character with his manner for the two of them to step out onto the dance floor and begin a slow waltz. And it was as though they were engaged in some sort of dance as they walked out the door. Only she was held the wrong way. When she stumbled, perhaps purposely, not following his lead, he wrenched her closer. As he pulled her against the door of the car he’d entered, as she balanced on the running board, he called out, “Come after me and I will blow her head off, Mister Sheriff.”
Then the ragged bum who had sat with arms neatly crossed at the side of the street accelerated the car with a roar. Slow Johnny the sheriff, solid in his tracks, raised his pistol, sighted carefully along the barrel, pulled the trigger, and shot Miss DeWitt. She took the bullet in the hip. So much was happening all at once—more shots fired, mad swerving to avoid an ice truck, two children diving into the roots of a lilac bush, sheer speed—that she felt the impact as a blow that rang her bones, but did not pain her, until the car hit a great freak of earth that nearly threw Miss DeWitt halfway into the open window on the driver’s side. Immediately, she was cast into an almost mystical state of agony. The heavens seemed to open. Black stars rang down. She heard the motor and then, later, more gunshots as from a great, muted distance. Thick strains of music looped through her mental hearing, all jumbled and spectacular. Held on the running board by an arm that seemed strung of pitiless wire, proceeding at a dreamlike pace do
wn the smoothly tamped and rolled roadbeds that led out of town, in a state of clarity and focused keenness she told herself, I am being kidnapped. I have been shot.
As the auto jounced her along she began to lose certainty. In her pain she imagined herself back at the convent in her tiny closet of a room. She closed the door, crawled doglike into the wet bush of unconsciousness, lay huddled small and unknowing. From time to time, she experienced a moment of reprieve. She was capable of standing upright. Gravely, she surveyed the country she passed through and found in the faint spring clouds of green a raw sweetness. The robber’s arm gripped her waist. She gripped the luggage rack. Her hair, unpinned and flying backward, made a short banner in the wet, fresh wind.
The Actor took the old Patterson road, by which she knew he understood the lay of the land, and by which, too, she knew if he took the turnoff he would pass by one of Berndt’s fields, their fields, where Berndt was likely to be working. Her heart pounded in hope. But the driver dressed in rags did not turn and she then thought instantly in great relief that Berndt wouldn’t be put in danger now. Just as she did so, the car sped first past the hired man and then farther on, Berndt, on his big slow horse, plodding. He was dragging along a harrow to be repaired. She tried to hide herself when he came by, but she was still balanced on the running board. So it was, he saw her approach from down the road like a figurehead on the prow of a ship. She stood at grand attention, her one leg a flare of blood. He stopped. His face went slack with uncomprehending shock. She rushed by close enough for their hands to meet and then she was gone, swallowed into the distance.
BERNDT VOGEL
Berndt followed the car not because he saw fear in her eyes—there was none, only a dreamy concentration—but because he grasped the whole scenario. Unhitching the harrow, then turning on his horse, he had no precise notion of her danger or any thought of how to rescue her but acted on instinct and absurdity. He was not afraid for her. Having met her in the first place nearly naked within the smoky radiance of his own barn, he knew she would survive the ordeal. There was always a side to her he could not touch. He felt indeed that she was a woman created of impossibility.