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

  “Is it him?” The priest was curious.

  “Him who?”

  “Your companion, may he rest—”

  “No, not him,” said Agnes DeWitt, her fingers moving suddenly, flying on the tea plate, tapping, possessed by the thought of the photograph reproduced in the frontispiece of her favorite musical text. Chopin! Chopin! Father Modeste changed the subject in some bemusement. What was there to say? He tried to round the horn and cleave to his original subject all in one sentence.

  “Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways. For that reason, I’ve studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo. Ah, poor unfortunate Father Hugo! His death of the sweating fever was compared by witnesses, I have it in a letter, to Christ’s agony in the garden. Blood, yes, beads of it all over him. He sweated blood from every pore of his body.”

  Diverted, Agnes imagined the scene. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked, but her voice was mocking, for truly, there was more to fear for her in a simple bank visit.

  Father Damien raked his strands of hair back. His hand was a yellow claw. Something about the distracted way he mumbled out an answer in the negative told Agnes that he was, indeed, nervously disposed. The urge to tease him came upon her.

  “I would be afraid,” she said. “Not so much of the Indians themselves, but of the many plagues and vermin that assail them—most pathetic of all God’s doomed creatures! Lice are very catching, for instance, and the devil trains them to descend in droves on the unwary priest who forgets to bless himself before he enters one of their homes.”

  Father Damien was silent in surprise.

  “Oh, I’ll bless myself all right,” he said at last. “With a lye bath every week. And constitutionals. I will look after my health.”

  Agnes DeWitt could not help but tease more sharply. “Will you really bathe in lye? How brutal! And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in séances.”

  “Most likely.”

  “Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne.”

  “No doubt.”

  “There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers!”

  Father Damien could not help glancing down at his lean thighs, pressed together under his cassock. They didn’t look all that tempting even to him. He really had to go. He dispensed a quick blessing and left with the cookies pressed on him by Agnes DeWitt, whom he had managed, though not by the avenues he’d attempted, to cheer so thoroughly that she rose from her couch, folded her blanket, and sitting down at her piano laughed so hard her fingers dropped off the keys.

  THE MISSION

  Into her brooding there intruded an absurd fantasy, the possibility of escape, though it was to a place few would consider so—the mission and the missionary life. She thought of doing good. Alleviating the pain that others felt might help to assuage her own. She began to pray, asked to regain the clarity of her original religious impulse, her early vocation. Chopin had stolen her from Christ to give to Berndt. Christ had stolen Berndt from her to take for himself. Now she had only her Chopin, his music, for Christ was preoccupied with introducing Berndt to all of the other farmers in heaven and for Agnes he seemed to have no time. She prayed. He did not answer. Chopin was more reliable. She could not stand the farm—not without Berndt. Now that she remembered him, the place was treacherous with the raw ache of memory that returned in unexpected bits, then vanished before she could get the whole of it firmly laid out in her mind.

  In her thoughts, she spoke to the priest again, questioned him strenuously, found her own answers. The Ojibwe, she had heard, the Indians up north, were an agreeable people not known for their ferocious instincts, even in the past. She was, of course, not afraid. She was curious, and her curious nature led her down tangled pathways. What was it like up there—wild? She could understand wild. Though her world was tame, the peace she sought was lost within the wilderness of her own heart. Sometimes she howled and savagely tore the wallpaper of her bedroom and then lay on the floor. Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief.

  THE FLOOD

  The river pushed over the banks that spring and ripped from the ground the dead horse, the mired car, and the money that had lain unseen underneath the gangster, fallen out of the waistband of the trousers he’d worn under the cassock. The horse swirled to pieces, the car tipped slowly downward, the money floated in thin wads straight north and was in a month or two plowed into the earth of a Pembina potato field. Meanwhile, Agnes kept hers locked in the Fargo bank. Tracing her elusive memories, she had gone where life was deepest many times, and she did not fear the rain. Of course, she did not know the history of the stream—at times deceptively sluggish or narrow as a whip, then all of a sudden pooling in a great, wide, dangerous lake with powerful currents that moved earth in tons. What began as a sheer mist became an even sprinkle and then developed into a slow, pounding shower that lasted three days, then four, then on the fifth day when it should have tapered off, increased.

  The river boiled along swiftly, a pour of gray soup still contained, just barely, within its high banks. On day six the rain stopped, or seemed to. The storm had moved upstream. All day while the sun shone pleasantly the river heaved itself up, tore into its flow new trees and boulders, created tip-ups, washouts, areas of singing turbulence.

  Agnes rushed about uneasily, pitching hay into the high loft, throwing chickens up after the hay, wishing she could toss the house up as well, and of course the fabulous piano. But the piano was earth anchored and well tuned by the rainy air, so instead of fruitless worry, Agnes lost herself in practice. She had an inner conviction that, no matter how wide the river spread, it would stop at her front doorstep.

  She didn’t know.

  Once this river started to move, it was a thing that gained assurance. It had no problem with fences or gates, wispy windbreaks, ditches. It simply leveled or attained the level of whatever stood in its path. And moved on, closer. Water jumped up the grass lawn and collected in the flower beds. The river tugged itself up the porch and into the house from one side. From the other side it undermined an already weak foundation that had temporarily shored up the same wall once removed to make way for the piano. The river tore against the house from all around. And then, like a child tipping out a piece of candy from a box, the water surged underneath, rocked the floor, and the piano crashed through the weakened wall.

  It landed in the swift current of the yard, Agnes with it. The white treble clef of her flannel nightdress billowed as she spun away, clutching the curved lid. The thing was pushed along, bobbing off the bottom of the flower beds first and then, as muscular new eddies caught it, touching down on the shifting lanes of Berndt’s wheat fields, and farther, until the revolving instrument and the woman on it reached the original river, that powerful vein, and plunged in. They were carried not more than a hundred feet before the piano lost momentum and sank. As it went down Agnes thought at first of crawling into its box, nestling as though for safety among the cold, dead keys. So attached was she to the instrument that she could not imagine parting from it but, as she actually struggled with the hinged cover, Agnes lost her grip and was swept straight north.

  2

  3 A.M., March 20, 1996

  IN THE THRALL OF THE GRAPE

  REPORT THE FIRST

  THE MIRACLE OF MY DISGUISE

  Your Holiness, I was the woman on the lid of the piano.

  Agnes. Beloved of Chopin and Berndt Vogel, raiser of chickens, groomer of blue horse, girl shot by the Actor. Student of memory. I remember some things and have forgotten others. I do know that I was tumbled into the flo
od of the cold Red River, which is not red but a punishing gray. Whirling once, twice. Even now, the ride stands clear. I sank toward the sludge bottom, struggling in my gown, my shoes like clods on my feet. I had the sense to tear them off and tried to get the nightdress, too, but I had sewn it with too many buttons. This proved my salvation, as it filled with air and ballooned around my shoulders like a life buoy. So I whirled off. I opened my mouth to wail. There was darkness, and I sank into its murmur.

  I met the undertow, a quick dark funnel not visible from shore. It must have pulled me farther down the stream, for when I came up, I was floating swiftly, moving in a grand swell. The current crested at the surface and all I had to do was paddle lightly. Even in my swirling gown, it took almost no effort. My dress caught air and floated behind me like a wedding train. It could have dragged me under, but instead I was pushed along. Buoyant, I dropped fear, dropped worry, went beyond cold into a state beyond numb. The rush was so swift and strong.

  Blessed One, I now believe in that river I drowned in spirit, but revived. I lost an old life and gained a new. Memories resurfaced. Berndt’s square hand in mine. The careful baritone of his warm voice. Perhaps, soon, I would join him. Then again perhaps I would live. The latter prospect suddenly intrigued me. I looked at the banks as I swept by and I wondered why Agnes was sad in such a strange world. Things look different from the middle of a flooded river. In the flow, time is erased. I had new eyes. Branches of toppled trees and upended roots. Houses split. The banks undercut and caving. Cows. Horses. Cows.

  I took the groaning roar that widened before me to be the mouth of a great white drop, and yet I stayed calm. I moved on faster, faster. But it was not tangled white foam rapids that met me. Instead, it was a drowning herd of cows, hundreds of cows. Wedged in trees, they had made a floating bridge so compact that I stepped, half frozen, onto it like a raft, stumbled across to the bank, fell off there to firm ground.

  Once my feet touched solid earth fear came over me. I went utterly weak; my strength drained. I sank upon the ground and knew nothing more.

  MIRACLE THE SECOND

  DIVINE RESCUE OF MISS DEWITT

  1912

  Knocked out by exhausted fear, Agnes slept. That cessation of awareness proved a bridge between her old life and her new life. Before she woke, she was one who believed without seeing, felt spiritual emotion without experience of its source, kept an orderly faith and haphazard observance without the deepest marks of conviction. Creation had spoken to her in ways she could encompass—in the splendor of sexual love, the grand Dakota sky, the arcane language of cramped, black musical notes. Yet her God had never sent a spirit, never spoken to her directly, never employed a visible shape or touched Agnes with a divine hand, unless you believe that God’s hand was Berndt’s and nudged the wrist of the Actor, causing the bullet to plow a shallow groove instead of to burrow deep. She had believed in her music. Now she was to lose that. But that loss would be replaced.

  She woke later, who knows how much later.

  It was night. Lamplight, a glowing glass, a roof over her, four walls. Agnes found that she was lying on a bed, covered with a quilt and a sheepskin. The air was heavy and warm with the smell of cooking venison and she was hungry. Beyond all measure, starving! She was young, barely a woman, and never full. A spoon was held to her lips. She moved toward it, lured like an animal, and she tasted a broth of meat that brought tears to her eyes. Then she saw a man’s hands held the spoon and the bowl. She slid her gaze up his strong arms, his shoulders, to his broad and open face.

  Kindness was there, sheer kindness, a radiance from within him fell upon her and it was like a pool of warm sunlight.

  Instantly, she remembered the river.

  “Who are you?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer she grabbed the bowl and drank its contents with such a steady greed that it was only when she’d reached the very bottom that she realized several things all at once: they were alone in the tiny hut, no woman had prepared the soup, and she was naked in the bed.

  The sheepskin dropped away from her body, and she felt the slight breeze of his breath along her throat. He stroked her hair, smiled at her. She felt warmth along her thighs, hovering elation. Bands of rippling lightness engulfed her when he moved closer. And then his hand, brutalized and heavy from work, fell gently as he held her arm and took away the empty bowl, the horn spoon, and wiped her lips. She felt his rough hair as he leaned closer, as he moved his length alongside her on the creaking boards, as he slowly turned her toward him. His breathing deepened, he relaxed. She lay there, too, spent and comfortable, curled against a sweetly sleeping man, a very tired man who smelled of resin from the wood he’d chopped, of metal from the tools he’d used, of hay, of sweat, of great and nameless things that she’d known, as in a dream, in her human husband’s arms.

  She lay her head beside him, and although she remained awake for many hours in that beautiful stillness, listening to his even breath, eventually she, too, fell asleep.

  Morning dawned with rain on the wind, the sky a sheet of gray light. Agnes remembered where she was, turned, and found that he was gone. Not only that, but she was lying in no comfortable settler’s shack, but in an empty shell of a long abandoned hovel with the wind whipping through, swallows’ nests in the eaves, no sign of the man, no bowl, no track, no spoon, no sheepskin covering or blanket. Only her nightclothes fit back onto her, dry, still smelling of the river. She stood in the doorway for a long while. As she stood there, she gradually came to understand what had happened.

  Through You, in You, with You. Aren’t those beautiful words? For of course she knew her husband long before she met Him, long before He rescued her, long before He fed her broth and held Agnes close to Him all through that quiet night.

  Dear Pontiff,

  Since then, through the years, my love and wonder have steadily increased. Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death? How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend Him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships.

  Modeste

  THE EXCHANGE

  Disoriented, Agnes walked farther north instead of south, for the river’s flow was mixed up in swirls and futile commotions now and there was no clear sign of the current’s force. The sky, too, was a low ceiling of thick gray through which the sunlight diffused evenly over the flooded landscape—no direction to be gathered. So Agnes walked and in walking she saw too much. A tangle of rats. Skeletal twisted machinery from tattered farms. A baby carriage with no baby in it. Pieces of houses. A basket of eggs afloat. A priest hanging on a branch.

  Not far up the river Agnes DeWitt came upon poor Father Damien Modeste, whom she freely admitted she disliked even as she pitied him now. The drowned man was snagged in a tree, gaping down at her with a wide-eyed and upside-down quizzicality. The wreckage of the rectory auto was already sucked upstream, if he had taken the auto. She didn’t know. Perhaps he was on foot. For a long while, she sat near the tree with the body, considering. She prayed for a sign—what to do? But she already knew. Once she was ready, she acted. She dislodged the priest with a branch that she used like a hook, pulling him down. His body, weighted like a sand-filled sack, shook the loose roots of the tree as it struck the ground. The man was green-white, and in his death more powerful than in life, more severe. Agnes had no way of digging him a grave but to use her two hands. The ground beneath was so soft, so saturated, that she was able to scrape out a rough hole to fit him, though it took her the day. All the time that she worked, the certainty grew.

  It was nearly twilight before she rolled him in. Her heavy nightgown was his shroud. His clothing, his cassock, and the small bundle tangled about him, a traveler’s pouch tied underneath all else, Agnes put on in the exact order he had worn them. A small sharp knife in that traveler’s pocket was her barber’s sc
issors—she trimmed off her hair and then she buried it with him as though, even this pitiable, he was the keeper of her old life.

  She could think of nothing to which she was required to return. In fact, as though the cold water had flooded her brain, her memory, again, was a distressing patchwork of eroding islands. Berndt was gone, she knew that, and she remembered that she had loved him, she thought. Also gone: the blue horse, her lovely lattice dress, her leather boots, and even her chickens were probably drowned, too. She could at least recall the chickens in reassuring detail, each of them particular and opinionated. The hens made such a proud fuss over each new egg. Even in the muck, covering the dead priest, she nearly laughed, thinking of her chickens. Then she breathed out, troubled.

  There was something, something . . . it was huge and it belonged to her, and it was vast. . . . When she tried to grasp at it the form faded like a dream. A grand dream, prophetic and important. Lines, black dots. She shook her head. Whatever it was, gleaming for a moment, shiny black, had it to do with her hands? She flexed her fingers doubtfully. Sound? She hummed a few bars of Die Lorelei, German Lied. Was she a singer? She cleared her throat, tried her voice. No, that definitely wasn’t it. Well, whatever it was, it was gone. She had no way of knowing that she had lost the vast gift of her music, but she did have the sense that the stark, searching motions of her hands were part of some larger complex of actions. Well, she shrugged, let them tingle away on the ends of her arms. Let them drum, and step-march and ripple. There was nothing to hold her back, now, from living the way she had dreamed of in the hot dark of her loss.

  When Father Damien’s grave was tamped over, she stood hungrily in the wreckage as the dusk winds blew the clouds aside. The clear sky revealed its map, star after star, until the world was again marked out for her. In the priest’s hidden pouch there was money, some papers, a crust of cheese. A biscuit spongy with river water. She squeezed out the biscuit and ate the handful of crushed wet crumbs. The priest’s clothes were wool. Though damp, she was warm enough. In time, the moon bobbed up in a cool blur to show her way, and then, under its light, Agnes began to walk north, into the land of the Ojibwe, to the place on the reservation where he had told her he was bound.