The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Page 9

  Into this complex situation walked Father Damien, with only the vaguest notion of how the ownership of land related to the soul.

  THE LOSS

  She transformed herself each morning with a feeling of loss that she finally defined as the loss of Agnes. Ah, Agnes! She lived at night in the shelter of bedclothes. Disappeared in daylight, bandages wrapped as when she had been a nun. As she left the cabin, her thoughts became Damien’s thoughts. Her voice his voice, which deepened as his stride lengthened and grew bold. Agnes’s speech had always been husky and low for a woman. Father Damien’s voice was musical, for a man. There were gestures left over from the convent, and also from her life as a woman in love. In the convent, she’d been taught to walk with eyes downcast. Now, Father Damien tipped his chin out and narrowed his gaze, focused straight ahead. As a farm wife, Agnes had leaned out with a hand on her hip, carried things on her hip, nudged doors open and shut with her hip. Men didn’t use their hips as shelves and braces. Father Damien walked with soldierly directness and never swayed. Nor did he touch a finger to his tongue and smooth his eyebrows, or glance at himself in mirror surfaces. Sternly, he nodded up and down when he listened instead of tipping his head to the side.

  Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?

  Now and then Agnes recalled a tiny portion of her encounter with the Actor, and she came to understand it as a sure prefigurement and sign of what was to come. The Actor had influenced the quality of Father Damien’s disguise, for when Agnes was held by that rope-tough arm against the car door she’d felt remote enough, from blood loss, to marvel at and assess the Actor’s change in personality from priest to robber.

  Father Damien was both a robber and a priest. For what is it to entertain a daily deception? Wasn’t he robbing all who looked upon him? Stealing their trust? Shameful, perhaps, but Agnes was surprised to find that the thought only gave her satisfaction. She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.

  NANAPUSH

  Agnes said Father Damien’s office early and long one morning, with extra fervor because she was still in bed. She needed the strength. She had decided to visit the reprobate Nanapush, who survived marginally in the bush somewhere with the young woman named Fleur. The air deeply chilled her and cold stabbed up through the icy boards. She put on every stitch of clothing, even Father Hugo’s. Still, she trembled walking out into the bitter air. Longing for the sad warmth of her predecessor’s willow-pole bed, imagining the comfort of burrowing under the leaden quilts and buffalo robes, she ate a sorry breakfast of cooked potato skins and tea. Such food, now, only worsened the stab in her stomach. She was comforted by the news that the roads were open and there would soon be supplies, enough for everyone. Six wagons would be arriving with relief.

  She wrapped her blistered and frost-burned feet in several layers of the nun’s dish towels, pulled on her boots, then she took from Sister Hildegarde the scratchings of a map. Before she could think about what she might encounter, or change her mind, she started off, walking into the bush.

  Her trek began on a road of packed ice that turned to snow that turned to unpacked snow that turned to nothing, so that she would have sunk to her knees at every step, were it not that Sister Hildegarde had insisted that she sling Father Hugo’s snowshoes across her back. She tied them onto her feet and then, in shelter of the trees where the crust on the snow was tough, she was able to maneuver with an almost galloping swiftness. Physical elation filled her. She made her way through wild throngs of birch, skirted the cracked, sere slough grass, pushed through thickets of red willow. The sun was high and bright, but the air was cold and bubbled in her blood like sleep. Several times, sitting down to rest, she imagined curling up in the snowy bays underneath the trees, but she always forced herself to her feet, kept moving.

  At the time, she still possessed an untested belief that, having survived the robbery, the chase, the bullets, and the flood, then transformed herself to Father Damien, she could not be harmed. That inner assurance would make her seem fearless, which would in turn increase the respect she won among the Anishinaabeg. So complete was her faith that on the journey to visit Nanapush she ignored the hardship and even danger she might encounter if she lost her way.

  What occupied Agnes was the misery of concealing the exasperating monthly flow that belonged to her past but persisted into the present. As she sprang along on the clever winglike snowshoes, she occasionally asked the Almighty, in some irritation, to stop the useless affliction of menstrual blood, so she could more confidently pursue the work cut out for an active priest. Her requests were heeded, for she definitely felt a lessening and then a near cessation. The heavy cramping faded until, stopping to change the cloth that she buried deep in snow, she found it barely spotted with darkness. No sooner had the evidence vanished than she felt a pang, a loss, an eerie rocking between genders.

  The sun was sweet, the air liquid. Kneeling in the momentary warmth, she washed lightly with a handful of fresh, wet snow. She shivered with shock and a lost sensation gathered, swept through her, and was gone with a shimmer of musical notes. She closed her eyes, tried to make the physical climax into a prayer, but her mouth dropped and she cried out in a quiet voice, feeling the ghost touches of her lost lover.

  When at last she returned to the present, stood again to make her way, Agnes consulted the angle of the sun, the trees, the careful map Sister Hildegarde had drawn, anxious not to lose the new priest. It did not take her long to arrive at the place. It looked ordinary enough—a low cabin made of silvery logs with a split-plank door, the spaces between the logs tamped with a fine cracked yellow-gray gumbo. There was nothing about the cabin to suggest it was the home of a serious miscreant, a guzzler of communion wine, an unregenerate and eager pagan who gave Sister Hildegarde such trials. The place was quiet. There was among Father Hugo’s papers a crude calendar, which sometimes included notes on the Indians he’d baptized—the day and hour. One day there were the words “Baptize Nanapush.” Under that self-command the exclamation “Folly!” Agnes took a step forward. It was said that Mr. Nanapush had excellent command of English as a result of several years with Jesuit teachers. It was also said that the old man had stubbornly retained and deepened his Ojibwemowin and that he wrote and thought in his language and conducted the very rites and mysteries that Kashpaw had mentioned.

  “Boozhoo! Aaniin!” Agnes called out the various greetings she’d learned from Kashpaw. She stood shifting uneasily from foot to numb foot. No sound came in answer, no stirring from inside. Up and down the side of a nearby tree, a tiny gray-capped bird zipped, uttering a sharp complaint. Some curled brown leaves, still attached to the nodes of an oak tree, ticked together. And then the wind stopped. Everything stopped. The stillness was profound.

  In that cessation, Agnes DeWitt was flooded with uneasy agitation. A prickle touched on the back of her neck, and she gave her head a shake. A low unease struck her. A voice cried out. She whirled. No one. Now a piping child’s voice, laughing, but again no source. She felt a mutter of presences, rustling and arguing on all sides, and she froze in place as their voices, speaking incomprehensible words—only a few of which she knew from Kashpaw’s talk—crushed toward her.

  The voices merged with her senses, filling her head. She tried to regulate her breathing, not to panic, but a vast weakness swallowed her and she thought she heard, maybe knew, could not be sure—were there spirits beyond the experience entrusted to her so far?

  “Who are you?” she whispered. “What are you?”

  She waited, increasingly disturbed, for long moments, until finally t
here was nowhere to go but in. Making the sign of the cross, she burst through the door of the lonely cabin into the stink of ghosts.

  Two beings, hollow and strange, stared quizzically out of the shadows at the priest, who gaped at them in return. One frowned in dignified hauteur at the crack of light within which the priest was caught, there in the doorway, hand on his throat and eyes wide in snow-blind shock. Another blinked and passed its hands across its bone features. Agnes stepped closer, pity flooding her as well as a curious horror at their condition. At first, she could not tell the old man from the young girl. Their faces were pale smears, porous and frail as birch-bark masks. Their hair burst out, ferocious, alive with sticks, mud, lice, tangled in intricate bushes on their heads. Their eyes glittered from deep in gray pits. They moved as though they’d break apart. As though their bones were brittle reeds. They were shells made of loss, made of transparent flint, made of the whispers in the oak leaves, voices of the dead.

  THE LIVING

  When the new priest burst into the cabin door, causing that great crack of light to interfere with death, the girl and old man were annoyed. That they were abandoned by their families who took the four-day journey into the sun-going-down world was bad enough. That some of the dead came back and waited outside the door, urging them to follow although their bodies clung to life, that was hard. And now, just as they had weakened and slid into a state somewhere between death and life, a drifting torpor from which they saw far ahead down the road and also marvelously lived vivid scenes from the past, here came this priest.

  The light dazzled, the dark spun. The priest’s pleasant interest was both irritating and surprisingly powerful. Fleur felt a faint impulse stirring in her to melt snow, or fetch water, then make tea, which meant a fire must be kindled, which seemed impossible and then imperative. She was sure that she was mostly dead. She hadn’t moved from her corner for days, maybe weeks. But somehow on stick legs she lurched out the door into blinding radiance. Light stabbed into her brain, subsided gradually to show the world in whirling shapes. A crust had formed across her mouth. She put a handful of snow on her lips, to unseal her tongue, and allowed a trickle of water to pass down her throat. Then the painful knowledge that now she would rejoin this life, which was only loss after loss, caused her heart to catch in a sob that became a snarl, and she struck out wildly at the air, behind the house, in the deep, warm snow.

  As for Nanapush, he still blinked inside the cabin like an owl and whispered bewildered answers to the priest’s awkward questions in his language. Finally, in English, Nanapush said, “That is enough from you, my friend, quite sufficient. Now for a moment you must be silent. The master calls and I must go out and have a shit.” Then, holding his pants up with both hands, the old man toddled from the cabin and did not return for quite some time.

  Fleur brought in wood, sticks, some rolls of flammable bark, and quickly brought up a blaze in the rusty can used as an indoor stove. Outside, as the sun was at its height, they could hear the dripping of snow water from the trees. They could hear the clumps of snow sliding down the mud-pole sides of the house. Water dripped from the soaked sod roof down the inside walls. The ice was retreating, but not inside of Fleur. She hated priests. The priests had brought the sickness long ago in the hems of their black gowns, in their sleeves, in the water they flung on people to make them holy but which might as well have burned holes in their skin. All these things, and more. She’d like to stab the priest’s heart, pull it out of his body. She’d look into his face as he died and take satisfaction from his anguish for all her loved ones, her little brother and sisters, her beloved father, her mother who had died last of all.

  Who should see such things?

  “What can I do to make you feel better?” asked the priest. “Gigaa minwendam i’in?” he tried in Ojibwe.

  In spite of herself, she almost laughed. What he actually said was, Can I make you feel good? Which was easy to take as sexual. Mistakenly, the priest took the smile for encouragement and earnestly tried out a little more Ojibwe, which now made her hold her hand up to her mouth to stifle the laugh that almost emerged. What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could. She banged a can of water on the stove and went out. She could not be around the priest. He stank. Or she stank. She would fire up a blaze to heat stones for a sweat and purify herself. She would smoke her clothes with sage. Burn sweet grass to clean the cabin’s air, sweep the sad litter out, the chewed twigs, the nests of hungry mice. Then she would know it was not she, but the priest, who stank. And the old man. He could use a sweat and a good wash, too. For sure, she hated priests. As she left the cabin, voices surrounded her, airy hands plucked at her sleeves, but she shook them off. She pushed snow away from the stones, the grandfathers, gathered last summer when no one knew what killing sorrows this winter would bring.

  As for Nanapush, he entered the door and pleasantly announced to the priest, “I have accomplished my end.” When the priest looked amused, instead of chastising Nanapush, the old man was sufficiently interested to want to live just a little longer in order to shock the priest. He rubbed his numb hands, his feet, and thought perhaps he would tell this priest the story of the inquisitive mouse rained on by the big vaginas, and how the mouse reported to and described these beings to his friends down in the holes that had filled with piss and nearly drowned them out. Or maybe the story of how Nanabozho got his penis changed from smooth to knobbed on the end when a clam he tried to fuck closed tight. Or maybe he would just proceed in his best English to tell the priest the many and specific ways he had made love to his wives, all of whom he’d outlived, but then the thought laid his heart down. He couldn’t breathe for the sorrow. He sat in the blankets, speechless. For a long time, he tried to gather himself out of his despair and perhaps the priest sensed this, which was good, for Father Damien maintained a neutral, kind, meditative watchfulness that had in it no hint of impatience.

  The water boiled. Fleur came in, made spruce-needle tea, went out again. The priest and the old man sipped the stuff from cans. Maybe, thought Nanapush, as with all things there was a reason for this intrusion and something in it for himself. He set his mind to it. There must be some way that Nanapush could use this priest, if he couldn’t get rid of him. And the priest looked set to stay. The priest would probably not do much about Nanapush’s lack of zhooniyaa—priests never gave out money, that he knew. And food, from the starved look of the black robe, was probably not forthcoming. He didn’t seem to have so much as a piece of bannock with him. No, there was not much good that this priest could do in an immediate way. Nanapush thought harder. Grief over his last wife still pressed him, and it was perhaps that grief and longing, coupled with the Nanapush-like need to take advantage when advantage could be taken, that led him to decide—since the priest had yanked him from the calm world of the dead to thrust him into the strife of the living, where he did not want to go—he at least would not sleep in a cold bed. No, if he had to stay alive, Nanapush would get a wife—a big, warm one. She would make a little nest for him every night, blankets spread over cedar boughs. He’d curl beside her and he’d get warm and then he’d make them both happy with what he’d been given, his gift, unless that, too, had starved so skinny it was useless.

  So while he sat quietly, Nanapush’s mind was really hard at work, and when it found a direction, his tongue was triggered and wouldn’t stop. Somehow, and Nanapush did not know how it would occur, the talking itself, if he did it long enough, always brought him by roundabout and unexpected ways to the place he intended. And so although he started somewhere altogether far from any discussion of wives or beds, he had no doubt that he would end up where he was going. He spoke what came to mind then, and told a story that he suddenly re
called hearing from a zhaaganaash-akiing Cree.

  NANABOZHO CONVERTS THE WOLVES

  Nanapush

  Our Nanabozho was like me, said the old man, launching it, very poor once—in fact, so poor he didn’t even own a rotten old rag such as I have to dress in, no, he had to go naked and his family, too. So it interested Nanabozho very much when he heard the Frenchmen were traveling around his home ground buying up furs and wolf pelts and buffalo robes. Yes, he thought, that sounded very interesting. He even saw people who had many furs and had bought warm new clothes. But yet, sadly enough, Nanabozho had no furs to sell.

  So he went to a Frenchman anyway and tried to persuade him to give some credit, telling him that soon he would have a great many furs to put down on his debt.

  Then the Frenchman, who believed Nanabozho, gave him blankets and coats and even a gun. Also, a great deal of clothing. Nanabozho brought these things home and gave them all to his wife. But she was angry and called him crazy.

  “How are we going to pay?” she yelled.

  “Oh,” said Nanabozho, “I will go back to this Frenchman. You’ll see.”

  So Nanabozho went back to the Frenchman and this time he asked for some medicine, poison. He took that poison home and then told his old woman to give him some fat, which she did. She gave him fat. Then he turned around and put that poison into the fat. He patted out many little flat lumps of poison fat and cooled them until they were hard. Then he took them all and went to look for the wolves.