The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (23 page)

“
Washtay,
” she said in her language. She stood aside to let the other woman rise.

A gift for clever thought, a certain talent for talking, a swiftness with the language, became a Puyat trait inherited from this quick Frenchman who then spoke to save his life. He spoke clearly, as though suddenly struck with his idea.

“Of course, if any of you big-bellied Bwaan men can beat me in a running race, then each of you can murder half of me. The woman can have my left side to cut my heart out, and eat it, too, if there’s anything left—after all, my wife has sharpened her teeth on it for years. The man can have my right side because wiinag swings there, long and heavy. When I run, I’m forced to tie it up or it will strike my thigh and bruise me. But today, since this may be the last race I’ll run, I’ll let it gallop free!”

By the time he finished speaking the two sides were laughing and there was no question that the race would occur. The only problem the Bwaanug had was in choosing a runner. There were two, and equally matched. One was a powerful bull-chested hunter with legs that bulged with fabulous muscles, and the other was an ikwe-inini, a woman-man called a
winkte
by the Bwaanag, a graceful sly boy who sighed, poised with grave nuance, combed his hair, and peered into the tortoiseshell hand mirror that hung around his neck by a rawhide thong. The wife of the hunter refused to let her valued husband risk his life in such a ridiculous game, and she yelled, browbeat, pulled her knife on him herself, while the others were lost in a debate. Was the
winkte
a man or a woman for the purposes of this race?

Some of the Ojibwe, who judged his catlike stance too threatening, rejected him as a male runner on account of his female spirit. Others were wary of the scowling hunter and argued that as the
winkte
would run with legs that grew down along either side of a penis as unmistakable as his opponent’s, he was enough of a male to suit the terms. The hunter’s wife finally won, delivering to her husband such a blow with the butt of his own rifle that he fell senseless and gagging. The
winkte
narrowed eyes rimmed with smoky black, shrugged off a heavy dress of fine-tanned deerhide, and stood, astonishingly pure and lovely, in nothing but a white woman’s lace-trimmed pantalets. At the signal, then, both commenced to race.

They tested each other, pulling a step ahead and dropping a step behind, speeding and slowing to throw the other off pace, and found themselves equally matched. It would be a race of wit as well as strength, then. When to spend the ultimate energy and when to conserve? Draw ahead to the last reserve of strength, in order to discourage the other? Or save some for the final kick? The clever Montrealer decided by the time he grasped the stick at halfway that he’d tag a pace behind and wheeze to confuse his opponent and then in his last lengths, sign of the cross, kiss of God, he’d fly past, surprising the Bwaan, and show him the heels of his feet. This would have worked more easily had not his opponent, whose job it was as a woman to study men and whose immediacy of manhood gave him an uncanny understanding, read the mind of the Frenchman and slowed to conserve his own ability to finish. They both knew, then, that their strategies came down to a hot finale and they each determined to blister straight through their lungs and guts to cross the line ahead and live.

When it came right down to the end, though, the Frenchman had the stronger kick and the
winkte
, losing by a toe, swiped his dress neatly from the grass and simply kept running, across the broad plains, into the hills. Those who wished to start after him were detained now by Father LaCombe, who, though slow to understand the outcome of the wager and the sequence of events, launched forth a God-inspired tirade that cowed the Michifs and brought them to their Catholic senses. As a result, they did not chase the fleeing Bwaan but grudgingly agreed with the priest’s diplomatic statement that the race had been an exact tie. No blood should be spilled.

Yet the Bwaan woman would have satisfaction for her relatives. Lunging forward with one arrowing blur of movement, she slipped her skinning knife beneath the ribs of the Frenchman, Pauline’s father, and drew a sickening arc so that he found, quite suddenly, he was kneeling in prayer, his intestines slowly popping into his hands. And then his daughter was before him trying gently to stuff them back in their exact mysterious intricate folds, but failing even as he crumpled. Leaning sideways, he spilled about himself. Dying, he looked into his daughter’s face and said to her in the clarity of last vision that she must kill her mother.

It was imperishable, the command of the father imposed upon the daughter. And no less the will she had to carry it out. Her intention was forged in the heat of grief and tempered in its freezing aftermath. Though young, the girl now harbored a blade of certainty that waited calmly in her for its chance. Pauline’s mother knew. That is why, one day, with no warning and no word but a filthy cry, she dragged the girl to the shit pile and forced her snarling child face-down and said in a deadly voice, “This is where you’ll be if ever you go against me.”

A mistake, on the mother’s part, to challenge one so like herself.

Ever after, the stink of waste reminded the girl. Her mother pushed Pauline into the fire, next, and so that, too, became an unforgettable piece of the promise. The burns of hot coals on her skin were markers of her duty. As was the soup her mother would not feed her—a bitter absence in her stomach. And the sticks of wood that broke against her legs and over her back. The air that tore open her chest each time she breathed with the broken rib, and bloody snow. The only thing her mother let her eat one winter when the meat was scarce was the bloody snow beneath the death of the animal or its butchering.

Yet the girl survived on that. She grew fast on the blows that didn’t land and even faster on the ones that did. She flourished in twisted energy and grew taller than her father and meaner than her mother until one day, as her mother lay weakened by fever in a brush lean-to, on the trapline, the daughter brought a horn of foul boiling stew of bark and diseased rabbit and a mole that an owl must have dropped. Although her mother clawed at her, she held the woman’s mouth open and poured the boiling stuff straight down her gullet so that her throat was seared, her mouth severely blistered, and all she could do was gasp, in her agonized delirium, for three days, the name Pauline.

That girl sat as far as possible from her mother, by the fire, surrounded by warm blankets and skins. With satisfaction, she watched the woman who bore her shake and chatter her teeth like a turtle rattle and weep as the fever alternately scorched and froze her. Recovering, the woman lost one side of her face. The nerves destroyed by inner heat, her flesh sagged in a bizarre leer that made her suddenly frightening to men so that, though she could still run, there was no one to catch her.

At the same time Pauline, who had inherited none of her mother’s grace and all of her father’s squat, exaggerated pop-eyed vigor, suddenly became irresistible to men. She was courted famously by love flute. She tried her lovers out across the tent, while her mother burned in dark nothingness. Men brought Pauline shells, miigis, a dress of red calico that reflected fire. They offered her trade silver cut and stamped in the shapes of owls, turtles, otters twining, bears, and horned frogs. They brought her meat so that she never went hungry. A necklace of brass beads appeared, hung beside her door by a night visitor. A very good kettle. Cakes of maple sugar. She wanted for nothing. Men sought her, although they were befuddled by their fascination. Was it her slim long waist, tight in the red calico? Maybe it was the way she looked so boldly at a man, then shyly away. It was not her face, or maybe it was, for her childhood ugliness had become something else: a ferocity, a sexual charm partaking of no sweetness, a look that registered and gloated over everything about a man. A hunger.

The young girl’s appetite became a famishment and then a ravenous emptiness that she found men, for very short amounts of time, were capable of solving. Still, even though she had her pick of them, she was restless. The terrible fact was this: In creating the emptiness, the mother disallowed her the means to fill her void. Pauline could not love or be loved. She had been robbed of her capacity either to give or receive anything so profoundly good.

Her mother’s face sagged until her tongue froze. Her brain locked. She finally died, removing the burden of her doom from Pauline. Freed, the girl married four times. With every marriage she experienced the beginning as a wicked and promising intensity that grew unbearable and then subsided into indifference. She bore her first child, a boy called Shesheeb, very early in life. Upon him, she raggedly doted. Twenty years after that first child, she bore a daughter. Her children were very different: the boy fathered by a full-blood and the girl by a Polish aristocrat visiting the wilds of Canada. The name of the latter was unpronounceable to Pauline, plus he was no more than a strange encounter during one dry northern summer. She forgot him and named the daughter after herself. Pauline Puyat, once again.

That child, born in her mother’s age and raised in her purified bitterness, was the Pauline Puyat who became Sister Leopolda and sponsored, we do not know how, such things as miracles. I relate what I know of this history in order to explain the slow formation of certain seductive poisons in the personality that both slow and require severe judgment. This killing hatred between mother and daughter was passed down and did not die when the last Pauline became a nun. As Sister Leopolda she was known for her harsh and fearsome ways. And her father, the Polish man with the title and the golden epaulets, who went back to his lands with marvelous paintings and strange stories, who was he? What unknown capacities, what secret Old World cruelties, were thereby tangled into her simmering blood?

If you know about the buffalo hunts, you perhaps know that the one I describe, now many generations past, was one of the last. Directly after that hunt, in fact, before which Father LaCombe made a great act of contrition and the whirlwind destruction, lasting twenty minutes, left twelve hundred animals dead, the rest of the herd did not bolt away but behaved in a chilling fashion.

As many witnesses told it, the surviving buffalo milled at the outskirts of the carnage, not grazing but watching with an insane intensity, as one by one, swiftly and painstakingly, each carcass was dismantled. Even through the night, the buffalo stayed, and were seen by the uneasy hunters and their families the next dawn to have remained standing quietly as though mourning their young and their dead, all their relatives that lay before them more or less unjointed, detongued, legless, headless, skinned. At noon the flies descended. The buzzing was horrendous. The sky went black. It was then, at the sun’s zenith, the light shredded by scarves of moving black insects, that the buffalo began to make a sound.

It was a sound never heard before; no buffalo had ever made this sound. No one knew what the sound meant, except that one old toughened hunter sucked his breath in when he heard it, and as the sound increased he attempted not to cry out. Tears ran over his cheeks and down his throat, anyway, wetting his shoulders, for the sound gathered power until everyone was lost in the immensity. That sound was heard once and never to be heard again, that sound made the body ache, the mind pinch shut. An unmistakable and violent grief, it was as though the earth itself was sobbing. One cow, then a bull, charged the carcasses. Then there was another sight to add to the sound never heard before. Situated on a slight rise, the camp of hunters watched in mystery as the entire herd, which still numbered thousands, began to move. Slightly at first, then more violently, the buffalo proceeded to trample, gore, even bite their dead, to crush their brothers’ bones into the ground with their stone hooves, to toss into the air chunks of murdered flesh, and even, soon, to run down their own calves. The whole time they uttered a sound so terrible that the people were struck to the core and could never speak of what they saw for a long time afterward.

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”

* * *

Father Damien sighed and for a while the two priests were lost in a meditative silence, then he spoke softly to Father Jude. “What does that tell you about Pauline? About her mother? About the great pain of the end of things that lives in every family, here on the reservation, in some form or another? What does that tell you about our so-called saint? Pauline was, of course, the warped result of all that twisted her mother. She was what came next, beyond the end of things. She was the residue of what occurred when some of our grief-mad people trampled their children. Yes, Leopolda was the hope and she was the poison. And the history of the Puyats is the history of the end of things. It is bound up in despair and the red beasts’ lust for self-slaughter, an act the chimookomanag call suicide, which our people rarely practiced until now.”

PART THREE

M
EMORY
and
S
USPICION

T
HE
R
OSARY

1919–1920

Late that summer the body of a man was found in the woods. Father Damien was sent for. Already, it was known that the dead man was the vanished Napoleon Morrissey. With that identity in mind and knowing the length of time he had been missing, Agnes was at least in some measure prepared. She had by then seen life from start to finish and was familiar with death’s peculiarities.