The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (27 page)

“All right!” He lowered the curved and recessed keyboard lid and then, with a key that fit within one of the clawed feet, locked the lid. All at once, Agnes felt more secure, although she could not imagine why and shook her head quizzically to clear it as she walked away. It was as though the keyboard itself were a giant set of teeth. As though the instrument were capable of devouring her!

Sister Hildegarde took charge and applied herself to cozening three heavyset parishioners to move the awful wooden creature. She brought them tea and thick chunks of lard on bread. Flattered them into setting the groaning weight
here, no there,
Entschuldigt,
back to the first again
. She agonized over the exact placement and hoped that Father Damien would commission a statue, at last a real statue for the church at Little No Horse. Such a thing would need a place of honor near the piano, where it could be seen and adored.

PRAYER

Four times a day—on rising, at noon, late afternoon, and before going to bed—Agnes and Father Damien became that one person who addressed the unknown. The priest stopped what he was doing, cast himself down, made himself transparent, broke himself open. That is, prayed. He prayed that the seething factions merge and dissolve their hatred. He prayed, uneasily, for the conversion of Nanapush, then prayed for his own enlightenment in case converting Nanapush was a mistake. Agnes asked for a cheerful spirit and that her dangerous longings cease. She asked for answers, and for the spirit of the language to enter her heart. Agnes’s struggle with the Ojibwe language, the influence of it, had an effect on her prayers. For she preferred the Ojibwe word for praying, anama’ay, with its sense of a great motion upward. She began to address the trinity as four and to include the spirit of each direction—those who sat at the four corners of the earth. Wherever she prayed, she made of herself a temporary center of those directions. There, she allowed herself to fall apart. Disintegrated into pieces of creation, which God might pick up and turn curiously this way and that to catch the light. What a relief it was, for those moments, to be nothing, a smashed thing, and to have no thought or expectation. Whether God picked up the fragments and stuck them back together, or casually swept them aside was of no consequence either to Agnes or Father Damien.

She rose, once she was finished, rubbed her eyes like a child, went on in Father Damien’s skin. Her loneliness sometimes seemed a thing not of this world, but a loneliness only that mysterious being, solitary and unique, could understand.

LULU’S BAPTISM

Father Damien baptized a bear and the baby in the woods on the wrong side of Matchimanito, and all because of Margaret Kashpaw. She sent his altar boy, Nector, to fetch him one day. Father Damien went along eagerly, swinging his arms through the bush that seemed to close instantly behind them. Very quickly, Father Damien grew disoriented and then lost. When at last they got near enough to the lake, a slim track that petered out and resumed and buried itself again, Nector pointed where Father Damien should go, then vanished. Agnes stood bereft for a moment, uncertain, then plunged on.

Keeping to the way was exhausting, but soon she could see, as long as she stayed near the shore, the outline of Fleur’s cabin. Resting, she took off the pack in order to check the contents and make certain she had included, in haste, all that was needed. She had just removed the vial of holy water when a gunshot sounded from the vicinity of the cabin. Startled, she splashed herself, then crossed herself at the sound of violent crashing, snapping, muttered grunting. In moments, the source of noise was before her, though lightly screened. And then the bear ripped aside the leaves.

Bear and priest gaped at each other in astounded dismay. The bear blinked its weak eyes, its intelligent nostrils rigid and glistening with inquiry. Agnes behaved by perfect instinct. As the holy water was immediately to hand, she dipped her fingers in and made the sign of the cross, giving the bear a tiny splash. Flinching as though shot, the bear jumped away and was gone. The bush closed over. Agnes was left to whack her way forward until she came to the cabin, at last, and stood panting in the clearing.

“Piindigen, Father!”

Margaret Kashpaw rushed out of the cabin and grabbed him so he spun with a jerk and was dragged to the doorway, into which she disappeared, tiptoeing back out with a baby in her arms. Stealthily, she asked Father Damien to baptize the infant.

Perhaps he shouldn’t have. It went against his very grain, he later thought, to baptize in secret, but when he saw Fleur’s newborn baby something happened to him—or to Agnes, what did it matter? The tender damage was done. Barely one day old, Lulu was the first newly born child he’d held in all his life. His other baptisms had been months or more usually years, often many years, old. Calm, deliberate, focused, serene, this new being stared at him with eyes that still knew the face of unbeing. In the long drinking gaze that grew between them, Agnes experienced a protective adoration that shook her to the bone.

“May I hold her?” Father Damien’s voice was hoarse.

Margaret gave the baby over, transferring the frail, floppy head and tight limbs, the exquisite pinch of buttocks and updrawn red knees. Agnes felt immediately natural holding her, as though her tiny goodness set off a charm in her brain. Father Damien laughed, delighted, baptized her with a slow enchantment and only reluctantly gave her back to Margaret. Agnes was still absorbed in the primal sweetness of the experience when Nanapush decided to walk back with the priest, and Father Damien was still lost in marveling when he returned to his own cabin and withdrew, from his desk, the certificate traditionally written out and kept for each new member of the parish. It was perhaps the imprint of the tiny body against his own, the connection that still lingered, a dreaminess, that caused him when he signed the certificate to add his own name, twice, mistakenly and along with Nanapush, as both priest and father.

Father Damien began to visit more often once the baby was born, for in the child’s presence, Agnes could temporarily forget the burden of half-realized memory and the load of suspicion that she carried through her days. Lulu was a touchy, lively charmer, precocious and fearless, curious and sincere. She was easy to please; anyone could rock her to sleep in her tikinagan of ash and cedar, the covering intricately beaded with flowers and heavy vines. Watching her drowsy lids fall, her delicate lip quiver with surrender, Agnes’s heart lifted. She was overcome with strange contentment, not maternal so much as fully human. During those visits she became a connected being.

Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. Nanapush of course, as teacher and friend, was the first she knew well intellectually. But Fleur, too, accepted the priest fondly. The moments when Fleur’s rare smile burst out were stunning pockets of light, and Agnes looked for them and courted them with an eagerness she hoped was not too obvious. Margaret, kindhearted and sour-tongued, loved Father Damien in spite of herself—he felt it in her grumpy embrace. He was always surprised when she showed anything at all besides the dour scorn her family inspired. Their love for him, in return, pained him and soothed him. He was thrilled and touched with sadness, he was hungry, and he was practical. He was lonely; he was a priest.

COLLATERAL

John James Mauser appeared, not in person but in the persons of others—in the local commissioner and the tax collector general. Payment-due notices arrived, which nobody understood. In the fine print, it said collateral would gladly be taken. Collateral wasn’t birch-bark baskets or buckets of just picked berries. It wasn’t a side of venison, a pack of furs, maple sugar, wild rice, dried currants, tanned hide, or anything else that by hook, crook, luck, or grueling work or desperate hoarding anyone was able to get. Collateral was land.

Sister Hildegarde had seen it coming, but she and Father Damien had been battling the spirit of disease, and then, absorbed in raising their church, they’d lost track of land acquisitions and foreclosures. They’d left off filling in the map whose boundaries changed drastically day to day. Father Damien’s despair had robbed him of awareness, too, so it was with a tremendous sense of self-castigating helplessness that they both, in stymied dumb surprise, regarded the papers in the hands of Nanapush, papers that transferred the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and to Nanapush himself into the hands of the lumber company.

As he read the notice, a stricken rage boiled up in Damien. It was partly guilt—while paralyzed by an interior misery he had failed to protect his people, his family. The paper crumpled in his hands, he was so furious he imagined the flame of his thoughts might scorch it. His fingers clenched and he said in a small and wretched voice, “I will write to the bishop.” It was not entirely too late. By raiding the church account, Father Damien was able to raise enough to keep Nanapush’s family from utter disaster. Still, the best of their land was lost.

Father Damien’s letters flowed everywhere. He wrote to the governor of North Dakota, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to John James Mauser, to the Grand Forks, Fargo, and Bismarck newspapers. He wrote the President of the United States and to county officials on every level. He wrote to Bernadette Morrissey and to the sick former land agent, Jewett Parker Tatro. He wrote to the state senators and representatives and to an organization called Friends of the Indians. He was determined to restore that land, but once it was gone, it was gone forever from Anishinaabeg hands. He didn’t know that, and as his pen devoured page after page, the Turcot Company and Mauser made roads into the woods. As Damien feverishly plotted, petitioned a tough lawyer, and planned strategies, the crews went in to take the trees and the trees were taken. Some chimookomanag did not come out, it’s true, or last much longer than the stealing of Pillager spirits and disruption of their ghosts. Some did not survive, but enough of them lived to ship the great oaks east, to Minneapolis, where they would line the impressive foyer of Mauser’s house.

FLEUR

Walking home, after the shock of finding out wore off, she began shaking. She stopped in the center of the road, whirled in a circle, her shawl cutting the air. She was filled with rattles, with clicking bones, with small ticking husks and vibrations of bees. Her vision snuffed out, she whipped along blindly through undergrowth until she came to the end of the lake. She stayed there long into the night.

The waves came in film over film, for the night was very calm and the water barely moved. Her land would be taken and the trees cut down and sold. She had exactly two dollars in an old snuff can, and she needed one hundred and ninety-eight more. She opened her mouth and the night bees burst out, swarmed over the rough surface of the lake, roared in a black cloud toward the spirit island. The anger built up again. She waited. This time she smashed a rock down on another rock until she split the rock in jagged stripes. The rage was deep in her spirit. This man who took everything had put it there. He was faceless and voiceless as a jibay, he was a ghost tormentor, shielded from her sight.

If only I could get to him, she thought, but I am nothing. She pondered her thin old green dress, worn makazinan, her faded red blanket-shawl mended and worn through and mended again. She opened her hands, turned them over, and looked at them—Pillager hands, big and spidery, rough from setting and hauling in nets. Clever hands, fingers she could murder with, or smooth away a knot of pain in old Margaret’s shoulders, or swipe a sand of sleep gently from the eye of her little girl. Yes, these hands were clever. Hands like this, she thought, shaking them curiously, would know or imagine everything there was to know about a man. On her face there appeared the glint of a smile—yes, she was nothing. But nothing can go anywhere. Nothing can do things. People don’t see nothing, but nothing sees them. She put her hands on her hips, threw her shoulders back, and glared at the sky. It was a wild night, full of black clouds and rolling wind. For a long while she stood on shore, watching the shapes of things. Slowly, in a sky that reflected her mind, directions appeared.

She removed the bones of her parents from the earth, washed them, and wrapped them in red cloth. Then she fed them a dish of manoomin and berries. She laid a pipeful of asemaa in the red cloth for them to smoke. Then she loaded the bundles in a small cart. If things happened as she foresaw, she would need them to come along with her and support her in all that she did. For what she contemplated was a strange thing. It had come to her as the shape of something, not all at once, but by suggestion. She would find the ghost man, the thief, and be nothing around him. She would watch him, learn everything about him, and from the knowledge ascertain just how she could destroy him and restore her land.

He was rich, that she knew. The rich aren’t difficult to find, she thought, they live in big wika-iganan.

“Aaniin ezhichigeyan, n’mama?”

Lulu had crept up behind her mother and peeked into the red cloth. Fleur showed her what she was doing. Lulu poked at the bones and her mother took her hands carefully away. A frantic laughter, a feeling of painful hilarity seized Fleur, and she grabbed Lulu, swung her around and then put her down and darted off. They raced wildly up and down the lake shore, pulling at each other’s clothes, throwing weeds. When they fell to the ground, Fleur’s heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird trying to leave her chest. She grabbed Lulu and crushed the girl close. Although she was quick as an otter and usually squirmed away from being held and ducked from her mother’s embrace, this time Lulu breathed out one long laugh and then fell asleep with her fingers gripping the cloth of her mother’s blouse. Fleur sat on the shore for a long time with her daughter’s weight heavy against her and the water rolling in, and rolling in, and without pause rolling into the shore.