The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (33 page)

Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal. They were part of the art of Father Damien’s Mass, as were the vestments—an extraordinarily ornate and meticulously worked chasuble in green, for hope, a less ornate one in passion red. A plain silken stole embroidered only with a cross, but in gold, and a maniple to match. His alb and cincture had been Father Hugo’s, and he accepted from Sister Hildegarde a rough amice that he donned with great devotion and seriousness at every Mass. It was his symbolic helmet and he wore it to repel the assaults of the devil. Rotten mutt! Better yet, he commissioned Margaret to add beadwork anywhere that it would fit on the vestments. She covered every bit she could—each robe weighed upon him like a shield, like armor.

Agnes bought deep blue paint for the ceiling of the church, as well as metallic gold, a special gilding from Chicago. That was the only paint that would do for the stars she envisioned upon that blue. And last, with the spurt of money left at the bottom of the pile, the money which had nearly fallen from Agnes’s fingers clumsy with terror, she bought urtext music, stacks of it from foreign publishers—Masses, choral pieces, sensuous rhapsodies and pieces beyond her capabilities, as well as Easy Pieces for Small Fingers, for she had determined to teach. She also commissioned a statue from a maker of religious artifacts up north, bought it sight unseen.

THE MADONNA OF THE SERPENTS

There lived in Winnipeg an old
mangeur de lard
who had put down his paddle and taken up the tools of a wood-carver and a statue painter. He made cigar store Indians and mannequin shapes, shop signs, and carousel horses, but statues of a religious nature were his specialty. For those, he used a secret recipe of plaster. He had in his workshop special molded blanks for Joseph, the Blessed Mary, Baby Jesus and adult Jesus, for Saints Anne and Theresa, for Saint Francis, and a few others especially popular in the region. These raw white forms spoke to him sometimes, especially when he worked late into the night. The shadows, he claimed, moving in the light of flames, often inspired him. One particular night he began to work on a special blank and found that he couldn’t stop. This statue, commissioned by a church just south, he’d determined to finish as soon as possible in order to finance a lengthy drunk he anticipated commencing, soon, to celebrate the proud fact that, at age seventy-five, he was to be yet again a father. Though he’d bought the woman’s favors, she was inexperienced enough to have gotten pregnant. She would have to marry him now!

He thought about her as he worked on the plaster in the flicker of candles. Yes, she was fat and her chin ran into her neck in a way that made him think of a snapping turtle. Her nose was a bulb. Her teeth were all crooked. She was a good person, though, and her eyes were very beautiful, sad and kind. Extremely beautiful! He thought of her eyes. What good were they in a face so cunningly wrought to inspire a man to wince and look away?

Those eyes made him happy. They nearly brought tears to his own eyes.

“A son,” he prayed. If the boy inherited her features, he would at least be a man, though just why that should make such a difference he couldn’t say. He worked carefully, carving folds into the gown, the robe. He took special care with the snake she crushed, refined the moon, painted the scallops of her toenails a delicate pink. He worked out the proportion of the face and then refined the features and the hands, so complicated that he just curled the fingers up and thought, Be done with it. Yawning, he touched paint to the masterpiece and just before dawn tumbled into his rough rope bed.

The next morning, when he squinted at her in the light, he saw that he had made her ugly. Just the same as his bride-to-be, however, her eyes were both kind and extremely alive. He would have taken up his chisel, he could have removed the paint, he could have changed her. Somehow, all that next day, just when he was about to get started, every time, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared at her, shaking his head.

“Forgive me, Saint Joseph,” he said out loud, at last. “I like her this way. There are advantages, see? I’ve lived, and in my life I have had many women. I would not choose a beautiful wife ever again, oh no, I would choose for myself a pair of kind eyes over the most magnificent breasts.
Difficile!
But Saint Joseph, you poor God-fucked cuckold, if you’d chosen a woman nobody envied you for, you would have had many children of your own. You would have died a happy man surrounded by his own children, just as I will.”

With that, the old
voyageur
put his tools down, patted the Virgin’s rump, and began to whistle as he constructed a shipping case to send her straight down to Little No Horse.

On a pure fall day the statue arrived, packed in golden straw inside a wooden crate built around it, perhaps not so much to protect as to contain the features. The nailed, heavy crate was pulled along in a wagon. Father Damien and the sisters and the wagon driver wrestled the crate off the bed of the wagon, prized open the boards that protected the statue, pulled down the wads and sheaves of golden straw, and at last brushed the dust off the features of her face. They kept brushing, for as soon as her eyes and nose and lips came clear, she startled, she fascinated, she elicited some repugnance, she evoked sorrow in one heart and derision in the next and in still others peace and loving quiet, so that she needed to be touched to be believed and for many hours stood outside the doorway of the church.

“Send her back” was Sister Hildegarde’s immediate judgment, but Father Damien disagreed, much as Hildegarde had regarding the piano. The other sisters mainly disagreed, too, saying that the Virgin’s eyes were remarkable.

“The carver had a strange talent,” Damien pronounced, “and his vision was of this face. Who is to say among all creation God should choose only a beautiful human mother for His son?”

“I suppose there is a lesson in this.” Hildegarde’s voice was a bit sour. She narrowed her eyes at the statue, suspicious. The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.

THE SERMON TO THE SNAKES

“What is the whole of our existence,” said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, “but the sound of an appalling love?”

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

“Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

“Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

“Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

“Oh my friends . . .”

The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

“I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

13

T
HE
R
ECOGNITION

1923

Surely it was delirium, thought Agnes, looking at the peaceful scene of twirling popple leaves and new-growth maple. Beside her sat Nanapush. He wore the huge plaid wool jacket Margaret had brought home from the sisters, and his hair, long and gray, was pulled back and tied with a reed. I was not really visited by the terrible dog, thought Agnes, nor did I nearly poison myself out of love and then despair. Her terrible abyss of mind seemed impossible now.

“Do you believe in the devil?” Agnes abruptly asked her friend.

Before he spoke, Nanapush gazed keenly at Father Damien through his little, round, wire eyeglasses. He tilted his head, considering. Damien lighted a cigarette, put it in his hand. Nanapush thanked the priest, his mouth pursed.

“Not yours,” he decided.

Father Damien waited for more.

“We have our own devils,” Nanapush said piercingly, all at once. “And our devils are not all bad. Ours are sometimes capable of showing pity, that is, if you can think of the right thing to say.”

“What, then, would be the right thing to say if you met up with a devil?” Damien leaned forward intently, eager.

“You would have to be clever about it,” said Nanapush.

“Say, for instance,” Damien decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

Nanapush leaned toward him, thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot out of my soup bowl!’ ”

Father Damien frowned, doubtfully. “And then?”

“If it took its foot out, you would know it had understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

Nanapush settled back into his chair.

“It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”

“Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark!”

“I don’t understand . . .”

“In order to confuse it.”

“I see. I would pretend to be a dog . . .”

“You already have a collar around your neck,” Nanapush pointed out.

Father Damien didn’t tell his friend about the conversation he’d had with the spirit, or about the sacrifice that he had made for Lulu, or about the painful temptation that followed. Instead, he took out the chessboard, an occupation that currently absorbed the two, and the playing of which they owed to a priest of a past century, Father Jolicoeur.

That young and largely unhistoricized eighteenth-century Jesuit had carried with him, into the unknown, a chessboard. He used it as an excellent means both to convince the natives of the superiority of a Catholic god who could design so perplexing and glorious an entertainment, and as a comfort to himself. Though he was uncertain whether his native guide and companion had the capacity to play such a game, he nevertheless made an attempt to teach the rudiments. Jolicoeur’s foundation belief in the innate superiority of himself was shattered when, to his amazement, in the space of just nineteen minutes the Indian trounced him in a match. Father Jolicoeur played again, hoping to recover his pride, but was the more severely beaten, causing him to put away his arrogance.

The fever for chess shook the Indians with the likeness of another epidemic, and they simply re-created the board and pieces to their own ability and began playing among themselves, often for deathly stakes. Long after Father Jolicoeur’s bones were cracked by wolves and cleaned by ravens in some lost corner of the wilderness, another lone adventurer, believing himself the first to gain a path into the uncharted glory of the west, was astounded when he accepted an invitation to a chief’s lodge only to be confronted with a chessboard properly laid out on a deerskin and his opponent waiting in eager anticipation of a violent game of wits. Of course, the stakes being, as they usually were, life or death, the trader wisely opted to pretend total ignorance of the game and used his evil queen, potent spirits, to bribe his way out of an encounter. It saved him then, but he was never the same in the estimation of the chess-playing Indians, for they did not count him a true man and took their peltries and tanned deerskins and bales of dried fish elsewhere, to another trader, who had learned the confounding game at his mother’s knee.

Father Damien now set the board up carefully on the level stump before Nanapush, the wooden pieces comforting to the touch, the ritual of putting them into order a small pleasure. Nanapush laid down his pipe, his hands careful among the pieces. Choosing white in the toss, he opened with a hopeful gambit that did not fool Damien. The afternoon was golden, the mosquitoes bearable in a light breeze. The sounds of birds accompanied their thoughts. Some time went by with little but the motion of their hands, and then Nanapush suddenly spoke.

“What are you?” he said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his bishop’s trajectory.

“A priest,” said Father Damien.

“A man priest or a woman priest?”

Agnes’s hand froze, pinching the knight, and her mental processes collapsed. A hollow roaring noise began around her, swirling, a confusion of sounds. Her mouth opened but no word emerged and slowly, very slowly, she drew back from the table and raised her eyes to Nanapush, who was simply looking at the priest as though that was not the one question in the world that would most upset Father Damien. The priest’s terror and confusion immediately registered on the older man, who leaned forward, frowning with perhaps too calculated a concern. Agnes still couldn’t answer, though now some little choking noises emerged. She tried to right herself, pretending she was heartily surprised at such a question but taking it as a joke. Agnes tried to laugh, but a spasm of sorrow cut the laugh in two. She found, maddeningly, that her eyes were spilling over with tears.