The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (45 page)

Death. That was its name. That’s what she dealt with and she knew it, dreaded it, hated death’s intimacy and the strange greed with which it pursued every living thing. Agnes screamed, bent her fingers into wire hangers around the mange-bald throat, locked her knees, squeezed harder, harder, harder, until the dog yelped, gave up, and disappeared.

THE WINES OF PORTRARTUS

Most High Eminence,

I remind you, we both exist in the compassionate dream of an unseen God. Please send me an answer . . .

“Are you that answer?”

Father Damien peered hard at Jude. Morning. Or maybe early afternoon. Father Damien spread his hands resignedly upon the tray and tilted his chin back to accept a solicitous towel pat from his visitor, the one who’d brought him his breakfast. Damien had wakened groggy, and was annoyed to have been restricted to his room by Sister Mauvis.

“I’m not entirely feeble.” Damien suddenly clawed the napkin from the younger priest’s hands.

“I know you’re not,” said Jude, “it’s just that you had a bit of oatmeal stuck to your chin.”

“There. Satisfied?”

With one sharp movement, Father Damien swiped at his chin once more and sat back in bed.

“They insist upon this, periodically.”

“Bed rest,” said Father Jude, sympathetic.

“Confinement!”

Father Jude tried to soothe the outraged and frail man before him. “I’m sure it is rather demeaning, in a way. But you see, they weren’t able to rouse you this morning.” His voice took on the chiding parental quality that vigorous, impatient people sometimes use with the elderly. “It seems that, last night, you were just a little . . . tipsy.” The younger priest’s voice was suddenly prim.

A cunning, soft, puzzled expression crept over Damien’s face. “Tipsy!” he mocked, his voice lilting. “Do you mean to say, drunk?”

“More or less.”

“Loaded, shkwebii, pinned to the leather, purpled, pumped, schnockered?”

Father Jude didn’t smile. He found no humor in these words, none whatsoever. Oh yes, he had seen the misery of alcohol’s effect and believed such words were not just words! His reply was stiff. “They found no sign of a bottle, but yes, you were sloshed.”

“No sign of the bottle, you say?”

“None,” said Father Jude, leaning close. “And you didn’t particularly smell like wine, or what have you. Yet last night you were distinctly intoxicated.”

“And no bottle?” Father Damien’s voice grew in intensity. He fixed Jude with a deep stare.

“None!”

“My house was searched?”

“Completely.”

“No explanation? No clue? No cause?”

“Not that your good Sister Mauvis could discover, or any of them for that matter. But you can trust me with the knowledge.” Father Jude leaned very close to Damien, smiled in conspiratorial sympathy. “Tell me, where on earth are you hiding your stash? We took the cupboards apart, the closet, the woodpile. What’s your explanation?”

“Explanation? Obvious!”

Father Jude waited.

“It is a miracle.”

Father Jude laughed at the joke, but the old priest maintained a dignified calm and lightly stabbed a leather bone of a finger at him.

“I have only to refer you to the early saint Portrartus.”

Father Jude looked indulgently blank, and Father Damien persisted stubbornly. “While tending sheep in the mountains, our Portrartus manifested a profound drunkenness in spite of the isolation of his flock. There was no tangible source of intoxicants. Like Portrartus’s, my drunkenness is not of this world.”

“Ohhhh?” Father Jude reacted with exasperated amusement.

“I do not”—here Father Damien grew intense—“require the fruit of this earth in order to experience an exaltation of the spirit. I have only to think back and consider my life. Soon, I find myself in a state of delirium, which, I understand, resembles the less rarefied behavior exhibited by—”

“Habituated winos,” Father Jude cut in, his patience lapsing.

“Last night I was also visited both by musical manifestations of the Holy Ghost and, I am sorry to say, of the devil himself.”

“These manifestations, they consisted of . . . ?”

Father Damien put a trembling hand in the air now, and appeared much troubled.

“A stinking mutt,” he whispered, “a dangerous intelligence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Recall, when the dog plunged its foot into my bowl of soup and that soup was tasted by the sisters across this lawn. I kept the dreams of the nuns in a locked tin box. I should not like them to fall into the wrong hands, though I must admit some were novel to the point where I read them again and again—”

“You read demonic torments for your own pleasure? Should I be scandalized?” Father Jude was diverted by Damien’s ploy and, Damien could tell, his curiosity was piqued. The older priest resumed with sly ease, “I found the dreams instructive. I did not avert my eyes. To others it may seem odd that a curious and passionate being, for I do consider myself such, should have chosen a life of denial. To me, it was not at all strange, for the choice itself was made with lust. Passion over passion. Hungrier for God, I came here . . .”

Controlling his interest with some effort, Father Jude attempted to double back.

“And so the black dog, it was a delirious vision? Or was it possible,” said Father Jude in the most respectful and nonthreatening tone he could manage, “that for a time, you went mad?”

With an outraged jerk of his head, the older priest quashed Jude’s gesture. He folded his hands, composed himself, and shot the younger priest a shrewd glance.

“When our senses are weakened by hunger or illness, we see things and hear things that are not of this world. The question is this: Do we invent these things in the cabins of our sorry brains, or are they there always and we too comfortable to reach them or to care? At any rate, whether the answer is the former or the latter, I have no doubt, none at all. Last night’s visit has persuaded me. I saw the black dog.”

The old priest sank against the pillows, limp, folding like a window blind, but he was thinking very deeply and the thinking visibly exhausted him. His head dropped to his chest and he began to breathe deeply. Jude felt a pang of quick guilt, although not enough for him to let the old man sleep.

“Can I fetch you some water? A blanket?”

Damien shrugged off the false solicitousness. “These old bones. This old flesh. The devil will have me soon enough, cold or hot.” Damien then laughed, a dry, papery sound. “At least I know his shapes, the ones he manifests here on reservation land.”

Father Jude finished his adjustments to the tape recorder, moved it closer to Damien. He turned it on and clipped the microphone closer to the old priest’s lips, for he had lapsed into the near whisper that he used when he was exhausted or wandering.

“You believe I mean the devil . . . metaphorically . . . of course . . .” Father Damien nicked his head, weary, but as he spoke his voice gathered passion. “Metaphors have very little influence in this world and the devil a great deal. The black dog! What is the devil but the lack, the crying hole in the skein of thought, Father Jude, that reasoning that says,
All is plain to see and yet you are deceived.
I am a priest. All that I am is based upon belief. And to begin, now, after all that has passed, to think perhaps he did not speak to me as a dog and from the dog’s mouth is, quite frankly, to cast doubt upon all else . . .”

Father Jude switched off the tape recorder and leaned back, frustrated and shaking his head. He’d had a truly inadequate breakfast and thought now of driving to the café he’d found, the next town over, where the food was edible.

“You don’t believe me,” said Damien, after a long silence fell between them. “That’s only because he’s never paid you a visit. If he had, the question you would be forced to ask is this: If the devil can take the time to make an appearance, where’s God? Why can’t God make more of an effort?”

“God is not a politician,” said Father Jude, his voice neutral. He kept his thoughts to himself, his expression blank, and took his mind off the hot roast beef sandwich he craved. He reminded himself that his task was to record, not judge, what he heard. Still, the idea that the devil should appear in person was disappointing, an unworthy piece of superstition, a marker of Father Damien’s unreliability. He saw that Father Damien was ready to start his morning, so he left him in peace and gladly sought a meal.

After the younger priest left, Father Damien gathered his wits, his strength, and then sat up and waited for the fog in his brain to clear. He got out of bed. Teetering stiffly with hands on the back of his chair, and then taking minute steps, the old priest shuffled off through his small residence. The exchange had actually rejuvenated him a little, and he sat down at his desk and began to write with enthusiasm. “Consider the word spirit, manidoo,” he wrote, “and all of the forms in which it resides. That which we consider vermin, insects, the lowest form of life, are manidooens, little spirits, and in their designation it is possible at once to see the penetration of the great philosophy that so unites the smallest to the largest, for the great, kind intelligence, the Gizhe Manito, shares its name with the humblest creature.”

Returning later from the café where he’d eaten, thoughtfully, alone in a scarred brown booth, Father Jude frowned into the blond sky. He was well thought of in his parish, calm and good. Things had been going smoothly down in Argus. He’d had a comfortable routine figured out. And now, what an unwelcome complication, in spite of the huge honor, to be afflicted with so many new problems, uncertainties, even doubts. And how terrifying, this feeling of loving someone. Thrilling. Awful. With an explosive shake of his head, Father Jude put the thought of Lulu from his mind. Not only had he fallen desperately in love, and at this age, but he was failing at the task entrusted to him by the highest levels of Church authority.

These interviews with Damien Modeste were not going as he’d hoped. Father Damien was an extremely difficult subject. Impossible to penetrate one day, and all too transparent the next. There were gaps in the old priest’s story, missed connections, all too many loops of obfuscation. It was clear, too, that the old man regarded Jude’s presence as a disappointment. Father Damien had been hoping for an envoy directly from the Pope, and was irritated by the younger priest’s humble, local origin. Now, exhausted with their sparring, Father Jude decided that he would once again visit the person Damien had pointed out as Leopolda’s first young victim. Marie Kashpaw.

THE INTERVIEW

Marie Kashpaw liked to bake in the outdoor heat, and could sit for long hours in a lawn chair in her courtyard garden, motionless, head tipped to catch the most intense angle of the sun. She seemed lethargic, but when threatened, she could vanish with surprising swiftness. Catching the shadow of movement from Father Jude, who approached across the courtyard, she disappeared into the safe gloom of her Senior Citizens apartment, from which he was unable to rouse her by knocking.

It was clear she didn’t want to talk to him, but that didn’t matter to Jude. He had to talk to Marie Kashpaw. He had to persuade her to share her story with him. Still, he had no idea how to accomplish his mission. Sitting in the lobby, thwarted, he planned. She took the Eucharist every week, but that was from Father Damien. He could bring the sacrament to her himself, since Father Damien actually was indisposed, but, he wondered, did that put him in the highly uncomfortable position of using the Sacred Host as the lure for an ulterior purpose?

It felt wrong, but half an hour later he returned with the black leather traveling Eucharist kit, 100 percent calfskin, as official-looking as a spy toy. He knocked at the door to her apartment. Seeing who it was, she frowned, but nevertheless she allowed him to enter and stand next to her kitchen table.

“Would you like to take communion?” he asked her.

She shrugged at a chair. He sat, the case in his lap. Again, she just looked at him with those opaque eyes, and waited.

“Are you in a state of grace?” he asked.

Here, she smiled.

“Are you?” She threw her question back at him, and touched her gray forelock absently. “You shouldn’t,” she went on, “use the holy body of God as bait.”

Father Jude actually flushed.

“I know what you want.” Her voice was flat.

Now it was Father Jude’s turn to go silent. In what he now thought of longingly as his “regular life,” he was routinely in charge of every human exchange. He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease. He sighed, caught, and as he had some humility even as spoiled as he was by his authority, he set the case carefully aside on a metal tea tray, folded his hands in his lap, and said to Marie, “Yes, you read my intentions. I am sorry.”

And so she nodded. And so again the silence.

“I will tell you a few things,” she said to him at last.

So, of course it was fortunate that he happened to have carried along the tape recorder, which he now removed from within the soul-saving kit he’d brought. He set the recorder carefully between them, tested it by counting into the microphone, played it back. Now she was a little nervous. At first, as she began to speak, she stared at the tape recorder as though it were a separate consciousness. But then, as her memories collected, the picture shaped itself between them.

RED MOTHER

Marie Kashpaw

When you don’t have a mother, as I never did, you have to make one. Get yourself a piece of clay and shape in your fingers and the shape you always make will be a mother. Or press her together of mud and sticks. Sometimes a tree would do, gnarled around me. Bundles of reeds. I used a blanket rolled and bunched in the shape of her. Rags. Sometimes there was a little extra stew in the pot and I stole it and said to myself she gave it to me. Sometimes just grass, grass was all I needed. The warmth of it in the sun was her golden green smell and the soft brush of it her fingers, stroking my face.