The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (46 page)

You don’t have a mother, you make one up. That’s how I made mine and still she is standing where I made her, dark and red in the heavy woods.

What happened to me when I went up on the hill with the black-robe women is between me and my confessor, Father Damien. I came down with a broken head and a bloody palm wrapped in a pillowcase, with a raging spirit and a man who would be my husband. But that is not the story here. For I came down with an inkling inside me of what I knew. I later found that my instinct was true. There was something about that nun that drew me to hate her with a deep longing. How, you say, can that be? To long for that black scarecrow flapping for crows. She had a face like a starved rat and a taste for cruel games. But the worst thing of all was that Sister Leopolda loved me—I felt that like a blow.

It is hard to hate a person if they love you. No matter what they do. What you feel in return twists between the two feelings. Not one. Not the other. But painful.

At the time, I was kept by the Lazarres. But I was a dog to the Lazarres. So instead of going back to the Lazarres, or claiming my new husband right after the convent, I went to the woods. I aimed to live by myself in the old shack Agongos had died in the winter before. The place was deep in the birch, other side of a little pothole. Slough ducks came to land in there, turtles haunted it, muskrats made their twig-pile houses, and there was plenty to eat. I had decided just how I would support myself. Before I’d left the Lazarres, I stole two dollars, my life’s wages. I used it to buy two bottles of nameless brown-red whiskey. I knew where there was a heap of old bottles in the woods, and I polished up two empty ones. Then I added some slough water to the good stuff and made four bottles in all, plugged neatly with white strips from my nun’s pillowcase.

Those four bottles, I sold for twice the profit. I bought more whiskey. I kept on moving up. I was just a child, just a girl, but I was a bootlegger now. And I sold to the best and I sold to the worst. I bought a long steel hunting knife for when my customers got ugly. I bought a rib-skinny paint horse named Brownie, and fattened her on good sweet grass and boughten grain. I traded a stove off an old white farmer, and nails and boards to fix some shelves on my walls. Blankets. At last my winter store, a fifty-pound sack of flour, potatoes, onions, apples. I dried a load of berries for some winter sweetness, and I dug a deep pit behind my little house and lined it with slough grass. Into that pit, I set a cache of whiskey, precious bottles. Each wrapped in reeds like an offering. Then I covered it up and let the snow fall where it might. I was ready for whatever came to me, I thought. But I was not ready for the truth of my beginnings.

One day, I returned to find Sister Leopolda had come for me. She was a pillar of stark blackness praying in the yard.

“Come back,” she said. She put out her hands and they were pierced in the palms, like mine.

I let her stand there, and I stood to watch her in a dull trance. Sun turned through the yellow leaves, rippled across her one way, then rippled back. I thought lazily of all that black hate that boiled up in me back at the convent, but I could not catch hold of it. I guess it had steamed away with the water from the kettle. Nothing was left, not shame, not indifference, not even a numbness or a heaviness—although, for the first time in my whole life, I thought with interest of my whiskey. I never drank my profits before, but maybe I would start.

I left the nun standing where she was, her arms held out stiff. Maybe she would stand there all night. I went on my rounds. She was gone when I returned. I staked Brownie in the clearing, where he could stuff himself, and I fried myself a potato with deer meat, boiled up a pot of tea. Then I went outside and sat on the little stump I had put right beside my door. There was something so deep of a pain in me, Father, like the end of all things was drawing near. I didn’t think it over, I just picked up the bottle. As I drank my first whiskey, I watched the darkness collect.

It came peacefully out of the hearts of things. Bled from the leaves. The clouds sifted darkness out of them and it swirled into the air. I put my head back against the log wall, still warm, and I felt comfortable. I drank again, deeply. The stuff burned, then spread through me with a radiator comfort. Before me, as the dark was all of a piece, then, I saw my real mother rearing up. Even booze has a spirit. Yes, I said, it is the liquor who cares for me now. Alcohol is my red mother. She was fire, she was stupidity, she was light. She was all I needed. Her heart was a golden catchall of sorrows and pains. She told me that if I chose her, she’d stay by me and she used the word forever, which with her I could believe.

As I said, I was a dog to the Lazarres. I ate the scraps when there were scraps. The old dress I wore sagged off my shoulders. My shoes were hides I tied onto my feet and my coat was the blanket I slept with. Besides my own so-called family, my best customers back in those days were Morrisseys. If someone was on a long dirty bender and coming down slow, I’d bring the bottle to them on Brownie. We’d make special delivery of the booze to certain drunks like Sophie Morrissey, who was long ago, as a girl, in that house hit by the Virgin’s statue and found it almost impossible after that to manifest a drunk state, though she tried. Anyway, this Sophie returned the favor by telling me the answer to the origin of Marie Lazarre.

We were sitting on broke chairs in her stomped-over yard. Sophie, she used to be a pretty woman in her time. When she told me these things she knew, her face still showed it, even though her body was strange—big bellied and spidery soft. Her features, blurred over with drink, were mild and stupid. She had brown skin and big wild green eyes, a straight little delicate nose, a darker sprinkle of tiny freckles. Her lips were slack and puffy, but when she smiled at the cork as she pulled it out, there was still a ghost of that girl I’d heard about. Frowzy hair caught up in a bun, wrinkled hands tough from the farmwork she did when not in ruin, she slugged back a good one, then carefully corked the bottle again and looked at me, eyes watering.

“You’re a good little niece to me.”

“Miigwetch.” I thought she was grateful to me for getting her wasted, and I didn’t take that serious. I sat with her for some time in the pleasant sunlight of her blasted yard—nothing grew there. It was peopled with dogs, fur sticking every which way, dogs nursing pups and biting fleas and sleeping belly up.

“This here’s my last bottle. I got to taper down so I can go cut hay.” She grinned at me, friendlier even than before. “Geget igo, you are a good little niece.”

Once again, I nodded. I took that in, but she wouldn’t let go of it yet.

“Eyeh, your deydey, he was my uncle.”

That was like a lightning wand went down my back.

“Take a hit and tell me more,” I said, all merry like I was a drinker too. I smiled with pleasant expectation at her, as though my heart weren’t beating in my throat, as though I didn’t have that sick way-down empty craving feeling that even at that moment I understood why she turned to the liquor to fill.

“She showed early. I was just a girl at the time and these things weren’t anything to me, but her belly popped right out!”

Sophie laughed, a cackling screechy sound, not unpleasant—unless she is laughing at your mother’s little tub of a stomach that once contained a baby who was you. I just wanted to slap her face, and it was even harder to stay in control of my tongue. All my life I have fought my quick anger and I did so, then, looking at my feet in their heavy, black, men’s boots. Listening. She knew about my mom. The Puyat. All I knew about my mom was her last name and the fact that not even the Lazarres would talk about her—she was that bad, I guessed, or that dead.

“My Puyat mama,” I commented, letting it hang in the air.

She took another long drink, extending her wrist to my mom’s memory, and then she began to talk, like all drinkers seem to do, about all the wrongs accomplished against them. In this case, the wrongs were specific to my mother, so I listened closely to try and gather more information.

“She witched me! She stole my virginity!”

Sophie started laughing until she choked.

“To be a Puyat is to be a thing not of this earth. Down below it”—she spat—“down where they put together dead bones and skin and hair and raise things up—witch creatures.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I never left my hair around her. I burned it, my fingernail clips neither. I threw them on the fire. I never let her get a part of me. At night, she witched me. I know what she was doing.”

“What?”

“Working me! She tried to work me like a puppet on a string!”

Some people, they go so deep. They are like a being made of tunnels. Passageways that twist and double back and disappear. You have a foot on one path and you follow for a while, but then there is a sinkhole, bad footing, a wall. My mother, she was this kind of person, so deep and so intricate of design. Now, when I think about her, I feel my head go heavy. My brain hauls freight—all that I will never know. For it seems to me that in my life I have thought everything there was to think about my mother, the Puyat. Only then, I didn’t know her fate.

And wouldn’t have, except for Sophie.

Of course, she told me. It didn’t come out in so many words, but little by little. First I heard more about the way Sophie was enforced by the Puyat to witless behavior. As she told it, the witch drew a certain pattern in the spongy ground just beside the outhouse. Buried in Sophie’s path a rag of monthly blood. Cursed her with owl’s feathers laid underneath the mattress. My mother bit like a wolf into her dreams. She, poor Sophie, was subjected to the advances of handsome men and, although she didn’t want to, the witch forced her to give in. Sweets tempted her. Again, she could not resist, and it wasn’t her own faulty determination but the Puyat’s bad medicine that weakened her so much. Drinking, likewise. She was still being influenced.

“I don’t want to drink you!” She held the bottle out at arm’s length and spoke to the ishkodewaaboo itself. “Geget igo, you contain an awful spirit! I don’t like to take the spirit of this evil water into my person. I resist. But the Puyat has done me lasting harm. She overcomes my poor arguments, splashes the first drops on my brain!”

Obvious, I thought, false blame was getting thrown here! Yet the smoke means fire. My mother was in Sophie’s life a source of corruption, that was clear enough to me whether or not she was in herself a weak person to begin with. There was a long—a very long—silence. In that quiet of Sophie’s brooding, I remember the air. Sour reek of gone slough mud. A blue sound of birds. Berries crushed underfoot and a resinous, sweet pine scent from deeper in the woods past her house. Dry, hot, dog fur. Cheap white-lady powder from the folds of Sophie’s last clean dress.

“Yet no matter how much I drink,” Sophie said, “I never really get drunk anymore. Once I get down to this last dress, though, I know I gotta quit.”

So even Sophie had some kind of limit—her vanity did not permit her to go on into the filth of habit more than four dresses deep, which is exactly what she owned. Four dresses. In the quiet, I felt a curtain open, and then the air swept through, a breeze, a fresh stirring of low wind from the east.

“My mother . . .” I prompted.

“Now she acts like she’s so holy!”

That’s all she said, but from those few words I got so much. The
now
meant my mother was alive. The
holy
meant she was showing herself in some hypocritical way, going to church perhaps. First the
now
acted on me like the clap of a bell. While I was still letting the ringing die down the
holy
came in and kicked me from behind. I whirled in my thoughts. And one thing more. From the unsaid ground of the sentence there could be no doubt Sophie saw her or knew of her, which meant she must be living near. Which seemed impossible.

“Tell me who she is!”

I jumped on this immediately.

But now that she imagined herself slightly juiced, Sophie wasn’t so eager to speak to me, and she wanted something else.

“Gimme your horse.”

“No.”

“Borrow me your horse!”

“No.”

She stomped toward Brownie, so I grabbed her skirt from behind, whirled her around, and threw her in the gooseberries. I knew her mind. She wanted to ride into town or to some drinker’s house, where she could continue on until this last dress was too filthy for even her to wear. As she fell, arms outflung, I neatly plucked away the half-gone bottle from her clutch.

“Hihn! Daga, miishishin!”

“Who is she?”

“Who what?”

“My mother!”

“Why, don’t you know?” Sophie was stark sober, anyway. Perhaps she realized, for a moment, how much her answer meant in my life. Perhaps she understood and cared with some nondrunk’s understanding, but the drinker’s crafty power overcame her and she bargained for all she could get.

“That will cost the other bottle you got stuffed in your carry sack, plus a ride to Call the Day.”

We bargained back and forth. Call the Day himself was waiting for the bottle in my pack, so in the end I hoisted her up, held Brownie’s halter, and started to walk, as we’d agreed, her nursing her hope of drunkenness along now slow and easy from the back of my horse, until we reached Call the Day’s corner, where, after I had helped her down, she told me as we had agreed. She said my mother’s name:

“Leopolda, the so-called nun.”

I still remember the complete and upright stumped nature of my surprise. Sophie bawled at the house and Call the Day scurried out, a wizened young fellow afflicted with great picklish lumps on his face and neck. He gave me the money he’d raised, and I gave him the bottle. It was the last I was to sell. As he took it from me, the hand that gave it up burned, the center, the palm where I’d been stabbed by this very nun, this Leopolda, my teacher and my sponsor in the holy convent. My mother. From my hand the burning spread, flowed up my arm like a streak of blazing grease. Ringed my throat. Bloomed in my face. Spread until the whole of me flared. Then the lick of flame tweaked my brain and struck me as so funny that I laughed. I laughed until I screamed.