The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  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

  MEMORY

  and

  SUSPICION

  9

  THE ROSARY

  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.

  Father Damien arrived in the hot, green, earth-smelling woods and approached the circle of men, who parted for him, hands or sleeves held to their faces. There, in a child’s play spot, surrounded by tufts of goldenrod and beds of blue asters, the body sprawled. Someone h
ad laid a potato sack over it for modesty, but the poor nakedness was really the least obscene thing about the tableau. A gaping mouth, inhabited by tiny, busy creatures, crow-plucked eyes, hands clutched up about the neck. Father Damien excused himself and threw up, casually and efficiently, behind a tree, then returned with a handkerchief held to his lips. The men waited for him, accustomed by now to the priest’s combination of delicacy and shrewd toughness.

  Steadier, he bent to the piteous human scraps, brushed a scraping of dirt from the throat, stared at the sight until it lost some of its horror and became a puzzle. Questions occurred, a great many questions. Of course, to begin with, the cause of death. Damien observed the stretched, fixed features, still apparent even after the summer’s heat—an effort to speak or, more likely, to gasp, to take air? And the hands to the throat. The man had surely choked, or been choked. If the latter, not by someone in a face-to-face death struggle, hands on windpipe, but something else.

  “Was there a rope,” Damien asked of the men surrounding the body. “Did you find anything, a noose, twine, leathers, something that might have been used to strangle this man?”

  There was no answer. As though thinking as one, they abruptly left the priest and fanned evenly through the woods. The undergrowth was thick and tangled with wild grape and raspberry, springy brambles, a summer’s growth of oak seedlings. The men stamped out a carefully widening circle. As they searched, Damien continued to take a meticulous inventory of the features of the body that might provide further information. The eyes—wide open—before they had been plucked? The feet, close together, had the body been dragged? The ankles bound? Alcohol. Any way of telling whether Napoleon was drunk at the time? Had there been a struggle? Was this a fight typical of drunks, and if so, with whom did he drink? Was there anyone missing from the reservation, a companion who’d perhaps run off in horror of what had happened?

  “Neshke,” said George Aisance. In his hand a long rope of beads, a twine of knots and black prayer markers, a rosary.

  Damien accepted the beads and tried to coil them around his fist. That was when he realized that this particular rosary was different from all others—it was strung on something stiffer, which kept an elegant shape. It was wire, some sort of wire, and then the barbs pricked his palm and he realized what kind. The crucifix of the rosary went cold in his hands.

  He wasn’t of a sufficiently certain mind to say anything yet, but there were marks, yes, there were, a necklace of deep pits decayed in small dents around the dead man’s neck. After he bid George and the other men to leave, to find a sledge to transport the body back to town, he measured the rosary beads in his hands. Gently, as though he was fitting to a woman’s throat a string of pearls, he compared a decade, ten beads and a larger bead, barbs between, a set of mysteries that exactly fit the wounds.

  That night, in the trembling radiance of candles, Agnes laid the rosary out before her on the covers of the bed and then sat next to it, looking at it, imagining just how it had been shaped. A pair of pliers, certainly, to untwist the wire. The beads were about a half inch in diameter as on a rope rosary, and they had accommodated—either naturally or by being enlarged—the wire and the barbs between. For the rosary had been cleverly planned to utilize the spun steel thorns, perhaps to prick a finger between each decade or perhaps . . . Here Agnes picked up the rosary dangling stiff by the crucifix, swept it over her shoulder so it caught in the flap of the overcoat that she still wore. She frowned at herself and disentangled it—a flagellant’s whip. It would have left, she thought, gingerly gripping it now, the hands of whomever used it to choke a grown man a bloody mess.

  THE TEMPLE WHIPPING

  Napoleon’s funeral set things going, created divisions that would last for years, during which a complex transfer of power would occur on the reservation. Land would pass from the hands of Napoleon’s sister, Bernadette, to the son of Margaret Kashpaw and from there into Kashpaw hands. That’s where it started—in the church before a crude pine box. Of course, Father Damien knew by now that the Kashpaws and Pillagers avoided the Morrissey and Lazarre camp. It had been his fruitless work to try to bring together the factions. What happened at the funeral made him give up the notion, forever, and accept that he dealt with a set of clan differences, complicated by loss, land, and money, that would never heal. These differences would go on, in fact, through time and come to define the politics of the place he loved.

  Margaret Kashpaw, shrewd and sour, kicked the misery to life.

  Some said that Margaret should not have shown her face at the funeral, given that the man who chased after her was the holdout Nanapush. She had the nerve to show up in bright clothing, and wore the garish red hat that made some call her Old Lady Cardinal and others mutter that it was a pointed mark of disrespect. You never wore that color near the dead, as it confused their spirits, attracted them back to the living. But apparently that did not bother Margaret. Margaret only said that she came because it was her duty as a member of the tribe and parish. Her words were met with scorn, right at the doorway.

  “So you came to gloat.” Bernadette greeted her with ugly irony. What she actually said in Ojibwemowin was that Margaret had come to make herself fat on the sorrows of her enemies. Then she added that Margaret already was quite fat enough and should go home.

  “Go fuck the old longhair in your dead husband’s blankets,” she advised, again in Ojibwemowin, a phrase lost on Father Damien, who was standing near to greet those who’d come to pay their final respects. He did catch the word blankets, waabooyaanan, and using his pocked mental lexicon he made the association between blankets and honoring gifts. Thinking Margaret had been uncharacteristically generous, he at once clasped Margaret’s hand and began with a nervous passion to thank her. Caught between the sudden insult and the copious gratitude, Margaret rocked back. Just for an instant, though. She quickly discarded the priest’s clumsy praise and prepared a barrage of killing wit, which she was unable to deliver. A crush of sorrowing Morrisseys now swept protectively around Bernadette, and simultaneously pinned Margaret Kashpaw in the center of the back pew, so that she had to scramble over the top of the bench to gain her freedom.

  This small woman, though of some age, could move with strength and economy. Before anyone could knock her down, Margaret Kashpaw wove through the mourners. Quick as a weasel, she popped up right before Bernadette. As she moved, her mind was working, so that by the time she confronted the Morrissey she had discarded her crude witticisms in favor of a bitingly sweet form of address.

  “You don’t know what you’re saying, in your pitiful condition. I loved your brother as my own brother. You should remember how he came to chop wood for me when my own husband was out on the trapline. And don’t you recall”—Margaret spoke with brilliant inspiration, lies jumping to her lips—“how your brother so generously gave up his horses and bought my dead husband’s team for a good price after he was killed?”

  Of course, Bernadette now recalled her brother bragging how he’d cheated the widows and taken advantage of the fact that, as Kashpaw’s death was the result of his team’s panic, nobody in the family felt right with the beasts. They traded them to Napoleon so cheaply that he couldn’t stop talking about his bargain.

  “Ishte, Bernadette, your brother was a good man,” said Margaret, sopping away fake tears. “He was so good to your niece-girl, the one who dug the dirt. Even, he took in that skinny Puyat who now wears the black gown. Oh yai, he used to bring that virgin to that old shack on Kashpaw land where he—”

  Father Damien now freed himself of other hands and again clasped Margaret’s, giving her his most profound attention, which worked out perfectly, for all Margaret had wanted to do was lay the foundation of suspicion for Bernadette to stand on, and shade her eyes, and look this way and that. Which she did, thinking surely no one else knew what evil Napoleon did to the Kashpaw girl? And the Puyat? And even if someone knew, at least that Puyat was alone, wasn’t she, no family members around to . . . but no, and
here Bernadette’s mouth gaped open. Perhaps there were people on the reservation who knew about Napoleon’s crime. She’d sent Marie to the Lazarres to avoid a repetition. Maybe there were relatives she hadn’t considered, vengeful ones. He was dead, wasn’t he? Dead by the hand of someone strong and capable. Although she mourned him for the blood he was, Bernadette had no illusions about the character of her dead brother.

  He had taken advantage of her too. Recalling this, quite suddenly, Bernadette’s face went dark with unshed emotion. She suddenly shook off the maudlin comfort of her family and strode to the front pew, where she brooded with great intensity on what he really was. What he really did. What he left her with. She brooded so hard and cracked her big knuckles so loudly that the other members of her family feared that she was disoriented by grief. But no, her thoughts were properly directed by Margaret’s truth. That was the problem.

  All through the painful service that Father Damien conducted, her oblivious mutters sounded. Napoleon had tried to cheat her of her own land and left her nothing but a spalted horse and his clothing, the acrid smell of himself in the cloth. She’d burn them now. He’d brought loose women to the house and drank with them. He drank anyway, alone, and sometimes . . . ah, she pushed away the pictures, glad to the bone that he was dead. Maybe she would stand up and kick his coffin. Maybe she would rage at heaven. No longer could she hold it in! She leaped up suddenly, but men were ready. They held her back, from joining her brother in death, they thought, but in reality she wanted to rip his pickled body from the box.