“We’ll tie them with ropes,” said Adik.
“We don’t have no ropes,” she said.
“Then we’ll use some goddamn vines,” he went on. “You go search them out right now.”
So Mercy left and for a while they heard her rummaging and tramping and swearing as she looked for rope substitutes. Finally, she came back, but the vines she found were much too stiff to act ropelike—they would not tie.
“That’s okay,” Adik said, “forget about the ropes. We’ll hit them on the head and knock them out.”
“Or you could use the rope underneath the back seat of Makoons’s uncle’s car,” suggested the silent one, Clay.
Nector and the others were so shocked to hear him speak—they’d practically forgotten what his voice sounded like—that they didn’t react to the meaning of his words at all. And in fact, Nector was just as glad not to be hit on the head—he pictured poor Paguk—so unlike the others he didn’t say a word to admonish his cousin but tried to keep his wits about him. That’s what Nanapush said saved his life on tough occasions. Not succumbing to panic. So he tried not to, but his breath tightened in his chest and he saw blurred death lights when the Lazarres pushed him into the car’s front seat and then tied his hands to the handle of the door. They tied Makoons to the steering wheel and the ones in the back seat they roped together with elaborate knots and fixed the ends of the ropes to the base of the seats.
“Mi’iw,” said Adik, dusting his hands proudly, “do you have any last words?”
Again, it surprised them very much, but it was Clay who spoke. After all, this was a special occasion.
“Every one of you Lazarres will rot in a hell of your own making” was his pronouncement, which Nector would have thought very eloquent were the car not already moving. Laughing at the curse, the Lazarres were pushing the car, rolling it down to the lake. Nector twisted and tugged—his hands were well tied, the knots were good. He admitted that, he would always admit that, he had no reason not to admit that: Lazarres could make tight knots. And he could feel the breeze on his face, the last air he would breathe, and next to him Makoons was saying his prayers as a good Catholic, and Rockhead was crying a little, Johnny Onesides was swearing but Clay was again silent.
They rolled into the water. It made a swishing sound around the tires and for a moment the car was afloat, then it sank and the water came boiling up through the floor around their knees. The Lazarres excitedly pushed it deeper. But as it settled it was suddenly harder to push. They nudged it along. The water crept up Nector’s waist, then up his chest, and he gulped air with rockets of fear going off, and then the water surged to just under his chin and the car bucked to a halt, stuck. Nector looked around and saw his friends were all just in about the same position, straining more or less, but mouths safely out of the water. No matter how hard the Lazarres pushed, the wheels wouldn’t budge an inch farther.
Adik then said, “We’re gonna have to drown the dogs by hand.” The rest must have agreed, but either there was some argument about how to do it or who got to drown whom, or maybe they just wanted to take a break, for the Lazarres gathered on shore behind them and now had a smoke and drank from a bottle. Nector could smell the fragrance of their tobacco drifting down over the water. The waves came in underneath his chin but lapped up onto his face. He couldn’t help imagining how they would be found. Once they were drowned, their dead faces would bob up once again and stare sightless across the waves. At the same time he imagined this, he couldn’t help despising the Lazarres for believing the five boys tied in a car were going to look like an accident. As he was struggling with these thoughts, and wishing he could see his mother once again, and as he also thought how good life would be without this dreadful end coming upon him, he suddenly felt busy fingers working on the knots his hands were still trying vainly to undo. He pulled eagerly—the hands held his still and then skillfully freed him. Clay, he recalled now, was very good with ropes as a result of being tied up often by his big brothers. Clay surfaced on the other side, freed Makoons from the steering wheel. Johnny and Rockhead wiggled their hands at him. They weren’t yet swimming so as not to arouse the Lazarres’ suspicions, but as soon as Makoons was free they took off their shoes and hell for leather started kicking for the island.
The Lazarres could tie good knots, but they weren’t skilled swimmers, except for Adik. He came blasting down the bank when he saw them escaping and he dived in and began swimming right after. The cousins were fast, but Adik came on like a steamboat, and as they passed over the deepest, darkest part of Matchimanito he was only feet away. That’s when Rockhead gasped, “You guys keep on. I’ll take care of him.” And he turned, treading water, as Adik lunged forward.
Rockhead’s one fighting skill was renowned, and when they’d attacked, the Lazarres had taken care not to let him exercise it. The biggest Lazarre had grabbed him around the neck and immobilized his head, while two others worked on the rest of him. Now, Rockhead’s serene stone-hard skull was all Adik saw, and the last thing he saw, as the two came face-to-face. For when Rockhead cracked him with his one effective weapon, Adik’s eyes rolled straight up to heaven. All the air went out of him and he sank straight down to the cold, bottomless, airless, black bottom of the lake, where nothing lived but a horned being and some colorless fish.
So it was another Lazarre who came out of that encounter missing, an outcome that added to the fury of the clan and deepened their thirst for revenge, which they slaked on whiskey for some time.
As for Nector and his cousins, they rested a short time, only on the edge of the island, for it was well-known that spirits lived there. And then they swam on, more slowly, and reached the other side of the shore. From there, it was a long way back to the road and Nector, only, was unafraid of that side of Matchimanito. He couldn’t persuade them by any means to go near Fleur’s cabin, though they did allow him to lead them and blundered in the dark toward the place where Nanapush kept his shack when he wasn’t living with Margaret. That’s where they stayed overnight. That’s where they told their story first.
Nanapush was a most interested audience. When they had finished, he lighted his pipe and leaned back to smoke and think.
At last he said, “Makoons will suffer when his uncle finds out.”
Makoons groaned out loud. Ever since it was clear they would live, he’d been faced with the prospect of telling his uncle that his car was in the lake. More than once, the anticipation of his uncle’s wrath and disappointment had caused Makoons such anguish that he almost wished the water had come six inches higher. But then, of course, his friends would have had to die too, which Makoons counted as unfair—especially since they believed the uncle freely allowed his nephew to borrow the precious auto when really Makoons had taken advantage of his uncle’s absence at a funeral and sneaked the car out for a spin.
As though reading his mind, Nanapush asked just exactly why his uncle had allowed his nephew the use of such a prize possession, at which point Makoons admitted the truth. Nanapush brightened then, his thoughts clicked into place.
“Ah, my boy, this is good news! And tell me, did anyone witness you boys driving around the reservation to show off this car?”
At this, they well could answer that only Zozed Bizhieu . . .
“Who is unreliable,” said Nanapush.
. . . and Father Damien . . .
“Who is oblivious,” crowed Nanapush.
. . . had seen them riding in the Model T touring car.
Then Nanapush put both hands out and gestured with his pipe.
“Young ones,” he said, “I am supposed to be old and wise. So I can’t tell you what I would do. All I can say is nobody saw you take the car, nobody saw you drive the car, and nothing would have happened had you not encountered the Lazarres. And as you lived, I don’t see why you boys shouldn’t end up heroes instead of punished for a Lazarre crime. Now, once again, who took the car?”
Makoons’s mouth dropped open, puzzled, and he wa
s ready to say, “Well I did, you know that!” Nector hushed him.
“No, cousin,” he gently said, patting Makoons on the shoulder, “think harder. Wasn’t Adik Lazarre at the wheel when you entered your uncle’s yard, and didn’t you round us all up to go and chase him, and didn’t he”—now Nector gestured at Johnny Onesides—“didn’t he head for Matchimanito and then, as we came rushing after the Lazarres, looking for revenge and to take back your uncle’s car, didn’t they overpower us, tie us in the car’s seats, and nearly drown us as it plowed into the lake?”
The boys paused only slightly before every one of them agreed that it was so, and then Nanapush sat back, very satisfied, and finished his smoke.
10
THE GHOST MUSIC
1913–1919
Agnes’s fingers ached. They moved ceaselessly in patterns that raged up and down the desk and table. The ghostly language that her hands spoke sharpened her longing. Perhaps, she thought, she had been deaf at one time and learned to speak in signs. The utterances of her fingers were complex—whole speeches, whole poems, whole books. She began to think that they knew something she did not. Sometimes she watched her hands, as from far away. Arched, veined with somber blue, the fingers delicate but square tipped, tapping. They tapped wherever they landed, struck the surface of table, desk, basin, paper, with forceful rococo skill. At last, though exhausted, to distract herself and to give her hands a ready focus, Agnes began the task of sorting and organizing the packets of correspondence, the papers and documents, the scrapped plans of Father Hugo.
The other priest had not the thrill for organization that she had developed since her affliction of memory. Before the shooting, as far as she could tell, Agnes was apt to file bills by stuffing them in lard cans. After, and without her shadowy Berndt, Agnes, and then Father Damien, gained a passion for setting small things into a rigid order. Perhaps it was a way of compensating for the loss of events. Perhaps it was a way of gaining back the person she was, or inventing this new one.
At any rate, Agnes tackled Father Hugo’s piles with a singular desperation close to happiness. She vowed to finish an incomplete Ojibwe grammar and dictionary. She found church plans of a fascinating nature. She found old bills of lading and a letter from a disappointed woman. She found pitiful mementos of unknown moments—buttons, flags, a dead watch. One day she was pleased to find a crumpled set of sketches and plans for a printed letter, one that Hugo hoped to deliver to a list of subscribers in the Fargo diocese and beyond.
Father Damien called the letter Notes from the Mission at Little No Horse. In it, he described the piteous effects of the most recent illness. The ravages of hunger. The moral effect of land loss and the deep thirst he had already experienced among the people—a thirst for the spiritual drink, curiosity, a hunger for the food of the heart. He did not describe Kashpaw, or the difficulty regarding the question whether to pare down the number of his wives. He did not speak of Agnes’s own bitter guilt over trying to enforce such a thing, or the pitiable events after Quill went mad, nor did he repeat the jokes of Nanapush. Father Damien strongly expressed his belief that certain hungers could be assuaged and souls brought to Christ through the consolatory application of money.
Father Hugo had compiled a list of names and addresses. There were four hundred. Father Damien gave to himself the task of copying two letters each night after peace fell, and sending them as a packet at the end of the week. When they were all dispatched, Agnes began each night to direct the letters in her prayers. She asked intercession with each letter, prayed to her personal guardian, whom she believed she remembered as St. Cecilia. She imagined Father Damien’s words in the hands of others, begged for a spark touched to a generous fire. Her fingers itched and stung.
Some money arrived, a dollar here and there for which she was profoundly grateful. Then a short deluge of junk. Bales of clothing were unloaded from an army truck—moth-chewed gray blankets. Jackets and pants of drab wool. The entire reservation took on a military air. One thousand cream cans arrived, a windfall. They were used as chairs, storage, canoe floats, anchors when filled with sand, and even by some of the more ambitious farmers, cream. Dozens of yardsticks. Harpoons and lobster traps, though the sea was half a continent away. Finally, a battered green-black upright piano arrived, painted and then scratched down to the white of the wood.
The thing sat before the church. It was floridly carved. Bunches of grapes decorated the sounding board. The feet were claws. Was it a lion or an arbor? Even the metaphor is mixed, thought Agnes with amused interest. The instrument had seen rain, warping humidity, and the sands of a scouring wind. Its keys were black as bad teeth. She touched the keyboard curiously and raised a tone, questing and off key. To Sister Hildegarde, the donation was spectacular.
“The carving, such workmanship!” The nun ran her fingers over the balled grapes, the flowing vines and leaves. Unloaded from a dray cart, the instrument seemed to crouch. Halfway into the church, it rested heavily on the threshold.
“Take it back!” cried Agnes all of a sudden, shocking herself.
A reasonless emotion resembling panic gripped her. She felt too large for her skin, the priest’s collar tightened around her throat, and her hands began to move with their own life. She tried severely to check their motion by winding them in Father Damien’s cassock.
“Absolutely not!” Sister Hildegarde thought Father Damien was perhaps too diffident to accept such a generous gift. She began to lecture him on having the humility to accept what God sent. As she launched into an attack on his pride, Father Damien regained some measure of control and stopped her, raising his freed hands in surrender.
“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 thi
s 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.