The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have. It went against his very grain, he later thought, to baptize in secret, but when he saw Fleur’s newborn baby something happened to him—or to Agnes, what did it matter? The tender damage was done. Barely one day old, Lulu was the first newly born child he’d held in all his life. His other baptisms had been months or more usually years, often many years, old. Calm, deliberate, focused, serene, this new being stared at him with eyes that still knew the face of unbeing. In the long drinking gaze that grew between them, Agnes experienced a protective adoration that shook her to the bone.

  “May I hold her?” Father Damien’s voice was hoarse.

  Margaret gave the baby over, transferring the frail, floppy head and tight limbs, the exquisite pinch of buttocks and updrawn red knees. Agnes felt immediately natural holding her, as though her tiny goodness set off a charm in her brain. Father Damien laughed, delighted, baptized her with a slow enchantment and only reluctantly gave her back to Margaret. Agnes was still absorbed in the primal sweetness of the experience when Nanapush decided to walk back with the priest, and Father Damien was still lost in marveling when he returned to his own cabin and withdrew, from his desk, the certificate traditionally written out and kept for each new member of the parish. It was perhaps the imprint of the tiny body against his own, the connection that still lingered, a dreaminess, that caused him when he signed the certificate to add his own name, twice, mistakenly and along with Nanapush, as both priest and father.

  Father Damien began to visit more often once the baby was born, for in the child’s presence, Agnes could temporarily forget the burden of half-realized memory and the load of suspicion that she carried through her days. Lulu was a touchy, lively charmer, precocious and fearless, curious and sincere. She was easy to please; anyone could rock her to sleep in her tikinagan of ash and cedar, the covering intricately beaded with flowers and heavy vines. Watching her drowsy lids fall, her delicate lip quiver with surrender, Agnes’s heart lifted. She was overcome with strange contentment, not maternal so much as fully human. During those visits she became a connected being.

  Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. Nanapush of course, as teacher and friend, was the first she knew well intellectually. But Fleur, too, accepted the priest fondly. The moments when Fleur’s rare smile burst out were stunning pockets of light, and Agnes looked for them and courted them with an eagerness she hoped was not too obvious. Margaret, kindhearted and sour-tongued, loved Father Damien in spite of herself—he felt it in her grumpy embrace. He was always surprised when she showed anything at all besides the dour scorn her family inspired. Their love for him, in return, pained him and soothed him. He was thrilled and touched with sadness, he was hungry, and he was practical. He was lonely; he was a priest.

  COLLATERAL

  John James Mauser appeared, not in person but in the persons of others—in the local commissioner and the tax collector general. Payment-due notices arrived, which nobody understood. In the fine print, it said collateral would gladly be taken. Collateral wasn’t birch-bark baskets or buckets of just picked berries. It wasn’t a side of venison, a pack of furs, maple sugar, wild rice, dried currants, tanned hide, or anything else that by hook, crook, luck, or grueling work or desperate hoarding anyone was able to get. Collateral was land.

  Sister Hildegarde had seen it coming, but she and Father Damien had been battling the spirit of disease, and then, absorbed in raising their church, they’d lost track of land acquisitions and foreclosures. They’d left off filling in the map whose boundaries changed drastically day to day. Father Damien’s despair had robbed him of awareness, too, so it was with a tremendous sense of self-castigating helplessness that they both, in stymied dumb surprise, regarded the papers in the hands of Nanapush, papers that transferred the land belonging to Fleur Pillager and to Nanapush himself into the hands of the lumber company.

  As he read the notice, a stricken rage boiled up in Damien. It was partly guilt—while paralyzed by an interior misery he had failed to protect his people, his family. The paper crumpled in his hands, he was so furious he imagined the flame of his thoughts might scorch it. His fingers clenched and he said in a small and wretched voice, “I will write to the bishop.” It was not entirely too late. By raiding the church account, Father Damien was able to raise enough to keep Nanapush’s family from utter disaster. Still, the best of their land was lost.

  Father Damien’s letters flowed everywhere. He wrote to the governor of North Dakota, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, to John James Mauser, to the Grand Forks, Fargo, and Bismarck newspapers. He wrote the President of the United States and to county officials on every level. He wrote to Bernadette Morrissey and to the sick former land agent, Jewett Parker Tatro. He wrote to the state senators and representatives and to an organization called Friends of the Indians. He was determined to restore that land, but once it was gone, it was gone forever from Anishinaabeg hands. He didn’t know that, and as his pen devoured page after page, the Turcot Company and Mauser made roads into the woods. As Damien feverishly plotted, petitioned a tough lawyer, and planned strategies, the crews went in to take the trees and the trees were taken. Some chimookomanag did not come out, it’s true, or last much longer than the stealing of Pillager spirits and disruption of their ghosts. Some did not survive, but enough of them lived to ship the great oaks east, to Minneapolis, where they would line the impressive foyer of Mauser’s house.

  FLEUR

  Walking home, after the shock of finding out wore off, she began shaking. She stopped in the center of the road, whirled in a circle, her shawl cutting the air. She was filled with rattles, with clicking bones, with small ticking husks and vibrations of bees. Her vision snuffed out, she whipped along blindly through undergrowth until she came to the end of the lake. She stayed there long into the night.

  The waves came in film over film, for the night was very calm and the water barely moved. Her land would be taken and the trees cut down and sold. She had exactly two dollars in an old snuff can, and she needed one hundred and ninety-eight more. She opened her mouth and the night bees burst out, swarmed over the rough surface of the lake, roared in a black cloud toward the spirit island. The anger built up again. She waited. This time she smashed a rock down on another rock until she split the rock in jagged stripes. The rage was deep in her spirit. This man who took everything had put it there. He was faceless and voiceless as a jibay, he was a ghost tormentor, shielded from her sight.

  If only I could get to him, she thought, but I am nothing. She pondered her thin old green dress, worn makazinan, her faded red blanket-shawl mended and worn through and mended again. She opened her hands, turned them over, and looked at them—Pillager hands, big and spidery, rough from setting and hauling in nets. Clever hands, fingers she could murder with, or smooth away a knot of pain in old Margaret’s shoulders, or swipe a sand of sleep gently from the eye of her little girl. Yes, these hands were clever. Hands like this, she thought, shaking them curiously, would know or imagine everything there was to know about a man. On her face there appeared the glint of a smile—yes, she was nothing. But nothing can go anywhere. Nothing can do things. People don’t see nothing, but nothing sees them. She put her hands on her hips, threw her shoulders back, and glared at the sky. It was a wild night, full of black clouds and rolling wind. For a long while she stood on shore, watching the shapes of things. Slowly, in a sky that reflected her mind, directions appeared.

  She removed the bones of her parents from the earth, washed them, and wrapped them in red cloth. Then she fed them a dish of manoomin and berries. She laid a pipeful of asemaa in the red cloth for them to smoke. Then she loaded the bundles in a small cart. If things happened as she foresaw, she would need them to come along with her and support her in all that she did. For what she contemplated was a strange thing. It had come to her as the shape of something, not all at once, but by suggestion. She w
ould find the ghost man, the thief, and be nothing around him. She would watch him, learn everything about him, and from the knowledge ascertain just how she could destroy him and restore her land.

  He was rich, that she knew. The rich aren’t difficult to find, she thought, they live in big wika-iganan.

  “Aaniin ezhichigeyan, n’mama?”

  Lulu had crept up behind her mother and peeked into the red cloth. Fleur showed her what she was doing. Lulu poked at the bones and her mother took her hands carefully away. A frantic laughter, a feeling of painful hilarity seized Fleur, and she grabbed Lulu, swung her around and then put her down and darted off. They raced wildly up and down the lake shore, pulling at each other’s clothes, throwing weeds. When they fell to the ground, Fleur’s heart was beating so fast it felt like a bird trying to leave her chest. She grabbed Lulu and crushed the girl close. Although she was quick as an otter and usually squirmed away from being held and ducked from her mother’s embrace, this time Lulu breathed out one long laugh and then fell asleep with her fingers gripping the cloth of her mother’s blouse. Fleur sat on the shore for a long time with her daughter’s weight heavy against her and the water rolling in, and rolling in, and without pause rolling into the shore.

  11

  THE FIRST VISIT

  1920–1922

  Agnes slumped at the table in her cabin. Felled with an autumn fever, she had spent a week tossing in bed. To cure her weak dizziness, now, she was drinking a foul, but she hoped nutritious, soup prepared by Mary Kashpaw. There was cabbage in it, she noted, translucent shreds of onions, the neck of a chicken. She closed her eyes to take a sip. The sisters were wary of Mary Kashpaw; except for Hildegarde, they all believed she was dangerous and still advised the priest to be careful lest she attack. Agnes knew that she was endangered only by the girl’s cooking, and she usually sent her out while she ate so that her reactions should not trouble Mary Kashpaw. Agnes had done just that and Mary Kashpaw was out in the yard, then, when the dog walked right in through the open window. A rangy thing, coal black and huge, he stood on the small table, front paw in the soup bowl. Agnes untucked the napkin from below her chin, and swatted at the dog.

  “Get!” she weakly cried, and then, through the glowing spots of a half-fainting weakness, she heard it answer.

  “Get?” The dog twisted the word sarcastically. “Get what, get where?”

  Stricken with a sick wonder, Agnes tried to bolt from the room. The soup was terrible, but capable of such an effect?

  “You look surprised to see me,” said the dog. “As you’ll soon find, I serve a greater master than yours. You’ve seen him at a distance, and you’ll soon see him close.”

  “What do you want?” Agnes gasped the words out and then her mind cleared. Some prank-pulling member of her parish was using ventriloquism. Who? Narrowing her eyes, she spun around, but saw nothing. The dog opened his dog mouth and spoke again.

  “I want Lulu! Where does she live?”

  The dog explained that he was sent for the girl, Lulu, who was marked for the taking. But he couldn’t find her on the reservation. Where was her family hiding her? Agnes jumped up, reeling, so angered that she hardly knew what words passed her lips. The strangeness of the scene palled before the idea of danger to Lulu.

  “What could you possibly want with her?” she accused. “She is the only child of a family who has lost everything!”

  “All the more valuable to me!” said the dog.

  “You cannot have her.” Agnes’s voice was firm as she could muster, given the fainting languor of her illness. She groped for the crucifix chained around her neck, but her fingers seemed thick as wooden pegs, clumsy, and the dog noticed with a sly glance.

  “I hear you’re a gambler. I’ll strike a bargain with you,” he insinuated.

  “A bargain . . .” Agnes fell back into her chair, and though sweating and breathless she couldn’t help marvel. The joke was clever. Or was this what the mad saw, the fevered? The dog was here and he seemed perfectly real, not only that, but he knew of Agnes’s passion. Although she came onto this reservation never having placed a bet, thrown the dice or the bones, she had since found gambling was a compelling way to raise money, for she was unusually lucky, and also she took great pleasure in her small winnings. She knew that she was being tempted by the gambit, tempted to wager even as her lips formed the words.

  “Name your offer . . .”

  “My offer is this,” the dog said. “I will spare Lulu if you come with me instead.”

  A frozen wind blew through the room and Agnes shivered, couldn’t speak. Soon there would be a punch line. Someone would pop around the corner, laughing at the hoax played on the good priest. For the benefit of whomever was listening to the ridiculous transaction, Agnes thought aloud.

  “A priest puts the welfare of his flock above all else, for they are entrusted to him by the author of the world, and so even in this lonely and unspeakable moment, my duty is clear!”

  Agnes waited for a hoot of laughter, none came.

  “I will trade places with the child, with Lulu Nanapush,” she declared, “but you must not take me until I am good and ready!”

  Now it was time for the applause. Silence. Agnes calmly lifted the dog’s paw from the soup bowl. It seemed real enough. She glanced away from the flames of the dog’s eyes. Frowning, she regarded the grained wood of the poor log table. When would the instigator of this farce show? And who would play so perverse a joke? Not even Nanapush.

  “It is done,” the dog conceded just before he loped off, “your lifetime is doubled. But there is more. Your insolence moves me. I have decided to send you a temptation.”

  It would come by mail, but not until the autumn rains soaked the walls of the cabin and drained the sky of heat.

  Agnes put her hands to her cheeks. She was still dangerously fevered. Perhaps, after all, the dog was no prank but a vision produced by the illness. The resinous scent of burnt pitch lingered in the room, and she could not help remember the figure she’d seen on the horizon at the time of Kashpaw’s death—the gaunt spirit with the flapping coat, the dog trotting beside, its breath rising, foul steam.

  At the thought, Agnes regretted her stubbornness, for what if the creature was real? She got the worst of the bargain. How could she know that she wasn’t meant to die that very night? She was young, and in a few more years eternity in hell could well stretch before her. On the other hand, she thought, once she’d calmed her breathing and lay down again, perhaps her natural life span was more like eighty years, in which case there was what seemed a huge amount of time in which to think of a way to win herself back from the black dog’s company.

  Dwelling on that more cheerful idea, Agnes staggered around the room for exercise, then returned to bed, leaving the full bowl of soup, into which the devil’s foot had plunged.

  That night, careful as always not to waste a drop or a morsel, Mary Kashpaw dumped the contents of Father Damien’s devil’s-paw bowl back into the soup pot and brought it over to the convent, where it was reboiled and served up to the nuns. The soup deranged their sleep. What terrible torments the sisters suffered! What a night of temptations! What lurid and arresting dreams! Poor Father Damien, who dragged himself to the church to hear confessions the next morning, was assaulted by a swimming sea of details. The sisters recounted their actions explicitly, and he became such a seething repository of voluptuous nightmares that he found it impossible to accomplish his duties. Weaker than ever, disturbed in mind, he was forced to cancel Holy Mass. As he was hurrying toward the solace of his tiny cabin behind the church, Sister Dympna came toward him from the opposite direction.

  “Father,” she gasped in a voice of shamed panic, “I have been visited in the flesh!”

  “You are absolved!” Damien cried out, and he practically blessed her on the run. Then he shut his door. Alone, he ran to the corner of his room and wrote feverishly, madly, until he had relieved his mind of the burden of an entire convent full of dreams.
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  Eternal Father,

  The people to whom I have carried the faith believe there is a spirit behind or informing all that exists on earth. In dreams, they tell me, these spirits communicate with them. I thought it a harmless and empty fancy until I myself was visited.

  Gracious Father, head of the church, the spiritual descendant of the one who has walked on water, what should I do?

  I fear I may be losing my mind.

  Modeste

  As soon as she was well, Agnes went to the postal window at the trader’s store and bought the stamps necessary to ship her letter across the sea. As she slowly licked the stamps and pressed them onto the envelope, idly tasting the faintly medicinal glue, the loneliness that so often visited her since the bewildering deaths by influenza sank through her bones. It was a black marrow. Ice. Since those days, prayer had not helped. The intimacy and the special favor shown her in the very beginning, at the river, at the first communion she’d performed, was withdrawn. She endured, instead of that warm broth of rescuing love, a skeletal deadness that surely the dog had sensed. Perhaps, she thought now, smoothing the envelope, Christ was still busy helping admit or reject the dead millions, that harvest fattened by the Great War and by disease. There was probably a lot of paperwork to the admission process. Imagining Christ an overworked bureaucrat amused her. But she wondered whether such thoughts were a marker of her cynicism, and an invitation to the test of her commitment, which was presented in the next moment in the form of a different letter.

  “There is something here for you,” said the wife of the trader, who handled the mail. She gave Father Damien a letter from the bishop, return address the cathedral in Fargo. Light-headed from the walk, Agnes put the letter in her pocket and forgot about it until, that night, the envelope crinkled in the folds of her cassock.