The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  Agnes loved smelling the milky-sweet and faintly sour new babies. She rocked them in their carefully made cradle boards, their tikinaganan. She talked to the babies, pitching her voice low and pretending to have no wish for a child of her own. But she could feel them in her arms, their tensile dependence, and sometimes a wish stabbed. After baptisms, she played music with an extra sweet load of yearning, and was consoled by the sounds and challenges that rose beneath her hands. She accepted, now, the great gift of the music as a substitute for all she had lost. Still, one question sometimes nagged. Had the devil in its original tempter’s form returned her art, or had God? And furthermore, what did it matter?

  THE PIANO

  Once the memory of the music unknit in troubled and ecstatic skeins from her hands, Agnes remembered. In recalling, she wept for her drowned Caramacchione, played now only by fish, and the strange cruel river that had utterly changed her life. With the outline of new memories, interior bits of the puzzle emerged. Fortunately, there appeared in these new visions a windfall. As she regained more of the past, she recalled the source of the money she’d wakened long ago to find in the lining of Agnes’s jacket. She’d deposited that money in a bank in Fargo, under a false name. Cecilia Fleisch, she remembered it.

  She wrote down the sum and the secret number under which it was deposited, and then decided how to use it. Perhaps in this decision Agnes ignored certain moral implications. The money was, in fact, stolen. But hadn’t Agnes suffered and hadn’t Father Damien? And would the anticipated use of the money constitute a form of justice? For Agnes must have a piano—not just any piano. A real piano.

  Perhaps, truly, Father Damien could have bought food or medicines, blankets, pots, necessities of all sorts, seeds and seed grain. Perhaps he could have purchased a bell with a far more pleasing toll than the hollow clang of the one bought by the diocese for Little No Horse. Certainly, he could have purchased comforts and warmth for the sisters, who routinely suffered deep chills, or the old people, who were in great need, but he didn’t. Not as Damien. Not as Agnes. Not as priest and not as woman, not as confessor and not as the magnet of souls, consoler, professor of the faith. When it came right down to it, she acted as an artist.

  TIME

  Once Nanapush began talking, nothing stopped the spill of his words. The day receded and darkness broadened. At dusk, the wind picked up and cold poked mercilessly through the chinking of the cabin. The two wrapped themselves in quilts and continued to talk. The talk broadened, deepened. Went back and forth in time and then stopped time. The talk grew huge, of death and radiance, then shrunk and narrowed to the making of soup. The talk was of madness, the stars, sin, and death. The two spoke of all there was to know. And although it was in English, during the talk itself Nanapush taught language to Father Damien, who took out a small bound notebook and recorded words and sentences.

  In common, they now had the love of music, though their definition of what composed music was dissimilar.

  “When you hear Chopin,” Father Damien asserted, “you find yourself traveling into your childhood, then past that, into a time before you were born, when you were nothing, when the only truths you knew were sounds.”

  “Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don’t sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman.”

  “This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can’t think. You become flooded in the heart.”

  “Powerful. Powerful. This Chopin,” asked Nanapush, “does he have a drum?”

  “No,” said Damien, “he uses a piano.”

  “That great box in your church,” said Nanapush. “How is this thing made?”

  Father Damien opened his mouth to say it was constructed of wood, precious woods, but in his mind there formed the image of Agnes’s Caramacchione settled in the bed of the river, unmoved by the rush of water over its keys, and instead he said, “Time.” As soon as he said it, he knew that it was true.

  “Time. Chopin’s piano was made of time. What is time in Ojibwemowin?” asked Damien.

  Nanapush misunderstood then, and did not give the word but deeply considered the nature of the thing he was asked to name. When he spoke his thoughts aloud, his voice was slow and contemplative.

  “We see the seasons pass, the moons fatten and go dark, infants grow to old men, but this is not time. We see the water strike against the shore and with each wave we say a moment has passed, but this is not time. Inside, we feel our strength go from a baby’s weakness to a youth’s strength to a man’s endurance to the weakness of a baby again, but this is not time, either, nor are your whiteman’s clocks and bells, nor the sun rising and the sun going down. These things are not time.”

  “What is it then?” said Father Damien. “I want to know, myself.”

  “Time is a fish,” said Nanapush slowly, “and all of us are living on the rib of its fin.”

  Damien stared at him in quizzical fascination and asked what type of fish.

  “A moving fish that never stops. Sometimes in swimming through the weeds one or another of us will be shaken off time’s fin.”

  “Into the water?” asked Damien.

  “No,” said Nanapush, “into something else called not time.”

  Father Damien waited for Nanapush to explain, but after he’d lighted his pipe and smoked it for a while, he said only, “Let’s find something to eat.”

  Agnes brushed the rich ebony rectangles, the black keys of the extraordinary piano on which she’d spent the bulk of the stolen money. A grand, exquisite and important, not a Caramacchione, but a new Steinway. The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim.

  Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

  With the stolen money, Agnes also purchased, from an eastern parish, a chalice of fine gold, a ciborium, a platen, an embroidered burse studded with semiprecious stones, and two cruets of fine crystal. They were part of the art of Father Damien’s Mass, as were the vestments—an extraordinarily ornate and meticulously worked chasuble in green, for hope, a less ornate one in passion red. A plain silken stole embroidered only with a cross, but in gold, and a maniple to match. His alb and cincture had been Father Hugo’s, and he accepted from Sister Hildegarde a rough amice that he donned with great devotion and seriousness at every Mass. It was his symbolic helmet and he wore it to repel the assaults of the devil. Rotten mutt! Better yet, he commissioned Margaret to add beadwork anywhere that it would fit on the vestments. She covered every bit she could—each robe weighed upon him like a shield, like armor.

  Agnes bought deep blue paint for the ceiling of the church, as well as metallic gold, a special gilding from Chicago. That was the only paint that would do for the stars she envisioned upon that blue. And last, with the spurt of money left at the bottom of the pile, the money which had nearly fallen from Agnes’s fingers clumsy with terror, she bought urtext music, stacks of it from foreign publishers—Masses, choral pieces, sensuous rhapsodies and pieces beyond her capabilities, as well as Easy Pieces for Small Fingers, for she had determined to teach. She also commissioned a statue from a maker of religious artifacts up north, bought it sight unseen.

  THE MADONNA OF THE SERPENTS

  There lived in Winnipeg an old mangeur de lard who had put down his paddle and taken up the tools of a wood-carver and a statue painter. He made cigar store Indians and mannequin shapes, shop signs, and carousel horses, but statues of a religious nature were his specialty. For those, he used a secret recipe of plaster. He had in his workshop special molded blanks for Joseph, the Blessed Mary, Baby Jesus and adult Jesus, for Saints Anne and Theresa, for Saint Francis, and a few others especially popular in the region. These raw white forms spoke to h
im sometimes, especially when he worked late into the night. The shadows, he claimed, moving in the light of flames, often inspired him. One particular night he began to work on a special blank and found that he couldn’t stop. This statue, commissioned by a church just south, he’d determined to finish as soon as possible in order to finance a lengthy drunk he anticipated commencing, soon, to celebrate the proud fact that, at age seventy-five, he was to be yet again a father. Though he’d bought the woman’s favors, she was inexperienced enough to have gotten pregnant. She would have to marry him now!

  He thought about her as he worked on the plaster in the flicker of candles. Yes, she was fat and her chin ran into her neck in a way that made him think of a snapping turtle. Her nose was a bulb. Her teeth were all crooked. She was a good person, though, and her eyes were very beautiful, sad and kind. Extremely beautiful! He thought of her eyes. What good were they in a face so cunningly wrought to inspire a man to wince and look away?

  Those eyes made him happy. They nearly brought tears to his own eyes.

  “A son,” he prayed. If the boy inherited her features, he would at least be a man, though just why that should make such a difference he couldn’t say. He worked carefully, carving folds into the gown, the robe. He took special care with the snake she crushed, refined the moon, painted the scallops of her toenails a delicate pink. He worked out the proportion of the face and then refined the features and the hands, so complicated that he just curled the fingers up and thought, Be done with it. Yawning, he touched paint to the masterpiece and just before dawn tumbled into his rough rope bed.

  The next morning, when he squinted at her in the light, he saw that he had made her ugly. Just the same as his bride-to-be, however, her eyes were both kind and extremely alive. He would have taken up his chisel, he could have removed the paint, he could have changed her. Somehow, all that next day, just when he was about to get started, every time, he dropped his hands to his sides and stared at her, shaking his head.

  “Forgive me, Saint Joseph,” he said out loud, at last. “I like her this way. There are advantages, see? I’ve lived, and in my life I have had many women. I would not choose a beautiful wife ever again, oh no, I would choose for myself a pair of kind eyes over the most magnificent breasts. Difficile! But Saint Joseph, you poor God-fucked cuckold, if you’d chosen a woman nobody envied you for, you would have had many children of your own. You would have died a happy man surrounded by his own children, just as I will.”

  With that, the old voyageur put his tools down, patted the Virgin’s rump, and began to whistle as he constructed a shipping case to send her straight down to Little No Horse.

  On a pure fall day the statue arrived, packed in golden straw inside a wooden crate built around it, perhaps not so much to protect as to contain the features. The nailed, heavy crate was pulled along in a wagon. Father Damien and the sisters and the wagon driver wrestled the crate off the bed of the wagon, prized open the boards that protected the statue, pulled down the wads and sheaves of golden straw, and at last brushed the dust off the features of her face. They kept brushing, for as soon as her eyes and nose and lips came clear, she startled, she fascinated, she elicited some repugnance, she evoked sorrow in one heart and derision in the next and in still others peace and loving quiet, so that she needed to be touched to be believed and for many hours stood outside the doorway of the church.

  “Send her back” was Sister Hildegarde’s immediate judgment, but Father Damien disagreed, much as Hildegarde had regarding the piano. The other sisters mainly disagreed, too, saying that the Virgin’s eyes were remarkable.

  “The carver had a strange talent,” Damien pronounced, “and his vision was of this face. Who is to say among all creation God should choose only a beautiful human mother for His son?”

  “I suppose there is a lesson in this.” Hildegarde’s voice was a bit sour. She narrowed her eyes at the statue, suspicious. The snake that writhed beneath the Virgin’s feet not only was too realistic, but did not look at all crushed down by her weight.

  THE SERMON TO THE SNAKES

  “What is the whole of our existence,” said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, “but the sound of an appalling love?”

  The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

  “What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?

  “Divine love may be so large it cannot see us.

  “Or it may be so infinitely tiny that it works on a level where it directs us like an unknown substance buried in our blood.

  “Or it may be transparent, an invisible screen, a filter through which we see and hear all that is created.

  “Oh my friends . . .”

  The snakes lifted their bullet-smooth heads, flickered their tongues to catch the vibrations of the sounds the being made somewhere before them.

  “I am like you,” said Father Damien to the snakes, “curious and small.” He dropped his arms. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”

  The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

  “If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

  He lifted his hand, blessed the snakes, and then lay down full length in a pew and slept there for the rest of the afternoon.

  13

  THE RECOGNITION

  1923

  Surely it was delirium, thought Agnes, looking at the peaceful scene of twirling popple leaves and new-growth maple. Beside her sat Nanapush. He wore the huge plaid wool jacket Margaret had brought home from the sisters, and his hair, long and gray, was pulled back and tied with a reed. I was not really visited by the terrible dog, thought Agnes, nor did I nearly poison myself out of love and then despair. Her terrible abyss of mind seemed impossible now.

  “Do you believe in the devil?” Agnes abruptly asked her friend.

  Before he spoke, Nanapush gazed keenly at Father Damien through his little, round, wire eyeglasses. He tilted his head, considering. Damien lighted a cigarette, put it in his hand. Nanapush thanked the priest, his mouth pursed.

  “Not yours,” he decided.

  Father Damien waited for more.

  “We have our own devils,” Nanapush said piercingly, all at once. “And our devils are not all bad. Ours are sometimes capable of showing pity, that is, if you can think of the right thing to say.”

  “What, then, would be the right thing to say if you met up with a devil?” Damien leaned forward intently, eager.

  “You would have to be clever about it,” said Nanapush.

  “Say, for instance,” Damien decided to be specific, “I was sitting down to eat, and a devil in the form of a black dog walked in through the window. Say it stood on the table, one paw in the soup bowl. What would you say to it?”

  Nanapush leaned toward him, thoughtful. “You would say this: ‘Get your foot out of my soup bowl!’ ”

  Father Damien frowned, doubtfully. “And then?”

  “If it took its foot out, you would know it had understood you and was no ordinary dog.”

  Nanapush se
ttled back into his chair.

  “It wasn’t ordinary. No, the dog spoke to me.”

  “Ah,” said Nanapush. “In that case, you would open your mouth and bark!”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “In order to confuse it.”

  “I see. I would pretend to be a dog . . .”

  “You already have a collar around your neck,” Nanapush pointed out.

  Father Damien didn’t tell his friend about the conversation he’d had with the spirit, or about the sacrifice that he had made for Lulu, or about the painful temptation that followed. Instead, he took out the chessboard, an occupation that currently absorbed the two, and the playing of which they owed to a priest of a past century, Father Jolicoeur.

  That young and largely unhistoricized eighteenth-century Jesuit had carried with him, into the unknown, a chessboard. He used it as an excellent means both to convince the natives of the superiority of a Catholic god who could design so perplexing and glorious an entertainment, and as a comfort to himself. Though he was uncertain whether his native guide and companion had the capacity to play such a game, he nevertheless made an attempt to teach the rudiments. Jolicoeur’s foundation belief in the innate superiority of himself was shattered when, to his amazement, in the space of just nineteen minutes the Indian trounced him in a match. Father Jolicoeur played again, hoping to recover his pride, but was the more severely beaten, causing him to put away his arrogance.