The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  “And you,” Father Jude asked curiously, “do you believe as Sister Leopolda believed?”

  “That conversion would bring about redemption?” Father Damien seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Oh no, I believe we were wrong!”

  Father Jude stopped the recorder, folded his arms, gathered himself. Although he had, on some level, expected what he heard, yet to have it out in the open demanded some response from him.

  “If you think that, how could you go on?” he asked.

  “Well, of course, at first I didn’t think we were wrong. Everything seemed clear. It was only after the epidemic that I knew. There was no doubt . . .” He trailed off. “By then I was so knit into the fabric of the damage that to pull myself out would have left a great rift, a hole that would have been filled by . . . well, others perhaps less in sympathy. I’ll name no names. And I believe even now that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy, Father Jude. That’s why I stayed.”

  Father Jude took this in with a certain degree of sympathy: to not believe in what one did, but to persevere out of duty to the practical desperation of the situation—in a way it was no less than a quiet heroism. Or idiocy, was his next thought. And then he felt a pang of irritated pity. What a waste to live your life without the assurance of faith. No sooner had he thought this than admiration for the old priest gripped him once again. Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love. Sacrifice had been his rule. He’d put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need.

  Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith? Father Jude had been sent here to gather knowledge, but the more he learned, the more he thought, the less certainty he grasped. And too, his fundamental self-assurance was put in jeopardy by this bewildering attraction to a woman whose presence he ached for. Idiocy indeed! Lulu. Before her name rang twice in his mind, he was already putting away his notes and preparing to go and find her. By way of simply getting near to her, he would ask her to talk to him. He would question her about the woman, Fleur, who so preoccupied the old priest’s memory. He’d sit across from her, inching closer, fiddling with his tape recorder, hoping she could not intuit his yearning fascination and confused hope.

  15

  LULU’S PASSION

  What I never forgot, what I’ll always remember, was my mother stroking the soles of my feet. She woke me gently that morning. I hated her for it later. She was tender, yet she knew just exactly what she was doing. The only way I could keep from despair was to hate my mother’s rough hand, the sinewy palm, hard as rawhide, the fingers of steel, grace, and lies. A mother’s hand should not be like that, Father Jude. A mother’s hand should never lie to a child.

  We put thick slices of cold bannock in our pockets and started out. “Aaniindi gi-izhamin ina?” I asked. My mother just frowned, and when she did that, I never prodded her for more. She wasn’t the kind of mama you could beg things from, Fleur. The trees were deep and just beginning to sigh in the first breath of the day. Oh, I love that, Father Jude, have you ever seen the leaves click together and break up the sun in circles? My mother put tobacco beside the trail, and still said nothing to me. But I had my freedom in that moment and didn’t care.

  “Maybe she couldn’t,” Nanapush told me later, “maybe her heart was too full, maybe she hurt too, did you ever think about that?”

  “Of course I did,” was my answer. “But she was my mother, she could have chosen differently. Grandfather! Fleur had the choice of saving me, her daughter, or having her revenge.”

  She chose revenge.

  I choose to hate her for it.

  That was the day it started.

  She took me by the hand when the path was broad, I dropped behind when it narrowed. I liked walking behind so I could watch my mother’s makazin heels as she stepped down and the hem, so even and careful. I watched the movement of her old majigoode as it flopped ever so lightly against her moving calves. I remember that dress like it was before me now—a print skirt of old greenish purple, deep and muddy with tiny cream-colored flowers that glimmered from the dusk of a slough.

  The day was warm. Late summer, Manominike-giizis, when the Anishinaabeg knock the wild rice. Our Pillager’s own lake, Matchimanito, was too cold and blue-black to grow rice and nobody even liked to fish it that much. We always offered tobacco for the fish. Once, in a fish stomach, my mother found a person’s thumb. She kept it in her medicine bundle along with the heart of that fish. There were all sorts of things in her medicine that I did not approach, but to walk behind her was to forget for a moment who she was from the front—the forbidding woman with the medicine. From behind, she was someone who didn’t know what kind of face I was making or how, mockingly, I copied the headlong force of my mother’s stride.

  Arrogance, she had that. I never did, though some mistook it for my joy.

  Now I could hear the sound of other people as we came through the woods, but as we crossed the clearing into town, I was surprised to see so many children. We continued forward, and it looked as though we would join the others. A crowd of so many was strange in the first place, but as we got closer, I was covered with an itchy blanket of feeling. I reached out for my mother’s hand and knew—that was it. The children weren’t running. They weren’t loudly playing, racing, teasing, apart from their parents. The children were clutching their mothers’ hands just like I did now. They were silent, close to their parents, bits of their mothers’ skirt squeezed tight, standing pressed against their fathers’ legs.

  Around the front of the crowd, I now saw four big audoomobiig, as Grandpa Nanapush called them, waasamoowidaabaanag, the wagons that moved by themselves. The first one, audoomobii, was the white word. There were four of these big cars and they were drawn up together in a line. Next to each, there was a man with a piece of paper clamped onto a piece of wood. He was writing down the name of each family and each child. As soon as he wrote down the name—as if with his marks he somehow suddenly possessed the spirit of the child—abruptly the child climbed into the auto and was swallowed into the dark as into the body of a fish. I saw the children looking out through the windows, sad, vague, and indistinct as though gazing from underwater.

  No! I tried to get my mother’s attention. Let’s go home, I said, I want to go home. But my mother was staring at the people with the boards and the paper, and at the other Anishinaabeg gathered around them. Her face was neutral and heavy. A sickness of fear seized me. I tugged and pulled my mother’s hand as if to bring it to life, but her hand was stiff, and cold, like the paw of a trapped, dead animal. And then she dragged me forward.

  I had never cried before that day, not really, unless you counted my bawling as a tiny baby and that one time I froze my feet. My mother had always picked me up, given me what I wanted, rocked me, never let me weep. And why did she teach me all this tenderness, this love, if she then threw me in a pit? For that is what the school would be, and better if she slapped me from the first and taught me to be hard. Now, I cried. For the first time, I cried. In this squeezed mass of children, I was a birch-bark scrap. I was floating downstream in a roiling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping. Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out of my eyes. The motor, like a throbbing strange drum, bore us off the reservation, in the direction that the birds went, zhaawanong. My mother told me to pray to that spirit, talk to that aadizokaan, but my throat was filling, filling. I was going down and a sick blackness overcame my vision, until, all of a sudden, this boy next to me nudged my arm, just a rude little push, the best he could do and still be a boy.

  I dared to look, and it was Nector. Neshke, he said. In his fist he held a piece of lint-rubbed hard black licorice from his pocket. Licorice in the shape of a little curved pipe. He said take it and I took it; then
he reached into his pocket and pulled out a licorice pipe just like the one he gave me. He turned his over and tapped out the imaginary old tobacco, then filled and pretended to light his little black licorice pipe. His movements were exactly that of a old man, of Nanapush. He gestured. I took my pipe, tapped it out the same way, and as I did so my tears stopped. I swaggered, clenched my pipe between my teeth. Nector pretended to have trouble lighting a match, and I started laughing. By this time I had my pipe going and I was smoking it, like Margaret, with a little squint in my eyes. Me and Nector Kashpaw were looking at each other, both laughing, blowing pretend smoke from our little black pipes.

  I would grow to love that boy. I would get into trouble because of that boy. He would get into much worse trouble because of me. On the bus ride down, going south like the wild geese, we sat close, smelling the alien stink of burning gas, and each other, unwashed, washed, in fear. We ate food I would come to know—the strange, delicate, delicious cheese sandwiches on white flour bread and the toad-skin pickles, sweet and crunchy, fished from a huge gray crockery jar, and the fat olives with the pits. I had never eaten these big fleshy green seeds. Tears filled my eyes at the taste of them. I started to cry in earnest, unstoppable, because of the evil taste of this thing they called olive.

  Nector turned to another boy and I was alone. Once I was alone it continued, the crying, for which I had no shame or remedy. It was a simple weeping in which the tears came up and flowered over. It wasn’t painful and it wasn’t unpleasant, this crying, it just was. It just was and it just was, I said once I became an adult woman known for never shedding tears. No, I never cried, not in love or in childbirth, not at death and not over any particular want or loss or piece of bad fortune. My tears had simply run out on that ride down to the school. That’s when I came to know that to be left, sent off, abandoned, was not of the moment, but a black ditch to the side of the road of your life, a sudden washout, a pothole that went down to China.

  That’s what the kids did when they saw the globe of the world and put their fingers on either side and the teacher told them theoretically it is possible to dig to China. They started a big hole behind the girls’ dorm, in the sandy spot where water flushed down off the tall roof, out of the square metal drainpipe. They used their tin cups to dig. They got the hole down and then said, Let’s throw Lulu in! Then the matron came out ringing the big brass handbell and hollering little kids, little kids, and they all jumped away like rabbits and I was left in that hole.

  It was cool, it was autumn by then, but I was wearing a jacket and the hole was warm. I was out of the wind. After I realized the others were not coming back, I tried once to pull myself out. But the top of the hole was crumbly and the collapse of sand scared me. So I dusted myself and sat, knees drawn to my chest, in the bottom of the hole.

  Now I was glad for the ugly, big, brown-plaid wool skirt they gave me. Too long, it covered my ankles when I curled up tight. And the jacket was good, too, with its big raw wood buttons. It was quilted on the inside with a smooth fabric that felt slippery, but warm when I held myself close. I held my arms by the elbows and looked up from the bottom of the hole. Soon it got dark, then it was night. Maybe some of the big girls balled up their coats and put them in my bed so the matron would be fooled, so they would not get in trouble for throwing me down the hole. I was not afraid. I didn’t care. That’s how I survived, by not caring. I tucked my head into my collar like a bird, and went to sleep.

  Then woke because the moon had stopped right above me. It was caught on the peaked corner of the dormitory roof and it was nearly full.

  “Aaniin, nokomis,” I said and I felt the kindness of the moon shine down on me as I went back to sleep.

  That was the first night.

  That day was the first day.

  I heard them running, yelling, herded off to the dining hall. Then I heard them from farther off calling again. Their sounds faded and the sounds of morning were above me. I had to pee. But I didn’t and then I forgot because I heard the buses. My heart thumped with shock. Then regret sliced me. I realized that I was missing a trip that the whole school was taking. It was a trip given to the children by a lady—a very big, doll-haired, red-cheeked lady with red fingernails and pointed red lips who spoke to us in the classroom—a trip to a circus. I knew all about the circus. Nanapush had once seen the circus. Ever after he had loved to describe its wonders. There was an animal called the anamibiigokoosh, the underwater pig. There was a horse with a long neck, genwaabiigigwed, which I had seen on the alphabet. The giraffe. There was a striped horse and little peoplelike creatures who constantly searched one another for lice. Nanapush had seen great brown panthers jump through circles of flame, and watched a woman launch through the air like a flying squirrel. Down in the hole, I went into a low grief. I had a black dejection, I would say when grown up, of my worst feelings. And it would mean I was again lost in my spirit, the way I’d felt in the bottom of the hole knowing I’d miss the circus, which was worse, much worse than wondering if I would ever get out.

  My feet went numb from their old freezing, and my legs prickled. I danced up and down in the hole until I felt all warm again. That was how I made the time go, when my legs numbed. Or I sang. “Our Country” and other songs that I had just learned in school. Nanapush’s love songs and hunting songs. Songs that went with my mother’s name. My own songs. Then songs I’d made up for my dolls. Each of my dolls had their own names and songs. I knew every little thing about my dolls and their lives and I felt stricken all over again because I didn’t know where my dolls were now. Had my mother kept them? Did Nanapush have them? I missed my dolls more than I could allow myself, ever, to miss my mother. The sun passed over, briefly flinging down a pour of radiance, and then moving on.

  The buses returned very late in the evening and the children were sent straight into the dorm. All of a sudden I heard a voice. “Lulu!” A cloud on a stick dropped into my lap. I was so shocked I couldn’t move. I touched the thing—pale, raspberry scented, sticky sweet, a balled-up spiderweb. I touched my fingers to my tongue, then I ate the stuff. After I ate every bit of it, a strange buzzing started just behind my eyes, as though my brain were a hive of bees. My thoughts kept flying in and out, impossible to catch. I danced, my feet moving in a quick floating flat-footed skip, and I sang a song to keep myself company and then curled up when I was warm.

  I slept, woke. The moon was caught in a mist of secret spiderwebs, of circus floss, cottony and quick to vanish. The moon blazed at me, as though it were thirsty too.

  “Ingitizima,” I softly said, words I had heard in prayers, I am pitiful.

  “You are pitiful,” I heard in answer. “I am sorry for you.”

  There was someone in the hole with me.

  That someone turned out to be a spirit who kept me company from then on out. There were those who wondered at me, all through my life, starting when I stayed at the school and refused my mother, who came back rich. People thought Lulu Lamartine was heartless as a cat. And like a cat, too, in my mind’s limber strength and survival toughness. People thought I was too bold. Many resented how I had no fear, not enough to cause me any sensible concern for what people thought. I just did what I pleased. Married men and left them. Had my babies and brought them up. Raised my own money through my thrifty profit. Showed my breasts rude and shockingly. Wore my skirts tight and my heels tall. Wore makeup paint. True, I had land. True, I was clever leasing it. True, I was even more clever in the use to which I put my talents with men. But it was that spirit who taught me that to laugh or to cry was all the same, and who gave me the strength to spit pain in the face and love the world in joy. I sat with that spirit, who would never leave me. And the spirit said, Look around you and if you think all there is to see is a rotten hole, look again and see the color and the beauty and the constant life of the earth. I stayed two nights and two days in the hole before a big girl broke free of the line and sneaked out back to pull me out.

  That big girl was a Pente
cost. Rose Pentecost. Named as a family by a priest in the last century who tired of translating and just added feast days to the roll of names that year.

  I got into the line with the other children and walked in to the morning meal. No dirt was on my face and no dirt was in my hair. I was neat and clean. My eyes were clear. I never told on the big girls, for which I was then a hero. None of the matrons ever knew. So even then, I did not get in trouble.

  But later. Trouble? I ate trouble. I was trouble.

  Being trouble started when they told me that I was not going home for the summer. Staying there, with the matrons, at school. At first I tipped sideways, as though the words pushed me over. Not going home was as much a shock as coming there in the first place. Not seeing my mother, my grandpa and grandma, the Yellowboy girls and the Anongs and again my mother—especially my mother, because in the beginning my skin ached for my mother’s touch and my ears kept straining. I hadn’t decided to hate her yet. And not that my mother exactly said, I’ll be back to get you, but I knew she would. When they told me I would not be going home, I staggered in a red zigzag and then sat by the bridal wreath bush outside the school office, there on the grass.

  It was out-of-bounds to sit there, it was an offense. That’s why I did. I sat there for a while and then slowly edged myself into the shadows of the thousands of tiny leaves. Through the shadows, then, and farther back, until I was in the curved space between the bush and the wall of the building. A clean space completely hidden, a place where I could look into the crossed and baffled twigs, the timid green leaves, the sprays of white flowers, the petals, clouds of frail dots.

  The idea first came to me when I boarded the school bus to visit the local school where we would do our yearly goodwill performance. I danced shawl and traditional. Rose Pentecost performed “The Lord’s Prayer” in sign language. I had got stuck on Rose after Rose came and got me. I learned “The Lord’s Prayer” in trade sign language, because Rose Pentecost always got so much applause. I thought I would like to have that, and to stand up there alone and silent, only my hands moving, my hand and arm making the upward spiral, so graceful, to indicate the spirit. I was thinking about that, and at the same time walking up the school bus steps when I dropped the little fan that I carried, on loan from our dance advisor. The fan flicked under the bus, blown by wind, and I lay flat on my stomach to get it. That was when I happened to look sideways and up, under the school bus, and noticed the little shelf.