The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

  “I don’t want to drink you!” She held the bottle out at arm’s length and spoke to the ishkodewaaboo itself. “Geget igo, you contain an awful spirit! I don’t like to take the spirit of this evil water into my person. I resist. But the Puyat has done me lasting harm. She overcomes my poor arguments, splashes the first drops on my brain!”

  Obvious, I thought, false blame was getting thrown here! Yet the smoke means fire. My mother was in Sophie’s life a source of corruption, that was clear enough to me whether or not she was in herself a weak person to begin with. There was a long—a very long—silence. In that quiet of Sophie’s brooding, I remember the air. Sour reek of gone slough mud. A blue sound of birds. Berries crushed underfoot and a resinous, sweet pine scent from deeper in the woods past her house. Dry, hot, dog fur. Cheap white-lady powder from the folds of Sophie’s last clean dress.

  “Yet no matter how much I drink,” Sophie said, “I never really get drunk anymore. Once I get down to this last dress, though, I know I gotta quit.”

  So even Sophie had some kind of limit—her vanity did not permit her to go on into the filth of habit more than four dresses deep, which is exactly what she owned. Four dresses. In the quiet, I felt a curtain open, and then the air swept through, a breeze, a fresh stirring of low wind from the east.

  “My mother . . .” I prompted.

  “Now she acts like she’s so holy!”

  That’s all she said, but from those few words I got so much. The now meant my mother was alive. The holy meant she was showing herself in some hypocritical way, going to church perhaps. First the now acted on me like the clap of a bell. While I was still letting the ringing die down the holy came in and kicked me from behind. I whirled in my thoughts. And one thing more. From the unsaid ground of the sentence there could be no doubt Sophie saw her or knew of her, which meant she must be living near. Which seemed impossible.

  “Tell me who she is!”

  I jumped on this immediately.

  But now that she imagined herself slightly juiced, Sophie wasn’t so eager to speak to me, and she wanted something else.

  “Gimme your horse.”

  “No.”

  “Borrow me your horse!”

  “No.”

  She stomped toward Brownie, so I grabbed her skirt from behind, whirled her around, and threw her in the gooseberries. I knew her mind. She wanted to ride into town or to some drinker’s house, where she could continue on until this last dress was too filthy for even her to wear. As she fell, arms outflung, I neatly plucked away the half-gone bottle from her clutch.

  “Hihn! Daga, miishishin!”

  “Who is she?”

  “Who what?”

  “My mother!”

  “Why, don’t you know?” Sophie was stark sober, anyway. Perhaps she realized, for a moment, how much her answer meant in my life. Perhaps she understood and cared with some nondrunk’s understanding, but the drinker’s crafty power overcame her and she bargained for all she could get.

  “That will cost the other bottle you got stuffed in your carry sack, plus a ride to Call the Day.”

  We bargained back and forth. Call the Day himself was waiting for the bottle in my pack, so in the end I hoisted her up, held Brownie’s halter, and started to walk, as we’d agreed, her nursing her hope of drunkenness along now slow and easy from the back of my horse, until we reached Call the Day’s corner, where, after I had helped her down, she told me as we had agreed. She said my mother’s name:

  “Leopolda, the so-called nun.”

  I still remember the complete and upright stumped nature of my surprise. Sophie bawled at the house and Call the Day scurried out, a wizened young fellow afflicted with great picklish lumps on his face and neck. He gave me the money he’d raised, and I gave him the bottle. It was the last I was to sell. As he took it from me, the hand that gave it up burned, the center, the palm where I’d been stabbed by this very nun, this Leopolda, my teacher and my sponsor in the holy convent. My mother. From my hand the burning spread, flowed up my arm like a streak of blazing grease. Ringed my throat. Bloomed in my face. Spread until the whole of me flared. Then the lick of flame tweaked my brain and struck me as so funny that I laughed. I laughed until I screamed.

  So that was who she was, Father Miller, this Leopolda was the Puyat who bore me in secret shame somewhere on Bernadette’s farm. It was the Morrisseys who passed me on to the Lazarres, whose dog I was until I got the power and they had to come to me begging for a drink. As I say, I quit that soon enough because I found, I got, I wanted to keep, and I did keep a man, Nector Kashpaw. I held on to him in spite of his own charms to himself and in spite of his mother. I stayed with him all his life. I married him, I buried him. I bore his children in between. And never did he know the name of my mother. And never did he know the name of my father. All he knew of me was that I was raised by Lazarres and escaped them. All he knew of me was what I let him know, and all he understood of me was that I was salt, not sugar. Salt, you’ve got to have to survive. Sugar, you can take or leave.

  Oh, he had sugar too, Father Miller. Sugar by the name of Lulu. Lulu Lamartine. I see from your face that you understand about Lulu. Don’t blame yourself, don’t worry—a handsome man like you, wasted on the priesthood—you had no chance here, no chance at all.

  21

  THE BODY OF THE CONUNDRUM

  1996

  Father Damien looked even more frail the next morning than he had the day before. The smooth planes and knobs of his bones pressed out against his skin and his cheeks were sunburnt and his temples throbbing and drawn. During the night, the blood had surged to Father Damien’s heart. He sat up, dizzily, and he made the instantaneous and rough decision at last to tell everything, though it meant he was implicated in the cover-up, everything. Risk all, even the ultimate. No matter were he stripped naked and found out, yes, he must at last quash for good and ever any question of Leopolda’s consideration. He must lay out the plain and simple truth to Father Jude, who was too obtuse after all to grasp it any other way.

  Haunted, strained, his eyes searched Jude’s face for questions.

  “Father Jude, what if your candidate for sainthood was a murderer? Let us imagine it. I think you have.”

  “No,” said Jude, shocked and then despairing at the abrupt statement. It had been quite enough to learn, the day before, that his saint was an abandoning mother. He had brought his own coffee and tried to hide his agitation now, carefully pouring out his first cup from a thermos he’d found in the rectory. Father Damien’s statement shouldn’t have rattled him. He should have understood by now that he understood nothing. Even so, he stammered. “I hadn’t, of course. Up until this moment . . . even now I have no idea what you’re talking about—and still, what evidence, what proof?”

  “Incontrovertible,” said Damien, delivering to the younger priest a piercing glare.

  “What now?” said Jude, faltering. The other priest was sly, extremely intelligent, and possessed of a hidden stamina that had foiled Father Jude’s imagination. He was truly taken off guard. Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. “What now?” he croaked again.

  “We enter into the body of the conundrum,” Damien answered with some pleasure, gaining strength from the younger priest’s confusion. “We have established that there are miracles, real ones, solid evidence of good. Moral as well as physical miracles. Suppose, suppose. Suppose that in addition to her miracle working, however, your Leopolda killed a man with her bare hands? What weighs more, the death or the wonder?”

  “The death,” said Jude. “Certainly. But again, where is your proof?”

  Damien laughed, without mirth, without lightness. “It is part of the miracle.”

  He sank into a silence so profound it seemed like death, stared at the toes of his shoes, closed his eyes. Jude Miller let the tape run on, scraping down the batteries, and was rewarded when, with a wild sleepwalking vigor, Father Damien Modeste sat up and spoke emphatically.

/>   “I kept the barbed-wire rosary in a drawer all by itself, fittingly, and from time to time I looked at it and speculated on its use. One day, in frustration, I gripped it in my own hands and doubled it, then swung it around the post to my bed until the barbs nearly pierced my hands, went deep enough anyway to leave blue marks of bruises. Quickly, I drew diagrams of where those marks fit. Again, again, I practiced the murderer’s art, and each time I stopped I added a detail to the picture until I had a very good idea where the rips, the wounds, the marks, the damage would have occurred in the hands of the killer. The barbs were long. I believe they would have torn short seams, at least two, upwards into the curve of the palm like so . . .”

  Here Father Damien brushed three marks up the inside of his curved old hands.

  “I began to look, Father Jude, I began to observe. To my unsurprise, although many of my parishioners wore scars and marks, none were striped with the regularity of my killer. I proposed excuses and theories, became a reader of palms, made a continual nuisance of myself, let it be known that I had some peculiar medical reason for examining the inner landscape of people’s hands. Nobody matched, Father Jude, nobody matched until I took off my blinders and began to look where I had rather not—close in, right next to me, inside the shape of Christ’s body.”

  The old one drew a troubled breath, disturbed even now to recall the scene. “Father Jude, I can see it clearly, the moment out of time when she opened her hands. In the beams of afternoon radiance, she implored me to allow her some penance or other. That’s when I saw that her palms bore the jagged white streaks, the raised scars, the triangular healed gashes where the barbs had cut into the flesh.”

  The two men fell silent in contemplation, and then Jude remembered.

  “The miracle,” he said to Father Damien, “you said that the proof was part of the miracle. What did you mean?”

  A slow smile cracked Father Damien’s face, squeezed the fine wrinkles to careful sheaves. “Oh, I thought it would be apparent to you early on, my friend. I thought it was clear—the stigmata—the marks she insisted she wore as the result of the vision in which she was given Christ’s crown of thorns. Those marks were not made by thorns, but by wire barbs, of course. As for the sign and the wonder, hear this. The metal bore a bloody rust. The true miracle was this: the fast that our so-called saint soon endured, the amazing rigidity, the miraculous possession that gripped the imagination of the parish, was not the visionary trance her sisters supposed, but tetanus.”

  THE MOUSE

  An irritatingly persistent mouse woke Father Jude, scrabbling lightly behind the studs and plaster, gnawing with businesslike devotion on something—electrical or phone wiring—inside the thick rectory wall. At night, against the hills, the powerful yard lamps doused, the dark was so heavy that he labored in the blackness to breathe. The chore of inhaling and exhaling became so tiresome that he switched on the dim reading lamp to divert himself. In its feeble show, he sat up dizzily and banged the wall to frighten the mouse. It stopped chewing for a moment, then recommenced, which was when the thought formed.

  Startled, Father Jude spoke the thought aloud.

  “He knew all along!”

  Scrambling out of bed to scrape through his notes, he tried to reconstruct the chain of dates and confessions, realizations and facts, that culminated in this absolute conclusion and conviction. Father Damien had known, from the first perhaps, that Pauline Puyat, later Sister Leopolda, had, with a cruelly modified rosary, strangled the farmer Napoleon Morrissey. Father Damien had known and yet kept the knowing secret to himself. He had made no move to contact the diocese hierarchy. There was no letter written to the bishop hinting obliquely of a grave crime. Father Damien had made absolutely no move either to contain or to punish Sister Leopolda. And any priest would have done as much, no matter how dear he held his vows regarding the secret nature of the confessions he heard. Something else was at work, then. Father Jude Miller cogitated. The mouse began munching another wire and a white moth fluttered into the pool of lamplight.

  Cogito ergo sum. Turn it around. My heart is clear, therefore I act. I am, therefore I think. I am, therefore I speak. Guilty, therefore I’m silent. Some premise known and understood by Damien and Leopolda, basic to the argument and essential to the agreement between them. Some premise powerful enough to cause a collusion between two enemies. Some secret endgame in which both of their triumphs were thwarted, a checkmate, a stalemate, and the result was the covered-up truth of a man’s ugly death.

  The conclusion was inescapable: Father Damien had also done something that he wished to hide.

  And Sister Leopolda had known what that something was.

  Father Jude Miller banged on the wall again. The dry, scattering scuttle of the mouse was like the random disarray of his thoughts. What, what did Father Damien do? He wanted to ask Leopolda herself, but of course the only way to do that was to appeal to her supernatural attention. Abruptly, Jude laughed, for the answer was to treat her as a saint and say his prayers, address her in the afterlife, the world beyond, only whether he should aim for heaven or hell there was no telling.

  Between heaven and hell, he thought now, wearily, here I am in North Dakota. I am in love. My life as a priest is over. My vows are stripped of sweetness. They become a desert in the face of human love. All I will know from now on will be a purgatory of the senses and a suspension of possibilities. Still, he must finish his work. He would try to pray. And what if Leopolda should answer?

  The next day, paging carefully through the stacks of papers, the marriage certificates, the records of death and birth, he came across a piece of paper that told him everything. Among the carefully organized papers of Father Damien’s first years—he had been a meticulous file keeper—the birth record surfaced. Jude read the hand-printed certificate over, once, twice, again and again, absorbing its claim. Then carefully he culled it from the official records and slipped it into a manila file folder all its own. Once he found the informing document, he was too disturbed to do anything else but try to absorb its implications. He went outside to walk the dusty road that led to the high school running track, where he would circle and circle in his springy shoes. It was perhaps on the third mile, though he’d lost count of laps, that startled, he again spoke a thought:

  “By God, she did answer!”

  FATHER JUDE’S CONFESSION

  When Damien moved aside the panel of wood and bent to the screen, he knew at once that he spoke to his fellow priest—it was the keen citrus aftershave. That gave him away, though he would have known from his voice as well. He naturally chose, as he did always, to allow Father Jude his privacy, and Damien spoke as though to a stranger. The younger priest went along with this and confessed anonymously, though he, too, knew that the screen was practically transparent and his voice was familiar to his colleague. Of course, once he spoke of Lulu, all pretense was abandoned. And anyway, Father Jude could not keep the emotion from filling his talk. He had not slept more than a few hours at a time for days.

  “It is actually”—his voice was low—“a form of madness. A special aspect of which is the inability of the afflicted one to see beyond the thorns of the flesh and loving spirit. I feel ludicrous, pained, hurt, drained, exalted, and sick all at once. Ludicrous because, quite obviously, at my age I should have dispensed with and put these feelings in their places. Pained because I cannot tell her. Hurt because the hurt of unattainable intimacy lies before me constantly. Drained . . . well, obviously all of this emotion takes its toll on the body. Yet, thrilled! I have never felt so supremely right in my emotions, not since I took my vows. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task, dear Father Damien, tremendous and foolish and human. I’m sick because I can’t eat for the beauty of it, and the anguish is beautiful too. Can I have her? No, I can’t! Can she ever be with me? Just once? Of course not, unless I leave the priesthood. I’ll do it. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Ever.”


  “My dear son,” said Damien, and his heart twisted in flat-out pity.

  “If I was more perfectly committed, more noble, more secure, more Christ-like, I’m sure I would be immune to her, Father.”

  “No one is immune to her,” said Father Damien, quite kindly.

  “There is no vaccine? No cure for the malady? I’d like a little something to ease the pain.”

  “What would help?”

  “Music.”

  “Of course.”

  “Would you play for me tomorrow?”

  “I will.”

  “And Father . . .” now there was in the sound of the younger priest’s pause something that put Damien on alert, some shift of attention and focus. It occurred to him that Jude, having admitted what he considered a great weakness, needed to extract a similar weakness from him, to put them on a more equal level. He considered tuning out and giving a huge, fake snore, but didn’t want the other man to feel he was wanting in attention to his first problem, so he quietly asked Jude to go on.

  “I know your secret,” said Father Jude.

  It was a wallop. Agnes’s wind left her. For a moment, she was panicked to nerveless buzzing. Then, suddenly, the air flooded into her body.

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Another pause. A yellow sheet of stars descended and Agnes thought, faintly, that she must not babble if she went unconscious. But the stars resolved to dusk air once more as Father Jude went on talking.