The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (10 page)

“Some say, go back to the old ways.”

“And what do you say?”

Kashpaw narrowed his eyes at the ice road, snapped the reins lightly on his horses’ rumps. When he smiled to himself, his huge soft face rounded in gentle humorous curves that Agnes found compelling. The only Indians she’d known were pictures in a book—in her part of Wisconsin, they were hated and cleared out. Once she had escaped her family, entered the convent, and taken up music, of course, there was very little to see or know of the outside world. So this new sort of human next to her, his self-possessed knowledge, upset her with an intense wish to understand everything about him.

“Here’s what I say,” he answered at last. “Leave us full-bloods alone, let us be with our Nanabozho, our sweats and shake tents, our grand medicines and bundles. We don’t hurt nobody. Your wiisaakodewininiwag, half-burnt wood, they can use your God as backup to these things. Our world is already whipped apart by the white man. Why do you black gowns care if we pray to your God?”

All that he said was strange to Agnes, and again she had to question him on each point. The half-burnt wood referred to half-breed people. Nanabozho was someone she would hear of often—a god, a story figure. The sweats and the shake tents were houses where Ojibwe ceremonies took place. All of this, he took his time to patiently explain. Agnes watched him closely, memorizing him, feeling in her heart he was so certain of himself that he would be impossible to convert. The great firm slabs of Kashpaw’s cheeks were pitted with dark pocks. As she found out later, he had survived that particular killing scourge only to lose many of his family. The abyss of loss had led him to his present complex marital situation—a problem with which Father Damien would presently become involved. For the time, as they endured the miles, Kashpaw’s openhearted ease was reassuring. Between the two, there grew a pleasant, thoughtful, silence. The space around the wagon, boundless and gray, serene and cold, changed only subtly as they passed through on the nearly invisible road. Suspended in the whiteness, they could have been traveling in place. The wheels moved, the wagon jounced and rocked, but nothing changed. The land rolled on in bitter white monotony.

The cold bit down, harder. Kashpaw maintained a politely fixed expression while his thoughts turned. He was a shrewd man, and he sensed something unusual about the priest from the first. Something wrong. The priest was clearly not right, too womanly. Perhaps, he thought, here was a man like the famous Wishkob, the Sweet, who had seduced many other men and finally joined the family of a great war chief as a wife, where he had lived until old, well loved, as one of the women. Kashpaw himself had addressed Wishkob as grandmother. Kashpaw thought,
This priest is unusual, but then, who among the zhaaganaashiwug is not strange?

The two fell deeper into private thoughts, and let the screeching and knocking of the wheels take over until at last the horizon grew, upon its distant edge, a deeper set to the filmy pearl, then a definite gray patch that slowly gained detail. There were hills now, covered in bare-leafed oak, and soon there were houses among those hills, small and modest little cabins neatly plumed with smoke, for a windless, icy seizure gripped the settlement and woods beyond. The wind of the great plains dropped off in this complex shelter, diminished by windbreaks of earth and mixed forest. They passed into the hills, through a town that centered around a modest trader’s store, seeing only one or two Indians at a distance. The people were dressed in farmers’ clothes, some in thin swaths of cloth and some heavily jacketed in wools.

The road to the settlement at Little No Horse led up, gently at first, but there was in those days a fierce, ungraded climb near the end. At last, the ice became too smooth for even the strong horses—their heavily feathered fetlocks and thick necks showing draft blood along with Sioux war-pony fleetness and nerve. One nearly slipped to its knees. Kashpaw stopped the wagon and wished Father Damien
bonne chance
in climbing the rest of the way on foot.

All alone, then, bearing on her back the thinly strapped bag, Agnes slipped and toiled, smashing continually through the snow’s glassy crust. The sharp ice pierced the crude leggings she’d made of a rough stole found in the priest’s bag and bloodied her shaking calves. By the time she clawed and scrambled to the hilltop, she was exhausted to the point of nausea and lay down to gasp for breath.

There was stillness, the whisper of snow grains driven along the surface of the world. It was the silence of before creation, the comfort of pure nothing, and she let herself go into it until, in that quiet, she was caught hold of by a dazzling sweetness. In the grip of this sudden, sumptuous bloom of feeling, Agnes rose and walked toward a poor cabin just behind the log church. Entering this new life, she felt a largeness move through her, a sense that she was essential to a great, calm design of horizonless meaning. There was the crooked-built church, the cabin silent as a shut mouth, the convent painted a blistering white—the scenery of Father Damien’s future.

Silence held.

In that period of regard, the unsettled intentions, the fears she felt, the exposure she already dreaded, faded to a fierce nothing, a white ring of mineral ash left after the water has boiled away. There would be times that she missed the ease of moving in her old skin, times that Father Damien was pierced by womanness and suffered. Still, Agnes was certain now that she had done the right thing. Father Damien Modeste had arrived here. The true Modeste who was supposed to arrive—none other. No one else.

DEATH ROBES

All great visions must suffer the test of the ordinary, and Agnes’s was immediate. She unlatched the door of the small tight-built cabin, her first rectory, and stood in the dim entry adjusting her eyes to the sadness. Just here, Damien’s predecessor, Father Hugo LaCombe, tough and well trained, one of the first, had died of a sweating fever. Upon the cabin’s floor a scatter of stiff photographs. Agnes picked up the card of a woman, perhaps a sister of Hugo’s, wearing a floral hat. His brother, cradling a gun. These people stared out, frozen in a bad dream. She stacked the pictures on the table. Touched an extra folded cassock, underclothing, a silver holy medal on a nail driven into the frosted gray wood next to the window. The bed made of sagging willow poles was covered with heavy quilts and buffalo robes, stripped beneath. Had someone at least taken out the linen? No, there it was, balled in a corner, rusted with the blood of poor Father Hugo and, even in the cold, smelling of shit and gall.

Father Damien didn’t want to pray. Nevertheless Agnes went down on her knees and spoke earnestly aloud. There was no answer but the howl of wind rattling shingles, the mice drifting in the eaves. There was no wood for a fire. No water but ice. Enough, she thought. Wearily, she climbed into Father Hugo’s deathbed. She wrapped herself tightly into the death robes, slept.

She dreamed first of black nails driven through the tender bloody sac of her heart. Dreamed second of Berndt’s trusting gaze. In a third dream, which lasted the rest of the night, Agnes ate and drank at an endless table. Boiled carrots. Foaming milk. Fresh, buttered potatoes in their jackets, thick stews of meat and onions. She woke more desperate with hunger than ever in her life, her stomach gnawing, pinching, her mouth still working on the rich imaginary meal. Some Catholic on the train had given her a bit of jerky, which she chewed still huddled in the quilts. There was no need to dress, as she’d slept in Father Damien’s clothes for warmth. There was no washbasin. She reached out, rubbed her teeth and face with a handful of snow sifted onto the sill of the ill-fitting window. She combed the tatters of her hair back with stiff fingers, swatted strings of dust from her arms and chest. She then bundled on the dead priest’s heavy black wool cloak and walked out.

MIRACLE OF THE MEAT

The nuns lived in a small white frame building of two rooms, one for eating and one for sleeping, pitilessly cold within. There were no sisters in sight, but on the rough board table Agnes spied a pot of tea steeping lukewarm on a towel. She drained it from the spout, then opened a cupboard and found a poor rock-hard bit of bread beside a thimble’s worth of raisins. The meal, however paltry, gave her the strength to walk over to the church, where the six nuns had dragged themselves to say their morning prayers.

Snow as fine as smoke blew in as she entered the church, but the nuns did not move. They knelt, hunched in cold, swathed in layers of patched wool, quiet as stones. There was only one parishioner in attendance, and in spite of the extremity of the cold and the tension of her first test in saying Mass, Agnes noticed her. The girl seemed, in her stiffness, to creak as she turned to watch. She stared as Father Damien walked to the nave of the church.

The girl’s nose jutted, her face was white and beak-thin, and her mouth was shaped by birth into a pale and twisted line. She stared at the priest with great, starved, black, disturbing eyes. Stared unblinking and with fixed aggressiveness. Young and scrawny as a new bird, she opened her mouth as though to shout, then shut it as Father Damien put out his hands to the women, the sisters, and held their hands and greeted them—the sight of their resigned and exhausted faces washed over him with a familiar tenderness.

“My dear sisters in Christ, my dear, dear sisters . . .”

They rose in surprise. Apparently, Father Damien wasn’t expected to arrive—thus the terrible disorder of the cabin. Their faces, gazing dull, were the maws of starved animals and their fingers were limp as wilted stalks. By the shape of their skulls, the wrinkled hands of privation, it was easy to see death was poking through their very skins. For the first time, now, Agnes was afraid, for she knew that the food she had eaten back in the convent was absolutely all they had.

“Let us pray,” Father Damien’s voice squeaked. Agnes tried to control the shaking and keep her voice low, but her tongue was thick with cold despair. She remembered to venerate the relic in the altar—what was it: splinters from the true cross? a filing from St. Peter’s manacles? perhaps a bit of bone, a slice of skin, a toe, an ear? What saint? How would she find out or ever know? It was the priest’s job to know. There was no altar boy, no vestments, and the chalice was humble pewter, but when Father Damien opened the sacristy and found fourteen holy wafers and a thread of wine, he turned in elation to the sisters.

“We have no choir”—he was already half delirious again with hunger—“but we will raise our best hymn! Body of Christ, blood of Christ, same here as in the richest cathedral. This is our cloth-of-gold.” He touched the burlap weave of the mantle, laid out on the altar stone. “This is our pearl-studded gospel.” He lovingly stroked the rag-bound book. “Our incense is God’s own breath—the wind through these rough walls!”

The women sighed together, all except for the one parishioner, the seething girl in a black scarf. She laughed out loud, screeched really, then coughed to contain her mirth. The nuns seemed numb to her. They prayed together and a cloud of breath stirred from their lips. Their hands were blistered with cold, their cheeks frostbitten and raw. The priest’s words were brave, but the sisters were at the razor edge of their endurance. They slumped against the wood of the pews, barely managed to hold themselves upright.

At least, now, the fire in the little tin stove had begun to warm the cabin of the church.

The Mass came to Agnes like memorized music. She had only to say the first words and all followed, ordered, instinctive. The phrases were in her and part of her. Once she began, the flow was like the river that had carried her to Little No Horse. In the silences between the parts of the ritual, Father Damien prayed for those women in his charge.

“
Quam oblationem, tu Deus, in omnibus quaesumus, benedictam . . .
” He crossed his breast five times, within those words, and the next: “
Qui pridie quam pateretur, accepit panem in sanctas ac venerabiles manus suas . . .
” And lifted his eyes and said the words “
Hoc est enim corpus meum,
” and the bread was flesh.

Of course it was, as it always was.

“
Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei novi et aeterni testamenti: mysterium fedei
. . .” The wine was blood.

And again, as she had before, the strange girl in the front pew emitted a sudden croak of laughter.

On her lips, in her mouth. Real and rich, heavy, good. Agnes choked with startled shock. She hesitated, put the food to her mouth again. Real! Real! Hunger roared in her as she broke the bread. Ate the flesh. Delivering the communion meal to her starving sisters, Agnes was caught in a panic of emotion. She heard nothing, saw nothing, went through the rest of Mass on reeling instinct. Was it really true and had they, as well, experienced what she’d felt? Was this something that happened, always, to priests? Did their part of the sacrament transubstantiate in real as well as metaphorical terms? Had the dry thin consecrated Host turned into a thick mouthful of raw, tender, bloody, sweet-tasting meat in the mouths of the sisters? And the wine to vital blood? And were they all full, as Agnes felt, satisfied and calm? They finished the Mass and stumbled back, holding one another by turns, all except for the black-eyed child, who abruptly left, quite alone, prompting Agnes to ask the nun nearest for the name of this striking person.

“She’s a Puyat,” said the sister. “Her name is Pauline. She is here every morning, most devout, but . . .” She paused as if to say something more, but only shrugged as though, after all, she was too weak to explain.

Once alone, Agnes went dizzy with questions.

Had Christ’s real presence entered them? Certainly, now, they were saved from the place of skulls, from the bones of death. Were they fed with the fat of the wheat and honey out of the rock? Was this just part of the ritual or was it miraculous?

That night, she composed Father Damien’s first letter.

March 1912

Gracious Leader of the Faith,