The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (20 page)

“My winnings go to a very good cause, as you know.”

“I do know that,” said Father Damien, holding her hand tighter, lovingly, “and even if you were the stingiest lady in the world I would forgive you. How are your boys? How’s Bonita?”

The question, as always, elicited an extremely complex list of their doings, and an analysis of their probable future doings as well as a comprehensive survey of grandchildren and their doings and all of her pride and complicated plans. When she had finished with her report, she made a swift exit. And so it was that she, too, avoided a certain portion of her destiny.

Father Jude emerged from his car bearing a plastic lidded cup in its cup holder and a bag, already showing grease marks, containing three rounds of hot fry bread.

“You missed her, missed Lulu!” said Father Damien, as soon as Jude sat down to eat the fry bread. It was still hot, soft as butter inside. Father Jude had sprinkled a little salt on the golden crust, and he didn’t much care whom he’d missed. He just wanted to eat.

“Lulu doesn’t let me use salt,” sighed Damien, watching the other priest’s enjoyment. “She is afraid it will affect my heart.”

“She worries about you.”

“Ah, yes,” sighed Damien. “I worry over her. And our sisters, too. You know that tired old joke about hearing nuns’ confessions, like getting stoned to death with popcorn? Not the case, not here. My sisters are robust women. Full of juice.”

“There have been scandals?” Father Jude asked.

Father Damien took this question very seriously. “I prefer to call such incidents,” he reflected, “profound exchanges of human love. Mary Kashpaw was one, in fact, whom love did call. She acted upon her passion. After all, we live on earth. We are created of the earth. The Ojibwe word for the human vagina is derived from the word for earth. A profound connection, don’t you think?”

“Do you condone such irregular behavior, then?” Father Jude leaned forward, wiping his lips, disguising his surprise at the old man’s casual use of a term most priests of his era entirely avoided.

“I do not condone,” said Damien. “It would be more accurate to say that I”—here he paused to choose the word—“cherish. Yes. I cherish such occurrences, or help my charges to, at least. Unless they keep them safely in their hearts, how else can they give them up? I tenderly cherish such attractions the way I look fondly upon a child’s exuberant compulsion to play. There is nothing more important, yet it is insignificant. God will still be there when the child is exhausted, eh?”

“And the attraction? The fall? The sin?”

“Cherish, as I said.”

Father Jude shook his head. “I don’t understand you.”

“You have never loved?” Father Damien asked.

“In the sense I gather you imply? No,” said Jude.

“You are only half joking,” said Damien. “You find my lack of moral outrage somewhat strange.”

“Somewhat appalling,” said Father Jude. “To put it another way, I wonder whether living so far away from Fargo hasn’t diluted your principles?”

Damien looked at the younger priest as though he were a marvel. “Truly!”

Jude raised his eyebrows and smiled to dismiss his remark, but as he spoke his gaze still rested curiously on Damien.

“I don’t mean to imply that Fargo is a stronghold of virtue, it is just that certain norms of behavior are taken for granted. Right. Wrong. These are simply distinguished. Black is black and white is white.”

“The mixture is gray.”

“There are no gray areas in my philosophy,” said Father Jude.

“I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.”

“Our job is to make it less so.”

“Our job is to understand it.”

“And in understanding”—Father Jude looked severely troubled—“to excuse immoral actions?”

“Never those that hurt people.”

“Sex hurts,” said Father Jude, simply.

“Have you seen a doctor?” said Damien.

The two paused, their breathing sharpened, surprised that they had so quickly fallen into such a pleasurable dispute.

“I was not speaking from personal experience,” Father Jude affected an irritation he did not feel. He hid a slight smile. “I should have put it more directly. Intercourse outside the boundaries of marriage hurts the order of things. Creates disorder. Breaks traditions, vows, families. Creates such . . . problems.”

Father Damien shifted in his seat and frowned. “That is true. Anything, though, of a large nature will create problems. The more
outré
forms of religious experience, for instance.”

“Mystical experiences?”

“Exactly.”

“So we have come around to that.” Father Miller leaned forward and looked expectantly, with sudden openness, into Father Damien’s face.

“May I suggest,” said Father Miller, “that I set up the tape recorder?” He opened a plastic briefcase, displayed the small box hardly bigger than the palm of his hand. Father Damien peered over his glasses at the box, which Jude Miller arranged with a careful flourish. The older priest cleared his throat, shifted in his chair, and then fell silent as Father Jude pressed a button. Listening to the faint dry rasp of tape turning on a wheel, he stared into the intimate puzzle of leafless branches outside the window.

“Let’s get right down to it,” said Damien suddenly. He rubbed his hands together. Sat up alert in his chair. “What have you got? First give me the source, then the story.”

“All right.” Father Jude leaned forward, fingers in a thoughtful curl. “There was in your convent a Sister Dympna Evangelica who served with Sister Leopolda and witnessed, as she said in her testimony, a case of stigmata bestowed by Leopolda upon a young protégée or novice.”

“What?”

Father Damien started, fell back in his chair, wiped his hands across his face and then, as though to smooth away some inner hysteria, wiped again. Still, he could not contain a wild bark of disbelief.

“This postulant . . . named Marie?”

“Yes.”

Damien had trouble forming words around his tongue, which seemed suddenly in rage to have swollen inside his mouth. He could only whisper, “Marie, Marie, Star of the Sea! She will shine when we’ve burned off the dark corrosion.” Damien tried to contain his reaction so that he could properly explain the trauma of the event, which he knew well, having been a confessor to that very Marie. His voice suddenly cracked out, angry.

“She bore wounds all right, appropriate and cruel. But they were not created by the prayerful intercession of Leopolda!”

“What then!” Jude was caught up in the drama.

“Leopolda took a fork and stabbed the girl!”

“Impossible!”

“I have”—looking suddenly chastened, Damien pressed his hand to his lips—“just violated the secrecy of the confessional.”

“There may be an extenuating . . .” Father Jude ruffled his notebook, clicked his pen. “Sister Dympna says that she was there—”

“Oh Dympna”—Father Damien waved his hand in despairing disgust—“never had the brains of an egg.” His breath caught in his throat and he began to pant, sweating. A watery weakness came over him. “I have seen what I have seen,” he declared. “I have heard the truth.”

Trying not to prompt him, lest he influence the story, or again call Father Damien’s scruples about the confessional’s privacy into question, Father Miller maintained silence and kept his eyes downcast. He was rewarded by a charged burst of information, laid out in staccato.

“It was during my early years on the reservation that I heard her confession. Marie. She slammed into the confessional. Had a way of doing that.
Father, forgive me for I have sinned
, she said,
my last confession was such and such ago.
Then hesitated. I said, ‘Of course, what is it my child?’ thinking it was hard to tell me. But she was just gathering her words. She had a peculiar habit of expression. Overly mature. Maybe even bizarre.
When I went there
, she said,
I knew the dark fish must rise.

“ ‘Went where? What fish?’ I asked.

“She continued on, putting it in colors and flavors, you know, like a mad person. Making pictures of what she saw as a monumental undertaking.
Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard
.

“ ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ I said, ‘I know you’re very devout.’

“
I was going up the hill with the black-robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I’d make a saint. They never had a girl from this reservation they had to pray to. But they’d have me. And I’d be dressed in pure gold.

“ ‘My dear,’ I gently said, ‘to be a saint is more than wearing pretty clothes.’ That set her off.

“
You can’t tell me nothing
, she raged.
Now listen. She’s a bitch of Jesus Christ
, she said.
You’d better hear about this nun.

“ ‘Of whom do you speak?’ I asked gently. Her response was loud and brutal.

“
Leopolda
, she yelled at the carved screen between us.

“ ‘Leopolda!’

“I jumped up, hit my head. I suppose my sudden interest must have shocked her, for she quieted and in a low voice continued her story with an intensity that I remember to this day.
Threw me in the closet with her dead black overboot, where he had taken refuge in the tip of her darkest toe.
She was, you see, speaking of the devil. This girl had understood before anyone, perhaps more deeply than we now can see, the true nature of Leopolda’s faith.”

“And what was that?”

Jude Miller had asked his question too soon, however, for Father Damien was still in the past, in the close embrace of the confessional.

“Marie Lazarre was cast from Bernadette Morrissey’s care into an ill-concocted family of drunks. Still, she’d turned out pious and developed a special bond with the nun in question. As a result, she was asked to come and visit the convent, to stay there as a postulant if she so chose, under the special tutelage of Leopolda. Later, in my confessional, she described the ascent up the hill. Once she entered the convent, there was apparently no special notice given to her by the other sisters. Leopolda put her straight to work, baking bread, and then there was the incident of the cup. The poor girl, all nerves, dropped a cup. When it rolled underneath the stove, she went down on the floor to get it.

“
Top of the stove. Kettle. Lessons. She was steadying herself with the iron poker.
What happened next was this: Leopolda held this girl down on the floor with her foot and poured scalding water on her back, telling her not to make a move or a sound.
I will boil him from your mind if you make a peep, by filling up your ear.
”

Father Miller winced, shifted in his chair uncomfortably, made a slight sound of protest, but Father Damien kept talking.

“Sometime after that so-called lesson, the two were removing loaves of bread from the ovens when some sort of argument occurred in which the girl, who by now had good reason to hate and fear Leopolda, called her down, as they say here.”

“Called her down?”

“Challenged her.
Bitch of Jesus Christ! Kneel and beg! Lick the floor!
That was when our candidate for sainthood stabbed the girl’s hand with the fork and cracked her head with the poker, knocking her unconscious!”

Father Miller looked aghast, but also skeptical.

“Was this witnessed? Documented?”

“Unfortunately, your witness, Dympna, entered just after the blow, while Marie was unconscious. Dympna was apparently persuaded by Leopolda’s story. Our holy woman told the other sisters that she’d prayed for the girl to receive the holy stigmata as a sign of God’s love, and that the girl had swooned when that first mark appeared. Marie woke confused, but soon understood the gist of things and went along with it until she could make her way out of the convent. She returned to her home, married not long after, has been known ever since as a solid and even wise member of her community. Marie. Star of the Sea. Marie Kashpaw.”

The two men sat quietly together, the tape recorder humming between them. Jude Miller put his hand out to turn it off, but then withdrew his fingers. The windows were halfway open and the storms pulled up already, the screens down. In the gooseberry thicket just outside, a bird’s whistle sounded, piercingly sweet. The breeze shifting through the screen was thin and dry. Father Damien now reached forward and punched off the tape recorder. Relieved, exhausted, he slumped in his chair. Closed his eyes. Before Father Miller could comment in any way or question him further, the old priest sank into a sleep so profound it looked like death. Father Miller watched intently until he saw telltale movements—a tiny twitch of Father Damien’s eyelid, a slow wheezing intake of breath. He worried about the open window, but apparently the old priest liked fresh air, so he quietly covered Father Damien with a light blanket. Then Jude Miller continued to sit, watching over his elder, wishing for a cigarette, though he had quit twenty years before. He wanted to replay the tape, form queries, ask everything that needed to be asked, for the troubling story raised more questions than it answered.

An early gnat landed on the old man’s nose and swatting at it, Damien roused himself enough to quit his sleep. Father Damien frowned, annoyed when he realized he’d fallen asleep in the presence of the other priest. Standing, Father Damien waved assistance aside, and took high, tiny childlike steps into the hallway of the house of his old age. He was heading for his tiny bedroom. Just before entering, he turned to the younger priest in a crack of darkness from the doorway. He waved his fingers, beneficent, as though dispensing drops of holy oil.

Father Jude blinked. In that instant a strange thing happened. He saw, inhabiting the same cassock as the priest, an old woman. She was a sly, pleasant, contradictory-looking female of stark intelligence. He shook his head, craned forward, but no, there was Father Damien again, tottering into the comfort of his room.

The rectory was made of the same whitewashed brick and thickly slabbed on interior plaster as the convent and church. Entering, after a long walk through the grounds of the church and the cemetery, Father Miller paused—the place held the tranquil mouse-nest scent of all rectories in Jude’s experience, an odor composed of male sweat and sweet deodorant, cabbage-y cooking, Old Spice, and the faintly sour breath of sexual loneliness. Someone had thought to build the place with tall rectangular windows—these admitted at late dusk a singular golden light that rose, as though emitted by the prairie town beneath the hill, and flooded through the entire house in a wave. The gift of that radiance would quickly be followed by darkness, noise, the rev of slow truck engines circling below, and the throb of sub-woofers on the faintly moving air.