The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (29 page)

“Father Damien,” said Gregory one night, as they laughed over some clumsiness, “why don’t we stay out here?”

“I believe we’d worry Sister Hildegarde” was Damien’s answer, and he quickly dumped snow on the fire. As they tramped the miles back, Agnes felt a sting of wishful desire. Nanapush had taught her how to build a brush shelter to conserve the heat of the fire, and the night was warm and starry. The whiskey gave her the temporary illusion of gliding power. She was on the verge of stopping there, making a new camp, and she even paused, turned, and opened her mouth to speak.

There was Father Wekkle, struggling behind her with a hopeful, bearish serenity. After he barged forward, he would stop, breath on his fingers, arrange his scarf, shrug, and surge forward again. He worked his way along in a comical intensity, and Agnes felt her heart squeeze at his endearing earnestness and cheer. Often, even in his snowshoes, he managed to break through the crust of snow. He had a start-stop kind of steadiness about him and kept on lunging forward. She saw the white flash of his teeth when he grinned at her, and she turned back onto the path, mumbling to herself, Be sensible!

So they returned, propped their snowshoes against the sides of the cabin, rekindled the fire that Mary Kashpaw had banked and left, and rolled into their beds. For a while she slept, but then, waking in the dark, a fury of discomfort seized Agnes, as though her skin was being stung with red-hot needles. She prickled all over, and she prayed for help in wrestling with her thoughts. By dawn, most of them were subdued.

Most, not all.

She had to touch him. There was no help for it. There was a faint, sweet, brown to Father Wekkle’s skin, a fading suntan, almost golden. His hands were broad, sensitive, well-padded, with wide, spreading, generous thumbs. He was good with a hammer, and one of his most winsome qualities was his sunny energy for carpentry work. He cleaned and oiled and sharpened the contents of his tool chest every few days. Agnes struggled for a while longer, angry and despairing of her need just to touch him by accident, just once! Be sensible, she told herself whenever her thoughts lighted on his hair, brown and wavy, growing out of its cut in swirls.

She was sensible until the night the books fell.

There were times she woke too early, and so as not to wake Father Wekkle, she read the spines of her side of the double wall of books stacked between them. Among others, she had given herself the Russians, all of George Eliot, her beloved Aquinas, Augustine, St. Theresa of Avila’s
Interior Castle
, and a two-volume set of the lives of the saints. This last was to atone for the other volumes, only four, of Colette—though, after all, François Mauriac had said that her voluptuousness led the soul to God. She had covered those books in butcher paper and changed the titles to Latin. She also kept the strange assortment of donated books to read through and decide upon—accounts of personal voyages were popular among them, as well as outdated medicinal or fashion advice. Mauriac was on Agnes’s side and also Proust, William James, and others she was confident of displaying. Stendhal, Hugo, and all of the Greeks were stacked on Wekkle’s side. Plus the histories of states and provinces and the mesmerizing horrors of a collection of Jesuit relations, which had once belonged to Father Hugo.

She knew the wall of books by each title. After the lantern was out, at night, she put out her hand and traced the stamped letters on the spines and the embossed ridges. Some of her newer books were very plainly bound, but she loved to run her fingers over them, too. Their heavily woven cloth covers were of a texture pleasingly dry and soft to her touch. Even when she was exhausted, each night she brushed the books between her bed and Father Wekkle’s, and she held her palm upon them until the books warmed to her touch. It seemed to her, listening to the other priest’s calm breath, that the books between them were a third, sympathetic, entity. For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged. Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinements, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. Hers was merely what it was, and her aches over it as well, but in all of the books that composed the wall between the two priests, and in all of the stories she’d ever read, she never had come across the exact example of what she contemplated doing to Father Wekkle. Nor could she imagine his reacting to her touch with anything but mystery and horror. Therefore, she took her hand away from the wall.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Father Wekkle was a sleeper who thrashed. He slept in a moleskin robe that his mother had sewn for him and insisted he wear up north in the bitter wild. Every night he put it on with mixed gratitude and embarrassment. As he was sensitive to the cold, its warmth made him thankful. At the same time, as his mother could not bear plain things and had sewn it with a ruffle, he made very certain that no other human ever saw him in it. As he slept, he warmed, and as he got warmer, he flailed in the moleskin gown and kicked away his covers, tossed and muttered. Also, he dreamed, and his dreams were always action masterpieces. All he’d left undone or half done during the day, he’d finish. More than that, he’d start new projects or he’d make parish visits, leaping high in his snowshoes and skating, even flying, to the rescue of those stranded from the presence of the Host. All that he imagined, he acted out and he had, many times, awakened Agnes. He’d also kicked or struck the book wall, making it lean so perilously that it sometimes had to be rebuilt by Father Damien, who could not help remember Agnes’s convent days as Cecilia and the careful construction of the birdbath containing only the brickworks word, Fleisch, and now again the wall she made containing thousands, perhaps millions of words, and still in her mind only that one word.

The moleskin robe stuck to Father Wekkle when he sweated, twisting around his hips so that he sometimes dreamed erotically. He had, in fact, that night, been the victim of a most intense and mysterious veiled female whose lips, only, were revealed by a small, round hole in the cloth. Her lips moved, mouthing the words
Be sensible
, words that require the most seductive motions of the lips. The advice aroused him and he lunged for her impatiently and in his sudden movement toppled the books.

In the stillness of the night, they were a skidding avalanche. One struck Agnes full in the face and she started awake, heart pounding. Groping around herself in panic, she touched him. His hand grasped hers. They didn’t move. The collapse of books had also torn down the blanket divider, so the moon-pale light from the window on Gregory’s side of the cabin washed across their beds. Raggedly breathing, hearts quickened, blinking, hands touching, they poised. If either had simply withdrawn a hand they would have laughed, rebuilt the wall of books. But they continued, in their staged paralysis, to search each other’s dim-lighted faces. Both were desperate for clues—what was to happen? At the same moment, both imperceptibly leaned forward. Brightness from the full moon rested evenly upon their hair, but their faces were in shadow so that, as Gregory tipped his chin questingly forward into that final space, he felt that he ducked into a cave. Once he entered that half sphere of shadow, he was lost. She was lost. They lay down together among the scattered books. Into Gregory’s mind, there surged the awful and appalling joy of knowing he was one of those whom the Church darkly warned against, the ones who lay with men as with women. The sin he would commit would be equal to the sin of murder, one of those sins crying out to heaven for vengeance.

In Agnes’s mind, a willing despair to be discovered. Her nipples burned against the cloth and her body slipped its boundaries of skin. Darkness sifted through her and she rose toward him, light, powerful, and calm. Gregory touched her breast through the night shift, and in a dreamlike reversal of who he feared he was, he held her like a raft in a torrent. They spoke now, their whispers incoherent. They undressed each other slowly, with formal innocence, shocked into foolishness at the pleasure of each discovery. Gregory had no experience at all of a woman’s nakedness, and the final sight of her, strong and unbound, washed in silver, astonished him so that he could merely sit with her for a time and touch her as one might a fabulous animal before suddenly, at her gesture, he spread her thighs open and entered the shadow between.

In surprise, once they began to move, they sighed in relief and smiled, delighted and aghast, to find themselves utterly safe and at peace. That was the strange and unexpected component of their passion—how safe, how ordinary, how blessedly normal it felt. For the next few days they lived in a daze, but nothing changed. In their work they were more zealous, more dutiful. They drove themselves harder than before. Secure in the night, they took no chances in the day and were remote but friendly with each other. Weeks accumulated in which neither spoke of what was happening. Only, in the depth of the night, with the window curtained, they made love with a charged tenderness that left them faint and weeping. Before falling asleep, they set things straight and returned to either side of their wall of books. Each whispered good night to the spines, the massed pages, then lay still underneath the heavy patched wool of the quilts of army blankets.

The snow melted into the earth and they walked now, through mud and swollen mashkiig, to bring communion to the laid-up devout, to instruct for various sacraments. Returning one cold spring day, they paused to rest on the soft old winter-dusty grass. They sat down silently. Gregory tore off a piece of the bannock given to them, and Agnes accepted the bread from his hands and ate. The massed reeds in the slough were a scorched and radiant yellow. The sun shot down from a half-gray sky, picking out the birch with a fierce light.

“I belong to you,” said Gregory to Agnes. “I love you.”

When she said the same to him, the bread went dry on their tongues and they felt spreading from those words a branching fury of impossible difficulty.

BERNADETTE’S CONFESSION

As Father Damien hustled across the yard to hear confessions, he saw that the nuns had frozen their pump again and were using Mary Kashpaw as their beast of burden. He watched her as he walked, saw her stagger as she rounded the corner to the back door of the convent, a great pole laid across her shoulders, two buckets hanging down from either end. He made a note to stop the sisters from overusing the girl’s strength, and passed at once into the church. There were a few parishioners hunched in contemplation near the jerry-built box of boards and blankets in which he heard confessions. He sat in the middle box, on a small cushioned stool, and bent to the muslin shadow. A discreet cough. The sinner spoke.

“What is it when you know of a sin and do nothing?”

“That is a sin of silence.”

“So it is a sin.”

“Yes.”

“Then I must confess it,” said the woman unwillingly.

In a few sentences, then, the woman whose voice was familiar to Damien—it was Bernadette’s—confirmed the truth of what he had long ago suspected of Napoleon Morrissey. He heard the rest of her confession in a numb, unfused state of tension. He absolved Bernadette, heard the other confessions. Once they were all finished, he continued to sit in the little booth, in his lap the soft, old, battered breviary that had belonged to Father Hugo. At last, he believed he knew the murderer of Napoleon Morrissey, and he pitied and loved the killer—his own Mary Kashpaw. According to Bernadette, Napoleon Morrissey had forced himself on Mary Kashpaw, most probably raping her. It followed in his mind that Mary Kashpaw had the strength to have strangled Napoleon with the cunningly wrought necklace of thorns. As for her hands, they were tough as leather mitts, scarred, and roped with calluses. If the barbed-wire rosary tore her palms, it was impossible to tell anymore. And yet, why would Mary Kashpaw construct such a dark-spirited artifact?

Agnes put her fingertips to her eyes, kneaded her forehead with her knuckles. She thought of Mary Kashpaw digging, digging, and her heart went hollow. Yet she was so tired that she could feel only a pale, exhausted pity for the angry confusion of that violated girl. Perhaps too much feeling had withered her heart and now it was a frail, paper husk. Whirling with frustration, she jumped from the confessional and walked back to the cabin. There, she began to work, cleaning with a mad zeal similar to Mary Kashpaw’s. She shoveled ashes out of the stove, then fetched a pot of blacking and painted it, opening the doors to let the spring air carry off the sharp odor of the paint. She worked on her papers until between her hands she snapped a pen. Then she cleaned up the spilled ink, dusted her books. Muttering and on the verge of weeping, she suddenly flung herself onto the bed. In a moment, she fell into a well of thick unconsciousness.

She was still asleep when Father Wekkle and Mary Kashpaw returned from a wood-hauling trip. Mary stamped down the snow for him too, broke the trail. Sometimes he teased her, called her Mary Stamper, and the big girl flushed, although whether she liked it or was embarrassed by the name there was no telling. While Father Wekkle went back to the church to set it all to rights and lock it for the night, Mary Kashpaw quietly drew near to Father Damien. For a long moment, she looked down at him with solemn watchfulness. Then she pulled a rough blanket from the back of a chair, shook out the folds, and secured it around the sleeping priest’s body with awkward, firm, tucks. Lastly, she plucked loose the laces of Father Damien’s boots and stealthily eased them off and then stripped the socks from the priest’s long, narrow, tender white feet. She set the boots beside the bed, hung the socks over each toe. She tucked the end of the blanket over the vulnerable feet, and then blew out the candle before she walked out to sleep upon the broken bales of hay, within the questions of the owls and the tremble of mice, and behind the barred door of the shed.

THE CLOUD

“How many ways are we damned?” said Agnes into the black air.