The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (48 page)

“I’m no help,” said Father Damien, “I won’t tell you what to do. You wouldn’t listen if I did.”

“I’m not asking you to dissuade me,” said Father Jude, gathering his pride. “I suppose, anyway, it’s not a place a priest should likely venture.”

“I venture.”

“Do you go with her too?”

“Of course,” said Father Damien. “The years between us have shrunk away. Since I retired from my active role in the Church to write my reports, Lulu has been kind enough to relieve my solitude with occasional trips to the Bingo Palace. There, we sit among friends, enjoying the workings of chance as we sip on cold drinks. We listen to the gossip, the bragging over grandchildren and lamenting of the actions of grown sons and daughters. She listens and I smile. She does not judge and I need not absolve, for after all these years my forgiveness is taken for granted.”

Father Jude nodded, flexed his hands, sighed wearily. “I should just go to bed and forget about this. But I know I won’t. I’ll end up going with her and going to the devil.”

He said the last extravagantly and earned a disapproving frown from Damien. “She is good,” said the old priest, “one day you will understand this. She is goodness itself.”

Three hours passed in which he thought she’d forgotten all about him. Then she came back and asked him again, just to make sure, and she brushed against him when she did this and he said, in that instant, yes he would. He got into her car. As soon as he did so, he realized that he’d never let a woman drive him anywhere before. He should have seen it coming, then, as he rode along in the sun-struck, dark, red seat in unaccustomed passivity. He’d never been so alone with a woman, except in the anonymity of the confessional. And now that it was just the two of them in so small a space, he wanted to drive forever. And then they were at the Bingo Palace.

“I’ll stake you,” she said, purchasing a bingo package. They sat down together at a long table with ashtrays in front of a big-screen TV on a stage. Not long, and the numbers rolled off the announcer’s lips. On B-10, Father Jude’s mouth went dry. His glasses fogged on G-40, and by the time they’d cleared and he saw the possibilities his lips were buzzing, numb, and he dabbed delicately on the square O-63.

“Someone else bingoed.” She tore off the flimsy sheet of numbers and tossed it away. Then she asked him what she’d got him here to ask him, solo and in her power: “What are you doing with Father Damien?”

The implication being, What are you doing
to
him.

“Interviewing him,” said Father Jude.

“He looks tired.” Lulu dabbed smoothly, marking a number he’d missed. “But he also looks”—and here she stamped his paper just a bit harder—“stronger. He actually looks stronger and healthier than I’ve seen him in quite a while. So whatever you’re interviewing him about . . .”

“Church business.”

“Seems he likes to talk about Church business then. What kind of business?”

Somehow, the way she asked, conversationally and distractedly, as though she had a perfect right to ask and know, left him undefended. He told her. Horrified later, he couldn’t remember the exact words and all that went with them, but he did know he’d treated her like a confidante and colleague. Not just telling but discussing the implications of what was to become of whatever findings he made, and even worrying about the difficulty of establishing a literal or factual truth when there were opposing versions of Leopolda’s life and story, when the life—as opposed to the evidence of miraculous interventions—did not add up.

“Should I be telling you all of this?” he asked at one point.

“Why not?” she asked calmly.

He couldn’t think of a reason, and then he couldn’t think of anything. He was looking at her helplessly. He couldn’t look away.

“You’ve got it bad,” she said, diagnosing his fever like a compassionate doctor.

He mumbled agreement and the great burden of his feeling pressed up all around him in a buzz of noise. Saying it lifted away the burden of strangeness. Relieved, he smiled at her, and then she was staring straight into his eyes, with an easy, knowing sympathy that made his blood hum in his ears.

LEOPOLDA’S PASSION

Father Jude Miller had always loved to read about saints—the first and oldest of course somewhat apocryphal, the stories structured to end with ingenious tortures, the saints even in agony making clever retorts to butchers and emperors. As well, he loved the more contemporary saints whose lives obtained of more possibility of emulation—he marveled at their sense of sacrifice and fervor. He found himself dwelling on the symmetry of the saints’ passions, or stories, on their simplicity of line. He was having trouble with passion, from the Latin
pati
, to suffer, defined in the Catholic Dictionary as
a written account of the sufferings and death of one who laid down his life for the faith
. He was persuaded that the God he knew, at least, wanted him to write a passion, a recognition for this very complex person, Leopolda.

Besides that, he wanted to get the whole thing over with, this mission. As soon as possible, he would then leave the priesthood, immediately marry Lulu, get old with her. Wait, they were old already. They would die in each other’s arms, then. He must concentrate. He turned back to the task of describing Leopolda.

With some dismay, in the welter of files and note cards in fans and toppling stacks, Father Jude understood that to tell the story as a story was to pull a single thread, only, from the pattern of this woman’s life, leaving the rest—the beautiful and brutal tapestry of contradictions—to persist in the form of a lie.

Still, he tried.

Sister Leopolda of Little No Horse was born in extremely humble circumstances and during a time when accurate birth and death records were not kept, especially for families of wanderers among the Ojibwe, Cree, and
métis
families of the plains frontier. Although only sporadically exposed to the teachings of the Church, her piety was marked from a very young age.

Here, he stopped, shuffling through his papers for examples noted during the brief period, especially, when she had lived in Argus with relatives. She was spared during a tornado that had ripped the town apart. Though she attributed her survival to prayer and to the rigid defense of her virginity, an elderly man who, as a child in that family, had been lifted with her into the roil of air that same day, said otherwise:
She used to cuff me around, slap me, scream, if that’s what you call praying.
Yet there had also been stories of her fervid attendance at Holy Mass. She was unflaggingly pious. Though Father Damien remembered their first encounter in the church as disturbing, others reported a dull metallic glow surrounded her when she was lost in prayer, and the strong, resinous scent of burning pine pitch, not unpleasant, filled the air when she spoke out loud the sincere act of contrition.

She had a great deal to be contrite about, Father Jude thought, so why was she then rewarded with spiritual favors? Not his place to figure out, he told himself, and continued writing.

Many conversions took place as a result of her example of continual prayer. During what others have called her “marathon adorations,” in which she knelt for hours, sometimes whole days, eventually consecutive days, before the Blessed Host, she was in a state of ecstasy almost tangible to those who approached to touch her. Many reported that they were overwhelmed with a poignant sense of peacefulness, or that, holding a hand lightly on her shoulder, they were able to close their eyes and clearly visualize the answers to their problems and follow the progress of their prayers out the stovepipe and over the roof of the church, off the tips of the leaves, dodging the clouds and away into the sky.

Father Jude Miller put down his pen and dropped his head into his hands. True, but others had said she left a black stain like oil where her knees pressed for all of those days. During the time of her longest confinement or trance, the rigid fast that Father Damien had revealed as no visionary journey of the spirit but a dangerous case of lockjaw, he had been told, this from Dympna, that voices were heard behind the closed door of her cell. Voices arguing, low demonic growls, hideous moans. And yet when the door was opened there would be only Leopolda, bones and skin underneath the coverlet, eyes staring through the roof.

She was accepted as a novice at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Little No Horse, and there she proceeded to raise great sums of money for the improved comfort of her sisters by giving missionary talks throughout the region. During these speeches, she would often become inspired to such a degree that others were moved to extreme acts of generosity. When she did return to the convent, she was physically and mentally exhausted, but tried her best to continue her studies in Church history and catechism, and to work toward the improvement of her soul.

He had to note, somewhere, what a trial she was to others and where her piety became terrific and strange. And, too, what to say about the deadly conversion she had effected with Quill, the useless baptisms she’d wrought on the defenseless dead, not to mention her amalgam of ancient practice with Catholic tradition and the skulls she dragged for years behind the Virgin of the Serpents, dragged by way of pierced back and arms, until they pulled free, shredding her. . . .

In an attempt to reconcile the two worlds from which Leopolda drew spiritual sustenance, the young novice mistakenly, but with a fervent heart and pure intentions, attempted to graft new branches onto the tree of Catholic tradition.

Father Jude hummed with approval for his metaphor, imagined the great rooted base of an oak spreading wide and the branches reaching hungrily toward light, one among them boldly colored, beaded entirely, and ribboned. He leaned back into the supports of his wooden chair and closed his eyes. Suddenly, he saw that he was mistaken. The picture shifted. The tree was beaded all the way down to the center of the earth and the branch of his own beliefs, the dogma and history of the Catholic Church not even a branch but a twig not strong enough for a bird to perch on, just a weak and slender shoot. He rubbed his eyes and resumed his place in Leopolda’s story.

When her efforts to meld the two cultures failed, she chose decisively for the one true church and diverted the fever in her soul to the zeal of conversion. She was assiduous in her attempts to lead her people to the knowledge of the Holy Trinity, and used whatever means were at hand to effect enlightenment. Sometimes, it is true, she overstepped the bounds that may be termed proper. These were crimes of passion for the faith, however, and as she continued in her growth she began to understand just how to channel the great zeal she felt into more effective ploys. While in Argus, North Dakota, she took her perpetual vows and then returned to Little No Horse to continue her missionary work among her own people, one of whom she had murdered—

Father Jude paused, blinked at the word, then shook himself, stared fixedly at his pen, and continued writing fiercely.

Granted, she killed out of revenge for his unwanted sexual attentions, but she actually used a sacred rosary to strangle him. Plus she bore his child and then repudiated the girl—no—lived near and tortured her! Leopolda poured boiling water from a kettle onto the girl’s back and then, in an act of shocking viciousness she brained the child with an iron poker and stabbed a hole—

He jumped out of his chair in extreme agitation and began to pace back and forth behind his desk. All this even without Lulu’s testimony, without the children Leopolda had bruised and, maybe worse, grievously humiliated in her classroom, the barbarous use she made of shame, anger, sarcasm—all poisons of the spirit, which she possessed every bit as much as the spirit’s gifts. Because of Sister Leopolda, and Lulu had laughed saying this about her teacher, she’d bathed for six weeks in Hilex water to see if her skin would bleach. Because of Leopolda, children endured memories of ear-ringing slaps, of uglier blows, of the jeering fun she made of their poverty and innocence.

So many know God who never would have! Jude argued with himself, hearing the counterargument. So many turned away from God, because the messenger was frightful. He could not write other than the truth, of course, what had he been thinking? Why this deep thirst to make a saint of this appalling woman? Perhaps the miracles were false concoctions, as many are, or they were simply phenomena unexplainable by what we know of physical science. Then again, perhaps they were true miracles. A tremor of frustration shook him. He closed his eyes and into his mind there fell again the image of the intricately beaded oak tree. He must remember to tell Damien, he thought, and allowed his thoughts to relax in a welcome diversion.

Father Damien. The old priest had fixed himself in Jude’s bland emotional landscape as the first interesting, though irritating, feature in a long while, and then of course Lulu had followed. But he wouldn’t think of her. He set his thoughts on the series of conversations he’d taped over the past few weeks. Placing Father Damien in the context of the writing he was embarked on, he realized that Damien’s story was not only fascinating in itself, but also probably revealed now for the first time to him, Father Jude.

There was Father Damien’s incredible beginning, the years of starvation and disease, the tireless love he had shown in pushing through slough and bush to give solace where he could. Damien had not shirked from physical labor, either, or the tedium of raising money for the Church or for the poor. He had learned the language of the Ojibwe and continued to translate hymns and prayers, even before Vatican II. There was a special sweetness in Father Damien’s relationships with his people. When he spoke, especially of Nanapush and Lulu, the warm humor of his love radiated out. His stories were intriguing—the salvation via Eucharistic corporealization—what to make of that? Then there were the visitation by the snakes, the voices, the continual devilish botherment and baiting of Father Damien.