The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (15 page)

Kashpaw displayed his arm, a short, thick white scar.

“Right to the bone,” said Margaret in satisfaction.

“Have you confessed your sin?” Father Damien asked, irritated by this woman’s smug ferocity.

“What sin?” she answered. “He deserved it.”

“Dispensing punishment is God’s task and right,” Damien went on. “In all ways a good spouse is gentle.”

“And slow,” said Nanapush solemnly to Mashkiigikwe, “and takes his time where it counts, and . . .”

She turned away and hummed, as though suppressing a yawn.

“If the priest won’t say it,” Nanapush lost patience at last, “I will say it. Kashpaw! You have too many wives. You’ll have to get rid of at least three!”

Kashpaw probably expected this outburst, for now, with a dramatic pause, he concentrated on his pipe, drew it from its case of red cloth and fitted its bowl to the carved stem. Once he had done this, everyone around him fell silent and in the vacant quiet the coals of the fire hissed and flared. He loaded the rose-red bowl with pinches of tobacco, then proceeded to light the pipe and to draw meditatively on the stem, emitting two thin streams from the corners of his mouth.

At last, he set down his pipe and looked reproachfully at his visitors. His expression slowly registered convincing bewilderment. “Wives?” he said. “Who is calling these fine ladies my wives?” Craftily, he feigned insult, knowing that he could be considered in violation of certain laws, not of his tribe’s making, but of the government’s. “I offer shelter to these women beneath my roof.”

“And I,” said Nanapush, unable to contain himself around Mashkiigikwe, turning to her, “I offer shelter to you in my bed. And since my cabin has a leaky roof, I’ll offer to lie down over you to keep the rain off.”

He looked directly at Mashkiigikwe, who pressed her lips together in pretend fury and then covered herself with indifference.

Kashpaw ignored this absurd sweet talk and addressed the priest. “I am still interested in this god who kills off his favorites, wipes them from the earth. I would like to know”—here he eyed Damien with frank curiosity—“what makes you walk behind this Jesus?”

This question of great simplicity caused the priest’s thoughts to wheel together like a flock of startled birds. What indeed? What cause? All Father Damien could do at first was contemplate the pattern of the flock out of which the great logos of his passion was written.

“It is love,” he said. “That is the sole reason. Love.”

The others looked uncertian. In the Ojibwe language the word does not exist in the same sense—there is love out of pity, love out of kindness, love that is specific to situations or to the world of stones, which are alive and called our grandfathers. There is also the stingy and greedy love that white people call romantic love. This love of Christ, this love that chose Agnes and forced her to give up her nature as a woman, forced Father Damien to appear to sacrifice the pleasures of manhood, was impossible to define in Ojibwe.

The boy named Nector ducked into the lodge, sat down next to him, peered at the slight new priest with curiosity. The boy was well dressed, extremely neat, and even wore an expensive-looking, smart, plaid cap. His father finally spoke.

“I am going to send my boy here, this Nector, to your church. He will investigate,” said Kashpaw. “He will tell me if this spirit is any good. If there is something to this god, I’ll come see for myself.”

There was a mutter of protest and consternation from the women in the tent, then, and Mashkiigikwe pounded the earth with her feet.

“Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?”

Father Damien, whose task it was to steal even the intangible about the woman beside him, had no answer.

KASHPAW’S PASSION

Kashpaw sat on the ground with his sacred pipe before him on a flat pale rock. Gizhe Manito, tell me what to do, he prayed. His heart was so dark and heavy that when he bent over to take up his pipe, it felt like it might tumble from his chest. For all of his power, right now he felt like a frail container. So much conflict was stuffed inside him that his skin seemed too thin to contain it. This young priest’s arrival had disturbed everything. Margaret, his one church-married wife, lambasted the others. Pushed past her limit, Mashkiigikwe threatened to brain the older woman. Fishbone drooped quietly and poor Quill, whose mind was sensitive, desperately clung to her older sister and begged Mashkiigikwe not to leave.

“The time for this arrangement is long over,” said Mashkiigikwe, “even the other full-blood families are starting to laugh at us. Now that this priest listens to old Nanapush, who as we know is only fishing for a leftover wife from Kashpaw, we’ll have no peace.”

Kashpaw pressed his knuckles to his eyes. A man’s heart was generous, giving, like a skin that could hold more and more water. But there was always a limit, the last drop, a sorrow that could burst it. Thinking of parting with Mashkiigikwe, of not hearing her bold call as she entered the clearing with good news of her hunting, that was unthinkable. Not to laugh at her jokes or wonder at her kindness to her sister, Quill, whom she had begged Kashpaw to marry in order to save her from facing a situation in which her peculiarities of mind were exploited. No, he could not grasp what would happen if Mashkiigikwe were to leave. And yet Fishbone, pregnant, could not be the one to leave either. Vulnerable as she was, and helpless, she must surely stay. She had no family to return to. Kashpaw tried not to allow the vision of her calm grace to sway him, or his wish to curve her against him at night, to feel the heat of her gravid body. He tried not to think of her long fingers or the sadness in her hidden smile. Fishbone, he greatly loved. And he loved Margaret as well. Her acid humor pleased him and the times she allowed him near, unexpectedly, her startling inventiveness and bold behavior overwhelmed him with admiration. Besides, she was the first of his wives, and they had come to each other very young and as virgins. He could not forget those nights and how they had been the teachers of one another. Their children came one after the next, and each was stronger and more intelligent than he had any right to wish. No, Margaret could not leave. Impossible.

The leaves rustled inconclusively. His thoughts turned back and forth in the wind. First one side then the other, quick as popple. This young priest possessed a surprising power, one he seemed unaware of, which made it all the more effective. The young priest had calmed Quill and made her happy. His mere presence had affected the change. After his visit, Quill fell to her knees whenever her mind swelled. By striking her breast and crying out in her own words a message to the priest’s god, she emptied her mind of the deadly thing that possessed it. Nothing else, no doctoring, had helped. But the priest, she liked.

So that was the first of several arguments Kashpaw’s mind put up. He didn’t listen to the self-serving evidence that his covetous friend Nanapush laid out before him. Even thinking of Nanapush’s transparent scheming, Kashpaw had to laugh. If Mashkiigikwe ever got her hands on the old dog, she would break him like a twig. And Margaret, he doubted anyone but himself could survive the ravages of Margaret’s love. Yet what could he do? It was clear that things must change, only he didn’t have the ability to make a decision. Each loss was impossible. Each solution meant destruction. If he did nothing, would his land be seized? Margaret mentioned that, but was she inventing the possibility for her own purposes?

Kashpaw grasped his pipe tenderly and touched the warm red bowl of the stone to his forehead. Why did a man have to love so much? The stone cooled in his fingers while he let his mind wander through all of the sorrows of possible answers.

*

Agnes tried to tell herself, later, that it was not one thing or another that broke up the Kashpaw family and set chaos into motion. Yet she could not ignore the fact that Father Damien started it with his visit. Later, when she was able to reflect upon the fall of events, Agnes pictured a tornado descending, one composed of political gusts and personal fabrics of wind, a twister in the eye of which rose Pauline Puyat, later to become Sister Leopolda, nemesis and savior.

Father Damien knew all that happened through the boy with the plaid cap, for Nector Kashpaw did show up, at first to stand uneasily within the nave, and then later to become an altar boy. The boy served Holy Mass each Sunday with great seriousness and precision, a contrast to his increasingly desperate home life, which he recounted to Father Damien over the post-Mass rolls and meat, tea and dried apples that Damien provided and Nector ate with strict intensity.

The violently independent Mashkiigikwe left her little sister, with Kashpaw’s promise that Quill would be the one wife he kept. Mashkiigikwe left at night, knowing that Quill would howl and clutch to her skirts. She took her gun and pack and disappeared onto her trapline. Kashpaw’s next youngest son, Eli, was already gone. That left Kashpaw another gun short and in want of hunters to feed the group. Fishbone’s baby was stillborn; she fell ill and could not be moved from the cabin. During spring sugaring, her older child crawled into the fire, and for days his screams and whimpers rang the little clearing. Margaret finally struck the child, silencing its cries to bewildered gasps. Kashpaw, sore over Mashkiigikwe, struck Margaret fiercely in return and didn’t even care to follow her when she hobbled off in fury to complain to Nanapush.

Who fell in love with her.

Nector didn’t tell this last development to Father Damien. The priest found out himself, and the situation provided him with much to consider. So it was Nanapush who threw the Kashpaw household like a pile of sticks into the air, in the night, and waited blindly underneath to catch what fell, or who, and wasn’t it a well-deserved and sad piece of luck that the one he caught was Margaret?

During the months that followed, it was apparent that Nanapush wasn’t over his first infatuation with Mashkiigikwe. He often thought about her, spoke of her great hunting skills with bashful adoration, spread his hands one way to show the size of her feet to Father Damien, spread his hands differently to show the weight of her breasts, threatened to follow her with gifts of love.

Gradually, though, and with increasing ardor, his attention turned to placating Margaret Kashpaw. She was composed of a shrewd toughness that intrigued him. Her features communicated regal scorn. She was surprisingly light on her feet and could easily run a dog down and whack the rabbit from its teeth. Nanapush had seen it. She could chop wood, haul water, drop a wild goose from the sky by clipping off its head with one shot. Nobody bested her and nothing intimidated Margaret. She was a challenge that Nanapush could not resist.

QUILL’S MADNESS

Without her older sister, Quill lost her bearings, for it was Mashkiigikwe who always told her what to do. Mashkiigikwe had soothed her and carefully unwrinkled the pain that crumpled her mind. She had stroked her younger sister’s face and sung an old song about the clouds lifting off the surface of the lake. Then she fed her tidbits from her own fingers and lightly pulled on Quill’s braids, as though to guide her back to the living. Eventually, Quill would respond slightly, and then Mashkiigikwe would know that once more she’d succeeded in reaching her. And she had wanted desperately to reach her sister, guide her back, for on this side of the spirit world Quill had a daughter who was turning out to be as massive as her father, but very shy, and needed a mother’s attention.

Mashkiigikwe had also kept things running smoothly, along with Margaret. There was always food, always wood, always water. Now, all Quill did for hours each day was chop, haul, gather. A frail sapling, her shoulders bowed beneath the weight of the family. Taking care of all the children including her own daughter, and the burnt boy, enduring a lack of food and the nerveless despair of her husband, Quill imagined that she had bent to the ground and been rooted by the ends of her fine, black hair. When she pulled herself upright, earth rained down on her and her thoughts were weak as dust.

Quill sat hunched on pukwe mats while her daughter, whom she’d just named Mary after the female whiteman’s god, combed through her hair with her fingers, then the clever brush. Mary divided off the hair strand by strand and removed from the hairs louse or egg of louse or husk or sign of such a creature. Lately, Quill had come to abhor these intimate vermin and to believe that they were biting her to disturb and to disarrange her thoughts. From time to time, her daughter dipped her fingers in a little can of kerosene and pinched off a louse. Quill’s thoughts burned. Temptations flared. A harsh volatility depleted her. Quill imagined that if Mary should purse her lips and blow on her head it would burst into flame like a candle. She slapped off her daughter’s hands, jumped up, started working.

Quill wove pukwe angrily, not half as well as Margaret. She moved the reeds between her fingers so quickly that they blurred, but the mats were uneven, the edges loose and sloppy. Who cared? One mat, another, appeared. When she stopped, her strength faded and her eyes rolled back, white around the iris. Her breath came short. A strange fear rode in her, and the only way to keep going was to keep working. Faster. Harder. She knit an extra mat and tossed it aside. Another materialized. The mats kept collecting until the reeds were gone. Yet her heart would not be still.

In the center of the day, she abandoned everyone, left them howling for her, crying for n’gah, n’gah, weakly asking for nibi or soup. She stood and walked into the bush, hiked her skirts and peed standing, frowning distractedly at the moving reeds onshore. Mashkiigikwe had always helped her drive away a spirit that annoyed her, a wild old skeletal woman who kept visiting her and putting evil thoughts into her mind. Suddenly, here the old thing came, scratching her way along through the undergrowth until very suddenly she was right next to Quill, invisible, fingering her skirt, lifting her blouse, touching her legs, laughing at Quill’s slow tears of fright.