The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (38 page)

“The best thing to do is ask Nanapush to talk to your daughter, ask him to lay it out plainly. That is the only way.”

Fleur raised her eyes to Damien in a moment of unusual openness, and he gazed into their reflecting depth with an ease that he’d never known. Her sharply cut eyelids, so fine and enigmatic, were only enhanced by the dark upward sweep of two lines that had appeared in her age. Her skin was still perfect, taut, of a gold so deep it seemed the tawny cover of a fabulous metal. And her straight nose, the nostrils so artfully flared, and the charged symmetry of her mouth, all were unchanged. If anything, deepened. Her beauty had ceased to intimidate Father Damien, though some had forgotten and were awed by it all over. When she’d first appeared on reservation ground, wearing her immaculate and tailored white suit, she’d been taken for a film star or singer strangely dropped from the new movie screen in Hoopdance. Now, clearly, the suit, hat, and heels stored carefully away, the makeup washed off, the fancy car she’d arrived in sold, here was Fleur again—her fate to chase one thing to lose another. She had regained her land, but lost her daughter.

And the son, what of the son, Damien wondered.

“He will stay with me,” Fleur said.

But Damien could tell already that the boy would not.

LULU’S CANARY YELLOW

It was Agnes’s practice to try to control her irritations, to monitor her horror of certain dishes made by Mary Kashpaw—the strangely acidic pea soup, the leather venison, the weird maltish cake and soapy oatmeal. But sometimes she couldn’t help exclaiming over the strangeness of the food, or recooking it herself. At those times, Mary Kashpaw glowered and stomped off, yet she herself did not partake of the loving and sometimes nearly lethal feasts that she prepared for Father Damien. Sister Hildegarde’s picayune frugalities also upset Agnes. Why must she remember to collect old scraps of soap in a sock? As for socks, would the priest ever have a new pair, smooth, without the bumps and ridges of impatient darning? And then, there were more serious, heart-sinking times she believed that the black dog’s bargain was real. At those times, she could not help her pettiness from surfacing. Not only was Lulu’s practiced avoidance of her mother tiresome, but Agnes couldn’t help wishing that, as long as she had sacrificed her soul and was facing eternity in hell, Lulu would behave with a modicum of thoughtful decency.

It’s not that I’m a prude
, thought Agnes,
I can’t have changed that much, it’s just that Lulu is so careless with her charm, so bold. Can any good come of it?
True enough, Lulu became a noticeably sensual young woman. She curled her hair with a permanent wave. She laughed with an irresistible intensity of mirth, shot jokes at people, tempted, and rejected. Returning from an off-reservation town, where she had paid a white woman to
poison her hair
, as the old ladies said, she was the talk in the church vestibule. People hushed when she entered, her curls tightly wound, glossy, rippling along the side of her head. After Mass, she was the centerpiece of a crowd of women who poked at the spirals, wondered, pinched their noses at the chemical smell. She wore face paint, too, and carried a little brown pocketbook. Her shoes were shocking. Toeless, heels like railroad spikes. Her shoes caused men to lick their lips and women to marvel at the odd, sharp tracks she left.

Her transformation presented Agnes with a small clutch of embarrassing resentments. Seeing the young woman’s tight-skirted sashay, she brooded on the distinct possibility of her soul’s entrapment all in order to save the very thing Lulu seemed intent on tarnishing. At last, she vowed to have a talk with Lulu.

“Bring her to the back of the church right after Mass tomorrow,” Father Damien directed Margaret one day.

The next morning, having fortified himself with Saint Augustine, who in his youth had stolen pears, who had gone to fleshpots of Carthage, Father Damien sat in back of the church, waiting. These last few pews, empty and quiet in the morning, were where Father Damien had many a long discussion with troubled members of the church.
Saint Augustine, Nanabozho, whoever can hear me, give me a little help now
, he prayed. The saint would have condemned the young girl’s self-display, and the notorious Nanabozho would have taken advantage of it. Such were Damien’s sources. His bedrock now was aggregate. The voices that spoke to him arose sometimes out of wind and at other times from the pages of religious books. Still, he was determined to help guide Lulu Nanapush. It was his duty to her mother, not to mention his old friend.

Just as he composed his purpose, Lulu entered and disarranged it. She wore a blouse of canary yellow that dazzled the eye. Her shoes had pieces cut from the sides and heels, and her skirt, though an appropriate length, was immodestly snug. She jingled a little memento bracelet on her wrist as she sat down beside Father Damien in the pew. Excitedly, she greeted him. He could feel immediately such a mild and innocent warmth that he was tempted to hug her as though she were a child. But she was most emphatically a woman, and lovely, so smiling and fresh that Father Damien’s irritations melted. Even with her lips stained the glossy purple of wild plums, she looked completely without guile. Father Damien took her hand and held her painted fingertips in his own.

“You have dipped your nails in the blood of the damned,” he sighed, hoping she could not tell that he admired the color.

“It’s called Happiness.”

From time to time, little things of this sort still pricked through the long years of Damien’s subterfuge. Even in his age, he was charmed by pure harmless feminine vanity. He knew immediately that she spoke of the color of the polish. He took hold of himself.

“Lulu, my child, that is only a label on a pot of lacquer. Happiness is more complex, as you know.”

Lulu nodded. The smile dropped abruptly off her face, and Father Damien now learned that this young woman he had known mainly as a child had inherited her mother’s lack of compromise, Margaret’s sharp sight, Nanapush’s unbiased curiosity, and perhaps his own natural sympathy.

“You are happy, I think,” Lulu said simply. “Without someone else.”

Her earnestness demanded that he truly consider an answer, not give her some pat ecclesiastic’s line. He put her fingers down gently and held his folded hands to his lips, as though praying.

“I have loved,” he said softly, “and yet the happiness of love is not the only thing. It is not even the most important thing. It is momentary, ungraspable, impermanent as the paint on your fingers, though I suppose the stuff is advertised as long-lasting.”

“Oh yes,” said Lulu, smiling sunnily again. “I think that I already know something about myself . . . it’s very sad.” She made an unconsciously flirtatious mockery of sorrow. “I am very bored with men. I get tired of them quickly. For a short time, I am insane, I can’t stop thinking about one or the other. And then, all of a sudden, I don’t want them around me. Just when I decide that I wish to do without him, any him, that one becomes most attached, Father Damien, and won’t leave!”

The color of her blouse, Father Damien thought, that blithe yellow, was the outward manifestation of the careless cheer and stubborn sensuousness of Lulu’s character. He immediately foresaw, indeed, exactly what came to pass in Lulu’s life. A series of passionate but inconclusive liaisons. Fatherless pregnancies. Children without support. He did not envision the number—eight sons, one daughter. Had he done so, he might have collapsed right there before her. Alarmed at what she told him, he turned practical. He had learned one truth in his work—there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.

“You need a profession,” he decided. “One that will support you here, for it appears you do not want to move to the Cities. And if you are as bored with men as you say, you will not marry one for long, no matter what the Church advises. You need an honorable profession,” he repeated. “What will it be?”

Partly as a consequence of Damien’s pragmatic approach, Lulu became a self-sufficient woman. Father Damien helped her from the beginning, so she didn’t falter. She survived the fires in her heart by using all of the skills she had developed—sewing, which she’d learned at the government boarding school, as well as knitting and beading, the making of gauntlets and makazinan, and feather bustles. She created quilts, dolls, vests, shirts. Sold eggs, bartered chickens, even horse-traded on occasion. As she could add and subtract quickly in her head, she left her children with a friend and worked for the trader’s market. A few pennies here, a dollar there. She leased out some land. Kept a cow and shot her own deer, dressed it efficiently just like her mother. Taught her boys to hunt, work in the fields, pick rags, bead and sew as well as she could. It was in fact a surprise she had any time for men at all. Where did she fit them in? people wondered. The old hens and dried-up roosters gossiped in the sun.

A short time with men went a long way with Lulu. She liked the thrill of not-having, became impatient with their daily presence, as she’d confessed. One hour here on the way to work, another well after dark in her private room, the boys arranged in the rest of the house on roll-aways and sound asleep. She collected and she discarded, she used and she tossed. So Father Damien’s weak attempt at counseling her succeeded only insofar as he was able to help her support the one real true romance of her life—her children, to whom she was devoted.

Father Damien’s talk with Lulu did yield one other good, perhaps, for Lulu was never herself scourged by the evils of drink. It was a subject they discussed, though Father Damien was not sure at the time how he had come out of their small debate.

He asked her, point-blank, if she imbibed. He spoke suddenly, and rather forcefully, hoping to catch her by surprise. She did look startled by his penetrating tone.

“Why, yes.” Half-ashamed, she glanced down at the wood grain of the pew.

“You mustn’t.”

“Why not?” She raised her graceful head, looked Father Damien in the eye with her bold and gleaming gaze. “Christ changed water into wine in Cana, at the wedding. He could have changed it into water or milk, something else. Is a taste of wine so bad, Father? You drink it every day . . .”

Father Damien opened his mouth to answer, but she went on.

“I’m not like some, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t drink any more wine than you yourself at the Eucharist. No more than a swallow, now and then a glass.”

Father Damien looked at her chastisingly. Still, she had a point.

“You cause talk,” the priest said softly to her. “You would sadden my friend, old Nanapush.”

“That’s what you think.”

She laughed, her voice a rushing sound of snow-melted water, of summer leaves in high wind. Her eyes sparked with a sweetly wicked glance.

“Nanapush hardly ever touches the bottle, it is true, but he gave me the money to buy these shoes. Remember when I was little, how I almost froze my feet off in a blizzard? He saved my feet with old-time medicine, and he likes me to show off the good work he did.”

She lifted her foot a little, rotated her ankle, wiggled her toes, in light stockings, through the open wedge.

“I suppose that I can’t argue,” said the priest grumpily. “I’m only thinking of your soul.”

Father Damien was thinking of his own soul, that was the truth of it. He resented anew the indifference she showed to her salvation, manufactured though it might be behind the scenes.

Lulu cast her eyes down. Her lashes were long and feathery. Realizing that she probably had no intention of taking his advice, Damien turned away from Lulu. Frustrated, intrigued, helpless with love for this young woman, he gazed steadfastly at Our Lady of the Serpents, whose hands were outstretched even as she balanced on a writhing snake and a slivered moon.

“Pray to her.” He pointed to the statue, but his voice was hoarse and a little desperate with the sympathy he felt for Lulu.

Those who clucked over Lulu were also fond of sighting the actual devil. One visit spawned others; there were periodic rashes of hysterical reports, each more creative than the next. The devil entered and possessed the body of a cow, which gave pitch-black milk. A hairball was found in that same barn. It contained a jagged tooth. The cow was heard, later, mumbling a curse. Every so often, the black dog made his rounds, barring the path of Mrs. Pentecost and her daughter as they walked to Holy Mass. A man in elegant dress sauntered through the woods, seducing women on the paths to church.

These eager visions broke Agnes’s patience. Ridiculous! Was she mad? Fevered? Overwrought? She examined the memory of the conversation with the dog who’d interrupted her meal, and wished she knew. Each night Agnes looked into the sky, for it comforted her to see the dancing of the northern lights, the spirits of the departed.
Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last
, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed—the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.

Agnes also continued, every so often, to wake feverish and panicked. Where was God in all of this? Where was justice? Why did the devil reportedly put on flesh and walk among the people, while God remained silent, producing only the false miracles of Sister Leopolda, never deigning to speak again to Agnes personally, no matter how deep the darkness in which she waited?

One picture salvaged the dubious bargain. One scene from Lulu’s life.

1945

Lulu’s house was small, an old-fashioned pole and mud cabin with a tamped dirt floor. It had been Nanapush’s once, and Lulu had taken it over once she left the Morrissey whose child she was large with now. She lived on the money from the wild, mean chickens she raised. They scratched and complained in the yard, flew toward Agnes with menacing cries. She shooed them off, laughing, as she once had her own dominickers. Lulu’s older son hauled water up from the tiny lake behind the house. Then, though he could hardly lift an ax, he began to split wood.