The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (47 page)

“The death,” said Jude. “Certainly. But again, where is your proof?”

Damien laughed, without mirth, without lightness. “It is part of the miracle.”

He sank into a silence so profound it seemed like death, stared at the toes of his shoes, closed his eyes. Jude Miller let the tape run on, scraping down the batteries, and was rewarded when, with a wild sleepwalking vigor, Father Damien Modeste sat up and spoke emphatically.

“I kept the barbed-wire rosary in a drawer all by itself, fittingly, and from time to time I looked at it and speculated on its use. One day, in frustration, I gripped it in my own hands and doubled it, then swung it around the post to my bed until the barbs nearly pierced my hands, went deep enough anyway to leave blue marks of bruises. Quickly, I drew diagrams of where those marks fit. Again, again, I practiced the murderer’s art, and each time I stopped I added a detail to the picture until I had a very good idea where the rips, the wounds, the marks, the damage would have occurred in the hands of the killer. The barbs were long. I believe they would have torn short seams, at least two, upwards into the curve of the palm like so . . .”

Here Father Damien brushed three marks up the inside of his curved old hands.

“I began to look, Father Jude, I began to observe. To my unsurprise, although many of my parishioners wore scars and marks, none were striped with the regularity of my killer. I proposed excuses and theories, became a reader of palms, made a continual nuisance of myself, let it be known that I had some peculiar medical reason for examining the inner landscape of people’s hands. Nobody matched, Father Jude, nobody matched until I took off my blinders and began to look where I had rather not—close in, right next to me, inside the shape of Christ’s body.”

The old one drew a troubled breath, disturbed even now to recall the scene. “Father Jude, I can see it clearly, the moment out of time when she opened her hands. In the beams of afternoon radiance, she implored me to allow her some penance or other. That’s when I saw that her palms bore the jagged white streaks, the raised scars, the triangular healed gashes where the barbs had cut into the flesh.”

The two men fell silent in contemplation, and then Jude remembered.

“The miracle,” he said to Father Damien, “you said that the proof was part of the miracle. What did you mean?”

A slow smile cracked Father Damien’s face, squeezed the fine wrinkles to careful sheaves. “Oh, I thought it would be apparent to you early on, my friend. I thought it was clear—the stigmata—the marks she insisted she wore as the result of the vision in which she was given Christ’s crown of thorns. Those marks were not made by thorns, but by wire barbs, of course. As for the sign and the wonder, hear this. The metal bore a bloody rust. The true miracle was this: the fast that our so-called saint soon endured, the amazing rigidity, the miraculous possession that gripped the imagination of the parish, was not the visionary trance her sisters supposed, but tetanus.”

THE MOUSE

An irritatingly persistent mouse woke Father Jude, scrabbling lightly behind the studs and plaster, gnawing with businesslike devotion on something—electrical or phone wiring—inside the thick rectory wall. At night, against the hills, the powerful yard lamps doused, the dark was so heavy that he labored in the blackness to breathe. The chore of inhaling and exhaling became so tiresome that he switched on the dim reading lamp to divert himself. In its feeble show, he sat up dizzily and banged the wall to frighten the mouse. It stopped chewing for a moment, then recommenced, which was when the thought formed.

Startled, Father Jude spoke the thought aloud.

“He knew all along!”

Scrambling out of bed to scrape through his notes, he tried to reconstruct the chain of dates and confessions, realizations and facts, that culminated in this absolute conclusion and conviction. Father Damien had known, from the first perhaps, that Pauline Puyat, later Sister Leopolda, had, with a cruelly modified rosary, strangled the farmer Napoleon Morrissey. Father Damien had known and yet kept the knowing secret to himself. He had made no move to contact the diocese hierarchy. There was no letter written to the bishop hinting obliquely of a grave crime. Father Damien had made absolutely no move either to contain or to punish Sister Leopolda. And any priest would have done as much, no matter how dear he held his vows regarding the secret nature of the confessions he heard. Something else was at work, then. Father Jude Miller cogitated. The mouse began munching another wire and a white moth fluttered into the pool of lamplight.

Cogito ergo sum
. Turn it around. My heart is clear, therefore I act. I am, therefore I think. I am, therefore I speak. Guilty, therefore I’m silent. Some premise known and understood by Damien and Leopolda, basic to the argument and essential to the agreement between them. Some premise powerful enough to cause a collusion between two enemies. Some secret endgame in which both of their triumphs were thwarted, a checkmate, a stalemate, and the result was the covered-up truth of a man’s ugly death.

The conclusion was inescapable: Father Damien had also done something that he wished to hide.

And Sister Leopolda had known what that something was.

Father Jude Miller banged on the wall again. The dry, scattering scuttle of the mouse was like the random disarray of his thoughts. What, what did Father Damien do? He wanted to ask Leopolda herself, but of course the only way to do that was to appeal to her supernatural attention. Abruptly, Jude laughed, for the answer was to treat her as a saint and say his prayers, address her in the afterlife, the world beyond, only whether he should aim for heaven or hell there was no telling.

Between heaven and hell, he thought now, wearily, here I am in North Dakota. I am in love. My life as a priest is over. My vows are stripped of sweetness. They become a desert in the face of human love. All I will know from now on will be a purgatory of the senses and a suspension of possibilities. Still, he must finish his work. He would try to pray. And what if Leopolda should answer?

The next day, paging carefully through the stacks of papers, the marriage certificates, the records of death and birth, he came across a piece of paper that told him everything. Among the carefully organized papers of Father Damien’s first years—he had been a meticulous file keeper—the birth record surfaced. Jude read the hand-printed certificate over, once, twice, again and again, absorbing its claim. Then carefully he culled it from the official records and slipped it into a manila file folder all its own. Once he found the informing document, he was too disturbed to do anything else but try to absorb its implications. He went outside to walk the dusty road that led to the high school running track, where he would circle and circle in his springy shoes. It was perhaps on the third mile, though he’d lost count of laps, that startled, he again spoke a thought:

“By God, she did answer!”

FATHER JUDE’S CONFESSION

When Damien moved aside the panel of wood and bent to the screen, he knew at once that he spoke to his fellow priest—it was the keen citrus aftershave. That gave him away, though he would have known from his voice as well. He naturally chose, as he did always, to allow Father Jude his privacy, and Damien spoke as though to a stranger. The younger priest went along with this and confessed anonymously, though he, too, knew that the screen was practically transparent and his voice was familiar to his colleague. Of course, once he spoke of Lulu, all pretense was abandoned. And anyway, Father Jude could not keep the emotion from filling his talk. He had not slept more than a few hours at a time for days.

“It is actually”—his voice was low—“a form of madness. A special aspect of which is the inability of the afflicted one to see beyond the thorns of the flesh and loving spirit. I feel ludicrous, pained, hurt, drained, exalted, and sick all at once. Ludicrous because, quite obviously, at my age I should have dispensed with and put these feelings in their places. Pained because I cannot tell her. Hurt because the hurt of unattainable intimacy lies before me constantly. Drained . . . well, obviously all of this emotion takes its toll on the body. Yet, thrilled! I have never felt so supremely right in my emotions, not since I took my vows. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task, dear Father Damien, tremendous and foolish and human. I’m sick because I can’t eat for the beauty of it, and the anguish is beautiful too. Can I have her? No, I can’t! Can she ever be with me? Just once? Of course not, unless I leave the priesthood. I’ll do it. Nothing like this has ever happened to me. Ever.”

“My dear son,” said Damien, and his heart twisted in flat-out pity.

“If I was more perfectly committed, more noble, more secure, more Christ-like, I’m sure I would be immune to her, Father.”

“No one is immune to her,” said Father Damien, quite kindly.

“There is no vaccine? No cure for the malady? I’d like a little something to ease the pain.”

“What would help?”

“Music.”

“Of course.”

“Would you play for me tomorrow?”

“I will.”

“And Father . . .” now there was in the sound of the younger priest’s pause something that put Damien on alert, some shift of attention and focus. It occurred to him that Jude, having admitted what he considered a great weakness, needed to extract a similar weakness from him, to put them on a more equal level. He considered tuning out and giving a huge, fake snore, but didn’t want the other man to feel he was wanting in attention to his first problem, so he quietly asked Jude to go on.

“I know your secret,” said Father Jude.

It was a wallop. Agnes’s wind left her. For a moment, she was panicked to nerveless buzzing. Then, suddenly, the air flooded into her body.

“Oh!”

“Yes, I do.”

Another pause. A yellow sheet of stars descended and Agnes thought, faintly, that she must not babble if she went unconscious. But the stars resolved to dusk air once more as Father Jude went on talking.

“I’ve already decided not to speak of it. I can’t, I won’t, though I might have before I experienced the confounding process of falling in love with Lulu Lamartine. I understand now, I actually identify to some degree with what you must have experienced. I cannot cast the first stone. Or any stone.”

“Thank you,” said Agnes, confused and unnerved.

“Don’t you want to know how I found out?”

“Yes.” Agnes’s voice was very faint.

“I found the papers,” said Jude, “while doing research on our subject. Of course, I looked up the birth certificate of Lulu, as I looked up everything about her in the church files. You didn’t bother to hide it very well.”

“Hide?”

“The birth certificate, of course. Father Damien, I
know
about it. You are, or would be, but of course you
won’t
. . .”

“What?”

“My father-in-law. If only . . . I mean, if only I could have her.”

“My dear son . . .”

“Yes! I saw your name on Lulu’s birth certificate.
You are Lulu’s father.
I know now, should have grasped before, from your words, how deeply you loved her mother, Fleur. I understand. To my great sorrow, no, joy, I truly and fervently know what it is to become undone by a woman. I shall keep your secret, as I know you’ll keep mine.”

And then, to Agnes’s astonishment, the stolid and nerveless man on the other side of the screen began to weep into his hands.

BINGO NIGHT

Father Jude was engaged in what was perhaps the greatest moral struggle over a bingo game conducted in the history of the Church. But of course, it wasn’t that alone, at all. Most things on the reservation, he was beginning to find, either connected with or came down to Lulu. Bingo was no different, especially when it concerned an invitation to accompany her to the Sweetheart Bingo Bash, with games commencing at midday and running through the night. Special prizes. Honeymoon trips. Weekend getaways in Grand Forks. Champagne suppers up in Winnipeg. A year’s worth of chocolates.

How was he supposed to define himself free of wishing now that he had a wish? How ignore the sleepless reality of the struggle in his thoughts? How configure his embarrassment? How not say a word? And accept that he was human, therefore ridiculous?

Playing bingo, she said, raising her eyebrows and sliding her eyes obliquely away, was just one of her many failings. She was sorry, but what was the harm in it after all? She never lost more than she could afford to lose or won so much that it made her act better than her friends, and if she did happen to win a lot, she spread it around with a generous hand. What was the problem, then, and did Father Jude think it was simply in the nature of gambling? If so, shouldn’t he try playing for himself and seeing how childish the game really was—just a diversion, really, like playing Monopoly, only in a vast roomful of people?

“No, I cannot go with you,” said the priest, for perhaps the tenth time.

As always, she smiled a particular smile he had come to think of as her neutral gear. She smiled that way when she was buying time. When her brain was clicking forward with a new argument.

“It’s probably better that you not go.” She said this easily, which caused his heart to catch in a stabbing and painful stitch he breathed deeply to loosen. He wanted to reach forward and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, though her hair was perfect. He wanted to lay his face against her neck, brush the curve of her throat. Instead, he pressed his fingers to his lips to contain the words that would expose his longing. Women her age were not supposed to have slim waists and smiles so joyous. And her radiant laugh! She was laughing at him, mocking his last ditch attempt at self-control.

“You want to,” she held a finger up to him. “I know. I can tell.”

Wanting was not the problem. Not going with her was the problem. In desperation, Father Jude went to ask Father Damien what he should do, and to try to elicit counsel that would shore up his resolve not to venture to the Bingo Palace, or anywhere, with Lulu.