The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (50 page)

Words. She heard herself as she gazed at the barrel of the Actor’s pistol. She told him that it was an old belief of her mother’s people that the soul of a murderer’s victim passes into the killer at the instant of death. “Are you prepared to bear the weight of my soul?” She had asked just this question before the gun went off, either causing the Actor to pull the trigger or ruining his aim by the hair that saved her life.

It was my soul that pressed him into the deep mud, she thought—I’ve never realized the weight of myself until now! Can I put it down? She asked this of the black sky, the stars. She no longer saw the constellations as she had before knowing them in Ojibwe, but saw the heavens as her friends defined them. Saw the otter. Saw the hole in the sky through which the creator had shot down at a blistering speed.

“Nanapush, Fleur, all of you!” She cried out to the ghosts of her friends, drunk and marveling with sorrow. “Come and sit with me.” When she poured just a bit of wine onto the ground, she felt Fleur approach, knew she sat just beyond the circle of firelight, in the rustling melt of shadows.

Reassured, she now sipped lightly, rested in a trance of increasing ease. Yes, it was time to put the weight down, the burden. The constant murmur of the pines, her beloved music, now became comprehensible to her in the same way that flows of Ojibwe language first began to make sense—a word here, a word there, a few connections, then the shape of ideas. Instead of growing duller, shutting down her senses, turning away from life, she found to her joy and consternation that she was growing keener. Her understanding was more intense, her vision wary and her hearing razor sharp. The roar and whisper of the pine needles intensified and she fell into a reverie of nostalgia.

“Just think,” she toasted history, speaking aloud to all of the invisible, assembled spirits. “Think all the way back to Agnes. If only she’d banked an hour earlier or later. If only she’d managed to fall off the moving car. If only Berndt hadn’t been going to Upsala to fix that harrow. How different my life. A farm woman with a beautiful piano.” Agnes held the bottle high and drank, deeply, to her lost Caramacchione and to her lost life as Agnes Vogel. Then she drank again to the huge life she had known at Little No Horse.

“Forgive me for drinking wine.” She asked pardon of the spirits. “I’m too weak and I’m alone. I have too many thoughts. If only the priest, the first Damien, hadn’t visited me with his doubts and stories. If only, if only. If only I’d thought to get out of the way when the river came for me. How easy my life would have been. How tedious! Thank god, I met your visionary, strange servant Nanapush!”

Agnes started to remember, and in remembering she couldn’t help laughing. In great joy at the foolishness of all design, she allowed herself to think openly and deeply of the incredible events of the last year of her old friend’s life. The even wash of black sky, clouded over and starless, fell about Agnes to muffle her closely. Whole sequences involving Nanapush bubbled up and she laughed at the awful absurdity, at the picture of her old friend dodging moose pellets, and the alert look on his face when he sat up at his own wake. Nanapush! The laughter grabbed in Agnes’s belly and she doubled over until she painfully gasped. Nanapush. The laughter cut her breath short and she took a huge wheezing gulp of air that made her snort. Aaah, it was all too unbearable. Tears squeezed out of her eyes shut tight in mirth. She’d taper off, but then the laughter spurted out and began, stronger, with a sweet, free vengeance that racked her ribs. Laughter traveled up through her feet, down her arms when she lifted her arms. It burst from her gut, unexpectedly. The laughter made her dizzy.

To clear her head, Agnes tried to lurch to her feet, thinking mirthfully,
I’m going to laugh myself to death!
It was then that she felt the stifled warm report of a blood vessel bursting just above her left ear. One side of the world went dark. She sank to her knees and with an amused wonder watched as slowly, with an infinite kindness, darkness covered up the other side as well. Sightless, now, she sank to earth and felt the heat of the leaping fire on her face.
I am going, I am going
, she thought. Underneath her and before her, a wide plain of utter emptiness opened. Trusting, yearning, she put her arms out into that emptiness. She reached as far as she could, farther than she was capable, held her hands out until at last a bigger, work-toughened hand grasped hold of hers.

With a yank, she was pulled across.

MARY KASHPAW

She paddled out to the island in a beat-up and awkward old aluminum canoe. She got out in shallow water, laced together her big rough shoes and slung them over her neck, tied the boat to a tough tree root, and waded ashore. She sat down on a powerful twist of exposed root. Methodically, very carefully, Mary Kashpaw tied the shoes back on her feet. Creaking monumentally, she stood. The island could be traversed side to side in ten minutes. Walking the rough shore might take half an hour to negotiate. The center was rock, piled rock rising in a solid cliff. Everyone knew the cave that Moses Pillager used and where his drum still lived. His cats had long ago died of boredom or devoured one another. Birds sang thick in the scuttering bushes, and a red squirrel chattered high in the lyre spread of an old white pine. Mary Kashpaw crossed a bed of soft duff, made her way over to the side of the island where the camping was easiest. There, she saw him right away and she stopped. He was no more than a fold of black cloth crumpled near the white ash circle of his fire. One arm was stretched alongside his hip and the other was bent, a pillow under his head. She knew before she understood that the stillness of his body was the immobility of earth.

She relighted his campfire, rolled him into a blanket, and laid out his limbs straight and true. She handled him gently, as though his bones were flower stalks, his skull fragile as a blown egg. She folded his arms across his waist, and then Mary Kashpaw sat beside him. Her eyes were clouded, her body stunned, her thoughts far away and tiny as a view through the wrong end of the telescope. Her heart was numb with a kind of odd embarrassment.

She felt shy now, entrusted with far too much power. Left with the choice whether to bring him back across the lake in the canoe or to bury him here on the island, she froze. She listened to the pines, paced, even considered opening a bottle of the wine at his feet although she never drank. She watched the waves, shut her eyes, fell into a drowsy suspension wherein she received what felt like an answer. She found the Ziploc bag of money and the note. It took a while to read the note, letter by letter she made it out. Of course she understood exactly what he’d expected.

She buried him in the lake.

Pulled him to the hacked rowboat and hoisted him in. Chose rocks to weigh him down, lashed them tightly into his clothes with strips of plastic taken from his stash of goods. Brought her canoe around and lined it up with the funeral boat. Towing her priest in his damaged rowboat, holes hacked in the bottom, she paddled out into the lake. She stopped where the water was of an anaerobic cleanliness, cold, black, and of an endless depth. As the sky filled with light, she watched the old heavy rowboat slowly fill and then sink. Father Damien’s slight figure, serene in its halo of white hair, lay just under the waves. As the dark water claimed him, his features blurred. His body wavered for a time between the surface and the feminine depth below.

EPILOGUE

A F
AX FROM THE
B
EYOND

1997

At the convent of the mission of the Sacred Heart at Little No Horse, it was uncommon to receive donations too large to be set upon the revolving lazy Susan, which conducted boxes of macaroni, surplus apples and eggs, sweet corn in season, and canned corn in winter from the world outside to the world behind the walls. But this afternoon, having rung the buzzer and disappeared, a person or persons left within its original cardboard box an item of the latest office equipment.

Sister Adelphine had followed Father Jude Miller on his permanent move to Little No Horse. He had succeeded in persuading the bishop to allow him to conduct continued research on the question of his new project, the proposed blessedness and possible sainthood of Father Damien Modeste, recently perished. Now, Sister Adelphine answered the ring of the bells. She entered the room in a state of disturbance, for she had been canning passionately, attempting to set by a load of turnips that had appeared just that morning in many bread bags saved and reused by a thrifty farm family. So many turnips, all at once, indigestible. But if preserved, a welcome addition to many a forthcoming winter stew.

She’d dried her hands, given instructions to the sturdy novice who was helping her, and made her way to the anteroom, but was too late to thank the visitor or ask instructions for the use of the instrument, which she carried, with help from Father Jude when he arrived, into the room used for settling the account books, keeping track of donations, sending letters to the diocese, and paying bills.

The room was neat, and upon a wooden desk salvaged from the renovation of the local high school, there was sufficient room for the contraption. Father Jude lifted it from its carton and set it down gently. The fax machine was a small thing, rather pleasant and neat, made of off-white plastic, bearing lettered buttons and a small blank screen for a digital readout.

Jude, who was never good with such things, waved his hands at it humorously and then, in a slight fit of jovial zaniness, blessed it.

“Father Jude!” said Sister Adelphine.

The other sisters, many much older, some here since the beginning of time, crowded to the door after Jude Miller left and watched as Sister Adelphine, upon whose shoulders it now fell to deal with anything modern or mysterious, set the box aside and unreeled an attached telephone cord. The line reached just far enough, to the room’s only telephone jack. Sister Adelphine, with a small mischievous smile at the others, unplugged the instrument. She then inserted the clear plastic hinge to the fax machine. She connected the electrical cord to an outlet, too, and stood back with her arms folded. The machine hummed. A roll of slippery paper was already loaded into the drum. A tiny bit inched forward. The sisters voiced low approval among themselves. With an air of discovery, Sister Adelphine bent to retrieve something from the box, and then flourished a thin paper instruction booklet in their direction. It bore a black-and-white image of the fax machine on its cover, and numbered within the buttons to push, operations that could be performed, places that could be reached instantly, in print, from anywhere on earth.

Sister Adelphine paged through the booklet, moving her lips to aid comprehension. Her sisters glanced over her shoulder from time to time. Suddenly, a loud ring sounded. One sister moved to answer it, to lift the machine’s receiver, but Sister Adelphine raised her hand against the action. She had just been instructed within the booklet not to answer the phone, but to wait and allow the mechanism to translate for itself the incoming message. Craning forward to decipher the sudden letters that formed on the tiny screen below the buttons, Sister Adelphine read the words Incoming Message. She raised her brows in satisfaction, breathed out.

From somewhere within, the paper burped and skipped forward. The movement was so abrupt that one or two of the older nuns drew back, startled, but the others crowded forward to see what emerged. The message was typed on an old-fashioned ribbon typewriter and the ink was fuzzy in places, the strokes uneven, light and dark, but always legible. The seal in the left corner seemed both foreign and familiar. The women frowned, squinted, murmured among themselves. Then one of them in recognition gripped another’s arm, the next, the next, until they were all holding on to one another, trembling. With each line that groaned forward they sighed in consternation, fear, astonishment, for the letterhead gave it all away. Finally they came to the signature at the end of the implacable linked pages. It was written in a trembling, sweet, rounded hand that slanted cheerfully to the right. Some kind of hoax. As he entered the office, Father Jude’s eyes narrowed. The sisters cried out:

“
The Holy Father! The Pope!
”

My dear Father Damien,

In attempting to respond to a fragment of your letter, dated last year, delivered in tatters by the Italian Postal Service, and captioned Most Estimable Pontiff, I asked an assistant to bring me the body of correspondence to which you referred. To my distress, I am informed that the file of your letters and reports, which I am sure was so thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated over the years by my predecessors, has been inadvertently destroyed in an update and purge of the Vatican’s filing system.

All is not lost. Copies were sent back to your diocese, as I’ll explain.

I was sufficiently intrigued by the content of your one surviving letter that I feel compelled to write this personal note requesting your assistance in reassembling your life’s work. I am certain it would be of use to your colleagues. If you would be so kind as to consult your notes and produce copies, the Vatican Library would welcome your papers.

Father Damien, your love for the people in your care is a joyful statement of your faith. May you abide happily in their return of your affection, and pass your days now in pleasant contemplation of all the good you have accomplished.

The signature was distinct as could be, and the small community marveled over it. Carefully, the document was slipped into a clear plastic sleeve. Later on, the letter was framed and set within the entrance of the little cabin where Father Damien Modeste had once lived, a place the bishop directed, and Jude recommended, be kept as it was and even restored. The little historical shrine was cared for now by Mary Kashpaw, whose attention to detail included a careful stropping of the razor and shining of the copper shaving mug used by Father Damien.