The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (51 page)

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.

Every day, she carefully dusted and arranged the papers on his desk, including words from a long ago sermon she’d saved, scrawled lightly and fading,
What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?
She polished the wood, washed and changed his sheets and towels. Dusted his piano. Burnished the pedals. She spent as much time as she possibly could at these tasks, where she still felt the comfort of his presence. When her duties on the grounds and in the convent were finished, she often took refuge in his house and sat beside his bed. Her body rocked, though the chair was solid. Her lips moved but she made no sound. Sometimes she dozed off and followed Father Damien through the underbrush. Sometimes she dug her way down with a teaspoon toward her priest, her love, through the layers of the earth.

END NOTES

Ozhibi’iganan:
the reservation depicted in this and in all of my novels is an imagined place consisting of landscapes and features similar to many Ojibwe reservations. It is an emotional collection of places dear to me, as is the town called Argus. It is not the Turtle Mountain Reservation, of course, although that is where I am proud to be enrolled.

I would like to thank my daughters for their patience with my work. Kenneth L. Woodward’s book
Making Saints
was of great help to me. The Minnesota Historical Society was a great source of material regarding early church work. Those who question the possibility of lifelong gender disguise might read
Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton
, by Diane Wood Middlebrook, a copy of which was sent to me by Honor Moore. I would like to thank my editor, Diane Reverand, for her meticulous work with endless drafts of this manuscript, and, as always, Trent Duffy, for copy-editing a daunting series and making sense of the tangle of family relationships. Gail Caldwell, thank you for recognizing when the fire was in the room.

*

I feel that I should also include the following passage, sent to (the deceased) Father Damien by fax from the Vatican, and bearing upon my responsibility as the author of this and my previous books:

Father Damien,

As for the problem of revealing the confessions tendered to you by your parishioners, the problem is more severe than you know. At present, according to an assistant who has managed your correspondence, your letters were copied and returned to the bishop of your diocese. Can it be, however, that these letters went astray and somehow ended up in the hands of a layperson in your same area? My assistant is shocked to discover that a certain writer local to your region (but published even in languages and places as distant as our own) has included a quantity of first-person confessions in the body of her otherwise phantasmagoric and fictional works.

Could this writer have possibly come by those letters? In particular, the private confession Marie Kashpaw is quoted verbatim, as are other monologues included in books published lately as two years ago.

If so, we are most distressed, beg your apology, and have certain plans to take up the matter with the writer, Louise Erdrich.

The source of these early narratives is mysterious to me also. Voices spoke to me in dreams, while I drove long distances, nursed my babies, and so on. Sometimes in sleepwalking I would find I’d written book sections. There they would be the next morning, on my desk. I feel sure they originated in my own mind, those stories, however they appeared. Yet sometimes, as I scrutinize the handwriting in those early drafts, I wonder. Who is the writer? Who is the voice? Sometimes the script is unfamiliar—the careful spidery flourish of a hand trained early in the last century. At other times—I am sure, I am positive—it is my own.

*

I also include in these end notes a possible explanation for the name given to the reservation where so many of the events in my books have taken place.

THE STORY OF LITTLE NO HORSE
(TOLD BY NANAPUSH TO FATHER DAMIEN)

White people usually name places for men—presidents and generals and entrepreneurs. Ojibwe name places for what grows there or what is found. There was no person named Little No Horse, no battle on that ground, no memory of just what happened, and yet the name goes back in time. It goes back to strange bones that were found there. People put these bones into their medicine bags during the beginning days, before the people had seen a living horse. There were rumors before a sighting ever occurred. From the south came a Shawnee who claimed that he witnessed a man leading on a vine a great dog whose paws, at the end of each leg, were gathered in one glistening nail.

Bebezhigongazhii, it was called, the one-nailed being.

That doesn’t sound possible, the people said, but the Shawnee put down his life on the truth of it. When those strange bones were found, bigger than a dog and heavier than a deer, with long strands of silver hair and those one-nailed ends to the paws, some argued that this was the creature the Shawnee saw. Others deducted from the remains an old, old, four-legged woman with a deer’s face and long, tossing ancient hair.

Not long, and that mystery was solved.

From afar, there was reported something else very new. It was seen in shadow, glimpsed by a girl and then her family. A spirit with the torso of a human and a strange wild head beneath, running, running, four legs pounding in a terror of swift music. The family hid themselves and waited quietly as it approached. The noise it made, stopping by the river, was strange as a ghost whistle in the mashkiig, or when people died very suddenly and mysteriously, felled by bad medicine. They stayed very still, and next their eyes nearly fell out of their heads. For the top of the being had detached from the bottom. They felt a little foolish, then, for soon it was obvious that the thing was two creatures, two manidoog, a man and a great dog with the paws gathered into one horned nail. The family finally understood and felt a little cheated by the truth: what they saw was human, just a Bwaaninini, hateful.

How their enemy had come to possess this spirit creature was now the whispered question among them. The natural progression of thought was this: how to kill the Bwaan and take the bebezhigongazhii. For all day, as they secretly observed, they could see how it loved him, how it cleared its throat when it saw the Bwaan, and nodded wisely in agreement with the Bwaan’s thoughts, and flicked its rabbit ears to catch his words. They did not pity the Bwaan. Drying on his hoops were two scalps, most surely Anishinaabeg. Those scalps determined them to kill the Bwaan immediately once they captured him, in order to quiet the spirits of their relatives. They never got around to it. A strange thing happened. Right before their eyes, the Bwaan clutched his groin, howled, and fell. He began to writhe upon the ground in the throes of some disgusting sickness.

“Leave him,” said the mother, when they saw by morning light what afflicted him. From knees to stomach he was bolting with black sores. They touched nothing, but grabbed the vine, which turned out to be cunningly woven. They led the spirit animal away and it quickly began to love them, too, the same way it loved the Bwaan. With the horse, though, came the sickness, selective but deadly, and it raged among them for two winters before it finally disappeared.

The horse and the illness it brought were the source of the name, which was translated by a Jesuit mapmaker and laid into a thick vellum that went under the rapids during his return to Montreal. Little Lost and No Name Lakes were partially erased and the word Horse was tagged onto them to describe the whole region.

We never had a name for the whole place, said Nanapush, except the word ishkonigan. The leftovers. Our words for the place are many and describe every corner and hole. We are called Little No Horse now because of a dead Bwaan and a drenched map. Think of it, nindinawemagonidok, my relatives.

If we call ourselves and all we see around us by the original names, will we not continue to be Anishinaabeg? Instead of reconstituted white men, instead of Indian ghosts? Do the rocks here know us, do the trees, do the waters of the lakes? Not unless they are addressed by the names they themselves told us to call them in our dreams. Every feature of the land around us spoke its name to an ancestor. Perhaps, in the end, that is all that we are. We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.

* * *

And at last:

Nimiigwetchiweyndan gikinoamadayininiwag gaye ikwewag, Tobassonakwut (Peter Kinew), Nawigiizis (Jim Clark), Pagawetakamigok (Lorraine Jones), and Paybomibiness (Dennis Jones). All mistakes are mine.

READING GROUP GUIDE

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

LOUISE ERDRICH

“This triumphant, fiercely lyrical novel places Erdrich solidly in the first rank of American novelists… Her prose shimmers.”