The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich Read Free Book Online

the last, he could not hear his own scream. Dirt filled his nose and then his tipped up straining mouth. No matter how he spat, the earth kept coming and the mud trickled down his throat. Slowly, infinitely slowly, bronchia by bronchia the earth stopped up each passage of his lungs and packed them tight. The ground absorbed him. When at last the first member of the reluctantly formed posse arrived, he thought at first the robber had escaped, but then saw how only the hands of the Actor, clutching Berndt’s arms and back like a raft, still extended above the level of the horizon.
     
    FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN
     
    After she came to, nursed by her own former sisters in the hospital, a bullet crease shadowing her mind, did Agnes DeWitt sorrow in her bones that she had teasingly pushed Berndt away that morning? Did she dream all that month, while she hovered in and out of death, of his entering and her receiving him? Recall looking into his eyes pillowed close to hers? Long for the rough cup of his hand on her breast? No, not for a moment. Rather, she thought again of music. Chopin. The kind bullet that split and roped her scalp had remarkably fused her musical joys with all memories of Berndt.
    She didn’t even recall, donning her jacket, how it came to be fitted behind the satin lining with an astonishing amount of money. Though she’d lost portions of her memory, she had not lost her wits, and she said nothing. Counted it in secret. Kept it safe in a Fargo bank. So she was well off. Berndt had written a will in which he declared her his common-law wife and left to her the farm and all upon it. There, she continued to raise rose-comb bantams, dominickers, reds. She played piano, too, for hours, and practiced more intensely than ever. She began to read. In the convent, she had not been permitted to read beyond her daily prayers and the lives of the saints. Now, with a town library full of volumes she’d never touched, she became a reader. A wolfish, selfish, maddened, hungry reader who let the chickens scream and peck one another to death, who ignored the intelligent loneliness of the pig and forgot to milk the groaning cow. She read or she played piano, did little else except that she did keep teaching. Only her toughest chickens survived.
    Perhaps a season or so after Berndt’s death, her students noticed she would stop in the middle of a lesson and either pick up a book to gulp a page in with her eyes, or smile out the window as though welcoming a long expected visitor. One day the neighbor children went to pick up the usual order of eggs and were most struck to see the white-and-black-flecked dominickers flapping up in alarm around Miss DeWitt as she stood bare upon the green grass.
    Tough, nonchalant, legs slightly bowed, breasts jutting a bit to either side and the dark flare of hair flicking up the center of her. Naked. She looked at the students with remote kindness. Asked, “How many dozen?” Walked off to gather the eggs.
    That episode with the chickens made the gossip table rounds. People put it off to Berndt’s death and an unstringing of her nerves. Still, she lost only a Lutheran student or two. She continued playing the organ for Mass, the celestial Bach, and at home, in the black, black nights, Chopin. As she had formerly when a Christ-dedicated virgin, she played with unbearable simplicity. Her music was so finely told it hurt to listen to the notes that struck the high sweet breeze. If she was asked, once, by an innocent student too young to understand the meaning of discretion but having overheard some story about Miss Agnes DeWitt—some very alert student longing perhaps to see the dimple where the bullet was dug from her hip or push aside the lively darts and strands of her hair to find the curved clef of a scar—if that student were to ask Miss Agnes DeWitt why she did not wear her clothes, sometimes, Miss Agnes DeWitt would answer that she removed her clothing when she played the music of a particular