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

frail mend of the bullet’s crease. “Only a short time ago, I was a sister in the local convent, having taken my temporary vows at a very young age. I remember every word, every Mass, every confession I made, every note I played. But only at times do I remember Berndt’s features. And yet I recall with unwished clarity the face of the man who killed him! Fortunately, I often see another man, one I’ve never met, hair parted far over to the left, a deep-eyed brow, a broad, beaky nose, a small and rather full mouth and low cheekbones, lumpy and sad.”
    “Is it him?” The priest was curious.
    “Him who?”
    “Your companion, may he rest—”
    “No, not him,” said Agnes DeWitt, her fingers moving suddenly, flying on the tea plate, tapping, possessed by the thought of the photograph reproduced in the frontispiece of her favorite musical text. Chopin! Chopin! Father Modeste changed the subject in some bemusement. What was there to say? He tried to round the horn and cleave to his original subject all in one sentence.
    “Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways. For that reason, I’ve studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo. Ah, poor unfortunate Father Hugo! His death of the sweating fever was compared by witnesses, I have it in a letter, to Christ’s agony in the garden. Blood, yes, beads of it all over him. He sweated blood from every pore of his body.”
    Diverted, Agnes imagined the scene. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.
    “Aren’t you afraid?” she asked, but her voice was mocking, for truly, there was more to fear for her in a simple bank visit.
    Father Damien raked his strands of hair back. His hand was a yellow claw. Something about the distracted way he mumbled out an answer in the negative told Agnes that he was, indeed, nervously disposed. The urge to tease him came upon her.
    “I would be afraid,” she said. “Not so much of the Indians themselves, but of the many plagues and vermin that assail them—most pathetic of all God’s doomed creatures! Lice are very catching, for instance, and the devil trains them to descend in droves on the unwary priest who forgets to bless himself before he enters one of their homes.”
    Father Damien was silent in surprise.
    “Oh, I’ll bless myself all right,” he said at last. “With a lye bath every week. And constitutionals. I will look after my health.”
    Agnes DeWitt could not help but tease more sharply. “Will you really bathe in lye? How brutal! And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in séances.”
    “Most likely.”
    “Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne.”
    “No doubt.”
    “There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers!”
    Father Damien could not help glancing down at his lean thighs, pressed together under his cassock. They didn’t look all that tempting even to him. He really had to go. He dispensed a quick blessing and left with the cookies pressed on him by Agnes DeWitt, whom he had managed, though not by the avenues he’d attempted, to cheer so thoroughly that she rose from her couch, folded her blanket, and sitting down at her piano laughed so hard her fingers dropped off the keys.

    THE MISSION

    Into her brooding there intruded an absurd fantasy, the possibility of escape, though it was to a place few would consider so—the mission and the missionary life. She thought of doing good. Alleviating the pain that others felt might help to assuage her own. She began to pray, asked to regain the clarity of her original religious impulse, her early vocation. Chopin had stolen her from Christ to give to