The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (34 page)

Rain, time, Emeraude, silence, fried onions. Their first meeting was an explosion of the ordinary and the vast unknowable, the pure and the underhanded, all Lulu. Father Jude sat in the cave of an old-fashioned brown recliner and Damien dozed in the deep crevice of a sagging purple couch covered with star quilts and pillows. Their unfinished plates of onion-slathered fried liver cooled on a coffee table set carefully with napkins and shakers of salt and pepper. In the kitchen, Mary Kashpaw alchemized her unspeakable coffee. They were digesting their early suppers, waiting for a new burst of energy to go on in their work, when the crackle of slow tires on gravel announced a visitor.

Later, Father Jude was to recall details that he didn’t know he’d noticed. He took in more than he admitted to his conscious mind, like a man under hypnosis. He recalled that the woman, who seemed only six or maybe eight years older than he was, entered the house, and sparked pleasure and lighted affection in Father Damien when she knelt beside the chair. She crouched gracefully, laid her hands upon Damien’s arm, and whispered to him in Ojibwe until the old man’s eyes opened and he came awake smiling in her laughing hug. It was an enviable hug, Father Jude thought later, a long, loving, unabashed embrace that tipped back the old man’s face and closed his eyes like a doll’s eyes, stretched his grin as far as it could stretch.

“Father, forgive me,” she said with mock penitence, “my last visit was one week ago. Who’s this?”

“This is Father Jude, my interlocuter.” Damien held her hand in his, unwilling to let go, and nodded at his companion. She released Damien and took Jude in, then,
took him in.
He felt it. Her drenched black eyes rubbed him all over with a curious heat. She absorbed him with her eyes and then, as though waiting for him to say something, fixed her gaze upon his mouth. Her gaze had a physical effect. As though he’d bitten into a hot pepper, his lips tingled and he broke into a light, fresh sweat. Embarrassed, he went remote and greeted her with a cool and abrupt manner, which did not in the least diminish her keen examination of his face.

“So you’re Jude, I heard about you. You’d better be giving the old man here lots of rest.”

She drew up a chair, sat, gave Damien’s hand a squeeze, all without taking her eyes off Jude’s face for a second. She stared into his eyes. Unsettling. He looked away, looked back, but she was still staring. He blinked and in that heartbeat, that instant, he was caught. And it was so easy. He was blinded and the sun wasn’t in his face. Heard nothing and yet the breeze as she entered the room was level and sweet, stirring the mild faces of the violet pansies that she’d bought to set early into the dirt around the trees by the door. Oblivious to taste, he gulped coffee from the cup set into his hand by Mary Kashpaw.

“Oooh,” said Lulu, setting hers down with no other comment. She excused herself and spoke to Father Damien in rapid, floating Ojibwe, which he answered in the same after a thoughtful pause. It was all right with Father Jude to sit there ignored. It gave him a chance, after all, to attend to himself and to try to decide what had happened to him, just now, right here, when he’d taken leave of sense and time. A mild stroke? He put his hands on his chest. Ticker going strong. Checked his pulse. Not much higher than after running six miles. The light breeze dried the sweat off his throat and he wiped his forehead with a plaid hankie, which suddenly seemed all the wrong plaid. What was happening? It all felt wrong, the scene, the season, how his trousers bit across the small of his back, how his breathing was uneven. It all felt wrong and then, just as suddenly, it all seemed right again.

She spoke, smiling into his face.

“Father Jude, do you know any stories?”

“Not really,” he stumbled, “I mean, I know stories but they’re all true things that happened.”

She was oblivious to his discomfort.

“That doesn’t matter. You’re drafted.”

“For what?”

“You’ll visit my little class. It’s a culture class. I mostly teach traditional dance, but every so often we study the foreign element—in this case, you.”

She smiled at him again, and her face opened like a flower. The wrinkles around her eyes were beautifully aligned; the sweeping uncontainable amusement brimmed up in her and spilled. He had the odd sensation that petals drifted in the air between them, petals of a fragrant and papery citrus velvet. Then the wind whipped them off and she was all business.

“Tomorrow at two o’clock in the fourth-grade classroom at the school. Be there!”

She raised her brows slightly and parted her lips. Distinctly, he heard the sound of her purring. She was wearing a simple white dress.

It took him a week to put the words with the feelings and, then, it came clear to him because of a dream. Inside it—as at the school, where she wore her jingle dress of red and silver—Lulu stood with her lynx eyes and face of a hungry cat and her fan held rigid and upright like a weapon, like a shield. As she turned to him with an imperious and practical grace, he thought, So this is what it’s like to fall in love.

There were times, many times Father Jude had admired women, but it had been his fate, his fortune, certainly his luck, never to have fallen in love. He was unprepared. He thought he had tested his commitment, his faith, certainly his vow. He was secure in his relationship with God. If so, why had the Almighty waited until now, until he was at his lowest, out of his element, away from his familiar terrain, to set this enigma before him, this magnet of hope, this slip of intrigue, this woman?

“Because God has a very dark sense of humor,” said Father Damien. He was not referring to the frightening disorganization of Father Jude Miller’s new and untested emotions, but to the erratic tumble of ants scurrying to rebuild a nest disarranged by their feet. Both men were sitting outside the door of the house. The tough pansies were planted, and nodded at the borders of the walk like the faces of spoiled babies. “Every so often, as though for His awful amusement, we are overturned. The desperate methods we use to right ourselves must seem hilarious.”

Father Miller emphatically agreed. He had been awake all night thinking of Lulu’s ankle, picturing the curved bone. He said nothing.

“That was my situation with the rosary,” said Father Damien. “I knew it had been used to strangle Napoleon and Napoleon was in the ground.”

“What about the police?”

Father Damien laughed. “That would have been Edgar Pukwan Junior, reliable only on the rare occasion he wasn’t drinking. He was drinking when we found Napoleon.”

“So the investigation, or whatever you want to call it, was left to you.”

“Such as it was, yes. But although it was important, it wasn’t the central locus of my thoughts. It was peripheral to the political situation on that piece of homeland. To tell you the truth, I first believed that the killing of Napoleon was done for the precise reason Bernadette assigned to it—to shut up a prime opponent. I even suspected Nanapush. And then I found out . . .” As though suddenly disconcerted at having spoken too much, Father Damien gulped down the rest of his words. Throughout his interviews, he’d carefully sidestepped certain facts that would have disqualified Leopolda, for at the same time they would have pointed toward the truth of his identity. Now Damien had trouble keeping it all straight. What he’d told, secrets he couldn’t tell.

“Father Miller, have we got to go on? Don’t you have enough evidence by now, enough proof that this Pauline Puyat who became Leopolda is not, was not, could not be a saint. Why, she sent the black dog!”

Father Jude breathed in, breathed out. He was exhausted, unbent, he really did not want to hear another word about the ghost dog, the hallucination, delirium tremens, most probably. Before he could reject the argument, Damien proceeded.

“And that was the least of it. . . . In concrete terms, yes, proven and concise, let me list the faults that most assuredly block her beatification. Primarily, Leopolda skewered the young postulant Marie.”

“Still open to debate.”

“All right then, the horses. Witness the horses! By raising their terror, she got two Kashpaws killed and is also responsible for the consequent madness of their daughter, Mary Kashpaw. You’ve tasted her coffee!”

Jude didn’t capitalize on the reference to the vile stuff in his ceramic mug, but weighed what the old priest proposed very cautiously in his mind before he spoke.

“Does the eventual outcome neutralize the circumstance? The peaceable conversion of Quill? The lifelong devotion of her daughter to the fixtures of the church? The runaway was unplanned, an accident, Father Damien. It wasn’t as though she deliberately set out to spook the beasts.”

“Of course she did! You’re indefensibly naïve,” Father Damien observed, sitting back in his chair. “Willfully ignorant. That’s dangerous.”

“So is sitting back too far. You’ll fall,” said Father Jude dryly. Damien righted himself with some difficulty.

“I repeat, she spooked the horses with the specific intent to cause a runaway.”

The younger priest waved his hands. “All right, fine, suppose I even give you that! Even so, what bearing does it have on her eventual consideration—”

“Why, character, Father Jade. Spooking horses to cause a dangerous runaway is hardly a mark of heroic virtue.”

“No, you are right. However, since we have established that her purpose was also to rescue the consecrated Host, and even, perhaps, that was her primary, maybe only purpose, her sin once again is the overzealousness of one who burns with the Holy Spirit.”

“Oh, she burned, all right,” said Father Damien. “She was a regular spiritual arsonist.”

Father Jude couldn’t help but smile, and the old priest took advantage of his momentary diversion.

“The whole convent suffered. These are hardworking women and when one of the sisterhood is incapacitated for whatever reason, an extra burden falls upon the community. Even if that reason is, say, a visitation from God—say God is having an intimate and passionate spiritual interaction with someone who must strictly attend to it—the circumstances into which the other women are put . . . to say the least, difficult! The others had to take on her chores and duties, not to mention wait on her hand and foot. Things were hard to hold together, quite as if the greater work of the church was sabotaged by one member’s . . . well, I’ll say it,
piggish
involvement with God.”

“And when did this all take place?”

“She had countless episodes, or bouts, or visitations. Whatever you want to call them, they were sicknesses that confined her to bed. Of course, in her later years she received many petitioners. It was known as her bed of intercession and her suffering was considered a form of physical prayer. She referred to herself as a sacrificial victim.”

“A victim soul.”

“Exactly. She regarded herself as one chosen to sacrifice her health, her happiness, after the example of Christ crucified, for the advantage of the Church and the general good of her people.”

“Whom—and this is important, Father Damien—would you say that she loved? She loved her people?”

Father Damien shook his head. “The love of a mixed blood for what is darkest communion in her nature, both the comfort and the downfall, source of pain and expiation, a complicated love. She loved her people but she had no patience with them. You’ve heard of Louis Riel, a
métis
who went to the gallows for his convictions on the political rights of his mixed-blood people. She, too, went to the gallows in an effort to free her people from what she saw as spiritual bondage. Their gods had not, in recent times, served the Ojibwe well. Of course, gods are not required to be consistent—in fact, gods aren’t required to be anything at all. There are no requirements for gods,” said Father Damien a little wistfully.

“And you,” Father Jude asked curiously, “do you believe as Sister Leopolda believed?”

“That conversion would bring about redemption?” Father Damien seemed surprised to be asked such a question. “Oh no, I believe we were wrong!”

Father Jude stopped the recorder, folded his arms, gathered himself. Although he had, on some level, expected what he heard, yet to have it out in the open demanded some response from him.

“If you think that, how could you go on?” he asked.

“Well, of course, at first I didn’t think we were wrong. Everything seemed clear. It was only after the epidemic that I knew. There was no doubt . . .” He trailed off. “By then I was so knit into the fabric of the damage that to pull myself out would have left a great rift, a hole that would have been filled by . . . well, others perhaps less in sympathy. I’ll name no names. And I believe even now that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy, Father Jude. That’s why I stayed.”

Father Jude took this in with a certain degree of sympathy: to not believe in what one did, but to persevere out of duty to the practical desperation of the situation—in a way it was no less than a quiet heroism. Or idiocy, was his next thought. And then he felt a pang of irritated pity. What a waste to live your life without the assurance of faith. No sooner had he thought this than admiration for the old priest gripped him once again. Whatever his belief, Father Damien had acted on the fundamental dictates of a great love. Sacrifice had been his rule. He’d put others above himself and lived in the abyss of doubt rather than forsake those in need.

Was doubt when coupled with devotion a greater virtue than simple faith? Father Jude had been sent here to gather knowledge, but the more he learned, the more he thought, the less certainty he grasped. And too, his fundamental self-assurance was put in jeopardy by this bewildering attraction to a woman whose presence he ached for. Idiocy indeed! Lulu. Before her name rang twice in his mind, he was already putting away his notes and preparing to go and find her. By way of simply getting near to her, he would ask her to talk to him. He would question her about the woman, Fleur, who so preoccupied the old priest’s memory. He’d sit across from her, inching closer, fiddling with his tape recorder, hoping she could not intuit his yearning fascination and confused hope.