The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (19 page)

“Aren’t you needed to supervise the play yard?” said Father Damien, again, “surely Sister Hildegarde—”

“Oh no, Father, please don’t worry!” Now Pauline lighted with an artificial jollity. Her skull’s face glowed, and she trembled, racked with zeal. “Sister Hildegarde will now be giving the children special instructions in hygiene. It is her pet project this month. And as she has them occupied, I thought I might attempt once again, to . . . oh, I know how tiresome you find me, but once again I would like to beg your indulgence . . . I need to confess.”

“This evening,” said Father Damien.

“Now,” said the Puyat in a low and stubborn voice that chilled Damien in some interior and fathomless place for which he had no guard or defense.

“All right,” he sighed, making the sign of the cross over her, “proceed.”

And so she began, avid, eager in desperation to spill. She knelt beside his desk. Although he tried to remain detached, the pitiable trembling of her hands clenched in prayer touched him. Clearly, she was in a state of grave inner agitation. In her confession, some nameless man appeared
a trimmed French mustache and flat, dark lips. It was a hot close afternoon, the day it happened. He pressed on me in a blinding darkness. Crushed me to a powder and spread me across the floor. Snapped me in his beak like a wicket-boned mouse.

“Stop,” said Father Damien, repelled now by her sly excitement, “you are absolved, say no more.”

He drew back, not like he was finished with me, Father, but like a dog sensing the presence of a tasteless poison in its food. Then went on, which he should not have done.

“Peace, my child, let yourself be calm, you are not forsaken.” Her wildness shook him, her insistence on strange details, her description of her own nakedness and that of her rapist or uncle or even someone she half allowed . . . he could not tell for sure, and then, her face narrowing and her voice hushed, she confessed the child.

I swelled so tight, Father Damien, that I could hardly lift my arms and every breath was forced, fought for against that baby’s weight. I felt my bones give, the bowl of my hips creak wide, and between my legs there was a soft and steady burning.

“The child was born . . .”

Yes, taken from me, born, however you put it, there was no stopping it, no—

“Where is that child now?”

Silence.

“Where is that child?”

The silence now held, now stubborn.

Again, his blood pounding, Father Damien asked and this time she answered, hasty and alarmed at the conclusion that her silence was forcing him to draw.

Dead, Father Damien, I did not touch it. Born dead!

Agnes waved both hands in the air, lapsing, horrified as if swiping away hordes of stinging flies. Pauline began to weep now, a dry sound like the scratching of a spent record on a phonograph. Beating her breast, she begged for forgiveness. Agnes caught herself. Gasped out Father Damien’s standard absolution, but was unprepared to give, or invent for Pauline, the proper penance.

“The penance, Father, what shall be my punishment?”

A trickle of spit collected at the corner of her mouth, her eyes were red with the exhaustion of having wrestled many sleepless nights with the violence of her past. Her gums bled from her continual fasting. Her ingratiating smile was frightful to Father Damien and hoping to get rid of her he manufactured an attack of sudden kindliness.

“You take on too much for your strength, my dear. You were violated and that could not be helped. Now rise . . . you will say two thousand Hail Marys—no, four thousand Hail Marys, and, as well, you will—”

“Thank you, Father, yes!”

With a sudden energy Agnes lurched around the chair and in a flash she hoped would take the other by surprise, raised the woman by the elbow. She was propelling Pauline out the door, when, with a false step the girl lurched and fell against Agnes, twisting as she went, clutching at the priest’s chest. Agnes had the instinctive wit not to catch Pauline but to step precisely backward so that the girl fell full length. She landed hard enough to knock the wind out of her body and she gasped, dry, fought for air. Even after Pauline picked herself up, Agnes could almost feel the thin claws and sense the cold clutch of Pauline’s hands as they raked the air, so close, reaching for her bound breasts. . . .

THE VICTIM SOUL

Shortly after that disturbing confession, Pauline Puyat was found in a state of collapse, naked, prostrate before the altar, covered with muck and raving, but as Hildegarde picked her up and hid the extent of her strange condition, it was some time before the full report leaked down from the convent on the hill. It was said that Pauline Puyat took upon herself an extraordinary penance. In her cell, covered in no more than a sheet, no pillow, sleeping on the bare floor, she maintained a rigorous fast and a strange concentration. Father Damien came to sit with her, and supposedly, to hear her confession or deliver the Eucharist. The moment he saw Pauline Puyat, however, he knew that he’d come into the presence of a darkness not to be assuaged by common means.

Light fell pale gray through a set of curtains pinned together at the center of the tall rectangular window. A searching blade of radiance struck through the slight gap between the pins and fell in a strict golden slant across Pauline Puyat, who refused a bed and lay upon the floor. She would not accept a single comfort, kicked off anything but one thin sheet, yet she spoke lucidly in making her wishes known, saying that she was atoning for a desperate sin and pleading to be allowed to continue her restitutional fast. When Father Damien refused her request, she clamped her lips shut. Her jaws had locked and the muscles of her throat knotted into pull cords. She spoke through her teeth with difficulty, but her words were still calm and sensible.

“Forgive me, Father, for this is what I must do.”

Her face, as she gazed upward, was womanly and open, her forehead bronzed by the seeking light. She seemed intent within, very still, as though listening for faint but vital instructions. Reaching across to draw her sheet around her shoulders, Father Damien’s hand brushed the point of her chin, alabaster white and cold. Her hands, rigid in fisted knots, were stone smooth, alarmingly bloodless and heavy, clenched around thick bandages that hid her unexplained wounds. Impossible to change because of their clawlike rigidity, the gauze had begun to exude the cloying reek of infection. Hildegarde told Father Damien that she had called for iodine and carbolic soap, water, salts to soak her hands and feet. With her gray skin and deep, black, ravaged eyes Pauline was a figure set to rest on a tomb, a grave’s image.

“It is a sin,” said Father Damien gently, “to chastise yourself too forcefully. You will receive a blanket. You will sleep upon a mat. You will drink water and light broth; later you’ll eat food.”

“Ah,” said Pauline Puyat, her eyes slowly filling with the loss of her ability to suffer, “please, Father, let me have my penance. It is everything and it is all I own.” She spoke through clenched teeth and a shut jaw, but her speech was plain enough. Father Damien felt himself soften with pity, knowing the truth of what she said was profound.

“What you confessed to me was not your fault,” he assured her.

The girl looked into Damien’s face with a grimace of sorrow, or perhaps self-hatred, for her face slowly turned golden red with a strange shame. Then the red flooded back toward her heart, and she drained to a terrific, nearly translucent, dead white.

“There is more,” she said wretchedly, and the veins in her temples jumped with the strength of her emotion.

“I will listen once you are healed,” said Father Damien. His sympathy enfolded him in spite of himself, but he determined, then and there, if she lived he would send her off the reservation, down to Fargo, down to Argus.

Her face was ratlike, her teeth stood out, her nose was a severe bone centered like a keel. She shook her head, tried to speak, but at last could not and merely closed her eyes. The shut lids sealed like a hatchling’s. She was gone into her thoughts, her prayer, whatever sustained her agony.

She was worse, said Sister Hildegarde, the next day, and so much worse the day after that she fetched Father Damien herself, though she had no way of warning him sufficiently, or preparing him for the bizarre sight that he would witness. On entering her room he was immensely struck and confused. Pauline had bent in the middle. Still more strictly rigidified, her legs were stiffened and raised, her torso also, so that she existed in a kind of permanent V shape, which the sisters had propped up with pillows and blankets, although she held it on her own. Slowly, she was bending in two. Sister Hildegarde, in her practical way, had snaked a flexible piece of rolled wet rawhide tubing down Pauline’s throat before the depth of stiffness sank into all of her limbs and froze Pauline’s voice box and throat. So it was that, although she fasted, the girl was given water and broth through the tube and was fairly well sustained. Except for the terrible rigidity, her vital signs were excellent now. As much as they could, they left her to peaceful silence.

News travels immediately, mysteriously, on the reservation. Soon it was out that Pauline was seized by spirits. She had left her body to visit in the world beyond this everyday life. Her body had turned wooden, they said, her tongue to stone. Slowly, she was lifting herself into the air, straining toward the sky world, arrowing her spirit toward the west. She was doing it for her people though she was of and not of them, though she was a betrayer and yet, too, betrayed by her raging Puyat mother. Though she was the half sister of a medicine man gravely feared and the rumored mother of a child raised by dog Lazarres, she was holy. Anybody can be holy, even a Puyat, that proved.

People drew near. People gathered. They came by car and wagon, they camped by the door to the convent house. They brought their sick ones, the mad, the dishonored. They brought their too quiet, ancient, dreaming children, their screaming new babies. They brought their old ones, farseeing through eyes cataracted over with isinglass scales. They brought their nerveless husbands, their foolish and silly teenagers, their ailments and failures, and they laid them on the steps of Pauline’s door.

Zozed Bizhieu asked Sister Hildegarde to place in Pauline’s bed a red-painted stick, which represented a request for help of a sort she wouldn’t specify. Danton Onesides asked to see her, and when turned away, begged the good Hildegarde for threads from the saint’s death blanket. She was not going to die, Sister Hildegarde told him, determined now that she would see to it herself that the girl survived, not only because that would discharge something of the debt that Hildegarde owed after the great flu, but also so that the Puyat could clean up the mess her disquieting illness was causing all through the convent. Sister Hildegarde fumed, threw up her hands. Who, did the people outside think, who took care of these holy martyrs, these self-indulgent saints? She could tell them, she knew. She struck her chest, an act for which she was immediately contrite. Still, it was true.

Linens must be bleached, scrubbed, hung on lines to dry, ironed smooth. They must be folded and set into the closets. Soon, removed from their shelves, the sheets would return to be stained, discarded, and go through the same tedious process. Food must be mashed up, pulverized, fed through the tube—invalid’s food. Pillows stuffed and restuffed. Pastes and poultices manufactured for the soothing of limbs. These cleanings and boilings required kettles, pots, spoons. And then there was the grinding of meticulously gathered herbs (and the grinder was most difficult to wash and clean). Buckets, mops, a constant correction of the floors, the state of which Hildegarde was most fierce over. The continual visitors meant someone must tend to the gate and door at all times. Not only that, but someone must keep more or less orderly track of the gifts and petitions with which the girl was now deluged.

Yes, the Puyat would live. She owed Sister Hildegarde a lot of work!

The Bizhieus brought smoked fish. The second Boy Lazarre asked something secret, whispered his request into a small, clean, empty baking powder can, quickly tapped the lid on, and gave it sternly to Sister Hildegarde to let out beside Pauline’s ear. From all corners of the reservation, now, pilgrims advanced, asking for assistance in every possible conundrum and affair. As she closed like a jackknife, more people arrived to camp. More notes and objects were brought, baskets and tobacco twists began to clutter the hall and entryway. No matter how forcefully Sister Hildegarde insisted to each visitor that Pauline could take no requests, no matter that a nurse came, pronounced on the case, and left, no matter that people kept dying or living to suffer their copious duties, onerous lives, no matter. Belief is belief. Faith is purely faith. Even when a doctor came all the way from Grand Forks, sounded Pauline’s entire body with small wooden blocks and a metal hammer, then spoke briefly to Father Damien, who nodded, but said nothing, knowing what he said would be meaningless to the people camped outdoors. No, no matter. In desperation, they made a saint. They made a saint because they had to, in those times, in that swale of loss.

T
HE
C
ONFESSION OF
M
ARIE

1996

Father Damien sipped coffee to clarify his mind—the stuff was burned, as always, by Mary Kashpaw. He was used to the metallic taste. Father Jude wasn’t, and his jaw dropped in shock at the first sip of what she poured. They sat at the kitchen table of the small book-stuffed house where Damien had lived since the beginning. Mary Kashpaw set out milk, spoons, packets of sugar, and she turned away in a powerful indifference that was almost contempt. Then she turned back, frowning down upon the two men. Her eyes rested appraisingly on Father Damien, assessing his strength. The glare she held softened to exasperated worry. Her cheeks flamed with distress. She pulled her fingers, but the men took no notice. Gradually, she backed away.