The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (24 page)

Father Damien arrived in the hot, green, earth-smelling woods and approached the circle of men, who parted for him, hands or sleeves held to their faces. There, in a child’s play spot, surrounded by tufts of goldenrod and beds of blue asters, the body sprawled. Someone had laid a potato sack over it for modesty, but the poor nakedness was really the least obscene thing about the tableau. A gaping mouth, inhabited by tiny, busy creatures, crow-plucked eyes, hands clutched up about the neck. Father Damien excused himself and threw up, casually and efficiently, behind a tree, then returned with a handkerchief held to his lips. The men waited for him, accustomed by now to the priest’s combination of delicacy and shrewd toughness.

Steadier, he bent to the piteous human scraps, brushed a scraping of dirt from the throat, stared at the sight until it lost some of its horror and became a puzzle. Questions occurred, a great many questions. Of course, to begin with, the cause of death. Damien observed the stretched, fixed features, still apparent even after the summer’s heat—an effort to speak or, more likely, to gasp, to take air? And the hands to the throat. The man had surely choked, or been choked. If the latter, not by someone in a face-to-face death struggle, hands on windpipe, but something else.

“Was there a rope,” Damien asked of the men surrounding the body. “Did you find anything, a noose, twine, leathers, something that might have been used to strangle this man?”

There was no answer. As though thinking as one, they abruptly left the priest and fanned evenly through the woods. The undergrowth was thick and tangled with wild grape and raspberry, springy brambles, a summer’s growth of oak seedlings. The men stamped out a carefully widening circle. As they searched, Damien continued to take a meticulous inventory of the features of the body that might provide further information. The eyes—wide open—before they had been plucked? The feet, close together, had the body been dragged? The ankles bound? Alcohol. Any way of telling whether Napoleon was drunk at the time? Had there been a struggle? Was this a fight typical of drunks, and if so, with whom did he drink? Was there anyone missing from the reservation, a companion who’d perhaps run off in horror of what had happened?

“Neshke,” said George Aisance. In his hand a long rope of beads, a twine of knots and black prayer markers, a rosary.

Damien accepted the beads and tried to coil them around his fist. That was when he realized that this particular rosary was different from all others—it was strung on something stiffer, which kept an elegant shape. It was wire, some sort of wire, and then the barbs pricked his palm and he realized what kind. The crucifix of the rosary went cold in his hands.

He wasn’t of a sufficiently certain mind to say anything yet, but there were marks, yes, there were, a necklace of deep pits decayed in small dents around the dead man’s neck. After he bid George and the other men to leave, to find a sledge to transport the body back to town, he measured the rosary beads in his hands. Gently, as though he was fitting to a woman’s throat a string of pearls, he compared a decade, ten beads and a larger bead, barbs between, a set of mysteries that exactly fit the wounds.

That night, in the trembling radiance of candles, Agnes laid the rosary out before her on the covers of the bed and then sat next to it, looking at it, imagining just how it had been shaped. A pair of pliers, certainly, to untwist the wire. The beads were about a half inch in diameter as on a rope rosary, and they had accommodated—either naturally or by being enlarged—the wire and the barbs between. For the rosary had been cleverly planned to utilize the spun steel thorns, perhaps to prick a finger between each decade or perhaps . . . Here Agnes picked up the rosary dangling stiff by the crucifix, swept it over her shoulder so it caught in the flap of the overcoat that she still wore. She frowned at herself and disentangled it—a flagellant’s whip. It would have left, she thought, gingerly gripping it now, the hands of whomever used it to choke a grown man a bloody mess.

THE TEMPLE WHIPPING

Napoleon’s funeral set things going, created divisions that would last for years, during which a complex transfer of power would occur on the reservation. Land would pass from the hands of Napoleon’s sister, Bernadette, to the son of Margaret Kashpaw and from there into Kashpaw hands. That’s where it started—in the church before a crude pine box. Of course, Father Damien knew by now that the Kashpaws and Pillagers avoided the Morrissey and Lazarre camp. It had been his fruitless work to try to bring together the factions. What happened at the funeral made him give up the notion, forever, and accept that he dealt with a set of clan differences, complicated by loss, land, and money, that would never heal. These differences would go on, in fact, through time and come to define the politics of the place he loved.

Margaret Kashpaw, shrewd and sour, kicked the misery to life.

Some said that Margaret should not have shown her face at the funeral, given that the man who chased after her was the holdout Nanapush. She had the nerve to show up in bright clothing, and wore the garish red hat that made some call her Old Lady Cardinal and others mutter that it was a pointed mark of disrespect. You never wore that color near the dead, as it confused their spirits, attracted them back to the living. But apparently that did not bother Margaret. Margaret only said that she came because it was her duty as a member of the tribe and parish. Her words were met with scorn, right at the doorway.

“So you came to gloat.” Bernadette greeted her with ugly irony. What she actually said in Ojibwemowin was that Margaret had come to make herself fat on the sorrows of her enemies. Then she added that Margaret already was quite fat enough and should go home.

“Go fuck the old longhair in your dead husband’s blankets,” she advised, again in Ojibwemowin, a phrase lost on Father Damien, who was standing near to greet those who’d come to pay their final respects. He did catch the word blankets, waabooyaanan, and using his pocked mental lexicon he made the association between blankets and honoring gifts. Thinking Margaret had been uncharacteristically generous, he at once clasped Margaret’s hand and began with a nervous passion to thank her. Caught between the sudden insult and the copious gratitude, Margaret rocked back. Just for an instant, though. She quickly discarded the priest’s clumsy praise and prepared a barrage of killing wit, which she was unable to deliver. A crush of sorrowing Morrisseys now swept protectively around Bernadette, and simultaneously pinned Margaret Kashpaw in the center of the back pew, so that she had to scramble over the top of the bench to gain her freedom.

This small woman, though of some age, could move with strength and economy. Before anyone could knock her down, Margaret Kashpaw wove through the mourners. Quick as a weasel, she popped up right before Bernadette. As she moved, her mind was working, so that by the time she confronted the Morrissey she had discarded her crude witticisms in favor of a bitingly sweet form of address.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, in your pitiful condition. I loved your brother as my own brother. You should remember how he came to chop wood for me when my own husband was out on the trapline. And don’t you recall”—Margaret spoke with brilliant inspiration, lies jumping to her lips—“how your brother so generously gave up his horses and bought my dead husband’s team for a good price after he was killed?”

Of course, Bernadette now recalled her brother bragging how he’d cheated the widows and taken advantage of the fact that, as Kashpaw’s death was the result of his team’s panic, nobody in the family felt right with the beasts. They traded them to Napoleon so cheaply that he couldn’t stop talking about his bargain.

“Ishte, Bernadette, your brother was a good man,” said Margaret, sopping away fake tears. “He was so good to your niece-girl, the one who dug the dirt. Even, he took in that skinny Puyat who now wears the black gown. Oh yai, he used to bring that virgin to that old shack on Kashpaw land where he—”

Father Damien now freed himself of other hands and again clasped Margaret’s, giving her his most profound attention, which worked out perfectly, for all Margaret had wanted to do was lay the foundation of suspicion for Bernadette to stand on, and shade her eyes, and look this way and that. Which she did, thinking surely no one else knew what evil Napoleon did to the Kashpaw girl? And the Puyat? And even if someone knew, at least that Puyat was alone, wasn’t she, no family members around to . . . but no, and here Bernadette’s mouth gaped open. Perhaps there were people on the reservation who knew about Napoleon’s crime. She’d sent Marie to the Lazarres to avoid a repetition. Maybe there were relatives she hadn’t considered, vengeful ones. He was dead, wasn’t he? Dead by the hand of someone strong and capable. Although she mourned him for the blood he was, Bernadette had no illusions about the character of her dead brother.

He had taken advantage of her too. Recalling this, quite suddenly, Bernadette’s face went dark with unshed emotion. She suddenly shook off the maudlin comfort of her family and strode to the front pew, where she brooded with great intensity on what he really was. What he really did. What he left her with. She brooded so hard and cracked her big knuckles so loudly that the other members of her family feared that she was disoriented by grief. But no, her thoughts were properly directed by Margaret’s truth. That was the problem.

All through the painful service that Father Damien conducted, her oblivious mutters sounded. Napoleon had tried to cheat her of her own land and left her nothing but a spalted horse and his clothing, the acrid smell of himself in the cloth. She’d burn them now. He’d brought loose women to the house and drank with them. He drank anyway, alone, and sometimes . . . ah, she pushed away the pictures, glad to the bone that he was dead. Maybe she would stand up and kick his coffin. Maybe she would rage at heaven. No longer could she hold it in! She leaped up suddenly, but men were ready. They held her back, from joining her brother in death, they thought, but in reality she wanted to rip his pickled body from the box.

That she went strange in her behavior after talking to Margaret was not lost on her relatives.

“It’s her,” cried one, totally disrupting Father Damien’s attempt to forge ahead with the service. “That damn Margaret Kashpaw put a powder on her!”

The whole church of Lazarres and Morrisseys and those on their side now turned to look upon Margaret, who was perhaps the only woman living anywhere, in all the Anishinaabeg territory now chopped into states and provinces, who could glare back with such authority. More than all of them put together. Her peaked red cap stood up, erect. Her eyes blazed and her bearing was of the old ogitchidaa-ikwe stance, too powerful to resist. For such a small, sharp woman, her voice carried. It rolled out of her. She put one hand up before she spoke and turned to each direction.

“We will see it coming soon,” she cried, her voice echoing in drama, “more deaths out in the woods. The trees strangled the Morrissey because he spoke of selling them all for timber and getting rid of our land!”

In the confused silence that greeted this preposterous statement, she walked out, leaving behind her a massed political war council of those determined not only to cut a deal with the lumber people but also, now, to avenge their martyr, and others scratching their heads and saying, the trees? The trees? Bernadette, pinned to the pew by the excitement of her rage, now sobbed and ground her teeth and begged to be carried out of the church. It was most unlike her, this impulsive weeping, this charging forward. Bony and elbowing, her arms slashed the air. As she was in fact a powerful character by reason of her influence upon the government agent, her agitation acted as a catalyst to further uproar.

Father Damien, now fearing they might burn down his church in their frenzy, patrolled inside nervously, then outside. What else could he do? This was a test. Agnes stopped, put her hands on her hips, rallied her wits and her strength. Was her priest to be driven from his own church? She rocked on her heels. Listened to the mass of would-be mourners argue and shout. She clenched and unclenched her fists, and at last threw her power into the voice and demeanor of Father Damien. Strode back inside.

At first, the muscled backs and shoving arms and jutting chins of the arguers barred him, but he persevered until he gained the altar. Gathering up his courage, he suddenly vaulted up onto the coffin, which sat on a sturdy table. He stood there with fists on his hips, at which point the mourners shut up and gaped at him in mass reproach.

“Bekaayan,” he ordered them. “Bizindamoog! You think I am disrespectful to stand full square upon the dead? No different than what you are doing! Be gone! Get out! This is a place of the Lord!”

Father Damien then had the glad luck to spy a strong whip coiled on the front pew. Bounding to the floor, he grabbed it and then commenced wielding it all around, right and left, so that the shamed mourners drew back and scattered. Stumbled through the door, and left. Father Damien emptied the place, and then stood panting near the holy water font, a bowl on a log, and cut the air in the sign of the cross.

Scrawny Mr. Bizhieu crept back in and begged Father Damien to return his whip. His rage leaped high and Father Damien launched it at Bizhieu like a lance.

“Miigwetch,” said the whip’s owner in admiration.

Soon it would be told all through the reservation and the land how the young priest drove false worshipers straight from God’s holy presence with a scourge just like the adventurous Jesus whipped the zhooniya men in the temple. And further, the story embellished, how those touched by the whip itself were saved and could not help creeping back to the church with confessions, while others were cured of goiters, sore eyes, rheumatism. And the whip itself was proudly displayed by the Bizhieus. Only Father Damien felt shame at his loss of temper, and resolved to be pragmatic from then on.

He would conduct two separate Masses for the enemies, so that they would never meet and defile the holy presence with their disputes.