Louise Erdrich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

There are four layers above the earth and four layers below. Sometimes in our dreams and creations we pass through the layers, which are also space and time. In saying the word nindinawemaganidok, or my relatives, we speak of everything that has existed in time, the known and the unknown, the unseen, the obvious, all that lived before or is living now in the worlds above and below.

Nanapush

1996

The grass was white with frost on the shadowed sides of the reservation hills and ditches, but the morning air was almost warm, sweetened by a southern wind. Father Damiens best hours were late at night and just after rising, when all hed had to break his fast was a cup of hot water. He was old, very old, but alert until he had to eat. Dressed in his antique cassock, he sat in his favorite chair, contemplating the graveyard that spread just past the ragged yard behind his retirement house and up a low hill. His thoughts seemed to penetrate sheer air, the maze of tree branches waving above the stones, clouds, sky, even time itself, and they surged from his brain, tense, quickly, one on the next until hed eaten his tiny meal of toast and coffee. Just after, Father Damiens mind relaxed. His habit was then to doze again, often straight into his afternoon nap.

A period of waking confusion plagued him, usually before the supper hour, sometimes and most embarrassingly while he said late afternoon Saturday Mass. When lucid again, Father Damien repaired for the evening to his desk, a place from which he refused to be disturbed. There, he wrote fierce political attacks, reproachful ecclesiastical letters, memoirs of reservation life for history journals, and poetry. He also composed lengthy documents, which he called reports, to send to the Pope he had in fact addressed every pontiff since he had come to the reservation in 1912. During his writing, Father Damien drank a few drops of wine, and usually, by the time he was ready for bed, he was what he called pacified. This night, however, the wine had the opposite effect it sharpened instead of dulled his fervor, sped instead of slowed the point of his cracked plastic pen, focused his mind.

To His Holiness, the Pope

The Vatican, Rome, Italy

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

From the pen of

Father Damien Modeste

Your Holiness, I speak to you from a terrible distance. I have so much to tell you, and so little time. A desperate gravity has hold of me these days. I am sure that my death must at last be near. That is why I address you with such familiarity and in such haste. Please forgive my awkwardness. I dont have time to revise!

My hand is distressingly shaky, but legible enough, I hope?

I have no idea whether any of my previous letters have reached you the body of my correspondence stretches back over the course of this century, but those most recent are, naturally, addressed to you. My letters contain documented evidence from a variety of sources, including actual confessions. I kept the identity of one murderer, in fact, a secret, an anguish I taste even now. Aternus Pater, you have in your possession enough material to fill at least several vaults of file cabinets. Dare I hope, since this will be the last of my reports, that at long last you will see fit to answer?

Here Father Damien broke off and crankily adjusted his wooden office chair. His brain throbbed with light. He threw his pen down with a clatter and glared with unfocused intensity at the neat arrangements of envelopes, index cards, parish stationery, postage stamps, and research files that filled the niches of the keyhole desk. He often found instinctive comfort in organizing the small things around him, and now, dissatisfied with what he had written, he reached out to tidy the edges of papers, nudge and tap desk objects into place. He fussed for several moments before he understood the source of his darkness. Apparently, one couldnt hope for a reply, oh no, that would be all too human, wouldnt it! An actual response from the Pope after a lifetime of devoted correspondence. Or could he call it that, implying as the word did some reciprocity, at least the semblance of an exchange? In all of this time, Father Damien had not received so much as a form reply. Even an autographed photo postcard would have been something. But no, not even that. His was a one-sided conversation, then, a monologue, a faithful and dogged adherence to truth and, of course, concern for what hed seen developing across the acorn-studded grass, behind the wall of scrub oaks, over there, within the whitewashed convent.

A great swallow of red wine this fierce clarity, perhaps it was the vintage? A potent year, no doubt. Father Damien took the bottle in his hand and examined the label. An obscure beaujolais, pungent and grapey, left by some extremely thoughtful parishioner on his very doorstep. It was the wine, yes, French wine blue-red on his tongue and clear, causing him to assign blame where blame was useless. His mood softened. After all, Father Damien leaned back, lips to his glass, and took a smaller sip, the Pope was a busy man! Did he have time for these wretched backwaters, and a persistent and pathetic cleric who couldnt even write in a straight line anymore without employing a childs ruler? No time, no time for either the nonsense or the vast spiritual transactions that I have witnessed. No time.

Not receiving the honor of a reply from your great office, I have nevertheless continued, over the years and from the earliest days of my assignment to this remote reservation, to document the series of unusual events that has given rise to speculation regarding the Blessedness of one Sister Leopolda Puyat, recently (though perhaps not entirely) deceased. Although not formally released from my vow of secrecy regarding what is revealed to me under the seal of Confession, I have taken it upon myself after years of nights of soul-wrenching argument to furnish certain segments of these proofs from long soliloquies delivered to me in the privacy of the confessional box.

I hope, in these instances, that my revelation of confessed sins has been warranted by the serious nature of my quest. I did not lightly undertake to break the trust bestowed upon me, as I have said. Without placing blame specifically on any of your predecessors, I must say that it would have helped enormously if one or another pope had seen fit to guide me in respect to this question long ago! But no doubt, Fountain of Faith, there were reasons past my vision, substance beyond my power to digest. Perhaps the silence from beyond these poor boundaries has been a test, a shrewd marker of my endurance, my belief.

If so, let this last report confirm my lack of doubt.

Again, the burning hands, arthritis, and a writers cramp. Father Damien put down the pen with care this time and wrung his left hand with his right as though squeezing water from a cloth. He had not written for so long or with such single-mindedness it had been many weeks, months perhaps. Even two glasses into the bottle of wine, his thoughts continued to flow with such rapidity that he decided not to quit. After all, how many such nights did he have left on earth? His hand, long and crooked, beautifully worn and supple, oval nails of opaque tortoise, surprised him on the stem of the glass. For a long time he had been old, then he was past old. A living mummy. Of all people to have become so ancient! Himself! He put his hand to his hair, just wisps of thin and brittle stuff parted by the white scrawl of the scar that unwrote so many of his early memories. And the heart in his chest, so touchy, so tremulous. Easy things had become difficult. For instance, children. He had always loved to be around them, but now their exuberance was rattling. Their voices and quick movements dizzied him. He had to sit, allow his heart to settle, and restore his strength. And his hearing had become quite tricky sometimes he heard everything, the undertones in Chopins preludes, which he still played, though with a fumbling energy, the rustle of his own bedsheets, and at other times all sounds were cloaked by the roar of an unseen ocean.