The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich Page A

illness itself.
    “We have no regular doctor, but the cure is plain. Food, warmth.”
    “Simply that?”
    “It is possible, with skillful care, to nurse even a weak subject through this fever. We could have saved Father Hugo, had he only come to us!”
    “Why didn’t he?”
    “Father Hugo wouldn’t endanger us, and so hid his condition. Barred himself inside of his cabin. He was sick to death by the time we broke in. And then, of course,” she said with hurt pride, “you found the place in sad repair. We hadn’t any notion you would stay there but had a place for you with a pious family. You see, we have not entered to clean for fear of the fever . . . only the Puyat doesn’t fear most illness. She was supposed to have cleaned.”
    “The one at the Mass this morning?”
    “That one.”
    “No need,” Agnes said, anxious even then to avoid contact with the girl. “I’m trained to keep my surroundings in good order.”
    “Oh,” Hildegarde was a bit surprised. “Very unlike poor Father Hugo!”
    Poor Hugo. With a powerful thrust, a scene stabbed into Agnes’s mind. She saw the priest laboriously sinking, taking leave of the world alone, speaking his good-bye prayers. She struggled to gain control of her exhaustion. The walk from the river had been endless, the train smoky and jolting, the miserable wait in the foul railroad hut a foretaste of hell. The drive with Kashpaw was encouraging, but Agnes had hardly slept the previous night and now could not battle the pressure of tears and more tears. She tried to lean on last night’s certainty, tried to keep her faith with the Christ who had fed her broth and taken on a human shape to give her comfort. She must follow through with the original plan, the vision. But to find herself here, in the midst of another’s vocation, was shockingly difficult. What had she supposed? Father Damien was in charge of these souls!
    “I am nowhere near as strong as the confidence Christ has placed in me,” she said to Hildegarde Anne, who sighed.
    “None of us is.”
    Agnes was tempted, next, to confess the specifics of her identity, the nature of her calling, to this good nun. After all, she looks much more capable than I, she thought with a certain faint hope. But Sister Hildegarde, perhaps sensing the despair of her tormented self-sympathy, squeezed Agnes’s hand in hers so hard she cracked the knuckles.
    “I prayed for a priest just like you,” she said, “young, with a tough, fresh faith!”
    So Agnes shut Father Damien’s mouth on that revelation.
    “Show me all you know of this place,” she demanded instead, steadying Father Damien’s voice and stilling the quaver in her heart.
    Sister Hildegarde drew out a path with the stub of a pencil. “This bisects the land they call ‘their’ reservation,” she said. “The place is shaped roughly like a house with a square beneath and one slanted roof, a jutting outpost like a chimney. They’ll lose all the land, of course, being unused to the owning of land. Incredibly, it makes no sense to them. They avow, in their own peculiar way, that the earth is only on loan. Yet, it’s going constantly into private ownership and already they are selling out to lumber interests. Father, your poor charges cannot read the documents they sign.”
    Here, Hildegarde was obviously distressed—she hated a bad business deal. “The government is not so much our problem,” she blurted out. “It is the thieves that surround us!”
    She showed every path and road, labeled cabins on the reservation, pointed out where certain of the most faithful parishioners lived.
    “Here, here, and here”—she pointed at nearly every spot—“the sickness has taken someone. Here, it took them all.” She stabbed out several places upon her map. Seeing the nun’s finger smash down, Agnes’s heart was touched with horror. The still cabin. The huddled forms. The unspeakable loneliness. Tears flashed again and Hildegarde, seeing this, slapped a