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

Agnes with a divine hand, unless you believe that God’s hand was Berndt’s and nudged the wrist of the Actor, causing the bullet to plow a shallow groove instead of to burrow deep. She had believed in her music. Now she was to lose that. But that loss would be replaced.
    She woke later, who knows how much later.
    It was night. Lamplight, a glowing glass, a roof over her, four walls. Agnes found that she was lying on a bed, covered with a quilt and a sheepskin. The air was heavy and warm with the smell of cooking venison and she was hungry. Beyond all measure, starving! She was young, barely a woman, and never full. A spoon was held to her lips. She moved toward it, lured like an animal, and she tasted a broth of meat that brought tears to her eyes. Then she saw a man’s hands held the spoon and the bowl. She slid her gaze up his strong arms, his shoulders, to his broad and open face.
    Kindness was there, sheer kindness, a radiance from within him fell upon her and it was like a pool of warm sunlight.
    Instantly, she remembered the river.
    “Who are you?” she asked, but without waiting for an answer she grabbed the bowl and drank its contents with such a steady greed that it was only when she’d reached the very bottom that she realized several things all at once: they were alone in the tiny hut, no woman had prepared the soup, and she was naked in the bed.
    The sheepskin dropped away from her body, and she felt the slight breeze of his breath along her throat. He stroked her hair, smiled at her. She felt warmth along her thighs, hovering elation. Bands of rippling lightness engulfed her when he moved closer. And then his hand, brutalized and heavy from work, fell gently as he held her arm and took away the empty bowl, the horn spoon, and wiped her lips. She felt his rough hair as he leaned closer, as he moved his length alongside her on the creaking boards, as he slowly turned her toward him. His breathing deepened, he relaxed. She lay there, too, spent and comfortable, curled against a sweetly sleeping man, a very tired man who smelled of resin from the wood he’d chopped, of metal from the tools he’d used, of hay, of sweat, of great and nameless things that she’d known, as in a dream, in her human husband’s arms.
    She lay her head beside him, and although she remained awake for many hours in that beautiful stillness, listening to his even breath, eventually she, too, fell asleep.
     
    Morning dawned with rain on the wind, the sky a sheet of gray light. Agnes remembered where she was, turned, and found that he was gone. Not only that, but she was lying in no comfortable settler’s shack, but in an empty shell of a long abandoned hovel with the wind whipping through, swallows’ nests in the eaves, no sign of the man, no bowl, no track, no spoon, no sheepskin covering or blanket. Only her nightclothes fit back onto her, dry, still smelling of the river. She stood in the doorway for a long while. As she stood there, she gradually came to understand what had happened.
    Through You, in You, with You. Aren’t those beautiful words? For of course she knew her husband long before she met Him, long before He rescued her, long before He fed her broth and held Agnes close to Him all through that quiet night.
Dear Pontiff,
Since then, through the years, my love and wonder have steadily increased. Having met Him just that once, having known Him in a man’s body, how could I not love Him until death? How could I not follow Him? Be thou like as me, were His words, and I took them literally to mean that I should attend Him as a loving woman follows her soldier into the battle of life, dressed as He is dressed, suffering the same hardships.
Modeste
     
    THE EXCHANGE
     
    Disoriented, Agnes walked farther north instead of south, for the river’s flow was mixed up in swirls and futile commotions now and there was no clear sign of the current’s force. The sky, too, was a low ceiling of thick gray through which the sunlight