The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (52 page)

Jacklight
, Erdrich’s first book of poems, was published in 1983, followed a year later by
Love Medicine
, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the
Los Angeles Times Award
, the Janet Kaufman Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and other prizes.
Love Medicine
eventually became the first novel in a remarkable series that would include
The Beet Queen
(1986),
Tracks
(1988),
The Bingo Palace
(1994),
Tales of Burning Love
(1996) and
The Antelope Wife
(1998).

In addition to these novels, Erdrich’s publications include a collaborative novel,
The Crown of Columbus
(1991, written with Michael Dorris), and another book of poetry
Baptism of Desire
(1989). She has written of art, infancy, and the natural world in her first work of nonfiction,
The Blue Jay’s Dance
(1995).

Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters. Her latest novel is
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse.

Introduction

Beginning with her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning first novel
Love Medicine
, Louise Erdrich has spent nearly two decades carving her own fictional landscape from both the rough and mystical details of life on and around a North Dakota Indian reservation. In her masterful new novel,
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
, Erdrich weaves a tale that spans nearly a century, the strange and compelling story of Father Damien Modeste, a beloved reservation priest who has hidden his true identity as a woman beneath his cassock.

When the novel begins in 1996, movement is afoot to consider Sister Leopolda, the former Pauline Puyat, for canonization because of purported miracles associated with her. But Damien knows many dark truths about the deceased nun; truths learned in the confessional and pieced together from fragments of history and conjecture. The old priest writes to the Pope, the last of a lifetime of letters he has written to the Pontiff, to reveal the truth about the controversial Sister Leopolda.

Damien has remained silent about the Puyat woman for decades, not only because of the sanctity of the confessional, but also because she knew his own secret. He reflects back on his extraordinary life, unfolding the details of how Agnes DeWitt, a nun with an almost erotic obsession with the piano music of Chopin, is transformed into Father Damien.

After a quixotic journey, marked by armed robbers and a terrible flood, Agnes assumes the identity of the real Father Damien, lost in the flood, and spends the next 84 years on the reservation as an integral part of the community.

With his own brand of religion, Father Damien melds the rigid dogma of Catholicism with the ancient mystical beliefs of the Obijwe. He becomes a great friend of the elder Nanapush, and his life intertwines with those of the Kashpaws, Lamartines, Lazarres, Morrisseys, Pillagers—characters who inhabit all of Erdrich’s novels with Faulknerian deftness. Damien witnesses cataclysmic events that change reservation life forever—the devastating 1919 influenza epidemic, the white man’s land grab, and finally the coming of the Bingo Palace—as well as the private passions, devotions and crimes of the Obijwe people he grows to love.

Later in his life, the Vatican sends a priest to investigate the holiness of Sister Leopolda. Father Jude encounters a maddening evasiveness from Father Damien about the would-be saint. As he stumbles through his own misguided search for meaning and transcendence, he too will be singularly changed by what he encounters.

A passionate and poetic writer, Louise Erdrich lends both elegance and wit to her most ambitious novel to date.
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
reaffirms Erdrich’s status as one of America’s best novelists.

A Conversation with Louise Erdrich

Your latest novel
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
is the story of Father Damien Modeste and it spans from 1912 to the present.

1911 or 1912, yes. It then moves forward to nearly the present. But it also includes some history of characters and those histories occur before the turn of the last century. It spans the emotional and historical landscape of my previous books as well and, I hope, brings them into some sort of focus or sheds new light on some of the characters’s secrets. And of course it brings one character, Father Damien, who was a minor contributor to the book
Tracks
, into his/her own.

Everything in the novel—from people to places to the very landscapes—seems to exist between two extremes. Damien is Agnes. Leopolda is somewhere between sainthood and acts of cavalier cruelty. Even the bank robber is called The Actor. There is almost a Manichaean split between things. And rather than being an expose on hypocrisy, it’s more that these are the necessary tools of survival in a way.

I don’t interpret what I write so it’s interesting to hear it put in a way that makes it seem planned and intelligent. I write so much on instinct that I’m enthralled when I hear the word Manichaean to describe what my characters just do. Agnes becomes a priest through an act of revelation. She doesn’t become a priest out of calculation. For her it’s a revolution of the spirit. It is meant to be. For her, everything that has happened to her up to that point has drawn her toward the moment in which she makes the decision to go into the priesthood. She’s carried by the flood of her being into this priest’s garments. From then on, she makes the choice every day. She grows in a spiritual way—but she also inhabits almost another body and it becomes natural to her. By the end, she doesn’t think of herself as anything else in the outside world but a priest and yet within herself, continues to exist in her own persona. And there is always that question: are the personae that we deliver to the world intrinsic to us or have we assumed them the way The Actor assumes his roles in the first chapter of the book?

There is almost no difference in the book between the sacred and the profane. You know Agnes, before she’s even Agnes, while she’s a young novitiate. And she plays the piano. And she’s transported by Chopin whom you describe, I must say at one point, as a “pierogi snarfer,” which I think is a first for a description of Chopin.

Yes, but that’s much later and the devil is describing him in that way. In the beginning, Chopin is her angelic lover. She is physically initiated by the marvel of the emotion that he has hidden in his music for her to discover. Later, she loses her musical ability and forgets why her hands move. Then it comes back to her. Chopin’s music returns to her with all the solace of an internal caretaker and a lover. Which I think music is for many of us. It is something that we can return to again and again throughout our lives and it never ceases to comfort.

It’s what carries her away from the absolute desolation of her old life, she climbs on top of her piano and she floats away to her new life.

That was the image that first started me writing the book. It was this picture of a woman in a billowing white nightgown moving off into the flood. She was captured on the lid of a piano. She was wearing the treble clef of a nightgown and riding into the flood. The first part of this book was actually written during a tremendous flood that occurred in North Dakota, and, I think, captured the attention of many people because it was so devastating and so unexpected. The river along which I grew up is rather innocuous most of the time but then it can suddenly swell to immense proportions. That’s what happens in the beginning of this book.

You’ve written, in many ways, a book about faith. But it is also a very erotic book.

I believe that faith is erotic in the sense that our yearning is toward union, toward the absolute. Toward a transcendence—not of the body—but of all of the concerns that grab us from every side from day to day. Transcendence of the ordinary or an acceptance—a love of the ordinary part of faith. So I interpret erotic to be a much more inclusive and embracing word than say purely sexual.

In terms of writing a character that vacillates between the male and the female so organically, how was that as a writer for you?

I’m surprised to say that it was not a difficulty. Maybe that is because I think we all do vacillate between male and female in some ways. I have no idea how it affects the reader. But for me the only difficulty was that for a while in the writing of it I had Agnes change dramatically. First she was Agnes and then she was Father Damien and there was a great divide in the book. But it didn’t seem to work and I couldn’t admit to Agnes being lost. It didn’t seem realistic. It seemed as though a person who was able to be this consummate actor—so skilled that she inhabited entirely the role that she was playing—that did not mean changing oneself. It would mean incorporating every skill in order to enlarge oneself so that she became two people. She became twice the person she was.

Near the very end of the book there is a sly reference about a local writer who has been intercepting Father Damien’s reports to the Pope.

All of these reports that have been sent off to Rome—because Father Damien doesn’t want to talk too frankly to the local bishop because of course that would blow everything. And someone has been sending these reports up for years to the Pope—really being the closest person to God. Originally the whole purpose of the book was different. I wanted to somehow explain how this writer, me, came into the possession of all these first person accounts belonging to all these other people. These outrageous voices, the confessions in
Love Medicine
and
Tracks
. It’s a way of explaining to myself where the books originated because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why suddenly I begin to think in a certain voice and the writing comes out in a certain voice. And some little flare of an image suggests a certain story. It’s a process that is mysterious to me. I originally began forming the idea of this novel as a way of explaining my role as a writer—I must have somehow appropriated dozens of confessions of people I’ve never met or known.

That’s not some kind of admission that you’ve been jimmying the lock on the archdiocese mailbox all these years.

That too perhaps. Why don’t I just leave this as a question mark?

Questions for Discussion

1. Do you find Father Damien to be an attractive character? If so, why? Does it bother you that he is an impostor, a thief, a liar? Does it bother you that he spends money on a piano rather than on some other cause? He easily forgives others their sins, but can we forgive him that he has an affair with another priest?
   

 


2. The novel invites comparisons between Leopolda and Damien. Make lists of some of their similarities and differences. Does Erdrich seem to want us to favor one over the other, or is she making through the strangeness of both of them a comment about the “miracles” of Catholicism?
   

 


3. Father Damien goes to Little No Horse to convert the Ojibwe to Catholicism. By the end of the book has he nearly become converted to the very paganism he set out to replace?
   

 


4. What do you make of the black dog that hounds Father Damien? Is it the devil? Does it really speak? Is it evidence that Damien is insane? Why did Erdrich risk having us even ask that last question by including the dog in the first place? If it is a devil who tempts Father Damien in the wilderness, does Damien become some sort of a Christ figure?
   

 


5. Consider the various meanings of “passion” in this novel? Why does Erdrich use the word so often? What do you make of the implied allusion to the passion of Christ—or do you see no such implication?
   

 


6. In this novel a very passionate woman spends most of her life impersonating a man. Along the way she becomes aware of certain ways that men typically behave, as well as how they are typically treated by others. Is there a message here about male-female roles and attitudes? Does Erdrich’s use of both genders of pronoun (he/she, etc.) to refer to Father Damien confuse you, or does it make sense in the context of the story?
   

 


7. In this novel more than any previous one, Erdrich gives untranslated words, phrases, and even sentences in the Ojibwe language. Why does she do this? Is it effective? Can you usually figure out from the context what the words, phrases, and sentences mean?
   

 


8. Do you find Nanapush to be as attractive a character as Father Damien does? Is he, like his namesake Nanabozho, a trickster figure of mythological proportions, or is he just a funny, oversexed, foolish, and sometimes wise old man? How would you compare his sexuality with that of Father Damien?
   

 


9. What are we to make of the Pope’s failure to reply to any of Father Damien’s letters during his lifetime? What are we to make of the Pope’s willingness to write at the end of the novel after Father Damien is dead? Does this last make the novel feel more like comedy or tragedy? That is, does the final fax give the novel a happy or sad ending?