The Making of a Saint

How do you write the life of a saint? Do you tell a story of sacrifice and fill in the blanks with the words of the faithful? Do you depict the moment of conversion, the light cutting through the dust of a misguided past? Do you borrow a page from the canon and let the miracles speak for themselves? Teetering between biography and fiction, hagiography is tricky business: Only God can make a saint, but it takes a novelist to tell the story.

Since her 1984 debut with “Love Medicine,” Louise Erdrich has in six novels created one of the more elaborate narrative strains in contemporary fiction, an intricate braiding of characters, place and generational history. Her ambition is breathtaking, and her art-a mixture of raucous storytelling and lyrical prose-has seldom veered from a deeper purpose, to portray the struggles of a community as it confronts the pain of its failed past.

“The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse,” her latest dispatch from the plains of northern North Dakota, is the story of Father Damien Modeste. In earlier novels, Damien’s church and the adjacent convent have been a focal point of reservation life yet, curiously, he stood almost invisible, at a distance. Now he takes center stage, and Erdrich uses his long life to take us deeper into the worlds of two families, the Kashpaws and Nanapushes, to chart their difficult passage from the 19th century to the present. Some of the stories are new; some have occurred in earlier work and are told from different perspectives. But none has the impact of Damien’s, whose life is most remarkable for the fact that he is a woman. “Then, with slow care,” we read at the end of the prologue, “he turned off the bedside lamp, and in the moonlighted dark unwound from his chest a wide Ace bandage. His woman’s breasts were small, withered, modest as folded flowers.”

It is a bold gambit, though not entirely surprising for Erdrich, who has always had something of the Trickster in her, and not entirely improbable (she cites in the end notes the example of the late Billy Tipton, the jazz pianist who passed as a man for most of her life). Yet it is a gambit that makes “The Last Report,” with perhaps the exception of “Love Medicine,” Erdrich’s riskiest novel and at times her most problematic.

“Some people, they go so deep,” she writes. “They are like a being made of tunnels. Passageways that twist and double back and disappear. You have a foot on one path and you follow for a while, but then there is a sinkhole, bad footing, a wall.”

Gender-bending aside, it is a frustrating and slippery path (that winds-perhaps more than one might wish-back into the previous books), but it is an apt metaphor for Erdrich’s understanding of what makes us human: the slow accretion of experience, the chipping at and the piecing together of memory, the reshuffling and reassembling of affections. (It may be a sign of these complications that “The Last Report” is Erdrich’s first novel to feature a family tree.)

When we first see Damien, he is more than 100 years old, writing reports to the Vatican late into the night, desperately seeking guidance from the pope before it’s too late. The weight of the past-decisions he has made and secrets he has kept-weigh upon him. First, there is the matter of Sister Leopolda, whom some believe worthy of beatification; an investigation is about to begin into her life that Damien thinks should not be done. Then there is the matter of his own sin, his deception and the great peril he’s placed the community in. “[A]ll would be lost,” he realizes, if the truth of his identity were revealed. “Married couples [he] had joined would be sundered. Babies unbaptized and exposed to the dark powers. Deaths unblessed and sins again weighing on the poor sinners.” As he wrestles with these demons, Erdrich cuts back and forth in time to draw out no fewer than 100 years of life on the Ojibwe reservation of Little No Horse, a broad sweep of time that is a measure of her vision of this place and the people who live here.

The narrative begins in 1910 when Damien is in the novitiate-once Agnes DeWitt, now Sister Cecilia-a young woman who finds God less compelling than Chopin’s piano works. Her playing disrupts the meditative life within and suggests a deeper, unfulfilled desire. Not long for the cloistered life, “[s]he was one who believed without seeing, felt spiritual emotion without experience of its source, kept an orderly faith and haphazard observance without the deepest marks of conviction.”

Abandoning the convent, she arrives one day hungry and homeless on the doorstep of a solitary farmer. They set up housekeeping. He buys her a piano, and they fall in love. It is a dream that breaks abruptly on a clear spring day when a bank robber murders the farmer and leaves her a widow, a tragedy made all the more terrible for its randomness.

*

“Who is beading us?” Erdrich asks in the closing paragraph of her last novel, “The Antelope Wife.” ’Who is setting flower upon flower and cut-glass vine? Who are you and who am I, the beader or the bit of colored glass sewn onto the fabric of this earth?”

In stories dense with desire, enmity, love-longing and grief-her trademarks through nearly 20 years-Erdrich has often parted the curtains of everyday life to intimate the lure of another world. In “Love Medicine,” on the morning before Easter, a woman disappears in a snowstorm, and her bereaved husband sees her in the visage of a deer he struck by the roadside. In “Tracks,” a woman hears a message from Jesus and confronts the devil.

But what had been an occasional dalliance with the spiritual is in “The Last Report” a deeper meditation. Part novel, part fictional biography, part hagiography, Damien’s story bridges the distance between the spiritual and secular world in an attempt to explain, if at all possible, the capriciousness of life.

Not long after the farmer’s murder, the river swells its banks and collapses the house. Agnes is swept into this biblical torrent and is saved, when the waters subside, by a man-or the vision of a man-who she believes is Christ. When she later discovers the body of a drowned priest snagged in a tree, she knows that she must assume his identity and continue his trek north to Little No Horse, where she comes to see the lives of the Ojibwe with uncommon sympathy. Over the course of his life, he will attend to their sufferings, through the ravages of consumption, then influenza and later, poverty and despair. He too will find his ministry fill with regret. “I believe even now,” he confides late in his life, “that the void left in the passing of sacred traditional knowledge was filled, quite simply, [not with the solace of Christian beliefs, but] with the quick ease of alcohol. So I was forced by the end to clean up after the effects of what I had helped to destroy....”

Agnes’ initial decision to embrace this life is less strange than it seems: Erdrich makes clear that her conversion-her reinvention-is all that remains for someone whose past has been thoroughly swept away. It is, of course, a theme made more poignant by her own life. Once married to novelist Michael Dorris, Erdrich saw her world shift first upon their divorce and then upon his suicide in 1997. She has since moved her family from New Hampshire to Minnesota, where she is an independent bookseller.

Reinvention also explains the importance of Sister Leopolda to this story, she who may be a saint but started life as the haunted Pauline Puyat. Her stormy conversion-told in Erdrich’s novel “Tracks’-took place early in her life and over a matter of time. As a young girl, she fought her heritage and ran from home. She witnessed a rape and saw its terrible repercussions; she fell in love, got pregnant and, in a pique of madness, abandoned the baby and murdered the father. Pauline, Erdrich writes, “was the residue of what occurred when some of our grief-mad people trampled their children.... [T]he history [of her family] is the history of the end of things. It is bound up in despair and ... self-slaughter.”

As a nun, Pauline, now Sister Leopolda, disguises her past and becomes, even beyond her death, an unwitting catalyst for the divine. But Damien knows about her crime, and he knows that her secret, like his, would unravel a lifetime of work if divulged.

By playing with such stakes and exploring their implications, Erdrich makes it clear that it is of little importance that Leopolda is a murderer or that Damien is a woman: What counts most are the lives that would be ruined by such revelations. It is an awareness that leads to forgiveness, but forgiveness is never simple: It either opens the doors of the world to evil or it changes the terms of the conflict altogether. The latter becomes Damien’s balm. Toward the end of the novel, he sees the purpose of his charade:

” ... Agnes was assured that her Father Damien had done the right thing in absolving all who asked forgiveness, and the realization filled her with a sudden and buoyant strength. Here it was-the reason she’d been called here in the first place. The reason she’d endured and the reason she’d been searching for. This was why she continued to live. She ... drew strength from the massive amounts of forgiveness her priest had dispensed in his life. She saw that forgiveness as a long, slow, soaking rain he had caused to fall on the dry hearts of sinners.” For a community like Little No Horse, wracked by so many troubles, such a gift is no small charity.

Earlier, when Damien builds a church on the reservation, he dislodges a colony of snakes with whom he develops a miraculous rapport. “I am like you,” he preaches to them, and they listen, mesmerized. “Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.... If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do.”

*

What sort of story befits a saint? It is a question that Kenneth Woodward asks in his book “Making Saints” (mentioned by Erdrich in her conclusion to “The Last Report’). “Not a tragedy, certainly,” Woodward writes. Possibly a comedy, but most likely “the story of a saint is always a love story ... that includes misunderstanding, deception, betrayal, concealment, reversal, and revelation of character. It is, if saints are to be trusted, our story. But to be a saint is not to be a solitary lover. It is to enter into deeper communion with everyone and everything that exists.”

This communion is Damien’s gift, and in picturing his conversion, his miracles and the abiding devotion of his congregation, Erdrich has compiled the life of a saint, who-as must always be the case-knows nothing of his saintliness. Only as Damien nears death does the meaning of his work on the reservation become more clear, and the bishop’s ambassador begins to wonder rightly if perhaps, by looking at Leopolda’s life, he might be missing the real story.

Messy, ribald, deeply tragic, preposterous and heartfelt, “The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse” is a love story, and what shine most brilliantly through its pages are Erdrich’s intelligence and compassion. Let the world shake, buckle, storm and burn. Let the people suffer, as they will. It is our connections to the past and the future, through families and connections to kin, th at grant us our saintliness and our transcendent power.