The transfiguration of Agnes.

In the same setting as her previous novels, Louise Erdrich tells the tale of Father Damien, a priest who has kept a lifelong secret from beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation In this excerpt, Agnes DeWitt encounters the priest whose identity she would soon assume.

When she didn't show up for several days on end to play the organ, it was known that Miss DeWitt was suffering from nerves again. Incrementally, tortuously, unnecessarily, she was unblessed by tiny fragments of memory. Berndt materialized, cruelly, touch by touch, until he was all there but not there. A word and a look, a moment they had spent together, had apparently entered the heart of Agnes to be kept sealed and safe until, for no particular reason, she was to be tormented by an elusive recovery. She shut herself away. Some people grieve by holding fast to the love of others, some by rejecting all companionship. Some grieve with tears and some with dry howls. Some grieve like water, some burn. Some are the fire of sorrow and some are stone. Agnes was pure slate, dark and impenetrable.

Even books didn't help--she began and discarded them until they threatened her couch in tottering stacks.

A priest en route to his Indian mission and taking wayfarer's advantage of the local rectory's hospitality was dispatched to the suffering widow with communion--of which she now partook as she lived no longer in a state of mortal sin. She heard his knock but did not rise to meet him, only called out from her place on the couch that he should enter, and so he did. Father Damien Modeste was a small, prunish, inquisitive man of middle age who had been called by his God, from a comfortable parish near Chicago, to missionize Indians. Momentarily intrigued, she sat up, but then almost immediately she lost interest. He gave her communion. Took what food she'd set out. And then, as she was silent in her blanket, brooding, he remained a bit longer and attempted to raise her spirits by telling her of his zeal.

"I am going north," he insisted and went into detail regarding the harrowing details of his trip to the reservation. "Letters addressed to me by my fellow priest, Father Hugo, confirm the deep need for my service. Oh, there had been inroads. We are not the first generation of priests, but the devil ..."

Here Father Damien paused, gauging Miss DeWitt's despairing reserve, licked his thin lips, and went on, "The devil works with a shrewd persistence, Miss DeWitt, and is never known to give up a soul merely because it is a thing willed in heaven. Our labor is required here on earth, in the ordinary world. Evil, oh yes, evil--"

"What do you know of evil?" Miss DeWitt's attention shifted suddenly from the acorn pattern of the wallpaper to the prematurely withered face of the missionary. He opened his mouth to go eagerly forward. But before he could speak, Miss DeWitt did.

"I've seen evil," she told her confessor, firmly. "It has blue eyes and brown shoes. About size 10. The feet are narrow. The hands are square. The build is slight, and I'd say the face, though not handsome, has an intriguing changeability about it. Though I am only now repossessing my memory of all the specifics, Father Modeste, I've seen the devil himself and he was disguised in a rumpled cassock."

Father Modeste, already in possession of the story, nodded with barely hidden avidity.

"God dispensed great justice that day."

"Selectively."

Now Miss DeWitt glared tiredly at her piano.

"I couldn't play this afternoon. Something haunts me, as though another terrible memory is ready to pour into my mind and only a sheer finger's breadth of earth is holding it in place."

"I suppose you are referring"--here Father Damien coughed delicately--"to your ... ah ... companion."

"Yes," Agnes admitted, unwillingly. She hated being pegged and didn't much like this priest with the avid eyes. She touched the frail mend of the bullet's crease. "Only a short time ago, I was a sister in the local convent, having taken my temporary vows at a very young age. I remember every word, every Mass, every confession I made, every note I played. But only at times do I remember Berndt's features. And yet I recall with unwished clarity the face of the man who killed him! Fortunately, I often see another man, one I've never met, hair parted far over to the left, a deep-eyed brow, a broad, beaky nose, a small and rather full mouth and low cheekbones, lumpy and sad."

"Is it him?" The priest was curious.

"Him who?"

"Your companion, may he rest--"

"No, not him," said Agnes DeWitt, her fingers moving suddenly, flying on the tea plate, tapping, possessed by the thought of the photograph reproduced in the frontispiece of her favorite musical text. Chopin! Chopin! Father Modeste changed the subject in some bemusement. What was there to say? He tried to round the horn and cleave to his original subject all in one sentence.

"Miss DeWitt, it is said that God often enters the dark mind of the savage via musical pathways. For that reason, I've studied translations of the hymns laid down in Ojibwe by our studious Father Hugo. Ah, poor unfortunate Father Hugo! His death of the sweating fever was compared by witnesses, I have it in a letter, to Christ's agony in the garden. Blood, yes, beads of it all over him. He sweated blood from every pore of his body."

Diverted, Agnes imagined the scene. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss, and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

"Aren't you afraid?" she asked, but her voice was mocking, for truly, there was more to fear for her in a simple bank visit.

Father Damien raked his strands of hair back. His hand was a yellow daw. Something about the distracted way he mumbled out an answer in the negative told Agnes that he was, indeed, nervously disposed. The urge to tease him came upon her.

"I would be afraid," she said. "Not so much of the Indians themselves, but of the many plagues and vermin that assail them--most pathetic of all God's doomed creatures! Lice are very catching, for instance, and the devil trains them to descend in droves on the unwary priest who forgets to bless himself before he enters one of their homes."

Father Damien was silent in surprise.

"Oh, I'll bless myself all right," he said at last. "With a lye bath every week. And constitutionals. I will look after my health."

Agnes DeWitt could not help but tease more sharply. "Will you really bathe in lye? How brutal! And what grave difficulties such a pious man as yourself will face when confronted with their shamans and hocus-pocus! I am sure they indulge in seances."

"Most likely."

"Trance states, those are probably common. And potions, elixirs, that sort of anodyne."

"No doubt."

"There are so many shapes to the evil you will have to contend with. They have, some of them, a tradition of devouring strangers!"

Father Damien could not help glancing down at his lean thighs, pressed together under his cassock. They didn't look all that tempting even to him. He really had to go. He dispensed a quick blessing and left with the cookies pressed on him by Agnes DeWitt, whom he had managed, though not by the avenues he'd attempted, to cheer so thoroughly that she rose from her couch, folded her blanket, and sitting down, at her piano laughed so hard her fingers dropped off the keys.

The Mission

Into her brooding there intruded an absurd fantasy, the possibility of escape, though it was to a place few would consider so--the mission and the missionary life. She thought of doing good. Alleviating the pain that others felt might help to assuage her own. She began to pray, asked to regain the clarity of her original religious impulse, her early vocation. Chopin had stolen her from Christ to give to Berndt. Christ had stolen Berndt from her to take for himself. Now she had only her Chopin, his music, for Christ was preoccupied with introducing Berndt to all of the other farmers in heaven and for Agnes he seemed to have no time. She prayed. He did not answer. Chopin was more reliable. She could not stand the farm--not without Berndt. Now that she remembered him, the place was treacherous with the raw ache of memory that returned in unexpected bits, then vanished before she could get the whole of it firmly laid out in her mind.

In her thoughts, she spoke to the priest again, questioned him strenuously, found her own answers. The Ojibwe, she had heard, the Indians up north, were an agreeable people not known for their ferocious instincts, even in the past. She was, of course, not afraid. She was curious, and her curious nature led her down tangled pathways. What was it like up there--wild? She could understand wild. Though her world was tame, the peace she sought was lost within the wilderness of her own heart. Sometimes she howled and savagely tore the wallpaper of her bedroom and then lay on the floor. Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief.

The Flood

The river pushed over the banks that spring and ripped from the ground the dead horse, the mired car, and the money that had lain unseen underneath the gangster, fallen out of the waistband of the trousers he'd worn under the cassock. The horse swirled to pieces, the car tipped slowly downward, the money floated in thin wads straight north and was in a month or two plowed into the earth of a Pembina potato field. Meanwhile, Agnes kept hers locked in the Fargo bank. Tracing her elusive memories, she had gone where life was deepest many times, and she did not fear the rain. Of course, she did not know the history of the stream--at times deceptively sluggish or narrow as a whip, then all of a sudden pooling in a great, wide, dangerous lake with powerful currents that moved earth in tons. What began as a sheer mist became an even sprinkle and then developed into a slow, pounding shower that lasted three days, then four, then on the fifth day when it should have tapered off, increased.

The river boiled along swiftly, a pour of gray soup still contained, just barely, within its high banks. On day six the rain stopped, or seemed to. The storm had moved upstream. All day while the sun shone pleasantly the river heaved itself up, tore into its flow new trees and boulders, created tip-ups, washouts, areas of singing turbulence.

Agnes rushed about uneasily, pitching hay into the high loft, throwing chickens up after the hay, wishing she could toss the house up as well, and of course the fabulous piano. But the piano was earth anchored and well tuned by the rainy air, so instead of fruitless worry, Agnes lost herself in practice. She had an inner conviction that, no matter how wide the river spread, it would stop at her front doorstep.

She didn't know.

Once this river started to move, it was a thing that gained assurance. It had no problem with fences or gates, wispy windbreaks, ditches. It simply leveled or attained the level of whatever stood in its path. And moved on, closer.

Water jumped up the grass lawn and collected in the flower beds. The river tugged itself up the porch and into the house from one side. From the other side it undermined an already weak foundation that had temporarily shored up the same wall once removed to make way for the piano. The river tore against the house from all around. And then, like a child tipping out a piece of candy from a box, the water surged underneath, rocked the floor, and the piano crashed through the weakened wall.

It landed in the swift current of the yard, Agnes with it. The white treble clef of her flannel nightdress billowed as she spun away, clutching the curved lid. The thing was pushed along, bobbing off the bottom of the flower beds first and then, as muscular new eddies caught it, touching down on the shifting lanes of Berndt's wheat fields, and farther, until the revolving instrument and the woman on it reached the original river, that powerful vein, and plunged in. They were carried not more than a hundred feet before the piano lost momentum and sank. As it went down Agnes thought at first of crawling into its box, nestling as though for safety among the cold, dead keys. So attached was she to the instrument that she could not imagine parting from it, but, as she actually struggled with the hinged cover, Agnes lost her grip and was swept straight north.

LOUISE ERDRICH is the author of seven novels as well as poetry, children's books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She lives in Minnesota. This is excerpted from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich. Copyright [C] 2001 Louise Erdrich. Published by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.