The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

The narrative shifts many decades back in time to briefly introduce a German farmer named Berndt Vogel. A bedraggled woman (Agnes DeWitt) appears on Berndt’s doorstep and asks in German for shelter and food.

The narrative then shifts to six months earlier to describe Agnes’s time as a nun named Sister Cecilia. A talented pianist, her musical performances are so intense that she experiences physical orgasms upon playing Chopin and creates sensual music that deeply disturbs her fellow nuns. When the Mother Superior tries to prevent her from playing such music, she gives up her calling as a nun and leaves the convent, taking refuge with Berndt. The two begin a relationship centered around a grand Caramacchione piano, and their erotic life involves Agnes playing piano while naked for Berndt’s pleasure.

Agnes becomes a vital part of Berndt’s life, and the two are very happy together. One day, Agnes has the misfortune to visit the bank just as it is being robbed by Arnold Anderson and his gang. Anderson is known as “the Actor” for his convincing masquerades; this time, he is disguised as a priest, but when Agnes, a devout Catholic, sees through his disguise, he takes her hostage in the aftermath of the robbery, driving off with her in his car as law enforcement belatedly pursues. Berndt pursues them on horseback and has a violent standoff with the robbers. Momentarily unobserved, Agnes stuffs handfuls of cash into the lining of her coat. When Anderson moves to kill her, she distracts him, and the bullet grazes her skull and renders her unconscious. Berndt, believing her dead, deals Anderson a mortal wound but then dies of his own wounds. The blinded Anderson, trapped beneath Berndt’s body, sinks into the mud and drowns.

Later, after Agnes recovers from her head wound, she adapts to her resulting memory loss, which has caused her to forget much of her life with Berndt. She also forgets how the money came to be hidden in her jacket, but she deposits it in a bank for safe keeping, nonetheless. Berndt has bequeathed his farm to Agnes in his will, and she lives an increasingly isolated life, alone with her music. At one point, she receives a brief visit from Father Damien Modeste, a missionary priest who is traveling to a new posting at the Ojibwe reservation called Little No Horse.

Soon after the priest’s visit, a historic flood destroys Agnes’s home and farm. The rushing waters sweep Agnes into the river, where she clings to the piano as her only means of survival. The flood carries her away from her former life. This moment marks the beginning her transformation into an entirely new identity.

Writing his confession in 1996, Father Damien recounts his origin story from 1912. The first-person account describes how Agnes survives the flood by using a jam of drowned cows to reach the shore of the Red River. She awakens in an abandoned hovel, experiencing a mystical vision in which a man she perceives as Christ tends to her wounds and feeds her. When she awakens again the next morning, she finds herself not in a settled cabin but in an “abandoned hovel.”

Inspired by this divine encounter, Agnes walks north and discovers the corpse of the real Father Damien Modeste, who drowned in the flood. She buries his body, cuts her hair short, and assumes his identity by donning his clerical clothing and taking his money and papers. Agnes has a vague thought that she once may have been a singer or had something to do with music, but the trauma of the flood has erased “the vast gift of her music” (45)—and even the memory of it.

Now disguised as Father Damien, she continues toward the Little No Horse reservation, where the original priest had been assigned. This identity theft marks her complete transformation from a pianist into a Catholic priest.

In 1996, Father Jude Miller, a Vatican investigator, arrives at the reservation to begin the sainthood inquiry for Sister Leopolda. Father Damien greets Father Jude with joy and demonstrates a level of foreknowledge of the canonization process that surprises Jude. Jude reads aloud from various letters of parishioners who have testified to Leopolda’s posthumous miracles and supernatural interventions.

When Jude directly asks whether Leopolda was a saint, Father Damien responds by gesturing toward his yard, where crows mob an owl in chaotic violence and emit a sound very much like sardonic laughter. Mary Kashpaw, Damien’s housekeeper, serves lunch to the two priests.

Father Damien tells Jude that their histories have been intertwined since his arrival at Little No Horse in 1912. He begins to recount how their connection started with a trick he played on Mary’s ancestor, setting up the narrative that will reveal the full scope of his long tenure on the reservation.

The narrative shifts back to 1912, with Father Damien’s arrival at Little No Horse. Disguised as a priest, Agnes travels by wagon with Kashpaw, an Ojibwe driver, to reach the reservation in the dead of winter. She finds the rectory in squalid condition and sleeps in the death robes of the previous priest, who perished in his quarters not long ago.

During her first Mass for the starving nuns, Agnes experiences a miracle when the Eucharist seemingly transforms into real meat and blood, providing physical nourishment to the desperate sisters. Sister Hildegarde Anne, the Mother Superior, urges the new priest to baptize the sick and dying. Agnes also meets the young Pauline Puyat, an eccentric young parishioner of Ojibwe and French heritage who will become the future Sister Leopolda.

To maintain her masculine disguise, Agnes creates a mental list of rules for how best to alter her behavior and mannerisms. These guidelines help her navigate the challenges of living as a male priest while concealing her biological identity.