Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“Then back to the blanket I go!” Mooshum was incensed with delight. “The old ways are good enough for me. I’ve seen enough of your church. For a long time I have had my suspicions. Why is it you priests want to listen to dirty secrets, anyway?”

“All right, be a pagan, burn in hell!” Father Cassidy restrained a belch and put out his cup for another shot. The bottle was nearly empty now.

“We don’t believe in the everlasting kind of hell, remember that?” Shamengwa said primly.

“We put our faith in a merciful hell,” said Mooshum.

“Then there’s nothing for me to do!”

Father Cassidy threw his hands up and staggered to the door, fumbled his way out, made it down the steps. Joseph and I sat on the couch still sipping cold water. Shamengwa and Mooshum stared musingly at the door. Shamengwa had just stirred himself to pick up his fiddle when there was a terrific sound from outside, a resounding thud, like a dropped beef. I was closest to the door and got out first. Father Cassidy was laid out on the grass like a massive corpse. He looked quite dead, but when I bent over him I saw that his breath still moved the froth bubbles at his lips.

“Oh no!” Joseph cried out, kneeling at the other end of Father Cassidy. He peeled something from the sole of Father Cassidy’s black cleric’s shoe, and cradled it in his two hands. He walked away with the flattened salamander, glaring back once at the felled priest.

Mooshum gaped at us, holding on to the wood railing. He and Shamengwa did not trust their feet to negotiate the front steps and were picking their way down sideways, as if descending a steep hill.

“He slipped on a salamander,” I said.

“Does he live yet?”

“He’s breathing.”

“Payhtik, mon frère,” he said as Shamengwa stepped carefully down the road to his own house. Shamengwa waved his good arm without turning back. Mooshum went out to his car seat on the back lawn, lay down across it, and fell asleep. I stayed with Father Cassidy, who snored in the grass for a little while. I helped him to his feet when he came to, and then to his car, which he drove wanderingly up the hill.

Things would be harder, now, for Father Cassidy. As I went back inside to stash the empty bottle and wash out Mama’s cups I knew that word would spread — the priest drunk, tripped up by the devil in the form of a mud puppy, cursing an old man to hell, all of these things would be recounted by Mooshum and Shamengwa when talking to their cronies. And Mooshum really did follow through with what had seemed like a drunken threat. He cast his lot in with the traditionals not long afterward and started attending ceremonies, which took place out on the farther reaches of the reservation and to which our dad drove him secretly. For Clemence was furious with Mooshum’s defection. When I asked my grandfather why he’d decided to change so drastically, so late in his years, Mooshum told me.

“There is a moment in a man’s life when he knows exactly who he is. Old Hop Along did not mean to, but he helped me to that moment.”

“You were drunk, though, Mooshum.”

“Awee, tawpway, my girl, you speak the truth. But my drunkenness had cleared my mind. Seraph Milk had a full-blood mother who died of sorrow with no help from the priest. I saw that I was the son of that good woman, silent though she was. Also, I was getting nowhere with the Catholic ladies. I thought that I might find a few good-looking ones out in the bush.”

“That’s not much of a reason.”

“You are wrong there, it is the best reason.”

And Mooshum winked at me as if he knew that I went to church because I hoped to see Corwin.

MY LOVE FOR Corwin Peace turned to outraged betrayal when he told the other boys that he had kissed me. I was wretchedly angry with love now, determined to revenge myself on Corwin no matter how much my heart broke to do it. But I soon found that my heart didn’t break at all, and I enjoyed tormenting Corwin. That whole summer, I struck him out whenever he dared join a game, and I looked forward to the moment when he slung his bat behind him in despair, sometimes cracking the shins of his teammates, turning their jeers to cries of pain. I shot at him with a BB gun. Years later, he claimed that my BB had migrated through his body and came out his kidney, causing him agony. My brother and I rode our ponies everywhere and took turns giving everybody rides except Corwin, around whom I barrel-raced one day in a circle, slowly obscuring him with dust as he stood and watched, hands out, helpless.

Yet, no matter how I tried to humiliate him, Corwin stayed in love with me. We grew side by side. I don’t know what happened to him underneath his clothes, but that summer my breasts turned to sore buds, and I almost cried when I found hair where it didn’t belong. Stoically, I endured my body’s new secrets. Summer went and the air cooled. I got a new dress, saggy in the bust. We were in the sixth grade, at last, and it was the first day of school. Mama got us up and shoved us onto the dirt road that led up the hill. We dawdled until we heard the other children on the playground, then we ran. Two lines formed as always. We went in, already knowing our classroom. The door banged shut and we were alone with our teacher.

The habits of Franciscan nuns still shrouded all but their faces, and so each of the new nun’s features were emphasized, read forty times over in astonishment. Outlined in a stiff white frame of starched linen, Sister’s eyes, nose, and mouth leapt out, a mask from a dream, a great raw-boned jackal’s muzzle.

“Oh, Christ,” said Corwin, just loud enough for me to hear.

I had decided to ignore him for the first month, at least, but the nun’s extreme ugliness was irresistible.

“Godzilla,” I whispered, turning to him, raising my eyebrows.

The teacher’s name was really Sister Mary Anita. People who knew her from before she was a nun said she was a Buckendorf. She was young, in her twenties or thirties, and so swift of movement for all her hulking size that, walking from the back of the room to the front, she surprised her students, made us picture athlete’s legs and muscles concealed in the flow of black wool. When she swept the air in a gesture meant to include all of us in her opening remarks, her hands fixed our gazes. They were the opposite of her face. Her hands were beautiful, white as milk glass, the fingers straight and tapered. They were the hands in the hallway print, of Mary underneath the cross. They were the hands of the apostles, cast in plastic and lit at night on the tops of television sets. Praying hands.

Ballplayer’s hands. She surprised us further by walking onto the gravel field at recess, the neck piece cutting hard into the flesh beneath her heavy jaw. When, with a matter-of-fact grace, she pulled from the sleeve of her gown a mitt of dark mustard-colored leather and raised it, a thrown softball dropped in. Her skill was obvious. Good players rarely seemed to stretch or change their expressions. They simply tipped their hands toward the ball like magnets, and there it was. As a pitcher, Mary Anita was a swirl of wool, graceful as the windblown cape of Zorro, an emotional figure that stirred something up in me. By the time I got up to bat, I was so thoroughly involved in the feeling that, as I pounded home plate, a rubber dish mat, beat the air twice in practice swings, and choked up on the handle, I decided that I would have no choice but to slam a home run.

I did not. In fact I whiffed worse than Corwin, in three strikes never ticking the ball or fouling. Disgusted with myself, I sat on the edge of the bike rack and watched as Sister gave a few balls away and pitched easy hits to the rest of the team. It was as if, from the beginning, the two of us had sensed what was to come. Or then again perhaps Mary Anita’s information simply came from my former teachers, living in the redbrick convent across the road from school. Hard to handle. A smart-off. Watch out when you turn your back. They were right. After recess, my pride burned, I sat at my desk and drew a dinosaur encased in a nun’s robe, the mouth open in a roar. The teeth, long and jagged, grayish white, absorbed me — I wanted to get the shadows right, the dark depth of the gullet behind them. I worked so hard on the picture that I didn’t notice as the room hushed around me. I felt the presence, though, the tension of regard that dropped over me as Mary Anita stood watching. As a mark of my arrogance, I kept drawing.