Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

But I was near to puking with anxious rage. When Sister Mary Anita turned to new work, I crooked my fist beside me like a piston, then I leaned across Corwin’s desk.

“I’m going to give you one right in the bread box,” I said.

Corwin looked pleased, and so with one precise jab — which I had learned from my uncle Whitey, who fought in the Golden Gloves — I knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping. I turned to the front, my face clear and heart calm, as Sister began her instruction.

FURIOUS SUNLIGHT. BLACK cloth. I sat on the iron trapeze, the bar pushing a sore line into the backs of my legs. As I swung, I watched Sister Mary Anita. The wind was harsh and she wore a pair of wonderful gloves, black, the fingers cut out of them so that her hand could better grip the bat. The ball arced toward her sinuously, dropped, her bat caught it with a clean sound. Off the ball soared, across the playground boundaries, over into the yard of the priest’s residence. Mary Anita’s habit swirled open behind her. The cold bit her cheeks red. She swung to third and glanced, panting, over her shoulder and then sped home. She touched down lightly and bounded off.

My arms felt heavy, weak. I dropped from the trapeze and went to lean against the brick wall of the school building. My heart thumped in my ears. I saw what I would do when I grew up. Declare my vocation, enter the convent. Sister Mary Anita and I would live over in the nuns’ house together, side by side. We would eat, work, eat, cook. Sometimes we’d have to pray. To relax, Sister Mary Anita would hit pop flies and I would catch them.

Someday, one day, the two of us would be walking, our hands in our sleeves, our long habits flowing behind.

“Dear Sister,” I would say, “remember that old nickname you had the year you taught the sixth grade?”

“Why no,” Sister Mary Anita would say, smiling at me. “Why, no.”

And I would know that I had protected her.

IT GOT WORSE. I wrote letters, tore them up. My hand shook when Sister passed me in the aisle and my eyes closed. I breathed in. Soap. A harsh soap. Faint carbolic acid. Marigolds, for sure. That’s what she smelled like. Dizzying. My fists clenched. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes and loudly excused myself. I went to the girls’ bathroom and stood in a stall. My life was terrible. The thing is, I didn’t want to be a nun.

“There must be another way!” I whispered, desperate. The whitewashed tin shuddered when I slammed my hand on the cubicle wall. I decided that I would have to persuade Mary Anita to forsake her vows, to come and live with me and my family in our BIA house. Someone was standing outside. I opened the door a bit and stared into the great, craggy face.

“Are you feeling all right? Do you need to go home?” Sister Mary Anita was concerned.

Fire shot through my limbs. The girls’ bathroom, its light mute and brilliant, a place of secrets, of frosted glass, paralyzed me. I gathered myself. Here was my chance, as if God had given it.

“Please,” I whispered to her. “Let’s run away together!”

Sister paused. “Are you having troubles at home?” she asked.

“No.”

Sister’s milk-white hand came through the doorway and covered my forehead. My anxious thoughts throbbed against her lean, cool palm. Staring into the eyes of the one I loved, I gripped the small metal knob on the inside of the door, pushed, and then I felt myself falling forward, slowly turning like a leaf in wind, upheld and buoyant in the peaceful roar. It was as though I’d never reach Sister’s arms, but when I did, I came back with a jolt.

“You are ill,” said Sister. “Come to the office and we’ll call your mother.”

AS I HAD known it would, perhaps from that moment in the girls’ bathroom, the day came. The day of reckoning.

Outside, in the morning school yard, after Mass and before first bell, everyone crowded around Corwin Peace. In his arms, he held a windup tin Godzilla, a big toy, almost knee-high, a green and gold replica painted with a fierce eye to detail. The scales were perfect overlapping crescents and the eyes were large and manic, pitch-black, oddly human. Corwin had pinned a sort of cloak upon the thing, a black scarf. My arms thrust through the packed shoulders, but the bell rang and Corwin stowed the thing under his coat. His eyes picked me from the rest.

“I had to send for this!” he cried. The punch hadn’t turned him against me; it had made him crazy with love. He turned and vanished through the heavy wine-red doors of the school. I stared at the ground and thought of leaving home. I could do it. I’d hitch a boxcar. The world went stark, the colors harsh. The small brown pebbles of the school yard leapt off the play-sealed earth. I took a step. The stones seemed to crack and whistle under my feet.

“Last bell!” called Sister Mary Anita. “You’ll be late!”

MORNING PRAYER. THE PLEDGE. Corwin drew out the suspense of his audience, enjoying the glances and whispers. The toy was in his desk. Every so often, he lifted the lid, then looked around to see how many of us watched him duck inside to make adjustments. By the time Sister started the daily reading lesson, there was such tension in the room that even Corwin could bear it no longer.

Our classroom was large, with a high ceiling, floored with slats of polished wood. Round lights hung on thick chains and the great, rectangular windows let through enormous sheaves of radiance. Our class had occupied this room for the past two years. I had spent every day in the room. I knew its creaks, the muted clunk of desks rocking out of floor bolts, the mad thumping in its radiators like a thousand imprisoned elves, and so I heard and registered the click. Then the dry grind of Corwin’s windup key. Sister Mary Anita did not. She turned to the chalkboard, her book open on the desk, and began to write instructions for us to copy.

She was absorbed, calling out the instructions as she wrote. Her arm swept up and down, it seemed to me, in a kind of furious joy. She was inventing some kind of lesson, some new way of doing things, not a word of which was taken in. All eyes were on the third row, where Corwin Peace sat. All eyes were on his hand as he wound the toy up to its limit and bent over and set it on the floor. Then the eyes were on the toy itself as Corwin lifted his hand away, and the thing moved forward on its own.

The scarf it wore, the veil, did not hamper the beast. The legs thrashed forward, making earnest progress. The tiny claw hands beat like pistons and the hollow tin tail whipped from side to side as it moved down the center of the aisle, toward the front of the room, toward Sister Mary Anita, who stood, back turned, still absorbed in her work at the board.

I had got myself placed in row one, to be closer to the one I loved, and so I saw the creature close up just before it headed into the polished space of floor at the front of the room. Its powerful jaws thrust from the black neck piece. The great teeth were frozen, exhibited in a terrible smile. The painted eyes had an eager and purposeful look.

Its movement faltered as it neared Mary Anita. The whole class caught its breath, but the thing inched along, made slow and fascinating progress, directly toward the hem of Mary Anita’s garment. She did not seem to notice. She continued to write, to talk, circling numbers and emphasizing certain words with careful underlines. And as she did so, as the moment neared, my brain finally rang all of its alarm bells. I vaulted from my desk. Two steps brought me across that gleaming space of wood at the front of the room. But just as I bent down to scoop the toy to my chest, a neat black boot slashed down inches from my nose. Sister Mary Anita had whirled, the chalk fixed in her hand. Daintily, casually, she lifted her habit and kicked the toy dinosaur into the air. The thing ascended, pedaling its clawed feet, the cape blown back like a sprung umbrella. The trajectory was straight and true. It knocked headfirst into the ceiling and came back down, in pieces. The class ducked beneath the rain of scattered tin. Only Sister Mary Anita and I stood poised, unmoved, absorbed in the moment between us.