Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“Thank you, my uncle,” said the boy, his voice soft and formal. “I regard you as my father, too.”

“We will see them soon,” said Cuthbert. “All our relatives.” He touched the boy’s arm, and smiled. His smile was awful in the dried blood. “Aniin ezhinikaazoyan?”

“Charles.”

Cuthbert shook his head. “Not the priest’s name. Not even our nickname for you, Holy Track. How do the spirits know you?”

Holy Track told him.

“Everlasting Sky. Good, you were named well. Give that name to the Person who will be waiting for you on the other side. Then you will go to the Anishinaabeg spirit world. Your mama and deydey will be waiting for you there, my boy. Don’t be afraid.”

“Don’t fight the rope,” said Asiginak. His voice shook.

Wildstrand made the four stand up and he refastened the ropes that tied their hands behind them. Emil Buckendorf arranged them on the wagon bed and lowered the loops of rope over their heads and then tightened the loops to fit more snugly.

Henric Gostlin stepped up to the wagon.

“He says he doesn’t want the boy to hang,” said Emil Buckendorf.

One of his brothers said, “Yah, just leave him.”

Eugene Wildstrand’s face darkened with a sudden rush of blood. “Were you there,” he said, looking at Gostlin and the others, one after another. “Were you there, at the place? You were there. You seen it.”

He held their gazes and his face burned strangely in the light.

“The girl,” he continued. “The wife. The two boys. My old friend, too. All of them.”

Emil stared at his brothers until they nodded and looked down at their feet. Henric Gostlin walked away, back down the path, slapping his hat on his thigh. The other men standing next to the horses started as Asiginak and Cuthbert suddenly burst out singing. They began high — Cuthbert’s voice a wild falsetto that cut the air. Asiginak joined him and Holy Track felt almost good, hearing the strength and power of their voices. And the words in the old language.

These white men are nothing

What they do cannot harm me

I will see the face of mystery

They sang the song twice before the Buckendorfs shook themselves and prepared the wagon. Emil steadied the two horses and counted down to whip them at the same time. The boy tried to open his mouth to join in his uncle’s song, but could only hum to himself the tuneless lullaby that his mother had always used to sing him to sleep. The Buckendorfs threw their arms back, cut the horses at the same time, then again, harder. The wagon lurched, stopped, then bucked forward. The men stumbled but did not stop singing. Finally, the horses bolted away. They halted after twenty feet. The men tried to keep singing even as they strangled. The boy was too light for death to give him an easy time of it. He slowly choked as he kicked air and spun. He heard it when Cuthbert, then his uncle, stopped singing and gurgling. Behind his shut eyes, he was seized by black fear, until he heard his mother say, Open your eyes , and he stared into the dusty blue. Then it was better. The little wisps of clouds, way up high, had resolved into wings and they swept across the sky now, faster and faster.

MOOSHUM FINISHED TALKING as the storm moved over us — the clouds low and black-bellied. In the yard, the sheets were thrashing wild, the overalls and Mooshum’s work shirts were ballooning out. Even my mother’s pastel underthings were flying straight back, wisps, and her bras corkscrewed around the wooden pins and line. She must have gone somewhere with Geraldine, leaving the baskets to tumble over empty.

I bolted forward as the first big drops splashed on my shoulders and began unpinning the clothes. The clothing flew from my hands, twisted off in the sharp wind. A circle-skirt wound me in its embrace. I was still caught in the story, and it took all of my concentration to struggle across the yard with my thoughts and that clothing into the quiet of the house.

My mother followed me into the kitchen, drenched. She had walked back from our uncle’s place in the rain, but it hadn’t put out her fire. Anyway, it was the kind of rain that passes quickly and leaves the air hot and clear right afterward, so she wasn’t inside for long, talking to Mooshum, before I saw her outside with the basket again, pinning up the same clothes that I’d just taken down. This time she was carefully hiding her underwear. Mooshum had gone out with Mama and he stood, hunched a bit, beside her, holding the clothespin bag. I thought that maybe she was giving him hell for telling us what had happened, about the hanged boy, but when she came back in the door holding Mooshum’s arm in hers, having left the basket outside again underneath the clothes, she only said, “I can’t persuade her, she has to see him, she cares for him. And she even knows about that woman doctor he was loving on the sly. You know who, you know damn well.”

I pretended like I was doing something else and not listening, but she was not in the least fooled. I wanted desperately to ask about the doctor.

“Oh, good. Evelina. I need you to peel potatoes.”

“Can we put our hair up tonight, like Geraldine’s?”

Mama gave me a sharp look, and I glanced away. I pulled up the ring on the square kitchen trapdoor rimmed with pounded tin and set into the linoleum. I gingerly let myself down the ladder into the cellar. She handed me a colander.

“I’ll shut you down there if you mention Geraldine right now,” she said.

I scrambled back up with the potatoes. While I was down there, though, I heard her say something about the judge to Mooshum, so I guessed this had to do with why she was so upset with Geraldine, only I got it wrong, entirely. I thought that Geraldine (surprisingly, for her!) had done something outside the law and would have to go before the judge, in court, pay some fine or go to jail. That’s what I thought.

THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Whitey and Shamengwa came over to the house. Uncle Whitey was teaching me how to hold my own in life and I was punching at his hands.

“You’re quick,” he said, “but not quick enough.”

I tried to duck my head before he touched my ear, but never could.

“Think like a snake,” he said. “Don’t think, react.”

But he could tell that I was a thinker and would never have lightning reflexes. Nor would Joseph.

“Boy, you’re hopeless,” said Uncle Whitey. He was a big, square man with an Indian Elvis face and a springy pompadour that he slicked back with hair oil out of a bright purple bottle. Sometimes he lived with us, sleeping on the couch.

“What’s going on with Aunt Geraldine?” I asked him.

“I could get killed for saying,” said Whitey. “It’s classified.”

“Let’s get some gloves,” said Joseph, “you come out back behind the sheds and they can talk all they want about Aunt Geraldine. Gossip is beneath us as men.”

“I’m with you,” said Whitey, and showed that inside his shirt he had a pint of Four Roses.

That left me with Shamengwa and Mooshum, and after I sat drinking water with them for a while I asked, because I knew they would not get mad at me, what Geraldine had done to make my mother so angry.

“Done?” said Mooshum, trying for once to look as if he didn’t know. “She’s not done nothing.”

“Yet,” said Shamengwa, his face still.

Shamengwa had brought his fiddle over, but he was only plucking and tuning it, frowning. He complained about the poor quality of the strings.

I asked what happened to the men who had lynched our people.

“You talked of that!” Shamengwa hissed through his teeth.

With a wary look at his brother, Mooshum turned to me. “The Buckendorfs got rich, fat, and never died out,” he said. “They prospered and took over things. Half the county. But they never should of. And Wildstrand. Nobody hauled him up on a murder charge. Sheriff Fells turned into a cripple and old Lungsford, out of disgust, he went back to the civilized world he called Minnesota. He moved to Breckenridge, where in 1928 they went and hung the sheriff. He could not escape it. I think he died out east.”