Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“Now, now! Reach over and grab onto him!”

Geraldine’s snapper swam alongside the boat and I leaned over, grabbed its shell, but failed to secure my grip. Twice I lost him, which exasperated Geraldine.

“Here, take this. I’ve caught lots of snappers before.”

She set the fishing rod in my hand and pulled it in by the tail, right over the side. It was the biggest snapper I’d ever seen, with olive green slime growing in patterns on its back and that strange, unreconstructed dinosaur beak. The neck was massive, slack, and the nose came to a delicate, creepy point.

“They go back over a million years unchanged,” I said. I planned to whack the turtle with the emergency oar if it attacked, but it lay there passively. Geraldine was staring hard at the shell, sitting stiffly with her hands folded in her lap. Her arrest became prolonged and her face went ash gray.

“Should I throw it back?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I kept talking.

“The one my cousin kept as a pet tried to lay eggs after two years alone in the tank. I guess the female can conserve sperm for quite a long time, if the need arises.”

I tried to stop myself, wondering how idiotic a man could be, but her silence rattled me.

“I know,” she said at last. “My brother-in-law studies reptiles.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, after we’d both sat for much too long looking at that turtle in the bottom of the boat.

“Don’t you see it?”

The turtle was becoming more responsive now. It opened its muddy eyes and poked its head out like a snake, then slowly stretched its jaws wide. The inside of its mouth was grotesque, ornately fleshy, and there was the low reek of turtle musk.

“We scared it,” I said, feebly, holding the paddle out. The thing moved toward it and struck, crunching down hard on the wood. I cried out, but Geraldine ignored me.

“Can’t you see? Take a good look,” she said again.

Now that its jaws were solidly clamped down on the paddle, I was less distracted. But I still couldn’t see until she traced the initials in air just over the turtle’s back. G R.

“Roman and I caught this turtle a long time ago, when it was small,” she said. “He carved our initials in its shell. I was mad. I said he was going to kill it anyway, so we might at least have soup.”

“So,” I said stupidly after a few moments, “you’ve been fishing here before.”

“So to speak.”

I damned Roman for dying and the turtle for living on; I damned the turtle for biting her hook; I damned it for letting itself be pulled over the side. With this sign from the past, my courtship might be delayed another ten years. By now, I knew how the Milk romantic streak could turn fatalistic.

She took my pocketknife and cut the line. Although I felt at this point I could have eaten the turtle raw, we lifted it (still gripping the paddle) over the side. I steadied the boat. Geraldine held one end of the paddle and the turtle floated at the other end, eyeing us in a weirdly doglike way, until Geraldine commanded, “Let go now.” It sank obediently and she sat frowning at the place it vanished. After some time, I started up the motor.

All is lost, I thought, definitely lost, more the luck. I wasn’t surprised, though. Losing women is a trait inherited by Coutts men.

That night, as I put together my bachelor dinner (cans of this, cans of that), I tried to counsel myself in persistence. I thought of my grandfather’s loves and hideous trials. He was part of the first, failed, town-site expedition, the youngest of a bunch of greedy fools, or venture capitalists, who nearly starved dead but eventually became some of the first people to profit financially from this part of the world. The lucky capture of a turtle had saved them way back then, a thought that cheered me now. I’d read his old journals. Some of his other books were piled deep in the other bedroom of my house, waiting for shelves. The living room walls were already stacked two volumes deep. Boxes of files and more books filled the basement. Although these books were valuable, I wasn’t fanatical about the way I handled them. Yes, they were very old, but they were meant to be read by a living human and I did them that honor. As I held one of my other favorites open with one hand and read, I slowly spooned up hot beef stew and baked beans. Finally, I found the passage I was looking for. The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company . Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Younger.

For dessert, as usual, fruit cocktail.

THEN AS EVER it did not pay well to teach, and the youth of St. Anthony did not sufficiently appreciate the writings of Marcus Aurelius to make Joseph J. Coutts’s vocation a labor of love. And besides, there was real love to think about. He felt that he should be traveling with more assurance in that golden realm as he was nearly twenty-six. But, tossing at night in the room he surely paid too much for in the home of Dorea Ann Swivel, widow, his prospects only gave him a galling headache. He had visited himself for a short time upon a woman named Louisa Bird — small, pretty, some four years older and unfortunately Presbyterian, but she certainly hadn’t kissed him and was stolen away during a sleigh ride by a young St. Paul minister with a set of fabulous whiskers. That theft erased any hesitancy on Joseph’s part, and now he could not get her out of his mind. So he burned, secretly enough, though sometimes as he walked through the chill early morning dark to light the stove in the former lumber mill office that served as a schoolhouse, he could almost feel the air scorch around him, and he wondered if the widow, for instance, understood the nature of his burden.

Shortly after Louisa flew to the arms of the minister, he realized that the widow did. One night, there was a rap on his door and Mrs. Swivel, who was large-hipped, plain, and shrewd, entered his cold little room. His bedstead did not seem sturdy enough to bear the weight of them both, and though the warmth and bread-dough fragrance of her body was sweet, he worried as he made his way toward bliss which one of them would pay for the bed if it collapsed. Their nights grew frequent and the bed more frail. He strapped the legs to the frame with strong rope and braced the base of the bed with river stones. She fed him better than her other boarders, which got their suspicions up. But real fear did not enter him until the first day of November, when she gave back half his rent and told him with a glint of tooth that she’d reduced it. So Joseph Coutts was ready to make a change in his life when he met up with Reginald Bull, who was looking for a man to join a town-site expedition heading for the plains.

Reginald was enough like his surname for that alone to stick. Bull was thick, wide-necked, powerful, but had the prettiest bashful brown eyes and a red bud of a mouth, which he was often teased for. As Bull laid it out, two land speculators, Odin Merrimack and Colonel LeVinne P. Poolcaugh, were getting up a party of men, which they would outfit at their own expense, and sending them out past the Dakota-Minnesota border to survey and establish claim by occupancy on several huge pieces of land that would most certainly become towns, perhaps cities, when the railroad reached that part of the world. The men would be paid in shares of land, said Bull, and there was already talk of millions in it; he’d heard that phrase. But they were not the only ones with town fever. Other outfits were making plans. They’d beat everyone by heading out in the dead of winter.

“I’ve seen men get rich er out here,” said Joseph, “but I never have seen a man poor to begin with obtain much wealth, not yet.”