Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“I was going to marry him, it’s a fact. I loved him, I think, but the truth is I cannot recall what he looked like. Our affection came on sudden and he was gone so fast. He hadn’t a picture of himself. But I do think I miss him and I am very sorry that he is dead.”

She was so lucid in her puzzlement and her speech was so calm that Joseph nearly asked her to marry him right then and there. He held his tongue out of respect for Bull, and went back to the room B. J. Bolt had insisted he be given out behind Poolcaugh’s establishment. There, he pondered, as he had many times, the mystery of his survival and the meaning of the otter. He took down the crucifix and touched it to his forehead. Alexander and Pompeium and Caius Caesar, after so completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared all over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritas; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out!

He put the book down. He pressed the cross into his forehead as if to absorb its meaning. He thought of Bull’s calm fiance. Again the otter looked at him, an innocent saint. And Bull’s fathomless eyes stared into the leaves.

“Well,” he said out loud, “I’m cured of town fever.”

He went out, bought a vested suit, and decided to become a lawyer.

HE WHO GOES to law holds a wolf by the ear , said Robert Burton. So there I was, here I am, the clichd mixed-blood with a wolf by the ear. One of my advantages in holding on to the wolf is that I grew up dividing my time between my mother’s family on the reservation, and the big house in Pluto. Thus, I know something about both sides of many cases I hear. My father built our house on land he had inherited from Joseph Coutts, whose own survey stones the railroad company tried to search out and steal when they came through, named, and platted out the town. That was some years after the town fever ordeal. Joseph Coutts was his own attorney, by then. In his first big case, he got back land for himself, therefore benefiting the Buckendorfs and any other of those original party members who cared to make a living near Pluto. Some did come back, drawn to where they’d lived the hardest, maybe, or where like Bull they had seen the truth of things flutter away in the pale leaves above them.

English Bill returned for a short time to open a saloon, but his terrier dog was thrown across the room in a poker dispute, shot right out of the air, and never did quite recover its vitality. Bill’s liquor was as remarkably bad as his food. I don’t know where he next tried his skill. As for the Buckendorfs, three of the four stayed on and were of course party to the lynching murder of the youngest Peace, whose older brothers had saved their lives.

After he got his land back, my grandfather was asked to move to Pluto and open a practice in what was thought of, after the mob had its way, as a town not quite fit to count itself part of the civilized new state of North Dakota. He did so, my father also went to law, and as they both married Chippewa women we became a family of lawyers who were also tribal members, an unusual combination at the time, but increasingly handy as tribal law and the complications of federal versus state jurisdiction were just beginning to become manifest.

As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation. It is the same with all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth. By drawing a line and defending it, we seem to think we have mastered something. What? The earth swallows and absorbs even those who manage to form a country, a reservation. (Yet there is something to the love and knowledge of the land and its relationship to dreams — that’s what the old people had. That’s why as a tribe we exist to the present.) It is my job to maintain the sovereignty of tribal law on tribal land, but even as I do so, I think of my grandfather’s phrase for the land disease, town fever, and how he nearly died of greed, its main symptom.

I have tried to keep some things about my Pluto self a secret here — my long defeat in love, for instance, by a woman who demolished my house, a few (mostly pardonable) youthful escapades, and a verbal mistake that resulted in my lengthy term of work digging graves in the town cemetery — a place for which I still have fond regard. But in one of my first law cases, I defended the perpetrator of a crime that had taken place in Pluto. This crime had also resulted in Corwin Peace. John Wildstrand was the perpetrator; he was also Corwin’s father. He was tangled in with the rest of the family in complex ways as his grandfather had also fathered Mooshum’s wife — but enough. Nothing that happens, nothing , is not connected here by blood.

I trace a number of interesting social configurations to the Wildstrand tendency to sexual excess, or “deathless romantic encounters,” as Geraldine’s niece, Evelina, puts it when listening to the histories laid out by Seraph Milk. But of course the entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions. We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression.

At any rate, the entire story of the case, which became lurid in its endless aftermath and was snapped up and salivated over by the Fargo and even Minneapolis newspapers, began a chain of events that worked its way through cultic religion full of inner dramas and hypocrisies, and eventually ended up pretty well, considering that it may be said to have started years ago when Corwin’s uncle, Billy, decided to defend his sister’s honor with a jammed gun.

I represented John Wildstrand, Corwin’s father, after the law caught up with him on a Florida racetrack. That was years after the crime. It was a disastrous criminal case — frustrating because Wildstrand was a jack-in-the-box. He continually popped out of his seat during the proceedings and blurted out wildly incriminating blather — he could not control himself. I debated whether to plead insanity, or simply gag him, and ended up settling for what he seemed to wish for — a conviction. He’d always wanted, I saw later, some sort of containment or certainty that would prevent self-harm. Of course, in the interview process, he told me everything. He told me too much. He told me things about himself that I could not forget.

Wildstrand’s sinned-upon wife, Neve Harp, whom I still see now and then when I visit my mother in the Pluto Retirement Home, hates me for defending the man who so insulted their marriage. Neve is not a resident there, she goes around collecting interviews for her historical newsletter. Neve glares at me, and looks away before I can catch her eye, then she sneaks a look back. She cannot help herself either. It is as if she wonders what I know about her, through him; she intuits that I have an intimate level of information, and she both resents and is curious about my knowledge of her former husband’s life. In spite of everything, I don’t think Neve actually stopped loving John Wildstrand, and I understand that for many years she was the only person who visited him in prison.

Burton’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, believed it was only due to Justice that man can be a God to man and not a wolf. But what is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases, justice is prey to unknown dreams. And besides, there was a woman.