Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

I was watching the wash of ink, rain on the horizon, when his white car pulled into our yard. A tall man, thin and tense, but with a shy and open smile. His eyes were brown and melting, rich as sweet milk caramel. I would find out later that they could freeze black or turn any color under the sun. He was dressed very neatly, wearing a tie and a shirt that was not sweat through, still ironed crisp. I noticed this as I was walking back down to the yard. I was starting to notice these things about men, the way their hips moved when they hauled feed, checked fence lines, the way their forearms looked so tanned and hard when they rolled up their white sleeves. I was looking at men, not with intentions, because I didn’t know what I would have done with one yet if I got him, but with a studious mind.

I was looking at them just to figure, for pure survival, the way a girl does. It is like a farmer, which my dad is, gets to know the lay of the land. He loves his land so he has got to figure how to cultivate it. What it needs in each season, how much abuse it will sustain, what in the end it will yield to him.

And I, too, in order to increase my yield and use myself right was taking my lessons. I never tried out my information, though, until Billy Peace arrived. He looked at me where I stood in the shade of my mother’s butterfly bush. I’m not saying that I flirted right off. I still didn’t know how to. I walked into the sunlight and stared him in the eye.

“What are you selling?” I smiled, and told him that my mother would probably buy it since she bought all sorts of things — a pruning saw you could use from the ground, a cherry pitter, a mechanical apple peeler that also removed the seeds and core, a sewing machine that remembered all the stitches it had sewed. He smiled back at me, walked with me to the steps of the house.

“You’re a bright young lady,” he said, though he was young himself. “Stand close. You’ll see what I’m selling by looking into the middle of my eyes.”

He pointed his finger between his eyebrows.

“I don’t see a thing.”

My mother came around the corner holding a glass of iced tea in her hand. While they were talking, I didn’t look at Billy. I felt challenged, like I was supposed to make sense of what he did. At sixteen, I didn’t have perspective on the things men did. I’d never gotten a whiff of that odor, the scent of it that shears off them like an acid. Later, it would require just a certain look, a tone of voice, a word, no more than a variation in the way he drew breath. A dog gets tuned that way, sensitized to a razor degree, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. I took orders from Billy like I was doing him a favor, the way, since I’d hit my growth, I took orders from my dad.

Except my dad only gave orders when he was tired. All other times, he did the things he wanted done by himself. My dad was not the man I should have studied, in the end, if I wanted to learn cold survival. He was too worn-out. All my life, my parents had been splitting up. I lived in a no-man’s-land between them and the ground was pitted, scarred with ruts. And yet, no matter how hard they fought each other they had stuck together. He could not get away from my mother somehow, nor she from him. So I couldn’t look to my father for information on what a man was. He was half her. And I couldn’t look at the old man they took care of, his uncle whose dad originally bought the farm, my uncle Warren, who would stare and stare at you like he was watching your blood move and your food digest. Warren’s face was a chopping block, his long arms hung heavy. He flew into disorderly rages and went missing, for days sometimes. We’d find him wandering the farm roads bewildered and spent of fury. I never saw Warren as the farmer that my dad was — you should have seen my father when he planted a tree.

“A ten-dollar hole for a two-bit seedling,” he said. That was the way he dug, so as not to crowd the roots. He kept the little tree in water while he pried out any rocks that might be there, though our land was just as good as the best Red River soil, dirt that went ten feet down — rich, black clods you felt like holding in your fist and biting. My father put the bare-root tree in and sifted the soil around the roots, rubbing it to fine crumbs between his fingers. He packed the dirt in, he watered until the water pooled. Looking into my father’s eyes you would see the knowledge, tender and offhand, of the ways roots took hold in the earth.

I believed, at first, that there was that sort of knowledge in Billy’s eyes. I watched him from behind my mother. I discovered what he had to sell.

“It’s Bibles, isn’t it,” I said.

“No fair.” He put his hand across his heart, grinned at the two of us. He had seen my eyes flicker to the little gold cross in his lapel.

“Something even better.”

“What?” My mother scoffed.

“Spirit.”

My mother turned and walked away. She had no time for conversion attempts. I was only intermittently religious, but I suppose I felt that I had to make up for her rudeness, and so I stayed a moment longer. I was wearing very short cutoff jeans and a little brown T-shirt, tight, old clothes for dirty work. I was supposed to help my mom clean out her brooder house that afternoon, to set new straw in and wash down the galvanized feeders, to destroy the thick whorls of ground-spider cobwebs and shine the windows with vinegar and newspapers. All of this stuff was scattered behind me on the steps, rags and buckets. And as I said, I was never all that religious.

“There is a meeting tonight,” he said. “I’m going to tell you where.”

He always told in advance what he was going to say. That was the preaching habit in him, it made you wait and wonder in spite of yourself.

“Where?” I said finally.

He told me the directions, how to get where the tent was pitched. He spoke to me looking full on with sweetness of intensity. Eyes brown as burnt sugar. I realized I’d seen his picture before in my grandparents’ bedroom. Billy’s was the face of Jesus leaning his head forward just a little to listen for an answer as he knocked on a rustic door. I decided that I would go, without anyone else in my family, to the fairground field that evening. Just to study. Just to see.

THE RAIN DROPPED off the edge of the world. We got no more than a slash of moisture in the air that dried before it fell. After the storm veered off, I decided to go to town. I drove a small sledge and tractor at the age of eleven, and a car back and forth into Pluto with my mother in the passenger’s seat when I was fourteen years old. So it was not unusual that I went where I wanted to go.

As I walked over to the car, I passed Uncle Warren. He was sitting on a stump in the yard, looking at me, watching me, his gray hair tufted out, his chin white stubble, his eye on me, green and frozen.

Where are you going?

Town.

After that?

Back home.

Then?

I dunno.

Hell.

Maybe.

Hell, for sure.

Sometimes he would say that I was just like him, that I maybe was him, he could see it. He could see my whole structure. I couldn’t hide. I told him shut up and leave me alone. He always said to me, you are alone. I always answered, not as alone as you.

In town, the streets were just on the edge of damp, but the air was still thin and dry. White moths fluttered in and out under the rolled flaps of the tent, but as the month of August was half spent there were no more mosquitoes. Too dry for them, too. Even though the tent was open-sided, the air seemed close, compressed, and faintly salty with evaporated sweat. The space was three-quarters full of singing people and I slipped into one of the hind rows. I sat in a gray metal folding chair, kept my eyes open, and my mouth shut.