Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin would have sat high on a bale of buffalo robes or beaver skins and sung traveling songs to the screeching wheels of an oxcart, now he drove a banged-up Chevy Nova with hubcaps missing and back end dragging. He drove it hard and he drove it all cranked up, but he was rarely caught because he traveled such odd and erratic hours, making deals, whisking to Minneapolis, heading out the same night. He drove without a license — that had been taken from him. And he was always looking for money — scamming, betting, shooting pool, even now and then working a job that, horrifyingly, put him on the other side of a counter frying Chinese chicken strips. I kept careful track of Corwin because it seemed I was fated from the beginning to witness the full down-arcing shape of his life’s trajectory. I wanted to make certain that if I had to put him away, I could do it and sleep well that same night. Now, although the violin was never seen in his possession and we had impounded the Nova, the police kept an eye on him because they were certain he would show his hand and try to sell the instrument.

As days passed, Corwin laid low and picked up his job at the deep-fryer. He probably knew that he was being watched because he made one of those rallying attempts that gave heart to so many of his would-be saviors. He straightened out, stayed sober, used his best manner, and when questioned was convincingly hopeful about his prospects and affable about his failures.

“I’m a jackass,” he admitted, “but I never sank so low as to rip off the old man’s fiddle.”

Yet he had, of course. We just didn’t know where he could be hiding it or whether he had the sense ultimately to bring it to an antiques dealer or an instrument shop somewhere in the Cities. While we waited for him to make his move, there was the old man, who quickly began to fail. I had not realized how much I’d loved to hear him play — sometimes out on his scrubby back lawn after dusk, sometimes, as I’ve mentioned, at those little concerts, and other times just for groups of people who would gather round at Clemence and Edward’s house. It wasn’t that I heard him more than once or twice a month, but I found, like many others, that I depended on his music. After weeks had passed a dull spot opened and I ached with a surprising poignancy for Shamengwa’s loss, which I honestly shared, so that I had to seek him out and sit with him as if it would help to mourn the absence of his music together. One thing I wanted to know, too, was whether, if the violin did not turn up, we could get together and buy him a new, perhaps even a better instrument. I hesitated to ask him, as though my offer was a selfish thing. I didn’t know. So I sat in Shamengwa’s little front room one afternoon, and tried to find an opening.

“Of course,” I said, “we think we know who took your fiddle. We’ve got our eye on him.”

Shamengwa swept his hair back with the one graceful hand, and said, as he had many times, “I slept the whole damn time.”

Yet in trying to free himself from the bed, he’d fallen half off the side. He’d scraped his cheek and the white of his eye on that side was an angry red. He moved with a stiff, pained slowness, the rigidity of a very old person. It took him a long time to straighten all the way when he tried to get up.

“You stay sitting. I’ll boil the tea.” Geraldine was gentle and practical. No one ever argued with her. Shamengwa lowered himself piece by piece back into a padded brown rocking chair. He gazed at me — or past me, really. I soon understood that, although he spoke quietly and answered questions, he was not fully engaged in the conversation. In fact, he was only half present, and somewhat disheveled, irritable as well, neither of which I’d ever seen in him. His shirt was buttoned wrong, the plaid askew, and he hadn’t shaved the smattering of whiskers from his chin that morning. The white stubble stood out against his skin. His breath was sour and he didn’t seem glad at all that I had come.

We sat together in a challenging silence until Geraldine brought two mugs of hot, strong, sugared tea and got another for herself. Shamengwa’s hand shook as he lifted the cup, but he drank. His face cleared a bit as the tea went down, and I decided there would be no better time to put forth my idea.

“Uncle,” I said, “we would like to buy a new fiddle for you.”

Shamengwa took another drink of his tea, said nothing, but put down the cup and folded his hands in his lap. He looked past me and frowned in a thoughtful way. I did not think that was a good sign.

“Wouldn’t he like a new violin?” I appealed to Geraldine. She shook her head as if she was both annoyed with me and exasperated with her uncle. We sat in silence. I didn’t know where to go from there. Shamengwa had closed his eyes. He leaned far back in his chair, but he wasn’t asleep. I thought he might be trying to get rid of me. But I was stubborn and did not want to go. I wanted to hear Shamengwa’s music again.

“Oh, tell him about it, Uncle,” said Geraldine at last.

Shamengwa leaned forward, and bent his head over his hands as though he were praying.

I relaxed now and understood that I was going to hear something. It was that breathless gathering moment I’ve known just before composure cracks, the witness breaks, the truth comes out, the unsaid is finally heard. I am familiar with it and although this was not exactly a confession, it was, as it turned out, something not generally known on the reservation. Shamengwa had owned his fiddle for such a long while that nobody knew, or remembered anyway, a time when he had been without it. But there had actually been two fiddles in his life. There was his father’s fiddle, which he played while he was a boy, and then another, which came to find him through a dream.

The First Fiddle

MY MOTHER LOST a baby boy to diphtheria when I was but four years old, said Shamengwa, and it was that loss which turned my mother strictly to the church. Before that, I remember my father playing chansons, reels, jigs, but after the baby’s death my mother made him put the fiddle down and take Holy Communion. We moved off our allotment for a time and lived right here, but in those days trees and bush still surrounded us. There were no houses to the west. We were not considered to live in the settlement at all and we pastured our horses where the Dairy Queen now stands. My mother out of grief became rigid and tightly ordered with my father, my older brother and sister, and me. Our oldest brother, or half brother, had already left home. He went beyond her and became a priest. We understood why she held to strange laws, and we let her rule us, but we all thought she would relent once the year of first mourning was up. Where before we had a lively house that people liked to visit, now there was quiet. No wine and no music. We kept our voices down because our noise hurt, she said, and there was no laughing or teasing by my father, who had once been a dancing and hilarious man. I missed the little one too. We had put him in the Catholic cemetery underneath a small, rounded, white headstone, where he lies to this day.

I don’t believe my mother meant things to change so, but she and my father had lost everything once already, and this sorrow she bore was beyond her strength. As though her heart was buried underneath that stone as well, she turned cold, turned away from the rest of us, lost her feelings. Now that I am old and know the ways of grief I understand she felt too much, loved too hard, and was afraid to lose us as she had lost my brother. But to a little boy these things are hidden. It only seemed to me that along with that baby I had lost her love. Her strong arms, her kisses, the clean-soap smell of her face, her voice calming me, all of this was gone. She was like a statue in a church. Every so often we would find her in the kitchen, standing still, staring through the wall. At first we touched her clothes, petted her hands. My father kissed her, spoke gently into her ear, combed her short hair — she was a full-blood and in the traditional way had cut off her hair in mourning. It made a fat bush around her head. Later, after we had given up, we just walked around her as you would a stump. Our oldest, my half brother, came and visited. He took my brother away with him to serve at Holy Mass. The house went quiet, my sister took up the cooking, my father became a silent, empty ear, and gradually we accepted that the lively, loving mother we had known wasn’t going to return. If she wanted to sit in the dark all day, we let her. We didn’t try and coax her out. More often, she spent her time at the church. She attended morning Mass and stayed on, her ivory and silver rosary draped in her right fist, her left hand wearing the beads smoother, smaller, until I thought for sure they would disappear between her fingers.