Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

MY MOTHER AND father come down every weekend to see me. All I do when they visit is cry in sympathy for their worry over me, or fall asleep, and after they go home I miss them — my father who left the bank knowing that he didn’t have the stomach to turn down loans or foreclose like old Murdo. My father who like his uncle Octave collected only stamps. He went away to the war — came back for love — left money for love — my father the schoolteacher hero.

And there is my mother, who loves Mooshum and keeps him going by taking away the bottle and walking him around the yard or down the road every day. I realize that I can only think of her in relation to other persons, and I am pained all over again at what seeing me in this hospital must do to her. I try to think of one thing that is all about Clemence, like my father with his stamps, Joseph’s salamanders, Mooshum telling stories, but I can’t think of anything.

I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.

I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.

I think of Billy Peace, whose meek and shattered-looking members included at least one Buckendorf, a Mantle also. One or another of the kindred would materialize sometimes beside a person in the grocery store and seemed lost in wonder at the aisles of plentiful food. Some adherents blended back in with the other town and reservation people as they took modest little jobs. Billy’s radio hour was taken by another voice. The little tracts we used to find in the Pluto or Hoopdance phone booths, or tucked in wayside rests, were more and more rare, then tattered, just souvenirs of the existence of Billy Peace, perhaps on another plane, those gone too.

Light falls through the wire-glass windows in a gentle swell. Mooshum told me how the old buffalo hunters looked beneath the robe of destruction that blanketed the earth. In the extremity of their hunger they saw the frail crust of white commerce lifting, saw the green grass underneath the burnt wheat, saw the buffalo thick as lice again, saw the great herds moving, flattening that rich grass beneath their hooves. Looking up, they saw the sky darkening with birds that covered it so that you could not see from one end to another. They flew low, a thunder. Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

I’m just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged, half-Chippewa. I think of Mooshum and Shamengwa sitting long into the afternoon. In the bed where Nonette curled — so warm, so golden — I see the beauty of women holding out their Latin missals and walking through the wheat in white dresses, praying away the doves in an ancient, foreign, magisterial tongue. And Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, for whom my passion should have clued me, and Corwin Peace, who also had a hand in this, I think of them.

I might go back and visit Sister Mary Anita. It might be a good thing to do. To speak to that monstrous, gentle face, to tell her that I’ve fallen from the church but that I still have visions, sometimes, of the mad swirl of her habit as she made adroit backhand catches and threw out a black-shod foot for balance. How the black wool snapped out in the air and then eddied back down around her ankles as she took a skipping hop and blazed the ball back to the catcher.

The Concert

ONE DAY, CORWIN Peace comes to visit me.

I am surprised, but not embarrassed. He’s learned where I am from my aunt, and is feeling bad about my desperate phone calls. He remembers the acid he fed me, and how I locked myself into my room for days after I took it. He says he decided that he should look me up. So one day as I am slowly crushing one cigarette after another into a sand-filled coffee can — there are six or seven cans in the patients’ lounge, always full of butts — in walks Corwin. He is dressed in a long, black sheriff ’s riding duster, but he wears a strange orange woolen hunting cap with a low brim over his eyes. He has on high-top tennis shoes, bellbottom jeans, a ripped T-shirt. Under the dramatic duster, he is carrying his new violin.

“Sit down.” I gesture with a newly lighted cigarette. I try to look bored, but actually I am excited. Corwin sits down in a plastic armchair and rests the violin case on his lap. His face is long and beautiful, his Peace eyes black and haunted. He has a short scraggle of unmowed beard. His ponytail flows down under his cap and snakes down his back. Corwin has always had lush brown lashes and those straight-across dramatic eyebrows. He can look at you steadily from under those minky brows, like his mother. He has some of what his uncle must have had to attract so many followers — that odd magnetism. When he smiles, his crooked teeth look very white. He doesn’t smoke.

“So,” he says.

“So,” I say.

We nod for a while like two sages on a hill. Then he opens the case and picks up his fiddle. As he tunes it, making such unfamiliar noise, the patients come out of their rooms or are attracted from down the corridor. The nurses venture from their station and stand, arms folded, chewing gum. Their mouths stop moving when he starts playing, and some of the patients sit down, right where they are, a couple of them on the floor, as if the music has cut through the big room like a scythe. After that first run of notes, the music gathers. Corwin plays a slow and pretty tune that makes people’s eyes unfocus. Lucille’s mouth forms a big O and she huddles into herself. Warren stands rooted, stiff and tall. Others sway, they look like they might weep, but that changes quickly as Corwin picks up tempo and plucks out a lively jig that has a sense of humor in the phrasing. At this point, Warren leaves his wall and begins to walk around and around the room, faster and faster. The music ticks along in a jerky way, a Red River jig. Then something monstrous happens. All sounds merge for a moment in the belly of the violin and fill the room with distress. My throat fills. I jump up. Alarm strikes through us. Warren stops walking and backs up flat against the wall. But Corwin draws some note out of the chaos in his hands, and then draws it further up and up, further, until it is unbearable, and at that very point where it might become a shriek, the note changes key a fraction and breaks into the most lucid sweetness.

Warren slides down the wall, his hand over his heart like he is taking the pledge. His head slumps down onto his chest. The rest of us sit back down, too. Calm rains upon us and a strange peace fills our stomachs and slows our hearts. The playing goes on in the most penetrating, lovely, endless way. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t know when or if it ever really ends. Warren has fallen over. A nurse plods over to check his pulse. The playing of the violin is the only thing in the world and in that music there is dark assurance. The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful. I am small. I am whole. Nothing matters. Things are startling and immense. When the music is just reverberations, I stand up. The nurse is checking her watch and frowning at it first, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stand next to Corwin as he carefully replaces his violin in its case and snaps the latches down. I look at my cousin and he looks at me — under those eyebrows, he gives his wicked, shy grin and points his lips in a kiss, toward the door.