Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“One could be?”

“Anyone, perhaps. My father said that his grandfather was very kind, the kindest one of all. And yet he always knew he’d been one of the lynching party. My father was never able to put him there, in his thoughts. A couple of times he said he spoke of it. He spoke of your grandfather.”

“Mooshum?”

I leaned forward and waited, but she hesitated.

“I’m not sure…but you asked. You want to know.” Her lucid eyes combed me over. “All right, dear, I’ll tell you. I believe your grandfather used to drink in those days. Your Mooshum told Eugene Wildstrand that he and the others were at the farmhouse. Mooshum told how they had found that poor family.”

I couldn’t look at her suddenly. I could only see Mooshum. A ragged flush rose from deep inside of me, a flood of pure distress. “He must have been stinking drunk to tell that,” I said.

Nowhere in Mooshum’s telling of the events did he make himself responsible. He never said that he had been the one who betrayed the others, yet instantly I knew it was true. Here was why the others would not speak to him in the wagon. Here was the reason he was cut down before he died.

Although I knew Mary Anita spoke the truth, I could not help arguing, and my voice rose. “They put a rope around his neck! He almost died. They tried to hang him, too.”

Sister Mary Anita’s hands twisted in agitation. “Yes, my dear. Wildstrand cut him down at the last moment, yes. From what I heard, though, they never meant to hang him all the way. They wanted to terrify him, to intimidate him. A false hanging will do that.”

Sister Mary Anita touched the bottom of her face lightly with her knuckles, then gazed over my head, at the crucifix I thought. She was looking at the basket of dried flowers — black-eyed Susans, the little brown thumbs of prairie coneflowers, rusty Indian paint, cattails — all recently gathered from the ditches and pastures.

“The boy made that basket,” said Mary Anita.

I rose, stepped across the room, and examined the basket — the wands, brittle and ancient, were more widely spaced than the best baskets, and a bit loose, the weaving not tight but irregular; it was a basket that a boy might make. Sister Mary Anita scraped out of the room, her feet uncertain on the floor now, and while she was gone I sat down, bent over, and held my head in my hands. Mooshum . When she came back, she had a brown paper bag, folded over on top. She didn’t sit down and when I stood up to take the bag in my arms, I saw that she was tired and wanted me to leave. She remembered at the door.

“I’ll pray for your vocation,” she said. “And your sanity. too.” She brightened and made a small joke. “They are not mutually exclusive.”

I walked back down the hill and entered our house. Joseph and I still had our tiny alcove bedrooms — though his was full of all of his things now, plus Mama’s sewing. Mooshum still slept in the little pantry off the kitchen. I went to my room, sat down on the bed, opened the paper bag, and peered inside. There was a pair of laceless boots, tongues dragging, leather dark and cracked with age. I took the boots out of the bag and held them in my arms. If I lifted one out and turned it over to look at the bottom, I knew I would see the nailed-on cross.

When I’d walked into the house, I had awakened Mooshum and now I heard him making his unsteady old man’s way down the hall to my room. Nobody else was home.

“Want to play cards?” he said at my door.

I turned around and held the boots out, one gripped in each hand. Mooshum looked at me strangely, arrested by my attitude. He pushed his fingers through his scraggly hair, touched his sparse unshaven bristles, white against his skin, but of course he didn’t recognize Holy Track’s boots.

“Evey?”

I shook the boots at him. He cocked his head to the side, opened his long fingers, and took the boots when I shoved them toward him.

“Turn them over,” I said.

He did and as he stared at the soles he bent slightly forward, as if they had gotten heavy. He turned away from me in silence and made his way back down the hall to his couch, which he fell into with the boots still in his hands. I thought that I’d maybe killed him. But he was frowning at the wall. I sat down next to him on the lumpy cushions. He put the boots carefully between us.

After a while, he spoke.

“I passed out cold, so I never knew when they cut me down. I lay there I don’t know how long. When I came to, I looked up and there was these damn boots with the damn crosses on, walking, the boy was still walking, on air.”

“They let him dangle there, choking to death, and watched him.”

Mooshum shrugged and put his hands to his eyes.

A dizziness boiled up in me. I jumped to my feet.

“You’re the only one left,” I said.

“Tawpway,” said Mooshum, complainingly, “and now you killed me some, too. I am sick to look on these old boots and think of Holy Track.”

“You’re the one who told!”

He rifled his pockets, took out his grubby, balled-up handkerchief, and tried to give it to me. I pushed it back.

“I did sober up for a long time, though, after that, some.”

We looked down at the splayed boots.

After a while Mooshum picked up the boots and said he wanted me to drive him someplace. So I got the keys and helped him out of the house and into the car.

“Where am I going?”

“To the tree.”

I knew where the tree was. Everybody knew where the tree was. The tree still grew on Marn’s land, where Billy Peace’s kindred used to stay. People had stopped going there for a while, but come back now that the kindred had disappeared. The tree took up the very northwest corner of the land, and it was always full of birds. Mooshum and I drove silently over the miles, then parked the car on a tractor turnout. When we slammed the car doors, a thousand birds startled up at the same instant. The sound reverberated like a shot bow. They flew like arrows and disappeared, sucked into the air.

We walked over dusty winter-flattened grass into the shadow of the tree. Alone in the field, catching light from each direction, the tree had grown its branches out like the graceful arms of a candelabra. New prayer flags hung down — red, green, blue, white. The sun was flaring low, gold on the branches, and the finest of new leaves was showing.

Mooshum knotted the laces, handed the boots to me. I threw them up. It took three times to catch them on a branch.

“This is sentiment instead of justice,” I said to Mooshum.

The truth is, all the way there I’d thought about saying just this thing.

Mooshum nodded, peering into the film of green on the black twigs, blinking, “Awee, my girl. The doves are still up there.”

I stared up and didn’t have anything to say about the doves, but I hated the gentle swaying of those boots.

SO AFTER ALL, Mooshum saw in the skies of North Dakota an endless number of doves cluttering the air and filling heaven with an eternity of low cries. He imagined that the blanket of doves had merely lifted into the stratosphere and not been snuffed out here on earth. By this flurry of feathers, he was connected to the great French writer whose paperback I picked up again after abandoning Anas Nin. I read it so often that I sometimes thought of Judge Coutts as the judge-penitent, who bore my mother’s name, and waited at a bar in Amsterdam for someone like me. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. Albert Camus had once worked in a weather bureau, which made me trust his observations of the sky.

It was a warm Halloween night, and I had come home from school to help celebrate Mooshum’s favorite holiday. To get ready for the trick-or-treaters, I drizzled warm corn syrup onto popcorn, larded my hands, and packed popcorn into balls until we had about a hundred or more stacked in a big steel bowl. We had backup — two vast bags of sticky peanut butter kisses. Our house was first on the road and everyone from out in the bush came into town on Halloween nights. Mooshum glared sadly at the treats. He didn’t like peanut butter and the popcorn balls would be a problem, as he had never adjusted to his dentures.