Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“I could not bite the liver out of anyone with these dull choppers,” Mooshum said.

I pulled out a bag of pink peppermint pillows. He plucked one out, set it on his tongue, and closed his eyes. The little wisps of his hair fluttered in the breeze from the door.

“I miss my brother,” said Mooshum, fingering his mangled ear. “I even miss how he shot me.”

“What?”

“Oh yai,” he said, “this ear, didn’t you know? It was him.”

Mooshum told me that the fall after he and Junesse returned to the reservation he followed his younger brother out hunting. Somewhere in the woods Mooshum had hidden the bear’s skin that ordinarily draped the family couch. Pulling the skin over himself, Mooshum managed a convincing ambush, rising suddenly from a patch of wild raspberry pickers and flinging himself forward in a mighty charge. Shamengwa fled as Mooshum pursued, fled with a loaded gun, but turned and shot with an awful cry as he tripped and fell.

“That bullet took my ear,” Mooshum said, chopping the side of his hand at his head. “Clipped me good.”

My mother sat down with us, and stirred sugar into a cup of tea.

“My brother pissed himself all the way down his legs that time. Did you ever know that?” Mooshum said.

“No!”

They started snuffling behind their hands. “Shame on you, Daddy,” said Mama. “You’re the one who peed himself.” They suddenly fell silent. Mooshum rocked back on his chair’s rear legs. He’d shrunk so that his soft, old green clothes were like bags, and his body inside was just lashed-together sticks.

Mama finished her tea, got up, and threw a couple of big hunks of dough on the cutting board. She started kneading, thumping them hard and shoving the heels of her hands in, a practiced movement I’d seen a thousand times. She was setting the dough to rise before going out with my father. They were attending some church-sponsored event that was supposed to be an alternative to the devil’s inspiration, trick-or-treating. Father Cassidy still worked on the family, though more by habit than with any real hope.

Mooshum chewed and spat; his new coffee can was a red Folger’s.

“They still won’t give me a stamp!” He hissed behind Mama’s back.

“Give me the letter,” I said. “I’ll mail it.”

Mama was leaving, a spiderwebby lace scarf at the collar of her neat navy blue coat. My father wore a starched green shirt and a plaid jacket. His face was tired and resigned.

“He’d rather of stuck here with us,” Mooshum said as they went out the door.

“He needs some relief,” I said.

My father’s class that year was dominated by two big unstable Vallient boys, who were uncontrollable. Most of my father’s days were filled with conflict. He said that he couldn’t take teaching anymore and had decided to sell his stamp collections and retire. Of course, we thought it was just talk, but he was conducting an auction by mail. Letters with the crests of stamp dealers appeared in the post office box.

After they left, Mooshum and I sat beside the door. Mama had wrapped each popcorn ball in waxed paper and twisted the ends shut. I opened one and began to eat it. There was an excited knock and the first wave of trick-or-treaters hit. We got the usual assortment of bums and pirates, some sorry-looking astronauts, a few vampires out of Dark Shadows , ghosts in old sheets, nondescript monsters, and bedraggled princesses with cardboard crowns. A lot of the older kids were motley werewolves or rugaroo with real fur stuck on their faces and wrists.

“This ain’t no fun yet,” said Mooshum.

For the next ones who came, I hid around the back of the door while Mooshum sat in darkness with the bowl of popcorn balls in his lap and a flashlight held under his chin. The kids had to approach and pluck the treat from the bowl, but only the toddlers were anywhere scared enough for Mooshum. A couple of older kids even laughed. He tried moaning some, rolling his eyes to the whites.

“They are hardened!” he said when they left.

“It’s not easy to scare kids these days with all they see.” I attempted to comfort him, but he was downcast. We tried the same thing with the next bunch, but not until he bit into a popcorn ball as one little boy approached, and his dentures stuck, and he took the ball out and held it toward the kid with the teeth in it, did we get a real satisfying shriek.

After that, when a child approached, I turned the flashlight on Mooshum and he bit into the popcorn ball, leaving his teeth in the gluey syrup. The kids had to reach underneath the hand and the popcorn ball with the teeth in it. We kept it up until one mom, who was carrying her two-year-old in a piece of white sheet, said, “You’re unsanitary, old man!” That hurt Mooshum’s feelings. He put his dentures back in sulkily and gave out peanut butter kisses with a stingy fist to the next three groups. There was a short hiatus, and I ate a kiss, which tasted faintly of peanut butter, more of glue. Mooshum’s dentures were so loose now that he clacked and spat.

I finished handing out the treats, shut the door, and turned back with the bowl of candy. Mooshum was gone.

“Don’t look yet!” he cried from the kitchen.

I walked straight back to see what he was up to, and nearly dropped over. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts made of tissue-thin cotton, and he was stretching a big wet hunk of Mama’s fresh, soft, new-risen bread dough over his head. He’d plopped it there and now it oozed horribly down his face, his neck, over his shoulders. His ears stuck out of the dripping mask. Strings of dough hung around his arms and he’d taken more bread dough and slapped it on his chest and stomach and thighs. His eyes peered out of the white goo, red and avid as a woodpecker’s. He’d filled his mouth with ketchup. When he grinned, it leaked from his toothless mouth and down his chin. He saw my face, whirled, and ran out the back door. There was a clamor of voices yelling trick or treat. I dropped the bowl and chased him out the back door, but he’d already disappeared. I was creeping around the front when I saw him rise from the yew bush, the flashlight trained on himself from underneath. He shrieked — a barely human, shocking squeal. He tottered toward the kids and I knew when he grinned the ketchup grin, because the five boys yelled in fright and broke ranks. Three bolted and sprang off quick as jackrabbits. One dashed a little way before he tripped. The last one picked up a rock and winged it.

The rock hit Mooshum square in the center of his forehead. He fell full length, the flashlight skidding out of his fist, just as my parents drove up and jumped out of the car. I picked up the flashlight and trained it on Mooshum as Dad turned him over. Mama fell to her knees. Mooshum’s eyes were wide-open, staring, and his forehead was bleeding all down his nose and cheeks. Mama put her arms around Mooshum’s shoulders and shook him, trying to make his eyes focus. I knelt beside him and tried to take his pulse, but I can hardly find my own pulse so I couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. I put my ear to his chest.

“Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Dad.

Mooshum woke and trained his eyes with great affection on my mother. “A good one, that.”

Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. He snored once. Mom said, “What’s he covered with?” I answered, “Bread dough.” We waited for the next snore. There wasn’t one. Dad bent over Mooshum, pinched his nose shut, tipped his head back and opened his jaw with his thumb. He blew a long breath into Mooshum. Ketchup bubbled and leaked down Mooshum’s neck.

“Did his chest move?” Dad wiped the ketchup off his mouth. He didn’t even ask about the ketchup.

“Yeah.”