Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

He bent over and blew four more times into Mooshum. Then Mooshum stirred and coughed himself back to consciousness.

We decided to load him into the car, and in the relief of the moment we seemed to carry Mooshum effortlessly. I sat in the backseat with his head in my arms, and as we sped toward the hospital I felt his breath go out, and not come in, but then start up, like a sputtering outboard.

In the emergency room, he caused a stir. The nurses called everyone else over to look at him in his bread dough until Dad got mad, said, “Quit gawking. You’re supposed to be professionals!” and shut the curtain around us. The doctor on call made it to the emergency room in five minutes. He was a young doctor, doing his government payback with the IHS, and he stepped around the curtain still shrugging on his white coat. The nurses must not have told him about the ketchup and the bread dough, but the doctor did pretty well. His mouth shook but he withheld laughter. Mooshum frowned in the bread dough mask, the ketchup drooling out the corners of his mouth, down his neck. Mama touched his hands tenderly and lightly as she folded them onto his chest. As we stood there looking at Mooshum, it seemed that his face slowly changed, relaxing into contemplation; contentment at the corners of his mouth. Dad gasped and wiped his face. The nurses were out there again, listening to us. We stood there for an endless amount of time, in a buzzing suspension.

“He looks happy,” said Mama. “He looks like he’s coming back.”

Mooshum started breathing steadily.

“I’m going to die now,” he sighed.

“No you’re not, Daddy.”

“Yes, I am. I want my lovergirl to visit me. Here in the hospital. Call Neve! It is my final request!”

“They’re not even going to keep you here, Daddy. They’re letting us take you home.”

“No, baby girl, I am gone.” He appeared to pass out, and Mama shook him, but just then Father Cassidy bounded lightly between the curtains. He had a spark in his eye and the good book in his hands. Mama would not step aside, so the priest had to crane to look into Mooshum’s face.

“Am I still in time?” he asked loudly. “One of the nurses sent word.”

Mooshum frowned and opened his eyes.

“There is time! How fortunate!” Father Cassidy muttered a fervent prayer. He had the Holy Oils along in a little kit. He began to fussily arrange them on the stainless steel bedside table. Mooshum gave a groan of irritation and sat up.

“If you won’t let me die in peace, then I’ll live, though I do not want to. You won’t get me this time, Hop Along, I’ll extend my life!”

Mooshum swung his legs over the side of the table and stood shakily. Dad and Mama held him from either side. He drooled a last bit of ketchup. “I have been told in the Indian heaven we live with the buffalo. I am content with that. Anyway, you have already spoken for me in the church. I couldn’t have wished for a better send-off.”

“I’ve apologized for that dozens of times,” said Father Cassidy. He began with hurt dignity to pack away his vials of oil and to primly refold the starched white napkins that came in his kit.

Mama helped Mooshum into Dad’s topcoat. He seemed stronger by the minute. He was still shedding dough, in dried flakes now. Father Cassidy noticed and asked what happened.

“He put dough on himself,” I said.

Father Cassidy shook his head and snapped the top of his handy leather case. He was still talking cozily to the nurses when we left. A year later, he quit the priesthood, went home, grew a beard, and became an entrepreneur. He sold Montana beef, shipped it to Japan and all over the world. We’d see him on billboards and in his TV commercials. His distinctive skipping bound, his calflike and happy energy, became a trademark for the beef industry and made him very rich.

BEFORE I WENT back to school that weekend, Corwin came to my house and picked me up. We got into his car and drove out to a deserted place far off in the middle of a flat field where we could see lights coming from a distance. We climbed into the backseat with the windows half open — it was an unusually warm November night — and we kissed. Strange, intimate, brotherly. Then hurting each other, greedy with heat. We pulled our clothes away but suddenly stopped, confused, overwhelmed by a shy aversion. We sat there holding hands until we dozed off. The light lifted and the edges of the earth showed streaks of fire. The sun would rise soon. I studied Corwin in the soft gray light. His face looked swollen and bruised — we were all cramped and stiff from sleeping bent together. Maybe he’d been crying, secretly. He stroked my face, tucked my hair behind my ears, then put his other hand between my legs.

“Hey, Evey?” Corwin’s teeth flashed. “You and me are supposed to marry. We’re supposed to love unto death, until death do us part.” His face was serious and exciting with the light creeping in a blaze up his throat and mouth. His eyes were masked in a slash of shadow.

“We’ll go to Paris,” he said. “We’ll visit Joseph at the U and take a plane from there. Paris, just like you always wanted. We’ll fuck in the street, fuck in the cathedral, fuck in the fucking coffee shops, you know?”

“Which cathedral?” I asked.

“The most beautiful one,” said Corwin, “the one with the best statues.”

“All right,” I said. “Which coffee shop?”

“An all-night one with very tall booths. It could happen.”

“How about the street? Which street?”

“All streets. We’ll take a map.”

I had studied the map on the endpapers of my book — an astonishing maze.

“We’d better get there soon,” said Corwin. “They’re probably building new streets in Paris right this minute.”

“What if I don’t want to, being a lesbian?”

Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.

“So you think it might be permanent?”

Driving slowly home, we passed an old man shambling along, coat flapping, hair streaming. It was Mooshum. We stopped the car just ahead, then turned around on the empty highway and cruised up beside him. He continued to stumble eagerly forward, so I jumped out and pulled him over to the car.

“Hey, get in!”

He looked at me, distracted.

“Oh, it’s Evey.”

“Get in the car, Mooshum, where are you going?”

“Visiting around.”

He let me put him in the car and, once he was in, he said in a grand voice, “Take me to lovey!”

“Okay.” I looked at Corwin wearily. He was staring straight ahead. “It’s my aunt, Neve. He wants to go and see her.”

“Why not?” said Corwin, shifting gears with a gesture of resignation.

As we were driving to Pluto, I realized that by now my mother was probably talking to the tribal police. She would be frantic over Mooshum. So as soon as Aunt Neve answered the door — wearing a bathrobe, no makeup, hair matted flat — I told her that I needed to use her telephone. Mooshum and Corwin sat down on Aunt Neve’s springy golden couch and waited while she left the room to brew some coffee. Mooshum flapped his hands at Corwin and hissed at him to leave. I turned away from them with the phone and put my hand over one ear.

“Mama? I’ve got Mooshum and we’re at Aunt Neve’s.”

Mama said a few explosive things, but was mostly relieved. She said something to Dad, then said, “Here, your dad needs to talk to you.”

“Evey? Are you at—”

“Aunt Harp’s.”

“Oh!”

His voice was strained, tense, more excited than I’d ever heard. “Look,” he said, “is there any way you can take a look at her mail?”

“What?”

My father told me that Mooshum raided his stamp collection when Mama refused to send one of his letters, and he glued several valuable, extremely valuable (my father’s voice shook a little), stamps on an envelope he sneaked into the mail two days before. I opened my mouth to say that I’d mailed the letter for Mooshum, but thought better of it.