Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“I got a little upset last night,” said Dad. “This morning he decided to take off…”

Just then the doorbell rang.

“Will you get that, dear?” Aunt Neve called from the bedroom, her voice a melodious trill. I was pretty sure that when she came out she would look perfectly groomed.

I set the phone down and answered the door. It was the postman with a postage-due letter among the other mail. I paid the postage with coins from my pocket and tucked the letter into my bra. I closed the door, set the rest of the mail on the neat little side table, and picked up the telephone.

“Well, I’ve got it. The letter has a one-cent stamp on it, blue, Benjamin Franklin.”

I could hear my father struggling with some emotion on the other end.

“It’s called the Z Grill. Honey, if you get that stamp back here safely, I promise I’ll send you to Paris.”

I put the phone down. My father never called me, or anyone, honey. And this was the second time that morning I had been promised a trip to Paris. I stared at Mooshum. His hair was a clean silver, swept into a neat tail. His teeth were back in, a white slash in his rumpled face. He was perfectly shaved. His clothes were spotless, shoes polished. He had his handkerchief out to touch the drip off the end of his nose.

Mooshum gave me a significant look that I understood to mean get out of here , so I grabbed Corwin’s hand. We sneaked quickly out, back to the car, and immediately peeled out back onto the road. Once we were driving, we tried again to talk, but nothing came out right. I put my hand on Corwin’s leg, but he just let it sit there and we both fell silent. It was awkward and my arm began to ache with the strain.

“We better start saving for our tickets,” he said before I got out of the car. We were parked in the road outside of my house.

I kissed him, and left. When I looked out the window of the house about ten minutes later, the car was still there. The next time I looked, it was gone.

Aunt Neve kept Mooshum at her house that night. Just as I was about to head back to school the next morning, she pulled up in her yellow Buick. I watched from the doorway as Mooshum extricated himself from the passenger’s side and walked around the front of the car, quick like a young man, brushing his hand across the hood and staring hawklike through the windshield at Aunt Neve. As Aunt Neve drove away, he stood waving slowly. The Buick disappeared, but he didn’t move. He kept his hand in the air until he shrank and became old again. When he finally turned and shuffled toward the house, I walked down the steps and took his arm.

“Awee!” His face was full of emotion as we climbed the steps. “At last, my girl. If only Father Hop Along was here. I almost wish it. At last, I have something to confess.”

I WAS NAMED for Louis Riel’s first love, a girl he met soon after his release from Beauport Asylum, near Quebec in 1878. He had been locked up there for treatment after suffering an attack of uncontrollable laughter during Holy Mass. Riel’s Evelina was blond, tall, humble, and a lover of sweet flowers. It was Mooshum who actually suggested to Mama that she name me for this lost love of Riel’s, and he was always proud that she had taken his suggestion.

FOR MONTHS, ALL winter, in fact, my father held a grudge toward Mooshum for nearly sabotaging his retirement by stealing not only the Z Grill, but a three-cent Swedish stamp issued in 1855 and colored orange instead of blue. That one was returned for insufficient postage. At least Mooshum had used a return address, I observed, looking at the envelope over Christmas break.

“Don’t joke. This is our family’s future,” said my father.

Mooshum had used a harmless paste of flour mixed with spit to stick it onto the envelope. The stamp did not even bear a killer or cancellation, because the postman in Pluto hadn’t known quite how to handle the mistake, except to ask at the door for postage. Dad had gently soaked both stamps off the envelopes and put them back on their album pages. He showed me all of his favorite stamps. Until he agreed to a price by mail, he planned to put the whole collection in a safe-deposit box that was not in his sister’s bank.

In late March, driving to Fargo with the collection, my father hit a patch of black ice and spun off the road, rolling the family car to the edge of a beet field. It was a sudden and deceptive freeze. He was alone, and unconscious, so the stamp albums were left behind. Since the windows were shattered entirely from the frames, much of what was in the car flew out as the car rolled, popping open the doors. The albums were left somewhere in a cold drenching rain that began soon after he came to consciousness at St. John’s Hospital. He asked for his stamps at once, but of course the last thing the doctors were interested in was a stamp collection.

After we got to the hospital and made certain that Dad was all right, Joseph and I went looking for the stamps. We found the albums about a hundred feet from where the car had come to rest. The leather-bound books were splayed open, warped, and ruined. We picked stamps off cattails and peeled stamps from wet clods of mud. When we brought what we’d found to his hospital bed, Dad looked sick. He pretended to fall asleep. Our mother said, “He is in despair.” We hadn’t known the stamps could really be that valuable.

It was weeks before Dad was strong enough to go home. Most of the stamps we found were so fragile that once dried, when he tried to handle them, they disintegrated into a minute confetti. I saw him try to reconstruct the Benjamin Franklin Z Grill stamp myself. I’d found that stamp in the beet field attached to a rotting root. Perhaps the chemicals in the fertilized soil had attacked the paper. It was no use. When he lifted the stamp with a tweezers, it fell into a little heap of incredibly precious dust, which he caught as it sifted down.

My father took a deep breath, then looked at me.

A moment passed. He asked me to come with him to the back door and watch half a million dollars vanish.

Ready? he said.

And we stood together in the sun as he blew across the palm of his hand.

ON THE DAY that Aunt Geraldine finally married Judge Coutts, with all of us in attendance, there was a herringbone trail of clouds running east to west that resembled a dusty road. I noticed it before anybody else spoke of it, I think, and pointed it out to the judge. I’ll walk that road with Geraldine , he said at once. Tears came into his eyes.

They were not married in the Catholic church (a disappointment to Geraldine and my mother). Besides his lingering outrage at Shamengwa’s botched eulogy, my mother said that Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins. He told Hop Along that he could not regret having sex out of wedlock and refused to be sorry, although he said the priest could feel free to absolve him anyway. Father Cassidy said he would not solemnize their vows under such conditions. So they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy — Mooshum’s old allotment land.

They said their vows and were pronounced husband and wife. Judge Coutts kissed Geraldine and people hugged all around. We could see from the judge’s face that he felt immediate relief, as if he were a man coming out of surgery, still half-anesthetized, but understanding that survival was now assured.

Our respective families had become accustomed to having within the ranks an unwed couple living in sin. Aunt Geraldine seemed surprisingly willing to accept her role as the family scandal, and Judge Coutts had always been afraid that she liked the part, in fact, too well to relinquish it. Now he kept looking at the sky, clutching Geraldine’s hand and pointing upward.