Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

Gottschalk pointed out some additional space and observed that my grandfather had bought a large family plot. There was room for me and my wife, even a couple of kids. It seemed far off and laughable then, but as time has passed I have become increasingly grateful that those places next to my ancestors lie empty and waiting. I have also looked at Geraldine and wondered if she would consent to be buried next to me, but have not yet had the courage to ask.

I was seventeen when I began digging graves for the Pluto dead. I measured with string and used four tent pegs to anchor the string in a rectangle. Later, we bought a chalk roller of the same sort they used to mark the high school football field. I took the grass off in sections, peeling it like a scalp, and laid the squares on a piece of wet burlap. I used a toylike backhoe and finished the graves by hand with a straight spade. After the burials, I’d cover up the coffins and make a mound so that the ground wouldn’t dent once the dirt had settled. I cut the grass, too, with a finicky gas mower, and learned how to trim the trees so that they would grow in a graceful, natural shape. I learned how to keep the death records in order, and after a while I knew the cemetery map as well as Gottschalk did. I could easily guide people when they needed assistance finding a relative, or wanted to see the war memorial, the ornate Russian ironwork crosses, or the humble, common fieldstones that marked the graves of a family murdered here long ago.

The thing is, this was just supposed to be a summer job before I went to college. But once I started having sex with C., I couldn’t leave sex, or leave her, or leave the town. Besides, once I started spending my days among the dead, I grew used to the peace and quiet, as Gottschalk had told me I would. I even started adding to his clippings of interesting people, places, or events. One controversy at the time was the proliferation in our town of bars that featured striptease dancers. There was a community battle as to exactly how naked they should be allowed to get. We clipped and posted all of the editorials.

“If people could see things as we do,” said Gottschalk. “No matter how small the G-string or how big the pasty, we all end up in the ground.”

Six months after that remark, I dug his grave. I prepared his last resting place with unusual care, as befitted one who had so precisely cared for the journey of his fellow citizens. There was really no one else to take Gottschalk’s place, and so at the age of twenty I became the manager of the Town of Pluto Cemetery, which helped a great deal in keeping my love secret — nobody wanted to date me.

I don’t mean that women were put off by my line of work. On the contrary, it often seemed to fascinate them. But there was a certain lack of future in it, which girls could see. Once it was discovered that I was contented with my work, I wasn’t bothered, even though I went to bars and such. I got on the radical pro side of going entirely topless because I liked watching Candy, who took suckers from her regulation G-string and tossed them to us. They were hygienically wrapped safety pops. At one time a patron of the bar had inhaled a straight stem sucker, perhaps in delight at one of Candy’s novel moves. I hadn’t had to bury him, but it was close. So she gave out the same kind of suckers as grocery stores give kids. In fact, that’s where she got them — free. I got to know Candy, wanted her to stay in business, and was delighted to make C. jealous enough to fight with me.

While I was seeing Candy, or actually, just flirting with her, C. renovated her old house in order to be near me.

At one time the cemetery was set on the western edge of town, but the neighborhood has grown and now it is bounded by blocks of houses, all with their backs turned, politely or in dread, away from the gravestones and monuments. After the fight about my friend the stripper, C. moved her office to her house, which had a yard abutting the cemetery. She remodeled the living rooms and built-in the porch as a reception area. She left the back leafy and private. I could leave Gottschalk’s old office, which had become mine, or walk from our equipment shed, which was set just outside a windbreak of pines, and enter C.’s back door without being seen. The thing is, we never could part, though C. did lose weight, shrink down considerably, and after a while she was no longer bigger than me.

MY LIFE WENT calmly along for five years after Gottschalk died. One day in early June, just after the lilacs and the mock orange had folded, I started, as always, working among the roses, the iris, and then the peonies. This succession of color and scent has always taken me out of myself, sent me spinning. As soon as I got up each morning, I started working in the gardens around the house. The bees were out, their numbers unusual in our yard, and I was surrounded by their small vibrating bodies. They followed me as I worked, but I like bees. They seem to know that I respect their nature, admire their industry, and understand that they are essential to all that grows. I brushed them off gently, as I always do. In fact, I have been stung only twice in my whole life. After I finished weeding and watering, I went quietly into Mother’s room, where she slept upright with a canister of oxygen. The rigors of her condition made her sharp and bitter for a time, but even when she was feeling awful, we still enjoyed each other’s company. She was a sharp-boned little Chippewa woman. She liked to joke, had been very dedicated to my father, and was to me.

“Where are you going?” Her voice was a rasp by then. Of course she knew where I was going, but wanted to get her line in.

“To work.”

“You’ll be digging a grave for me soon!”

“No, I won’t.”

“Yes, you will!”

She cried this out with baleful joy in her voice. I wheeled her to the bathroom door and she rose, supported herself on the railing I’d installed.

“Shoo!”

I closed the door. We were both dreading the day when even this last piece of privacy would be taken from between us. We were both thinking about the Pluto Nursing Home, but to get her in there we would have to sell the house, which was a beautiful and comforting old place on a double lot, where I’d gardened and planted all my life. Mother wanted to leave the house to me. To that end, she was cheerfully trying to die. Mother weakened herself by not eating and hoped to suffocate herself in her sleep by not using her oxygen. Her natural toughness was not fooled by these tricks.

“All right, I’m done,” she called out. In the kitchen, she ate a bit of toast and sipped a cup of coffee. I tried to get her to drink some water, but she was trying to dehydrate herself, too. As she did every day, she asked me what I’d be doing in the evening. It worried her that I hardly went out anymore.

“I’m going to play poker with you, Mom, then I’m watching the news and turning out the lights.”

“You really need a wife, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You’re not going to find one by sitting home with your mother.”

“I know the one I want.”

“Give up on that old, tough hen!” she said, swiping at me. She had found about C. quite some time ago. “Get yourself a spring chicken and give me a grandchild, Bazil. She cured your cancer, but she’s no good for you otherwise.”

As a boy, I’d had a strange series of lumps on my head. They came and went until C. had affected a miracle cure — which was painless, as I remember, and left no mark. My mother has always been convinced that I had brain cancer, though it couldn’t have been much more than cysts or warts. Still, I don’t correct my mother as she thinks I owe my life to C., and that confuses the issue about our being lovers. I even say, sometimes, “Well, I’d be dead without her,” when my mother begins to pester me.