Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

ABOUT A MONTH after our wedding, I was sitting with Geraldine. Between segments of the national news, we were chatting about some illness she’d once had, or I’d once had. C.’s name came up and Geraldine said, “Oh, that doctor who won’t treat Indians.”

“What?”

In all the time that I knew C., in all the time that I’d made love to her, I never knew such a thing. And there I was, a member of our tribe — which proved how off-reservation my mind-set was, growing up. But it was also strange I hadn’t heard this in my capacity as a judge, or from my mother. Then I remembered my head bumps.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh, she won’t.”

“How so?”

Geraldine switched off the television, then returned to sit down beside me. By talking of C. we had already violated our tacit rule in which she was not mentioned. And it had gone further. Geraldine did not believe me.

“You must have known.”

It was the first time that my involvement with C. was acknowledged between us. Part of me wanted to drop the subject forever, but another part insisted I defend my innocence.

“I didn’t know.”

My words sounded false even in my own ears. There was a sudden cleft of space between us. Stricken, I said something I’ve always wished I could take back.

“But she treated me.”

Geraldine raised her eyes to mine, then looked away. I had seen disappointment.

“They always need an exception,” she said.

Geraldine then told me of several cases, over the years, where the doctor had turned people down — even in a crisis — and how she had let it be known, generally, that she would not treat our people. They all knew why. It was more than your garden-variety bigotry. There was history involved, said Geraldine. I understood, then, that I’d known everything and nothing about the doctor. Only later did I realize: if I had been the same age as C., it would not have mattered. Even though she’d cured my head bumps, become my lover, I’d always be her one exception. Or worse, her absolution. Every time I touched her, she was forgiven. I thought the whole thing out — as Geraldine says, I took in the history. I had to swallow it before I accepted why Cordelia loved me and why she could not abide that she loved me. Why she would not be seen with me. Why tearing down my house was her only option. Why to this day she lives alone.

THE DEAD OF Pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill I can see from my kitchen, in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes only once a week to the church. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted, so by summer the weeds are thick in the old beds. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town caf to feed.

That there is a town caf is something of a surprise, and it is no run-down questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money and named it the 4-B’s. The granite faade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make our caf seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change people might donate to the hospital care and surgeries of a local boy whose hand was amputated in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the caf. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the caf serves as office space for town council and hobby club members, meeting place for church society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall — sixty-eight miles south — and a place for the few young mothers in town to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left childless or, like me, spouseless, due to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons who, for one reason or another, ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, as their only major possession.

We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original value would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing less. Our town is dying. I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in the year of my retirement, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.

At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then our fertilizer plant went bust and the farm-implement dealership moved to the other side of the reservation. We were left with agriculture, but cheap transport via the interstate had pretty much knocked us out of the game already. Our highway had never been improved, so we began to steadily diminish, and as we did, I became the repository of many untold stories such as people will finally tell when they know there is no use in keeping secrets, or when they see that all that’s left of a place will one day reside in documents, and they want those to reflect the truth.

My friend Neve Harp is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator Frank Harp, who came after the first town-site party failed in its survey. Frank arrived with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Town Site Company, who were establishing a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit. These town sites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risk takers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers to every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.

Now, of course, the trains are gone and we are still here, stranded.

The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and had used up in naming their sites presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, North American mammals, and the names of their own children. To the east lay the neatly marked out town sites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. It was always called Pluto, but the official naming of the town did not occur until the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony, now, that Pluto is the coldest, loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable body in our solar system, but that was never intended to reflect upon our little municipality.

Dramas of great note have occurred in Pluto. In 1911, five members of a family — parents, a teenage girl, and an eight-and a four-year-old boy — were murdered. In the heat of things, a group of men ran down a party of Indians and what occurred was a shameful piece of what was called at the time “rough justice.” The town avoids all mention. My thoughts veer off, too. As it turned out, it was soon found that a neighbor boy apparently deranged with love over the daughter had vanished, and so for many years he remained the only suspect. Of that family, but one survived — a seven-month-old baby who slept through the violence in a crib pushed unobtrusively behind a bed.