Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

Yet, I find my time from dusk to midnight wonderful. I am not lonely. I know I haven’t long to enjoy the luxuries of privacy and silence and I cherish my familiar surroundings. Neve, however, misses her two stepchildren and stepgrandchildren from the last marriage. She spends many evenings on the telephone, although they only live in Fargo and she sees them often. Both Neve and I find it strange that we are old, and we are both amazed at how quickly our lives went — Neve with her abduction and her multiple marriages and I with my own painful ecstasies. We are often surprised when we catch sight of ourselves.

As I often remind myself, I am fortunate in my age to have a good companion like Neve, though she does luxuriate in dark thoughts sometimes.

That night, she does have an episode of black moodiness brought on by the sugar in her coffee, though I do not say so, when I answer her first phone call. She speaks as she sometimes does of the strange beauty of her kidnapper, and what she taught him, or he taught her, on the mattress in the back room of his house. He became a decorated veteran and, when he returned from Korea, grew in charismatic perversity — he became the leader of a religion marked by unfathomable laws. A few leftovers have migrated, worn out and twisted, into the local churches over the years. But I’ve heard about Billy’s insatiable penis way too many times. I divert her, and she finally hangs up. But later on, she makes an odd discovery.

Flanked by two bright reading lamps, I am quietly absorbing a rather too sweet novel sent by a book club that I subscribe to, when the telephone rings again. Speaking breathlessly, Neve tells me that she has been looking through albums all evening with a magnifying glass. She has understood something that she should have realized long ago.

“My brother has the real collection,” she says, her voice squeaking in huge distress. “I took the money and let him paw through the stamps. At the time, I didn’t know. I hadn’t any idea that he knew what he was looking for. The upshot is: mine are worthless. His are worth…” She cannot speak. Her voice catches and she mews softly. Her lips are pressed against the receiver. “A million. Maybe. He cheated me.”

I restrain my laughter and do not say, “Everybody knows you cheated him!”

As she has continued to sift through Octave’s papers and letters, she has found something else that distresses her. In a file that she had never before opened, a set of eight or nine letters, all addressed to the same person, with canceled stamps, the paper distorted as though it had been wet, the writing smudged, each varying from the other by some slight degree — a minor flaw in the cancellation mark, a slight rip. She had examined them in some puzzlement and noticed that one bears a fifty-cent violet Benjamin Franklin issued two years after the cancellation, which was dated just before the sinking of the Titanic .

“I am finding it very hard to admit the obvious,” she said, “because I had formed such a sympathetic opinion of my uncle. But I believe he was experimenting with forged disaster mail, and that what I found was no less than evidence.” She sounds furious, as though he had tried to sell her the item himself. (Perhaps, I think, she has.) “He was offering his fake authenticated letter to a dealer in London. There were attempts at, and rejections of, certification letters, too.”

I try to talk Neve down, but when she gets into a mood like this all of her rages and sorrows come back to her and it seems she must berate the world or mourn each one. True, she has some tenuous family outside the area and will not be trapped here like me. But I do not want her to say it. As soon as possible, I put the phone down, and my insipid novel as well. Neve’s moods are catching. I try to shake off a sudden miasma of turbulent dread, but before I know it I have walked into my bedroom and am opening the chest at the foot of my bed and I am looking through my family’s clothes — all else was destroyed or taken away, but the undertaker washed and kept these (kindly, I think) and he gave them to me when I moved into this house. I find the somber envelope marked Jorgenson’s Funeral Parlor, and slip from it the valentine, within its own envelope, that must have been hidden in a pocket. It is a hideous thing, all schmaltz and paper lace. I note for the first time the envelope bears a commemorative stamp of the Huguenot monument in Florida. What a bloody piece of history to place on a valentine, I think, and yet, inadvertantly appropriate.

Sometimes I wonder if the sounds of fear and anguish, the thunder of the shotgun, is hidden from me somewhere in my brain, the most obscure corner. I might have died of dehydration as I wasn’t found for three days, but I don’t remember that, either — not at all — and have never been abnormally afraid of thirst or obsessed with food or water. Apparently, so I’ve been told, I was fed by one of the Indians later hanged. No, my childhood was very happy and I had everything — a swing, a puppy, doting parents. Nothing but good things happened to me. I loved getting high marks and having friends. I was chosen queen of the prom. I never underwent a shock at the sudden revelation of my origins, for I was told the story early on and came to accept who I was. The only thing is, I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible. I believed that until Neve Harp set me straight — in fact, showed me all the clippings. Told me all the points of view. And now I think that my adopted mother even suspected that somewhere in our area there still might reside the actual killer, not Tobek but another — invisible, remorseful. For we’d find small, carefully folded bills of cash hidden outdoors in places Electa or I would be certain to find them — beneath a flowerpot, in my tree house, in the hollow handles of my bicycle — and we’d always hold the wadded square up and say, “Santa Claus has been here again.” But truly, I am hard-pressed to name more than the predictable sadnesses that pass through one’s life. It is as though the freak of my survival charged my disposition with gratitude. Or as if my family absorbed all of the misfortune that might have come my way. I have loved intensely. I have lived an ordinary and a satisfying life, and I have been privileged to be of service to people. Most people. There is no one I mourn to the point of madness and nothing I would really do over again.

So why when I stroke my sister’s valentine against the side of my face, and why when I touch the folded linen of her vest, and when I reach for my brothers’ overalls and the apron my mother died in on that day, and bundle these things with my father’s ancient, laundered, hay-smelling clothes to my stomach, and press, and why, when I gather my family into my arms, do I catch my breath at the wild upsurge, as if a wind had lifted me, a black wing of air? And why, when that happens, do I fly toward some blurred and ineradicable set of features that seems to rush away from me as stars do? At blinding speeds, never stopping?

When Pluto’s empty at last and this house is reclaimed by earth, when the war memorial is toppled and the bank/caf stripped for its brass and granite, when all that remains of Pluto is our collected historical newsletters bound in volumes donated to the local collections at the University of North Dakota, what then? What shall I have said? How shall I have depicted the truth?

The valentine has always told me that the boy’s name should not have been scratched from the war memorial. Not only were innocent people hanged, unbearably murdered for nobody’s justice, but even that boy was not the killer after all. For my dead sister loved him in return, or she would not have carried his message upon her person. And if he had her love, he probably fled out of grief and despair. Perhaps he’d been there. Perhaps he’d seen her dead. Poor Tobek. But if not the boy, who was it? My father? But no, he was felled from behind. There is no one to accuse. Somewhere in this town or out in the world, then, the being has existed who stalked after my brothers and destroyed them as they fled toward the barn, who saw the beauty of my sister and mother and shot them dead. And to what profit? For nothing was taken. Nothing gained. To what end the mysterious waste?