Louise Erdrich: The Plague of Doves

An extremely touchy case came my way about twenty years ago. The patient was an old farmer who’d lived his life on acreage that abutted the farthest edges of our land. Warren Wolde was a taciturn crank, who nevertheless had a way with animals. He had a number of peculiar beliefs, I am told, regarding the United States government. Certain things were never mentioned around him — Congress being one, and all of the amendments to the Constitution. It got so his opinion was avoided, for fear he would fly into a sick, obliterating rage. Even if one stuck to safe topics with him, he looked at people in a penetrating way they found disquieting. But Warren Wolde was in no condition to disquiet me when I came onto the farm to treat him. Two weeks before, the farm’s expensive blooded bull had hooked then trampled him, concentrating most of the damage on one thigh and leg. He’d absolutely refused to see a doctor and now a feverish infection had set in and the wound was necrotic. He was very strong, and fought being moved to a hospital so violently that his family had decided to call me instead and see whether I could save his leg.

I could, and did, though the means was painful and awful and it meant twice-daily visits, which I could ill afford in my schedule. At each change of the dressing and debridement, I tried to dose Wolde with morphine, but he resisted. He did not trust me yet and feared that if he lost consciousness he’d wake without his leg. Gradually, I managed to heal the wound and also to quiet him. When I first came to treat him, he’d reacted to the sight of me with a horror unprecedented in my medical experience. It was a fear mixed with panic that had only gradually dulled to a silent wariness. As his leg healed, he opened to my visits, and by the time he was hobbling on crutches, he seemed to anticipate my presence with an eager pleasure so tender and pathetic that it startled everyone around him. But he’d shuck off his forbidding and strange persona just for me, they said, and sink back into an immobilizing fury once I’d left. He never quite healed enough to take on all of his old tasks, but lasted pretty well for another few years before he went entirely senile and was sent down to the state hospital. At an advanced age he died naturally, in his sleep, of a thrown blood clot. To my surprise, I was contacted several weeks later by a lawyer.

The man said that his client, Warren Wolde, had left a package for me, which I asked him to send in the mail. When the package arrived, addressed in an awkward script that certainly could have been Wolde’s, I opened the box immediately. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of wadded bills of assorted (mainly small) denominations, and of course I recognized their folded pattern as identical to the bills that had turned up for me all through my childhood. I called the lawyer, who connected me with the nurse who’d found Wolde dead, and I asked if she could shed any light on his state of mind.

It was the music that killed him, she said.

I asked what music and she told me that Wolde had collapsed when a visitor named Peace had played a little violin concert in the common room. He’d died that night. I thanked her. The name Peace upset me. I could perhaps believe that the money gifts and the legacy were only marks of Wolde’s sympathy for the tragic star of my past, and, later, gratitude for what I’d done. I might be inclined to think so, were it not for so many small, strange truths. The name, the violin that belonged to the name, the music that spoke the name. And the first few times I had come to treat Wolde, I remember, he reared from me in a horror that seemed too personal, and pitiable. There had been something of a recalled nightmare in his face — I’d thought so even then — and I’d not been touched later on by the remarkable change in his character. On the contrary, it had given me a chill.

THOSE OF YOU who have faithfully subscribed to this newsletter know that our dwindling subscription list has made it necessary to reduce the length of our articles. So I must end here. But it appears, anyway, that since only the society’s treasurer, Neve Harp, and I, have convened to make any decisions at all regarding the preservation and upkeep of our little collection, and as only the two of us are left to contribute more material to this record, our membership is now closed. We declare our society defunct. We shall, however, keep walking the perimeter of Pluto until our footsteps wear our orbit into the earth. My last act as the president of Pluto’s historical society is this: I would like to declare a town holiday to commemorate the year I saved the life of my family’s murderer.

The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.

Oh my, too apocalyptic, I think as I leave my house to walk over to Neve’s to help her cope with her sleepless night. Dust on dust! There are very few towns where old women can go out at night and enjoy the breeze, so there is that about Pluto. I take my cane to feel the way, for the air is so black I think already we are invisible.

THANK YOU: Terry Karten, this book’s editor; Trent Duffy, this book’s copy editor; Deborah Treisman; Jane Beirn; and Andrew Wylie. Thanks also to Sandeep Platel, M.D.

The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which parts of this novel have appeared in different form: “The Plague of Doves,” The New Yorker and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006 ; “Sister Godzilla,” The Atlantic Monthly ; “Shamengwa,” The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2003 ; “Town Fever,” North Dakota Quarterly ; “Come In” (as “Gleason”), The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories 2007 ; “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet,” The Atlantic Monthly and Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards ; “The Reptile Garden” and “Demolition,” The New Yorker; and “Disaster Stamps of Pluto,” The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories of 2005 .

As in all of Louise Erdrich’s books, the reservation, towns, and people depicted are imagined places and characters, with these exceptions: Louis Riel, and also the name Holy Track. In 1897, at the age of thirteen, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota. The section “Town Fever” draws upon a Red River town-site speculation in 1857 by Daniel S. B. Johnston.

Any mistakes in the Ojibwe or Michif language are the author’s and do not reflect upon her patient teachers.

Part of the proceeds of this and all of Louise Erdrich’s books help fund Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore, and Birchbark Press, an Ojibwe-language publishing venture, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota (www.birchbarkbooks.com). This book is printed on recycled paper.

LOUISE ERDRICHis the author of twelve novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.