Future Home of the Living God

by Louise Erdrich

  Now I ask you, how was it that Cuthbert’s sisters knew the shape of my dreams? When he told me that his sisters were telling this story around, all about me and the Devil, he laughed. They were worried about how I might have my eyes on his eighty acres cleared and planted, or the money that the bank kept locked up. He laughed until he shook about the blue suit his sisters spoke of, and did not notice how, when I heard that, I nearly went faint off my feet. I recovered. I thought about it. It did not take me long to realize that the only way that Cuthbert’s sisters possibly could know about my devil was if he visited them too.

  I grew furious and plotted out of jealousy to throw over my devil. I would have my revenge. I decided to kill him, though I wasn’t sure just how to destroy a man who existed only as a phantom, without physical substance. Then it came to me that I must dream his death. I must conceive of a knife honed and sharp.

  Each night, I dreamed a knife beneath my pillow. I dreamed about its shape and weight. I dreamed its black wooden handle. I dreamed its sharpness. I dreamed the gleam of white light off its point. I dreamed the way it would feel in my hands. I dreamed how it would fit between the dream ribs of my angel of perversion. I dreamed all of this so well that on the night I reached beneath the pillow and found the perfectly dreamed weapon, it was a memory of a dream I dreamed, a dream within a dream. His death was undreamable, however, and horrible. I woke soaked with terror and tears. The nightmare haunted me all morning as I prepared for the feast day of the Assumption. A celebration was supposed to take place at the church, and at Holy Mass the priest was to read the banns preceding my marriage to Cuthbert.

  I was shaky that day and my mother said I was pale. But I made six pies. Three for Cuthbert. He was running in the fat man’s race. Every year only the biggest of the big men lined up. Their race, comical and thunderous, was always the feast day’s high point. At the end of it, the winner would have his choice of pies and a Holy Medal for a ribbon—Saint Jude or Saint Christopher or Theresa of the Little Flower. As we drove our wagon to the church grounds, I was almost giddy with happiness—I’d killed off the Devil and would soon marry Cuthbert. His sisters would wonder at the loss of their own blue demon, but they never would know the one who killed him was me.

  Then came shock. As the big men lined up at the far end of the field, as we watched, pointing and making little bets of money on this one or the other, there staggered into the group a man in a blue suit and blue shirt, blue tie, blue shoes and with black hair and pale brown skin. Only he was much, much bigger than in my dream. He lined up with the rest of them. I don’t know if it was me or Cuthbert’s sisters whose eyes went wider, and whose jaws dropped farther, but it was only I who knew that having killed him in a dream, I had brought the Devil to life. And here he was, racing Cuthbert for the fat man’s prize.

  He didn’t look well at all. I saw as they began to run. He was bloated and gray as a gorged tick, his skin almost dead green. He ran holding a hand against his ribs and I nearly shrieked as he passed and turned on me the flash of his red, robbed eyes. His mouth was open and I saw that it was filled with black blood. He and Cuthbert were neck and neck, out ahead of the others, and I saw that the Devil was taunting and mocking my husband-to-be, who flew into a rage of running and leaped forward like a stag to surge ahead.

  When it was over, two men lay still at the finish line. One was Cuthbert, who died of a burst heart. The other man was dead all along, people said. When they opened the blue jacket they found a knife with a black handle buried to the hilt between his ribs.

  So, said Grandma, I married instead a man who hadn’t an ounce of spare flesh, a man who hated the color blue and never wore it, a man whose sisters liked me. I lived with him for fifty-seven years now, didn’t I, and the two of us had eight children. Adopted twenty. Raised every kind of animal that you can think of, didn’t we, and grew our corn and oats and every fall dug our hills of potatoes. We picked wild rice. Now and then we shot a deer from off the back porch, and yes we fed our children good, didn’t we.

  Grandma’s eyes slowly open after she’s finished her story, and she goes on talking in her cracked-bark voice. She tells me that she didn’t know when she made those six pies for the Fat Man’s Race that she was pregnant. The father of her baby was the blue man in her dream, and her son was born with strange marks. He came out with bruises on his back and bottom. So dark they looked indigo. Didn’t seem to hurt. The Devil must have kicked this one out, said the medicine lady. But I said, hugging my baby close to me, no. No. Angels must have beat him to find out how much he could endure.

  Whatever else, Grandma’s story completely diverts me from the sudden reversals in my own narrative. It also feels like a warning. My father and mother, both loving and lying to me. And Phil, my angel of deception. I need a real angel. A good spirit. At night, again, as I am falling asleep I feel the presence approach again to sit at the end of my mattress. Whether or not it is an illusion, this visitor is so calming, so powerful, that I float easily into a dreamless pure sleep.

  * * *

  Eddy hides me in the truck and brings me to the tribal offices. His secretary takes my picture and laminates my new tribal ID. I look happy in my picture. My cheeks are round and full. I am wearing a pair of eyeglasses not my own. My hair is shiny and long. I am a mixture of Sweetie and Glen. That’s me. Mary Potts.

  And what sort of being am I, really? First I find that I am my father’s actual child, descended of a line that goes back to Richard the Lion-Hearted. Then I find that my heritage is also bound up in a sinister blue man who impregnated my grandmother in a dream. And you, with Phil as your father, a man who did harm when he tried to do no harm, carry within you the patience of ancestors who worked with stone. Sometimes I think of the grab bag of labels and photos that I rescued from the recycling center, the fascinating collection of printed words and images. Without act or will on my part, I am creating a collage of DNA and dreams, all those words made flesh, and I am doing it even in my sleep.

  November 19

  A piece of plywood slides out of place behind the boiler, and if a raid starts I can crawl in there, I guess, and disappear. Sweetie has made the entrance undetectable. It is an actual room, newly finished inside. There are no windows, of course, but the walls are clean and freshly painted. Mom and I make peace long enough to agree that we’ll go inside when we’re ready. So that is where you will be born. Underground. Safe in a dug burrow. Or at least that’s what I expect. After you’re born we’ll probably still have to hide you. But things will change. They’ll leave me alone. Sweetie says I’ve got a girl. She overheard Sera and me arguing and heard me talking about parthenogenesis. She thinks it’s hilarious that we imagine we can make our own babies now.

  “Immaculate Conception. According to Cedar! That’s the new thing,” she says, “but I still prefer Eddy.”

  * * *

  I shouldn’t have promised Eddy to keep this stupid rifle with me, but I can’t put it back in the trunk because he’s locked that. I tuck it down the side of my blow-up mattress, against the wall, loaded but with the safety on. Tired, so tired, I swoon into sleep as often as I can.

  November 20

  They make their way past the dogs, through the kitchen, the living room, to the bedroom where I am sleeping in piles of Mary’s dead clothes. Some tiny sound, a squeak or cough, wakes me. I hear their stealth. One of the dogs starts barking, but far away, in the field. Maybe they lured the dogs away. I pull more clothing over me and I reach down the wall for the Custer rifle. I draw it up next to me, removing the safety. I whisper to Little Mary, who shifts in her sleep but doesn’t wake. The door opens, light from the hallway spills in. Under the spaghetti of stockings, scarves, shirts, jackets, leggings, my eyes are shaded. I peer out from under the wreckage. She looks straight at me.

  It is Mother. Her thick hair is fiercely sprayed, the bangs immobilized. Her dark eyes are sunken in her dough face. Her lipless mouth puckers in sympathetic consternation.

  “A
re you in there, dear?”

  She is wearing a maroon quilted down coat that reaches past her knees. Brown mittens. Rabbit-fur earmuffs. Her eyes dart around the room and she whispers, “Can you believe this shit?”

  With a thrill of pride in Mary, I realize that Mother can’t even see me beneath all of these wads of clothing. Now is the time to shoot, if I could shoot, but of course I can’t shoot. Anyway, Mother looks like she’s already been shot. As she takes in the overpowering chaos and layers of developed filth, her mouth opens and shuts. Her face crushes in, distorted, like a softened take-out box.

  With an air of sacred awe, Mother backs out of the room. I feel soundless footsteps glide down the hall. I slide the rifle back down along the wall. I’m so disoriented that I immediately decide that I did not see what I did see. I can only think of nestling farther down into my sister’s pile of musty tights and limp dresses. Crawling underneath the chaos. Curling up in the endless yellow afghan. All I want is oblivion. Right after I hear the tiny click of the front door and the dog outside, barking good-bye, I thank my little sister and fall into a dead black sleep.

  I am pulled down, down, sucked into this sleep. I wake with a hand clapped over my mouth, Phil’s hand. He drags me up, out of my mattress cave and bundled clothing, keeps his hand over my mouth as he picks up the go bag I always keep beside my bed. He whispers in my ear as he drags me outside—“They’re coming back.” As he puts me in a smoke-smelling car—“Don’t make a sound.” As he coasts down the driveway and starts the motor at the mailbox—“If they found you there, they’d take out everyone. We’re going to the gas station. It’s empty. We’ll sneak in and you can hole up. There’s a van going north this week.”

  I’ve turned to pudding. I’m so groggy and astonished that a couple of miles go by before I speak. I am pretty sure I’m in a dream, and I don’t want to wake from riding in this (very nice, where’d he get this?) car with a cushy interior. I don’t want to wake from the comfort of the heated leather seat, the purring engine, the world rushing by. Only the fact that Phil is driving without headlights forces me to say something.

  “Uh, Phil. Headlights?”

  “I know, honey. But if I was using my headlights they’d know where I was right away and could track us from the air.”

  There is a half-moon, enough vague radiance to make out the road. Driving without lights we seem to float. The world to either side of the highway is black space, gray foam, the trees loom, then a building with shining black windows, then the reflective pillars of gas pumps. We turn in. Phil bumps over the curb, into the woods behind the Superpumper, pulling as far as possible into the brush. We sit in the car as the engine ticks down and cools. We are together in the night. I wake up.

  “You turned me in.”

  In answer, he takes off his flannel shirt, pulls his T-shirt over his head.

  “Feel.”

  I put my hands on his shoulders, down his back, catch my fingertips on the lumps and skin knots and terrain of scabs and scars. He puts my hand to the side of his cheek. I touch his face and hair—it is like a ball of twine has been glued in random lengths onto his scalp, underneath his hair. His voice rasps out.

  “I’m like that all over, and it’s worse inside. I don’t even remember giving them your name. I thought I was a hero, but I’m not.”

  He put his shirts back on, gets out, and piles brush over the back of the car. Covers the reflective taillights. I pull a blanket from the backseat and huddle underneath. When he gets back in, closing the door gently, he says he thinks we should wait in the car and make sure they don’t try breaking into the Superpumper.

  “How do you know they’re coming?” I ask.

  “I was with them,” he says briefly.

  I mull that over. So, I’m sitting with one of Mother’s helpers. And it is my angel, Phil, who still smells the way he used to, like inevitability and ironed shirts. Though where would he get the chance to iron a shirt? Maybe he just smells slightly scorched. I can’t think clearly. It is powerful magic to be sitting next to Phil, who has survived, though he is covered with welts and scars. He is the father of my baby and I start to cry, silently, my face in my hands, the tears popping out and rolling down my fingers.

  No I don’t. I sit in the heated car seat, dry-eyed, outraged. Because I was right about the reason Grandma told me her story. It was indeed a warning.

  Phil. Another angel of deception. Phil. Fucking angel of wrong.

  “So, Phil, are we just waiting so you can get credit for turning me in? Are you going to drag me out when they get here? Maybe you got scratched up by a flock of chickens. How do I know you’re for real?”

  There’s no answer for an uncomfortable piece of time. I can feel that Phil is struggling either with my grasp of the truth or my lack of gratitude.

  “I guess we wait,” he says at last.

  “I guess I don’t have a choice.”

  So we wait, and after a while I fall asleep. And after still more while, it is nearly morning. Phil says Eddy has opened the front door. He helps me climb stiffly out of the car and we make our way to the back of the gas station, where Eddy lets us into the storage room.

  “I’m going to start things going like usual,” he says. “I got a buzzer on the door, extra loud, so you’ll hear when somebody comes in. It’s usually pretty quiet this time of day.”

  He goes away and we lock the steel door from the inside.

  “So can we talk?” says Phil.

  “Talk your head off.”

  I pull together another of my makeshift nests, this time out of a pile of tarps, back-stock sweatshirts, and Eddy’s jackets. I curl up, still swimming with exhaustion and tension, and my thoughts drift while I listen to Phil explain how he was caught, where he was taken, what they did, what he said or didn’t say. I tune in when he tells me that after he was released, he went back to my house, our house. The first time, he went back, got the guns, and brought them to Eddy. The second time, he went back because he remembered my stash of food and, to some small extent, what I’d hidden. In the cupboards, he thought. If there was liquor he could use it for trade. But this time the house wasn’t empty.

  “There was a woman sleeping on the couch,” says Phil. “I knew her. Her name was Bernice and she was good at taking women into custody.”

  “She’s the one who picked me up,” I say. “She’s the one who shot my roommate’s boyfriend.”

  Phil peers at me.

  “She was dead drunk,” he says.

  I sneak a look at him. Bernice must have found a few bottles from the stash. Phil goes on talking.

  “A bottle of Jameson was on the end table, drained, with one of your Songmaker grandmother’s fancy highball glasses, tipped over. Another empty bottle was at the foot of that overstuffed chaise. A carton of Marlboros was torn open beside and she’d piled her butts in your grandmother’s favorite ashtray, that heavy one you told me was made of her wedding crystal.”

  “The nerve,” I say. “But you have a good memory.”

  “Poor Bernice,” said Phil. “She was getting drunk alone. She couldn’t stand herself. I decided to immobilize her while she was drunk. Tie her up, gag her, I guess. Find out where she got the booze.”

  Then Phil grins at me. I can see his face in the gloom cast by a tiny vent near the ceiling line—I’ve never seen that sick smile before. His teeth are knocked out of one side of his jaw. I look away.

  “I know the things she did, more than you can imagine,” he says after a few moments. “Actually, I decided to kill her.”

  I can just see the fuzzy gray outline of his ruined features, the pits and scars and burns all over his face and neck. He turns to me, suddenly, grips my chin hard in his hands and crushes his mouth to mine. I know he has suffered, even suffered for me, but his grin was a caffeine jolt, reality. His kiss numbs me. My heart turns over.

  “What did you do?”

  “I started a fire.”

  “Not the most inconspicuous way to kill
someone.”

  “It was kind of an accident.”

  “Nobody starts a house fire by accident.”

  “Unless you’ve got a gas can. I went in there. While she was groggy I poured the gas on her. Then I lit her up with my Bic.”

  “You did not.”

  “No, of course I didn’t. She’d left something on the stove. You could smell it. She got up and staggered into the kitchen, grabbed the pan, which was smoking hot. She burns her hands. Staggers to the sink. Then she throws water on the fire.”

  “Grease fire?”

  “I guess. Next she flaps dish towels on the fire and the towels flare up. It’s almost comical. She throws them at the curtains. Massive flames. It’s crazy. She was throwing fire around the room, laughing. She was high, too, maybe. So I just tiptoed away.”

  “So she did it to herself,” I say.

  “I was halfway down the street when I hear this big whump. I look back and suddenly fire’s coming out of the roof.”

  “Probably the Finnish vodka.”

  “Oh. What a waste. Then as I was turning the corner there were explosions, rat-a-tats, like a firefight.”

  “The wall was filled with ammo.”

  A small voice inside me starts hissing mortal sin mortal sin mortal oh my god I am heartily sorry. Bernice was a terrible person, a killer herself, but there is no equivalence that absolves someone . . . me? Not me. I put my hands over my face, as if to hide from my wasted guilt.

  “I didn’t know where else to go,” Phil says eventually. “I’m wanted. And they have searched the house here twice by now. They are probably everywhere, still looking.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You said you were with Mother. Now you say you’re wanted. Which is it?”

  He stutters, filling me with fear.

  “It’s both,” he says. “They picked me up. I stole a car from them and got away.”

  “Aren’t they arresting enough women? What do they want me for?”