The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  THE SUMMER AFTER my first kiss, the TV faltered and all sound was lost. We could raise only random buzzing noises and the picture spun so rapidly it made us queasy. But we lived outdoors anyway. Joseph and I were allowed to catch and ride the paint horses belonging to Aunt Geraldine whenever we wanted. Both were swift and loved to run. The black and white was fairly good-natured, but the other, a flighty brown and white pinto, had been struck in the face and bit viciously if you stepped into her blind spot. We rode them bareback with rope halters and tied them at the edge of the yard when we stopped long enough for food. One day, as we were sopping up bowls of soup across the table from Mooshum and Shamengwa, our horses tied under the trees in the backyard, it began to rain lightly down. Sheltered by thick leaves, the horses busily cropped the long grass all around them, so when Mama answered the door and ushered in Father Cassidy we did not attempt to escape, but decided to play gin rummy against the door until the sky brightened.

  The two old men greeted the priest with huge delight.

  “Tawnshi! Tawnshi ta sawntee, Père Cassidy! How good of you to visit us! How well you look, please sit down, sit down with us, have a bite to eat, a bowl of soup, a crust of bread.”

  “Perhaps a pour from the jar, too. Clemence?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” said Father Cassidy, shivering a bit, though with anticipation, for it wasn’t cold. “A little nip would take the chill off me.”

  Joseph looked at me, raised his eyebrows and drew his mouth down in that way he had. It wasn’t even the least bit cool outside. The air had stayed hot and the rain made steam rise off the grass, by which it was immediately obvious that here we had a thirsty priest. Mooshum crowed with pleasure and tipped Clemence’s hand up when she poured stingily.

  “Daughter, be more hospitable!”

  Mama frowned, and sighed huffily, but left the bottle on the table.

  “So, Father Cassidy, you have been here for several months now. What do you think of our ways?”

  But the priest had his head tipped back to catch the last drip from the shot glass.

  “Oh yai! I remember when priests used to take their whiskey with water, but this one takes the firewater straight. My brother, let us do the same!”

  “That’s a Montana boy for you,” said Father Cassidy, trying to appear as though he’d not tossed his shot back too greedily. “We don’t stand on ceremony and we don’t water down our whiskey, but we do believe in going to Holy Mass. Now Clemence attends regularly and she drags along Edward, and the young are of course obliged to make Holy Confession every Friday and attend at least three Masses during the week. But you, now I haven’t seen the two of you at church since I arrived here. So that means at the very least that your confessions are much overdue.”

  “Tawpway, Père Cassidy, you speak the truth. But old men have no chance to sin much,” said Mooshum in a regretful voice. He looked at Shamengwa. “Brother, have you had a chance to sin this year yet?”

  Shamengwa made a long face and sighed in reproach. “Frère, you would know it, as I would tell you immediately in order to make you jealous. Hiyn, no, I have been pure.”

  “I, too, completely pure,” said Mooshum. His chin trembled.

  “Are you sure,” said Father Cassidy, eyeing the bottle. His hand clutched his empty water glass. He lifted the glass toward the bottle. “Great sins are not required. Have you not, perhaps, taken the name of the Lord in vain?”

  “Mon Dieu! Never!” The brothers looked quite shocked and displeased at the notion, and hastily poured the priest a double shot and refreshed their own glasses.

  Father Cassidy looked thoughtful, and perhaps a little downcast to find the two old brothers sinless. But then he sipped deeply and brightened. “There are so many ways of sinning not readily apparent! You may for instance share in the guilt of another’s sin without actually committing it yourself, via the Sin of Silence. Has anyone you know sinned?”

  The brothers shook their heads in blank surprise. The priest cast about, waving a plump hand for inspiration. “You may have sinned against the Holy Ghost by resisting known truth—the worth for instance of Holy Mass—thus hardening your soul to the penetrations of grace!”

  Father Cassidy looked extremely pleased with himself, but the brothers seemed most offended that he should imagine their souls hardening and they put their hands protectively upon their pulsing hearts. The priest did not give up, however, and quickly rattled off a list of venial sins: “a stab of envy or pride or…, no? Bad temper or even a minor untruth, no? Or even, I hesitate to say…” The priest’s soft hand wobbled a bit as he closed it around the glass, and he smiled in tender delight at its contents, swirling the golden liquid gently as he spoke. He was now a bit dreamy. “Impure thoughts,” he whispered. “Very common.”

  At this, Mooshum gave his brother a look of wounded puzzlement, and raised his eye questingly to the ceiling. Shamengwa made the sign of the cross with his good arm, and then took a small sip of his drink.

  “We should know what he is talking about,” said Mooshum, touching his poor maimed ear, “but we must admit, we are completely ignorant of these…”

  “Impure thoughts,” said Joseph, from the doorway, frowning at the cards in his hand.

  “Gin,” I said.

  “Aw.”

  “Impure thoughts,” said Shamengwa. “Dear priest, could you explain to us—exactly what are these impure thoughts you mention? As you say, if they are common, we must have experienced them, and yet we haven’t noticed somehow.”

  “Perhaps we sin unknowingly,” said Mooshum, his eyes sincere as he gazed at the priest over his poised shot glass. He tried for dignity, but his chewed-up ear always made him look ridiculous. “Which would be something…”

  “Tragic!” said Joseph. He tried to cover a snorting laugh with several quick card shuffles.

  “Tragic…as we’d end up in the bad place without warning, were we to die!”

  “Could these impure thoughts send us to hell?”

  Paralyzed with alarm, both men sat bolt upright. The priest frowned cross-eyed into his empty glass and Mooshum neatly filled it.

  “Concupiscence,” said Father Cassidy, raising one finger beside the glass, which he held slightly out at the level of his clerical collar. With his other hand, he tugged at the collar itself, as though it was tightening. “From the Latin, concupisserry, I believe, meaning, ah, to dwell upon unclean emissions in one’s past or to anticipate such as…any act of imaginary or ejaculatory fornication. Bluntly speaking!”

  “Ah, fornication!” The brothers grew animated and tipped their glasses to each other, then to Father Cassidy, who inadvertently tipped his in automatic fellowship and then stared confusedly down, mumbling, “from the Latin…”

  “From the Latin forn, as in foreign, for relations with foreigners,” cried Joseph.

  “Ho, ho!” exclaimed the brothers, toasting again as Joseph set his cards down and skimmed out the door.

  I quickly followed, but Father Cassidy and Mama were out the door right behind us and Mama said, “Now you two stop right there, and apologize to Father.” But Father Cassidy, perhaps to prove what a horse-savvy Montanan he was, strode up behind us with his great chin of dough bulging over his collar and said, “No need, no need, yours, eh? Nice little docile scrub ponies, awful conformation, of course, positively knock-kneed and they do need the currycomb something worse.” A nasty light sparked in the long-necked pinto’s eye. Father Cassidy stepped up to her face and put his hand out. Quick as a rattlesnake, she struck and crushed his fleshy bicep in her teeth. Father Cassidy screamed and began to skip in place. But the mare held on firmly, like a mother might grip a naughty boy. Father Cassidy tried to swat her nose with his open hand. Her eye rolled back, she gave some coughing grunts that sounded like sobs of laughter, and bit down harder before she finally released his arm. There was hot shock in Father Cassidy’s eyes.

  “Oh,” said Mama, “I am so sorry, Father. Please come back in and let me ice tha
t little nip.”

  “Little nip!” cried Father Cassidy. He clapped his hand over his upper arm as if to keep the meat of it in place and was edging backwards now, heading for his automobile, which was parked in the road before our house. “Good-bye, Clemence, much gratified, the drop did no harm. Aghhh. Who knew I’d need the anesthetic!”

  “From the Latin anesthed, meaning numskull,” said Joseph to me.

  Father Cassidy got into the car. “Tell your father and his brother that they flirt with damnation by resisting Mass!”

  “I’ll tell them, Father, yes, don’t you worry.”

  Mama stepped forward to wave politely to Father Cassidy, and by the time she’d turned around to come at us full steam we’d mounted up and sped away. So I believe on that day she walked into the house and poured her frustration out on her father and her uncle, even though she was normally gentle with the two old men, whom she loved as greatly as she loved us. They were chastened and quiet when we returned for supper. Shamengwa stayed on because she had not allowed him to “slink off,” as she put it. The television blared out and the picture scrolled slowly along, edging up the screen and sticking halfway so that a woman’s legs would be on top of her talking head. Then her head would rise and the legs would tremble for one moment beneath her, until her head disappeared and popped up below. The two old men leaned back and closed their eyes, unable to bear the disorienting sight. They fell asleep. They were snoring lightly in profound innocence.

  THAT WAS NOT the end of it. Mooshum and his brother attended Holy Mass and then lapsed intentionally in order to provoke a visit from Father Cassidy. His hopes had been raised by seeing the two old men, so close to eternity, in the pew before him, and he wished to secure their souls. This second visit was as ridiculous as the first. Mooshum promised to make an heroic attempt to sin, so he would have something to confess. Joseph watched all of this with a teenager’s long suffering omniscience.

  Life as a boy was hard on my brother. To be the son of a science teacher in a reservation school cast him under suspicion, while it was to my advantage. It is always good for a girl to have a visible father. Worse for Joseph, he loved science and actually was teaching himself the Latin names of things. To make up for this, he rode one or the other of Aunt Geraldine’s pintos all over, way back into the bush, and got drunk on bootlegger wine whenever he could. We both had friends, as well as eight or nine Peace cousins first to third, about sixteen others that we could count, and Corwin. I had girlfriends and I did not mind going to school, but somehow the closeness of my family was enough for me outside the classroom. We were not social. Plus Joseph and our father were somewhat isolated by their fascinations—collecting stamps, of course, which was a way of traveling without leaving, but also stars and heavenly phenomena, grasses, trees, birds, reptiles and happenstance insects, which they collected methodically, pinned to white squares of cardboard, and labeled.

  Joseph was particularly interested in a species of fat black salamander that he believed endemic to the region, and he’d persuaded Dad to help him follow the life cycle throughout the year by observation in the field. Thus, they would be off even in dead winter with shovel and pick to unearth a hibernating creature from the rock-hard mud of Aunt Geraldine’s slough. Or in summer, as now, they created false playgrounds for the creatures and watched their every move, taking notes in precise printing. For some reason they had agreed to avoid cursive.

  Maybe the fact that I grew up admiring Joseph made him softer-hearted toward me than most brothers. We also knew that there would be no other children. Mama said so, and when we fought she shut us up by saying, “Just imagine how you’d feel if something happened.” Imagining the other dead helped us enjoy each other’s company. I helped Joseph collect specimens in stolen canning jars, and memorized a few Latin names just to please him. It helped that I also liked the salamanders—or mud puppies, as they were commonly known. They were lumps of earth, dark with yellow spots, helpless when they left the water. During heavy rains, they swarmed with slow gravity out of wet cracks in the ground. There was something grand and awful about their mute numbers. Mooshum said that the nuns had believed they were emissaries from the unholy dead, sent up by the devil, and hell was full of them. We shuffled slowly through the grass, gently kicking the plump things over. We picked them up and stashed them on higher ground, covering them with wet leaves. They dropped in piles down low wet spots around the school buildings—ten or twenty could be found in the window wells. Joseph always woke me early when the drowning rains came, late in warm spring, and we got to school first so that we could fish the creatures out before the boys found and stomped them to death.

  That summer, using picks and shovels, Joseph and my father had dug a deep pond in the backyard. The water table was high that year, and it immediately filled. They planted cattails and willow around the edges, then added frogs and salamanders. The pond was not for fish, those enemies of neotenic larvae, but they stocked it well with chorus and leopard frogs transported from Geraldine’s slough, and then the salamanders, which we carried home in buckets. To Joseph’s disappointment, the salamanders seemed to vanish into the earth. Even if he did find one, they were hard to observe actually doing anything. It took all day to see one open its mouth. Joseph grew impatient and swiped a dissection kit from Dad. The cardboard box contained a scalpel, tweezers, pins, glass slides, a vial of chloroform, and some cotton balls. There was a diagram of an opened frog with all of its organs labeled.

  Joseph laid the instruments out carefully on the windowsill of the small room we had divided between us. He took a jar from under the bed. It contained a specimen of Ambystoma tigrinum, the eastern tiger salamander. Into the jar, he dropped a cotton ball dabbed with chloroform, then he stashed it under the bed. Our father didn’t really like dissections.

  That night, I moved a candle to shed more light where Joseph needed it. I watched as he sliced the belly of the salamander open and revealed the slippery muck of its insides—a tangled set of tubes filled with transparent slime.

  “It was just about to release its spermatophore,” said Joseph with awe, poking at a little white piece of mush. There was a footstep outside the door. I blew out the candle. Dad opened the door.

  “No candles,” he said. “Fire hazard. Hand it over.”

  I rolled the candle to his feet from under the bed and he said, “Evey, get out of there and go to bed!”

  The next morning, I got up before Joseph and found that the salamander had revived and tried to crawl away, unraveling the piece of entrails that Joseph had pinned into the soft wood of the dresser. The trail of its insides stretched to the windowsill, where it had managed to die with its nose pressed against the screen. That day, at the funeral, Joseph buried the dissection kit beside the salamander. He sighed a lot as we covered the plump little graying body, but he did not speak and neither did I. It was months before he dug up the dissection kit, and a year might have passed before he used it on something else.

  BOTH MOOSHUM AND Shamengwa insisted that if Louis Riel had allowed his redoubtable war chief Gabriel Dumont to make all of the decisions preceding and at Batoche, not only would he have won for the mixed-bloods and Indians a more powerful place in the world, but this victory would have inspired Indians below the border to unite at a crucial moment in history. Things would have been different all around. The two brothers also liked to speculate about the form that Metis Catholicism would have taken and whether they might have had their own priests. Mooshum insisted it would be better if the schismatic priests were allowed to marry, and Shamengwa was of the opinion that even Metis priests should keep their chastity. Both agreed that Louis Riel’s revelation, which he experienced upon learning of his excommunication and that of his followers, was probably sound. After much meditation, Riel the mystic had announced that hell did not last forever, nor was it even very hot.

  “And I believe this,” Mooshum insisted, “not only because Riel was comforted by angels, but because it stands to reaso
n.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  Dad went to Mass to please Clemence and vanished at the first sight of Father Cassidy. He was a Catholic of no conviction whatsoever.