The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  The white men knocked Father Severine aside and banged into the church. They strode down the church aisle in their heavy boots and each genuflected. Some crossed themselves. Then they looked behind the altar and into the confessional.

  “He run again,” said a bright, clear voice.

  “We got one anyhow, let’s hang the one we got,” sang a man from outside. It was a lovely, melodious voice with a German buzz.

  As the men outside dragged Asiginak past Father Severine, the priest went rigid. He opened and shut his mouth like he was choking, and tried jerkily to bless the old man. Asiginak slapped his hands away.

  “Don’t be useless,” he cried. “Get them off me!”

  From under the bench, Holy Track heard his uncle cry out. Asiginak gave a wail of penetrating fear and shouted in Ojibwe, “I don’t want to die alone!”

  Father Severine swayed and propped himself against a tree in the yard. Suddenly everyone stopped. They sensed that someone had come to stand in the doorway of the church. They all turned as one.

  “Uncle, I will go with you,” said the boy.

  Mooshum crawled from under the pew and jumped up to pull Holy Track inside. He struggled to bar the door against the men, but the Buckendorfs surged in and caught them both fast in their big hay-pitching arms. The men hoisted Mooshum and the boy out into the light. One held the boy by the nape of his neck. When he saw the horror and the shame on Asiginak’s face, Mooshum knew that Holy Track regretted showing himself. But he stood his ground and made the sign of the cross over and over until the white men pinned his hands behind his back. They tied his wrists together and threw the boy along with Mooshum and Asiginak into the bed of their wagon. Father Severine cried something out in Latin and bolted to life. He clawed at the sides of the wagon and tottered awkwardly beside them. He blurted crazily useless threats and conflicted blessings as they rattled down the hill. Soon, his croaking died away. Asiginak hunched over at first, staring at his feet, and would not speak. At last, in a voice filled with anguish, he said to Holy Track. “I never knew you were hiding in there. My words were not for you to hear.”

  Holy Track glared, angry at his uncle for a moment, then he shrugged and pretended that he didn’t care.

  Wild plum trees were blooming in the scrub. Willow had leafed out narrow and green, and the sloughs glittered in the early light. The question of a tree and a place arose among the chimookamanag. However, they were diverted by two others who appeared dragging Cuthbert behind a horse. They pulled him slowly, so they could hang him, too. Cuthbert looked like a big caterpillar coated with gray dust. They cut him out of his ropes and hoisted him into the wagon. He lay still, blinking up at the others.

  “Ah,” said Cuthbert after a little while, from his bloody face, “they have rubbed off the worst of my nose. It is a pity to die now that I am handsome.”

  “You’re still ugly, my brother,” said Asiginak.

  “Then I won’t be such a loss to the women,” said Cuthbert. “It is a comfort.”

  The wagon jostled them along in a friendly way. As they crossed the boundary into the fields and roads off the reservation, a farmer or two stood in his field, stilled and planted, and watched the slow procession of men, horses, dogs, wagon, and trussed Indians, pass by.

  The Baby

  MOOSHUM LOOKED OVER at his daughters, who had begun arguing away at the end of the yard. He swigged precisely at his medicine. Suddenly, Mama and Geraldine quit talking and frowned up at the sky. They walked over to the clothesline, but before they had even plucked off one clothespin, they resumed arguing. Instead of taking in the rest of the wash, the two looked over at us to make sure that we weren’t listening. When they saw us watching, they swished their skirts and strode swiftly around to the front of the house. We turned back to Mooshum. He told us other things he knew. How the little brother of a woman named Electa Hoag—well, he wasn’t little, exactly, at seventeen—had run away in the night just after the murder, taking two of her newly baked loaves, his shoes, a woolen jacket, and an extra pair of overalls. Her husband Oric’s cap was also missing from the hook by the door. Oric had gone off so quickly, summoned by Colonel Benton Lungsford and the sheriff, that he’d forgotten to wonder where he’d put the cap. Electa might have said something about Tobek running off when the men came back from the farm, not long after. She might have said something, but she was too surprised by the baby Oric held up there on the horse. She was too distracted by it, and then absorbed when he leaned over the saddle and transferred it into her arms. Instead of screaming, the baby just gave her a calm and trusting look, a direct look, like it was all grown up now but still caught in the tiny body. Oh, it screamed later, she told Mooshum, it turned into a baby again. That was once the men had rustled up some food for themselves and gone and she was alone cleaning it and trying to feed it. After she knew about the murders, Electa decided that she would tell Oric that he must have taken the cap with him and lost it, laid it down in shock somewhere on the farm. Knowing what had happened, she decided that she would not let on that Tobek was missing, run off, not for a while, not for as long as she could.

  “If she had told…” said Mooshum. “If only she had told…and then there was Johann Vogeli. My old friend Vogeli. He was coming back from the barn when he saw his father, Frederic, smoke a cigarette in the middle of the day.”

  “What’s so strange about that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Mooshum.

  Vogeli

  FREDERIC VOGELI WAS standing in the yard talking everyday German to the Buckendorfs. Johann’s late mother had spoken a more complex German. Her voice was fading in his mind, or getting used up, like everything else about her. She had written letters back to her family in Heidelberg and made copies, written love letters to Frederic and notes to Johann himself, and she had kept a detail-filled diary of their little adventures and all that happened in their daily lives—except the beatings Frederic gave her once she got sick: those she hadn’t written down. All the same, Frederic never liked all that writing and he ripped out a page of her diary or used the fine paper of a letter whenever he rolled himself a cigarette. Johann hated to see it.

  He came around the corner of the house now, and there they were. The Buckendorfs were also smoking. His father had rolled cigarettes for them. The slender tube of paper and tobacco hung off the younger Buckendorf ’s boulder jaw. As they stood there, talking, Johann watched the men breathe the burning paper into their lungs. His mother’s exact words vanished into their chests and emerged as formless smoke.

  Johann walked into the house and hid his mother’s diary in a new place. He had grown about a foot in the months since she’d died and put on muscle. He wasn’t used to how strong he was now. When he walked out again, Frederic grabbed him by the collar and said, “Catch the horses,” then shoved him toward the pasture. He came back with a horse called Nadel and his father made him saddle Girlie, too. As they mounted their horses, his father said, “Now you will see something.” And they rode off after the Buckendorfs.

  “So that was old Johann,” I said. “That’s the one you called the Deutscher.”

  “Ya vole,” said Mooshum. “The Deutscher. Later on, he told me what happened when he and his dad caught up with the others, and when the sheriff and the old colonel tried to stand in their way.”

  Death Song

  COLONEL BENTON LUNGSFORD and the sheriff, whose name was Quintus Fells, caught up with the party of men as they were searching out a place that would do for hanging. Oric Hoag had fallen back and approached from a distance. The men were standing at the side of a well, peering down the hole, discussing the problem and testing the rope that held the bucket. The colonel and the sheriff maneuvered their horses in front of the wagon and they blocked the party of men from moving forward.

  “Well, friends,” said Sheriff Fells in his easy way, “I see you’ve done some of our work for us.”

  “We’re going to finish it, too,” said Frederic Vogeli.

&nb
sp; Eugene Wildstrand, a neighbor of the slaughtered family, and William Hotchkiss, a locksmith and grain dealer, stepped their horses close to the sheriff. Some of the men were on foot. Two or three had even ridden in the wagon. Emil Buckendorf was driving the wagon. His pale-eyed brothers sat on the wagon seat with him, their hands in their laps. They looked like oversize boys in a pew.

  “Step down,” said Sheriff Fells. “I’m commandeering this wagon and it is my duty to drive the suspects to jail.”

  “Commandeer,” said Emil Buckendorf. He snorted through his beard. One of his brothers laughed, and the other, with the big jaw, just stared at his knees.

  William Hotchkiss craned forward over his saddle. He was carrying an old repeating rifle. Sheriff Fells had his shotgun out, and Colonel Lungsford had his hand on the revolver he had carried in the Spanish-American War, and kept oiled and clean on a special shelf ever since. The men and horses were so close that they grazed one another as the horses nervously tried to avoid a misplaced step.

  “That’s a boy you caught,” said Colonel Lungford to them all. “No more than.”

  “That’s a killer,” said Vogeli.

  “Don’t you have no conscience?” Wildstrand, holding his horse tight up, spat and coldly addressed the sheriff and the colonel. His eyes stood out black as tacks on white paper. “Didn’t you or didn’t you step in that house?”

  William Hotchkiss urged his horse up suddenly behind Colonel Lungsford and he poked his gun against the other man’s back. Colonel Lungsford turned and spoke to Hotchkiss, pushing the barrel of the rifle away from his kidneys.

  “Put that thing down, you idiot,” he said.

  Vogeli herded Hotchkiss away from Sheriff Fells.

  “Sorry, boys,” said Wildstrand. “We got to do what must be done.”

  He leaned across the space between them and shot Fells’s horse between the eyes. The sheriff threw up his hands as he went down with the horse. There was the bullwhip crack of bone. The report made everybody jump. The men all looked at one another, and in the wagon Asiginak started toward the sheriff. He was thrown back by one of the Buckendorfs.

  “We are done for,” said Cuthbert. He began to gag on the blood soaking down his throat from his nose.

  Emil Buckendorf slapped the reins and the wagon rolled smoothly ahead.

  “We still ain’t figured out a place to hang these Indians,” said William Hotchkiss. “Maybe we could use Oric’s beef windlass.”

  “I ain’t in this!” cried Oric, who’d just caught up. He jumped off his horse to help Quintus Fells. The sheriff was breathing fast and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa…” He was still under the dead horse. His eyes rolled up to the whites and he passed out. Lungsford said “damn” and a few other words and got off his horse to help Oric free the sheriff, letting the wagon go by.

  Jabez Woods, Henric Gostlin, Enery Mantle, and all the others stood quietly alongside the road watching the men who had guns and horses. Now they began to walk alongside the wagon, down the two-track grass road.

  “Maybe over that swell,” said Mantle. “Those trees this side of it are scrawny.”

  “All the good trees is back of us, over the reservation line,” said a Buckendorf.

  “We just need one tree branch,” said Wildstrand. He looked into the wagon and his face was white around the eyes, like all the blood was gone underneath the field tan.

  “We found those people already dead,” cried Cuthbert, stirring Holy Track from a drowsy stupor. Mooshum was listening to everything. “We found them, but we did not kill them. We milked their cows for them and we fed the baby. I, Cuthbert, fed the baby! We are not your bad kind of Indians! Those are south of here!”

  “Don’t talk bad of the Bwaanag,” said Asiginak. “They adopted me.”

  Cuthbert ignored him and badgered the white men. “Us, we are just like you!”

  “Just like us!” Hotchkiss leaned over and slammed the butt of his rifle against Cuthbert’s head. “Not hardly.”

  “You are right,” said Asiginak in Ojibwe. “You are a madness on this earth.”

  Cuthbert’s head was all blood now. His eyes were hidden in his bloody hair, his neck awash with blood, his dirty shirt was blood all up and down. He spoke Ojibwe from inside the bloody mask and said to Holy Track, “Don’t worry. There is another boy among them. Pretty soon one of them will notice and remember the sheriff ’s words. They’ll let you go. When you speak of my death to others, tell them of my courage. I am going to sing my death song.”

  “I hope you can remember it before you shit your pants,” said Asiginak.

  “Aiii! I am trying to think how it goes.”

  Both men began to hum very softly.

  “To tell you the truth,” said Cuthbert, after a little while, “I was never given a death song. I was not considered worth it.”

  “Make one up,” said Asiginak. “I will help you.”

  They began to tap their knees and mumble a whine of melody beneath their breaths again. They did not address a single word to Mooshum. He gazed out over the fields, which were newly plowed and planted, the furrows straight and just sprouting a faint green fuzz. The sky was the sweetest color of blue. The horizon was dusty with a hint of green, just like the egg of a robin, and the clouds were delicate, no more than tiny white breast feathers way up high.

  They came to a tree that looked all right, but the white men thought the limbs were too slanted and thin. They came to another tree and the men argued underneath it and measured with their arms and hands. Apparently, that tree wasn’t good, either.

  “They are giving us time to practice our song, anyway,” said Cuthbert. He wiped his face. It looked as though his nose-lump had been shorn away smoothly.

  “Now that I look at you closely,” said Asiginak, “I think you would have been handsome, my friend.”

  “Thank you,” Cuthbert said.

  “That tree over there will do,” said Emil Buckendorf.

  Mooshum heard someone begin to sob and he thought at first it was himself—it sounded just like himself—but then he realized that it was Johann Vogeli. The boy was riding next to him, his hands clutching the mane of his horse. His tears rushed down and wet the leather of the saddle. Frederic Vogeli rode up beside his son and swung his arm back, then smashed his knuckles and forearm across his son’s face. Johann nearly fell off the back of his horse, but he caught himself. As he gained his balance, he changed, grew broader, bigger, and something in him could be seen to light. This thing took fire, and blew him right up. It propelled him off his horse: he lunged into an embrace with his father, who flew sideways out of his saddle and was still underneath his son when the two men landed and skidded—Frederic’s back the sled. Johann sat on his father’s chest and began to hit his face with the side of his fist like he was pounding on a table. He pounded with all his arm’s strength, like he would strike through the wood, or the flesh. His other hand had closed around his father’s throat. The wagon lurched on and the other men traveled with it, leaving the two rolling and kicking, then standing, then swinging and punching. Down again, then up, their battle looked more comical as they receded into the distance. Finally they were two black toy figures popping up and down against an endless horizon and beneath a boundless sky.

  “The boy’s heart was good, anyway,” said Cuthbert.

  “I hope he doesn’t kill his father, yet,” said Asiginak. “He could carry that hard.”

  Cuthbert agreed.

  “So you talked to Cuthbert, too,” said Joseph, his voice strained. “And Holy Track? Asiginak? They lived to be old men, right?”

  “No,” said Mooshum. “Oh,” said Joseph.

  The Clatter of Wings

  THE OAK TREE had a generous spread. It had probably grown there quietly for a hundred years.

  “I can show you that tree to this day, on the edge of Wolde’s land,” said Mooshum. “There’s tobacco put down there. Prayer flags in its branches.”

  The men rode up to it and got down a
nd walked around the base, peering up into the branches and pointing at one particular limb that ran straight on both sides of the tree and then bent upward, as if in a gesture of praise. They decided that it was the tree they had been looking for and drew the wagon up beneath it. Five or six ropes were neatly coiled underneath the straw on the wagon bed. Enery Mantle and the Buckendorfs took the ropes out and argued over which ones to use. Then they tried and repaired the knots, clumsily, several times, still arguing, and threw the ropes over the limb. They tested the slip of the rope and discussed who would hit the horses, and when.

  “They don’t know how to snare a rabbit,” said Cuthbert, “or drop a man. This will not go easy.”

  Holy Track was sick and wild. Asiginak did not answer. Mooshum was staring into space and pretending to be already dead.

  “The Michif will do all right,” said Cuthbert, meaning Mooshum. “He knows how to jig.”

  Asiginak roused himself from deep thought and touched his nephew’s shoulder.

  “I regard you as my son,” he said to Holy Track. “We will walk to the spirit world together. I would not have liked to walk that road alone. Howah! You made my old heart proud when you showed yourself in that church door!”

  “Thank you, my uncle,” said the boy, his voice soft and formal. “I regard you as my father, too.”

  “We will see them soon,” said Cuthbert. “All our relatives.” He touched the boy’s arm, and smiled. His smile was awful in the dried blood. “Aniin ezhinikaazoyan?”

  “Charles.”

  Cuthbert shook his head. “Not the priest’s name. Not even our nickname for you, Holy Track. How do the spirits know you?”

  Holy Track told him.

  “Everlasting Sky. Good, you were named well. Give that name to the Person who will be waiting for you on the other side. Then you will go to the Anishinaabeg spirit world. Your mama and deydey will be waiting for you there, my boy. Don’t be afraid.”