The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  “Don’t fight the rope,” said Asiginak. His voice shook.

  Wildstrand made the four stand up and he refastened the ropes that tied their hands behind them. Emil Buckendorf arranged them on the wagon bed and lowered the loops of rope over their heads and then tightened the loops to fit more snugly.

  Henric Gostlin stepped up to the wagon.

  “He says he doesn’t want the boy to hang,” said Emil Buckendorf.

  One of his brothers said, “Yah, just leave him.”

  Eugene Wildstrand’s face darkened with a sudden rush of blood. “Were you there,” he said, looking at Gostlin and the others, one after another. “Were you there, at the place? You were there. You seen it.”

  He held their gazes and his face burned strangely in the light.

  “The girl,” he continued. “The wife. The two boys. My old friend, too. All of them.”

  Emil stared at his brothers until they nodded and looked down at their feet. Henric Gostlin walked away, back down the path, slapping his hat on his thigh. The other men standing next to the horses started as Asiginak and Cuthbert suddenly burst out singing. They began high—Cuthbert’s voice a wild falsetto that cut the air. Asiginak joined him and Holy Track felt almost good, hearing the strength and power of their voices. And the words in the old language.

  These white men are nothing

  What they do cannot harm me

  I will see the face of mystery

  They sang the song twice before the Buckendorfs shook themselves and prepared the wagon. Emil steadied the two horses and counted down to whip them at the same time. The boy tried to open his mouth to join in his uncle’s song, but could only hum to himself the tuneless lullaby that his mother had always used to sing him to sleep. The Buckendorfs threw their arms back, cut the horses at the same time, then again, harder. The wagon lurched, stopped, then bucked forward. The men stumbled but did not stop singing. Finally, the horses bolted away. They halted after twenty feet. The men tried to keep singing even as they strangled. The boy was too light for death to give him an easy time of it. He slowly choked as he kicked air and spun. He heard it when Cuthbert, then his uncle, stopped singing and gurgling. Behind his shut eyes, he was seized by black fear, until he heard his mother say, Open your eyes, and he stared into the dusty blue. Then it was better. The little wisps of clouds, way up high, had resolved into wings and they swept across the sky now, faster and faster.

  Bitter Tea

  MOOSHUM FINISHED TALKING as the storm moved over us—the clouds low and black-bellied. In the yard, the sheets were thrashing wild, the overalls and Mooshum’s work shirts were ballooning out. Even my mother’s pastel underthings were flying straight back, wisps, and her bras corkscrewed around the wooden pins and line. She must have gone somewhere with Geraldine, leaving the baskets to tumble over empty.

  I bolted forward as the first big drops splashed on my shoulders and began unpinning the clothes. The clothing flew from my hands, twisted off in the sharp wind. A circle-skirt wound me in its embrace. I was still caught in the story, and it took all of my concentration to struggle across the yard with my thoughts and that clothing into the quiet of the house.

  My mother followed me into the kitchen, drenched. She had walked back from our uncle’s place in the rain, but it hadn’t put out her fire. Anyway, it was the kind of rain that passes quickly and leaves the air hot and clear right afterward, so she wasn’t inside for long, talking to Mooshum, before I saw her outside with the basket again, pinning up the same clothes that I’d just taken down. This time she was carefully hiding her underwear. Mooshum had gone out with Mama and he stood, hunched a bit, beside her, holding the clothespin bag. I thought that maybe she was giving him hell for telling us what had happened, about the hanged boy, but when she came back in the door holding Mooshum’s arm in hers, having left the basket outside again underneath the clothes, she only said, “I can’t persuade her, she has to see him, she cares for him. And she even knows about that woman doctor he was loving on the sly. You know who, you know damn well.”

  I pretended like I was doing something else and not listening, but she was not in the least fooled. I wanted desperately to ask about the doctor.

  “Oh, good. Evelina. I need you to peel potatoes.”

  “Can we put our hair up tonight, like Geraldine’s?”

  Mama gave me a sharp look, and I glanced away. I pulled up the ring on the square kitchen trapdoor rimmed with pounded tin and set into the linoleum. I gingerly let myself down the ladder into the cellar. She handed me a colander.

  “I’ll shut you down there if you mention Geraldine right now,” she said.

  I scrambled back up with the potatoes. While I was down there, though, I heard her say something about the judge to Mooshum, so I guessed this had to do with why she was so upset with Geraldine, only I got it wrong, entirely. I thought that Geraldine (surprisingly, for her!) had done something outside the law and would have to go before the judge, in court, pay some fine or go to jail. That’s what I thought.

  THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Whitey and Shamengwa came over to the house. Uncle Whitey was teaching me how to hold my own in life and I was punching at his hands.

  “You’re quick,” he said, “but not quick enough.”

  I tried to duck my head before he touched my ear, but never could.

  “Think like a snake,” he said. “Don’t think, react.”

  But he could tell that I was a thinker and would never have lightning reflexes. Nor would Joseph.

  “Boy, you’re hopeless,” said Uncle Whitey. He was a big, square man with an Indian Elvis face and a springy pompadour that he slicked back with hair oil out of a bright purple bottle. Sometimes he lived with us, sleeping on the couch.

  “What’s going on with Aunt Geraldine?” I asked him.

  “I could get killed for saying,” said Whitey. “It’s classified.”

  “Let’s get some gloves,” said Joseph, “you come out back behind the sheds and they can talk all they want about Aunt Geraldine. Gossip is beneath us as men.”

  “I’m with you,” said Whitey, and showed that inside his shirt he had a pint of Four Roses.

  That left me with Shamengwa and Mooshum, and after I sat drinking water with them for a while I asked, because I knew they would not get mad at me, what Geraldine had done to make my mother so angry.

  “Done?” said Mooshum, trying for once to look as if he didn’t know. “She’s not done nothing.”

  “Yet,” said Shamengwa, his face still.

  Shamengwa had brought his fiddle over, but he was only plucking and tuning it, frowning. He complained about the poor quality of the strings.

  I asked what happened to the men who had lynched our people.

  “You talked of that!” Shamengwa hissed through his teeth.

  With a wary look at his brother, Mooshum turned to me. “The Buckendorfs got rich, fat, and never died out,” he said. “They prospered and took over things. Half the county. But they never should of. And Wildstrand. Nobody hauled him up on a murder charge. Sheriff Fells turned into a cripple and old Lungsford, out of disgust, he went back to the civilized world he called Minnesota. He moved to Breckenridge, where in 1928 they went and hung the sheriff. He could not escape it. I think he died out east.”

  “And you,” I said, “how did you live? Can you live after being hung?”

  “They were never going to hang him to death,” said Shamengwa.

  “Why not?”

  But Mooshum began to argue with his brother, saying things that made no sense to me. I saw the same thing as Holy Track, the doves are still up there. Their annoyance with each other grew, so I went away and turned all that I had heard over in my mind. Later on, someone drove up to the house, and I went out to see who it was. When I saw her, I ducked back in the door.

  Aunt Harp had came over from Pluto to interview the two brothers for the local historical society’s newsletter. My mother usually arranged to be out whenever Aunt Harp visited. But if she
couldn’t get away, Mama endured Neve because our father was still fond of his sister, even though she had kept their inheritance to herself with my other grandfather’s blessing. Old Murdo never forgave my father for not becoming a banker. My father thought about getting a lawyer and making his sister divide what was left, but he never did. He insisted that he just wanted a few old stamp albums that had belonged to Uncle Octave.

  Still, it wasn’t that greed we held against Aunt Neve. She irritated and exhausted everyone around her with continual nave questions that she would ask, and without waiting, answer herself.

  “What did the Indians use for firewood?” she asked that afternoon. It became one of her more famous questions. “I can’t believe I asked that!” She dissolved in self-appreciation.

  Shamengwa wearily humored her, but Mooshum was delighted to have her near to work his charms on. He flirted with her outrageously, asking if she’d like to sit on his lap.

  “You ever sit on a horse, in a saddle? Then you know there’s a horn you got to grab on to. I got one too…”

  Mooshum’s brother turned his face away in distaste and I said, “What horn, Mooshum? Where is it?”

  Mama came out the door and stood watching her father with a very quiet look on her face. I shut up. She was wearing a blue checked apron trimmed with yellow rickrack and had her arms folded over her breasts. Mooshum noticed her, straightened up, cleared his throat, and asked Mrs. Neve Harp if she had ever received his notes. She said yes, and that she’d come because she wanted material for her newsletter. Mooshum said eagerly that he would answer her questions. Shamengwa folded his hands. But when Neve Harp said that she was going back to the beginning of things and wanted to talk about how the town of Pluto came to be and why it was inside the original reservation boundaries, even though hardly any Indians lived in Pluto, well, both of the old men’s faces became like Mama’s—quiet, with an elaborate reserve, and something else that has stuck in my heart ever since. I saw that the loss of their land was lodged inside of them forever. This loss would enter me, too. Over time, I came to know that the sorrow was a thing that each of them covered up according to their character—my old uncle through his passionate discipline, my mother through strict kindness and cleanly order. As for my grandfather, he used the patient art of ridicule.

  “What you are asking,” said Mooshum that afternoon, opening his hands and his mouth into a muddy, gaping grin, “is how was it stolen? How has this great thievery become acceptable? How do we live right here beside you, knowing what we lost and how you took it?”

  Neve Harp thought she might like some tea.

  “I’ll make it,” I said, and went inside the house. I filled the kettle with water and lit the front burner. Over the sink, there was a little window, and I stood there waiting for the water to boil. I was just able to see over the sill. I watched Aunt Neve waggle her tiny fingers at the two old men and squeeze smiles out of her face. Mama came in the door and stood beside me. She hardly ever touched me, so when she put her hand on my back I might have shaken it off, in surprise, and then regretted I had done so. I think I moved a step closer to her so that my shoulder lightly touched her arm. We stood there together, and for maybe the first time ever I understood that we were thinking roughly the same thing about what we were seeing.

  “It’s not her fault,” said Mama, not talking to me. She was reminding herself to think charitable thoughts, so that she could stand having Mrs. Neve Harp in her yard.

  “I think it is her fault,” I said.

  “Oh? Maybe you’re thinking about the money,” said Mama. “I know you know about that. We don’t need it.”

  “There were no Harps at the lynching,” I said without thinking. “But there was a Wildstrand. She married one.”

  It surprised me that Mama didn’t question the fact that I knew what she had warned Mooshum not to tell us. She just took a little breath.

  “Well,” she said, “and Buckendorfs. That was a long time ago. And look how Mary Anita has come back to help the young children of the parish.” Her voice took on that overcareful pious quality that always made me step away from her. I stepped away.

  “Oh, her,” I pretended, and we were quiet for a little while. Just before the tea boiled, Mama shook herself.

  “Evelina, you know that your grandma, Junesse, was not all Chippewa.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Her father left her and of course she was raised by her aunt. Her father’s name was Eugene Wildstrand.”

  I just kept looking out the window, as if I hadn’t heard what she said. But inside I thought I now understood the reason that they hadn’t hanged Mooshum to death, as his brother put it. Behind me, I heard her take the kettle off the stove. The handle rattled a bit as she set it down. She scooped the tea leaves out of a tin with her fingers, then dropped them in the teapot and tapped the lid back onto the tea can. I heard the pour of steaming water as she filled the brown teapot and then she came back to stand beside me. This time, when she put her hand on my back, I did not shrug it off. We waited, together, for the tea to brew the way the two old brothers liked it, dark and bitter. Neve Harp could add a pound of sugar and she’d never get it sweet enough.

  “Oh, anyway,” said Mama, “I might as well tell you everything. You’ll hear it anyway. Your aunt Geraldine and Judge Coutts are having…” But she couldn’t say it. She just gave a great, cracking sigh and put her hand on her chest.

  “A baby?” I said.

  Mama looked at me in surprise, then realized I didn’t really know what I was saying.

  “Your aunt can’t have babies,” she said, in a somber way.

  “Oh?” I said. “Then what? What are they having?”

  But Mama regretted her moment, I could tell, and sent me outside with the teacups.

  Lines

  THE STORY MOOSHUM told us had its repercussions—the first being that I could not look at anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage. As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum’s story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew—parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still, I could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help. He bore interrogation with a vexed wince and silence. I persisted, kept on asking for details, but he answered in evasions, to get rid of me. He never spoke with the direct fluidity of that first telling. His medicine bottle, confiscated by our mother, had held whiskey. No one knew from what source. She’d never get him to stop. I still loved Mooshum, of course, but with this tale something in my regard of him was disturbed, as if I’d stepped into a clear stream and silt had billowed up around my feet.

  Judge Antone Bazil Coutts

  The Way Things Are

  THE MOMENT I passed Geraldine Milk in the narrow hallway of the tribal offices, I decided I had to marry her. As we swerved slightly sideways, nodding briefly, her breasts in a modest white blouse passed just under my line of sight. I was intensely aware of them and forced myself to keep my eyes level with hers, but still, I caught the delicate scent of her soap mixed with a harsh thread of female sweat. The hair at the back of my neck prickled, I stopped dead, swiveling like a puppet on strings, to watch her as she passed on down the hallway. Geraldine’s walk was elastic, womanly. But there was no come-hither in it. There was a leave-me-alone quality, in fact. Geraldine was thought aloof because she’d never married—her first boyfriend, Roman, the one off the passenger train, had been killed in a car wreck and she had not become attached since. I had my own pains in that department. We had that in common.

  Of course, Geraldine knows all. She is a tribal enrollment spe
cialist and has everyone’s secrets alphabetically filed. I must, in fact, call upon her expertise for many questions of blood that come my way. A few days later, I visited her office. I nodded as I entered the room and Geraldine glanced away.

  “I’m Antone Coutts,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  Her eyes, black and upslanted in a pale, cool face, rested on me with an odd intensity, but no warmth. There was no sign of friendliness, although she made a gesture. Raised her eyebrows a fraction. That day, she was wearing a rose pink dress belted at the waist with a black tie. She wore sheer stockings and low black heels. She had on a gardenia perfume that left behind the suggestion of moist vegetation. A woman who smelled tropical, here in North Dakota. I watched her leave the office and Margaret Lesperance, who’d seen me rebuffed, said in a sympathetic tone, “Her old uncle is probably waiting outside for her.” At the time, I thought Margaret said it just to cover the awkward moment. It seemed obvious that Geraldine wanted nothing to do with me. But later on I found that her uncle really had been waiting for her, and of course, she intended to get to know me all along. Yes, she had tried to avoid me, but the reason was not, as I imagined, the way she viewed my past or thought about my family. She was cool because that was her way. She was a woman of reserve.

  It took a long time before Geraldine would even talk to me, longer still before she’d sit down and drink a cup of coffee in my presence. At a conference in Bismarck she finally had dinner with me—I’d maneuvered into the hotel smorgasboard line right behind her and when she walked over to a table I stuck tight. We talked of general and familiar subjects, getting acquainted, but all the while I longed to say, “I’m going to marry you, Geraldine Milk, and you are going to marry me.”

  Though impatient, I managed to keep my interest hidden. I heard the Milk girls had tempers, and I did not want to begin by sparking hers. After the conference, when we returned home, I boringly kept an appropriate distance, though sometimes I thought I’d die of all I didn’t dare say in her presence. My love of her uncle’s music helped—I often went to sit with him in the evenings. At other times I dropped by his house early in the mornings, made a pot of strong tea or took him out to breakfast. That was on the weekends. The first time Geraldine showed up at her uncle’s house and found me there, I faked an elaborate surprise. She was not fooled.