The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  Where are you going?

  Town.

  After that?

  Back home.

  Then?

  I dunno.

  Hell.

  Maybe.

  Hell, for sure.

  Sometimes he would say that I was just like him, that I maybe was him, he could see it. He could see my whole structure. I couldn’t hide. I told him shut up and leave me alone. He always said to me, you are alone. I always answered, not as alone as you.

  In town, the streets were just on the edge of damp, but the air was still thin and dry. White moths fluttered in and out under the rolled flaps of the tent, but as the month of August was half spent there were no more mosquitoes. Too dry for them, too. Even though the tent was open-sided, the air seemed close, compressed, and faintly salty with evaporated sweat. The space was three-quarters full of singing people and I slipped into one of the hind rows. I sat in a gray metal folding chair, kept my eyes open, and my mouth shut.

  He was not the first speaker, as it turned out. I didn’t see him until the main preacher finished his work and said a prayer. He called Billy to the front with a little preface. Billy was newly saved, endowed with a message by the Lord, and could play several musical instruments. We were to listen to what the Lord would reveal to us through Billy’s lips. He came on the stage. Now he wore a vest, a three-piece suit, a red silken shirt with a pointed collar. He started talking. I could tell you just about what he said, word for word, because after that night and long away into the next few years, sometimes four, five times in one day, I’d hear it over and over. You don’t know preaching until you’ve heard Billy Peace. You don’t know god loss, a barbed wire ripped from your grasp, until you’ve heard it from Billy Peace. You don’t know subjection, the killing happiness of letting go. You don’t know how light and comforted you feel, how cherished.

  I was too young to stand against it.

  THE STARS ARE the eyes of God and they have been watching us from the beginning of the earth. Do you think there isn’t an eye for each of us? Go on and count. Go on and look in the Book and total up all the nouns and verbs, like if you did somehow you’d grasp the meaning of what you held. You can’t. The understanding is in you or it isn’t. You can hide from the stars by daylight but at night, under all of them, so many, you are pierced by the sight and by the vision.

  Get under the bed!

  Get under the sheet!

  I said to you, stand up, and if you fall, fall forward!

  I’m going to go out blazing. I’m going to go out like a light. I’m going to burn in glory. I said to you, stand up!

  And so there’s one among them. You have heard Luce, Light, Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. You have seen it with your own eyes and you didn’t know he came upon you. In the night, and in his own disguises like the hijacker of a planet, he fell out of the air, he fell out of the dark leaves, he fell out of the fragrance of a woman’s body, he fell out of you and entered you as though he’d reached through the earth.

  Reached his hand up and pulled you down.

  Fell into you with a jerk.

  Like a hangman’s noose.

  Like nobody.

  Like the slave of night.

  Like you were coming home and all the lights were blazing and the ambulance sat out front in the driveway and you said,

  Lord, which one?

  And the Lord said, All of them.

  You too, follow, follow, I’m pointing you down. In the sight of the stars and in the sight of the Son of Man. The grace is on me. Stand up, I said. Stand. Yes and yes I’m gonna scream because I like it that way. Let yourself into the gate. Take it with you. In four years the earth will shake in its teeth.

  Revelations. Face of the beast. In all fairness, in all fairness, let us quiet down and let us think.

  Billy Peace looked intently, quietly, evenly, at each person in the crowd and quoted to them, proving things about the future that seemed complicated, like the way the Mideast had shaped up as such a trouble zone. How the Chinese armies were predicted in Tibet and that had come true and how they’ll keep marching, moving, until they reached the Fertile Crescent. Billy Peace told about the number. He slammed his forehead with his open hand and left a red mark. There, he yelled, gut-shot, there it will be scorched. He was talking about the number of the beast and said that they would take it from your Social Security, your checkbooks, these things called credit cards—American Express, he cried, to Oblivion, they would take the numbers from your tax forms, your household insurance. That already, through these numbers, you are under the control of Last Things and you don’t know it.

  The Antichrist is among us.

  He is the plastic in our wallets.

  You want credit? Credit?

  Then you’ll burn for it and you will starve. You’ll eat sticks, you’ll eat black bits of paper, your bills, and all the while you’ll be screaming from the dark place, Why the hell didn’t I just pay cash?

  Because the number of the beast is a fathomless number and banking numbers are the bones and the guts of the Antichrist, who is Lucifer, who is pure brain.

  Pure brain gonna get us to the moon, get us past the moon.

  The voice of lonely humanity in a space probe calling Anybody Home? Anybody Home Out There? Antichrist will answer. Antichrist is here, all around us in the tunnels and webs of radiance, in the transistors, the great mind of the Antichrist is fusing in a pattern, in a destiny, waking up nerve by nerve.

  Serves us right. Don’t it serve us right not to be saved?

  It won’t come easy. Not by waving a magic wand. You’ve got to close your eyes and hold out those little plastic cards.

  Look at this!

  He held a scissors high, turned it to every side so the light gleamed off the blades.

  The sword of Zero Interest! Now I’m coming. I’m coming down the aisle. I’m coming with the sword that sets you free.

  Billy Peace started a hymn going and he walked down the rows of chairs, singing, and every person who held a credit card out he embraced, then he plucked that card out of their fingers. He cut once, crosswise. Dedicated to the Lord! He cut again. He kept the song flowing, walked up and down the rows, cutting, until the tough, trampled grass beneath the tent was littered with pieces of plastic. He came to me, last of all, and noticed me, and smiled.

  “You’re too young to have established a line of credit,” he said, “but I’m glad to see you here.”

  Then he stared at me, his eyes hardened to the black of winter ice, cold in the warmth of his tan skin, so chilling I just melted.

  “Stay,” he said, “stay afterward and join us in the trailer. We’re going to pray over Ed’s mother.”

  SO I DID stay. It doesn’t sound like a courting invitation, but that was the way I thought of it at the time, and it turned out I was right. Ed was the advertised preacher, and his mother was a sick, sick woman. She lay flat and still on a couch at the front of this house trailer, where she just fit end to end. The air around her was dim, close with the smell of sweat-out medicine, and what the others had cooked and eaten, hamburger, burnt onions, coffee. The table was pushed to one side and the chairs were wedged around the couch. And Ed’s mother, poor old dying woman, was covered with a white sheet that her breath hardly moved. Her face was caved in, sunken around the mouth and cheeks. She looked to me like a bird fallen out of its nest before it feathered, her shut eyelids bulging blue, wrinkled, beating with tiny nerves. Her head was covered with white wisps of hair. Her hands, just at her chest, curled like little bloodless claws. Her nose was a large and waxen bone.

  I drew a chair up, the farthest to the back of the eight or so people who had gathered. One by one they opened their mouths and rolled their eyes or closed them tight and let the words fly out of them until they begin to garble and the sounds from their mouths resembled some ancient, dizzying speech. At first, I was so uncomfortable with all of the strangeness, and even a little faint from the airlessness and smells, that I breathed in wit
h shallow gulps, and I shut the language out. But gradually, slowly, it worked its way in and I felt dizzy until I was seized.

  The words are inside and outside of me, hanging in the air like small pottery triangles, broken and curved. But they are forming and crumbling so fast that I’m breathing dust, the sharp antibiotic bitterness, medicine, death, sweat. My eyes sting and I’m starting to choke. All the blood goes out of my head and down, along my arms, into the ends of my fingers. My hands feel swollen, twice as big as normal, like big puffed gloves. I get out of the chair and turn to leave, but he is there.

  “Go on,” he says. “Go on and touch her.”

  The others have their hands on Ed’s mother. They are touching her with one hand and praying, the other palm held high, blind, feeling for the spirit like antennae. Billy pushes me, not by making any contact, just by inching up behind me so I feel the forcefulness and move. Two people make room and then I am standing over Ed’s mother. She is absolutely motionless, still, as though she is a corpse, except that her pinched mouth has turned down at the edges so she frowns into her own dark.

  I put my hands out, still huge, prickling. I am curious to see what will happen when I do touch her, if she’ll respond. But when I place my hands down on her stomach, low and soft, she makes no motion at all. Nothing flows from me, no healing powers. Instead, I am filled with the rushing dark of what she suffers. It fills me suddenly as water from a faucet brims a jug, and spills over.

  This is when it happens.

  I’m not stupid, I have never been stupid. I have pictures. I can get a picture in my head at any moment, focus it so brilliant and detailed it seems real. That’s what I do. That’s what my uncle does when he’s just staring. It’s what I started when my mom and dad went for each other. When I heard them downstairs I always knew there’d be a moment. One of them would scream, tear through the stillness. It would rise up, that howl, and fill the house, and then one would come running. One would come and take hold of me. It would be my mother, smelling of smoked chicken, rice, and coffee grounds. It would be my father, sweat-soured, scorched with cigarette smoke from in the garage, bitter with the dust of his fields. Then I would be somewhere in no-man’s-land, between them, and that was the unsafest place in the world. Except for the gaze grip of my uncle. So I would leave it. I would go limp and enter my pictures.

  I have a picture. I go into it right off when I touch Ed’s mother, veering off her thin pain. She grew up in Montana and now I see what she sees. Here’s a grainy deep blue range of mountains hovering off the valley in the west; their foothills are blue, strips of dark blue flannel, and their tops are cloudy halls. The sun strikes through, once, twice, a pink radiance that dazzles patterns into their corridors so they gleam back, moon-pocked. Watch them, watch close, Ed’s mother, and they start to walk. I keep talking until I know we are approaching these mountains together. She is dimming her lights, she is turning thin as tissue under my hands. She is dying as she goes into my picture with me, goes in strong, goes in willingly. And once she is in the picture she gains peace from it, gains the rock strength, the power, just like I always do.

  The Daniels

  WE WANDERED IN the desert three years, and I bore two children in the daze and rush of Billy’s traveling visions. His cognitions came on us like Mack trucks, bowling us from tent to tent and town to town. He would howl with the signal, then writhe at tremendous sights he saw, shout for a pen and paper, growl and puke and wrestle with the knowledge until he lay calm on the bathroom floor, spent, saying to me, Now, do you doubt?

  I never did. I had faith in Billy from that first night I heard him speak. I had faith and I cleaved to him, utterly. But as the months and then the years went by, I missed my mother and my father. I missed their ordinary routine, their low drama, even the familiarity of their quarrels. I missed that I could read their danger, and knew a safe place to be around them—in my pictures. I was having trouble with the pictures. I had to stay on this plane of existence with my babies, that was why. And because I could not disappear into my pictures I needed to go home.

  JUDAH IS FLUSHED and peaceful, lips red and soft as petals, his cheeks bright and marked with the seams of the fabric of my blouse. And Lilith, so small and hot, pressed into the folds of my skirt, sighs and falls into a glutted sleep.

  “Let’s go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I say to my babies, thinking of my mother’s face. She hasn’t seen them yet.

  Nothing can pry this idea loose, I am bent on it.

  “Billy,” I say when he walks in. “We’re going home.”

  “No,” he says without a beat of hesitation.

  “We’ve got to,” I tell him.

  I’ve never crossed him before and my fierceness surprises, then shakes him.

  “Your parents died when you were young,” I tell him. “Your sister raised you until you went into the army, then she went to the dogs, I guess. So you don’t really understand the idea of home, or folks, or a place you grew up in that you want to return to. But now it’s time.”

  He sits down on the edge of the little bed in our motel room. I have made him a hot pot of coffee, which he drinks like he is listening.

  “Tomorrow,” I say.

  I tell him that I have spoken to my parents on the telephone more often lately. As their grandchildren came along, they grew more resigned to Billy, and even will say hello to him on holidays and birthdays. I know if we go back home and bring the babies, things will be all right. My parents will come around. It seems to me that it is time for this to happen, for the break to be mended.

  “I’ve never asked you for anything before,” I say to Billy, and that is true. “I’m going home,” I repeat.

  “But I’ve just started my ministry here. I can’t leave behind our membership.”

  We have signed on eight retired persons, who have liquidated all of their assets to join our congregation. We are based in motor homes, on land one of them has donated, in the Gallatin Valley near Bozeman. It’s just two acres, and we’re crowded together, always listening to the whine of someone else’s radio.

  “You’ve got reservation land,” I said, “and we could get a bigger parcel of land out near my folks. We could buy up a building in town and open a God-based bookstore. But I want to live back where my family lives, close to the farm. I miss all that flat land, green crops, those clouds. We grew everything,” I tell him. “The big crops, soybeans, flowers, flax. I miss the blue fields. The yellow mustard fields. Sunflowers turning all day to catch the light. I miss the house garden. Mint for iced tea. Tomatoes big as your foot.”

  Billy thinks about it. Maybe, in the end, it is the mention of the farm’s acreage, 888 acres, although he knows about my two brothers. It’s not like I’m going to inherit the thing, or so it seems then. For one week, I can tell he’s mulling it over and I say nothing, worried I’ll tip the balance if I do speak, say the wrong thing or say too much.

  Then one night, at meeting, he raises his arms and he makes the announcement. We are going to move. And I feel happy, so lucky, so proud as he is standing slim and handsome, fresh-faced and smiling, before his followers, that I don’t think right then where they will live. The eight of them, the four of us, hold hands tight and pray in a circle. We sing for an hour, then split up. That night we all begin packing and several days later we set off in a caravan. It is not until we cross the county line that I realize with a jolt, though nothing is expressed, that the place Billy has in mind to park the trailers is my parents’ farm. Where else?

  When I ask him, he says, “I’ll take care of their objections. I’ll talk to them.”

  He grins. His silvery, curved sunglasses reflect me and reflect the land to either side, now absolutely flat. The sky is gray-gold with dust. The sun is huge and blurred, and seems to hang above us longer here and cast a richer and more diffused light. My parents have told me that there was a long, terrible heat wave this early May. It was a record spring, rainless and merciless. Although the temperatures have gone d
own somewhat, there has still been no rain, and the earth is suffering.

  It is just like when I first met Billy. Another drought. But we’ll end it.

  “We’ll bring rain,” I say, excited, when we are just a few miles away from the farm. It is just something to say at the time, but Billy looks at me and starts to get reflective. We are waiting for the Armageddon that never came on Billy’s date, which was just a preliminary date anyway, says Billy. This Armageddon we are waiting for is a different one than the usual, and the signs for it are multiplying, according to Billy’s correlation between the Bible and the business pages. But while we are waiting for the universe to end, Billy gets the notion, as we turn down the road, that we should pray for rain to delay the inevitable. That is what he tells my folks, not fifteen minutes later. We have left the others parked at the turnoff.

  I’m hugging and crying with my father and mother, and they’re exclaiming over the babies. Uncle Warren is in the background, strained and vigilant. He’s shaking with the volume of emotion set loose around him. And with his own thoughts. I am careful not to meet his raving eye. It is a prodigal’s return. They are forgiving of me—it’s each other they are hard on. They do not hold a grudge about my absence, even after all the trouble they’ve been through. They seem to accept Billy. Politely, in a grave voice, my mother beckons him up the stairs and into her domain. She is a glass collector—bowls, figurines, vases, tableaus. I hold Judah firmly in my grasp and give Lilith to my father. We walk into the living room and hear Billy exclaiming over the glass. He notices each and every artifact, runs his fingers along the curves of my mother’s green unicorn, polishes a heavy blue egg with the side of his cuff. And after he has finished with the glass, he goes out to the sheds and the barns with my father. I don’t know what they do out there, or what Billy says, but as they return Billy’s hand is firm on my father’s back and my father is frowning in concentration, ducking his head up and down. My father’s face is long and tired. His eyes are the washed-out white-blue of an overworked German. His shock of white hair hangs thick between his eyes like the forelock of a horse.