The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  “What did you speak to Dad about?” I ask Billy that night, as we’re curled together on the three-quarter bed I slept in all my life. The children are down beside us in a trundle. I can hear their whimpering baby sighs.

  “We talked about your brothers. One’s hit the skids and the other would rather join the navy than go into farming. Plus they are having trouble taking care of your uncle. He wanders off. They found him half dead of exposure. Found him taking an ax to a cow.”

  “Ax to a cow?”

  Billy shrugs and his voice gets intense now, the voice he uses at the ends of his sermons, the saving voice. “We could help them put your uncle in the state home, and you could have the farm if we just stayed here, you know that.”

  I do not answer for a long time. Outdoors, the night is still, just the sound of black crickets sawing in the cracks of the foundation, just the thin tangle of windbreaks and the dew forming and collecting on the powder-dry earth. I have been with Billy three years and I have spoken an unearthly language. I have spoken directly in the power, to spirit, but I’m still only nineteen, the age some girls start college. Some girls just finish high school then. I feel so old, so captured by life already. As we lay together in the dark, the yard lights off to save on the electric bills, as the moonless night covers us all, I feel something else, too. Half-awake and drifting, I feel the stark bird that nests in the tree of the Holy Ghost descend and hover.

  I open my mouth to call Billy’s name, but nothing. The wings flutter lower, scored white, and the down of its breast crackles faintly as the sparks jump between us. The bird flattens its wings across my breast, brushing my nipples. Then it presses itself into me, heated and full. Its wings are spread inside of me and I am filled with fluttering words I cannot yet pronounce or decipher. Some other voice is speaking now, a constant murmur in my head. Something foreign that I will hide from Billy until I understand its power. I’ll hide it from everyone, I think, because it’s rich and disturbing and something about it reminds me of my uncle and I wonder if his rage is catching.

  The next morning, I put Lilith in her playpen outdoors, by the garden, and I set into weeding. The garden is in reach of the hose, so there’s carrots feathering, and purple bush beans that will turn green when boiled. There’s about ten rows of sweet corn, surrounded by a string fence hung with glittering can lids, to keep out raccoons. Later on in the summer, I’ll walk the windbreaks looking for currants and juneberries, and still later chokecherries, wild plums to make a tart jam.

  My mother comes out and stoops to the hoe, chopping the earth fine then carving in a little trench, putting in a late crop of Sugar Anns. She’s leaner, and wrinkled with sudden age. Lines have webbed her cheeks and pulled down her eyelids, and even her full, pretty mouth is scored and creased. My first brother only calls for money, my other brother left three months ago and made his decision never to return. They didn’t even mention that on the phone, but I do think I sensed the change occurring, the desolation. It is why I returned out of the blue, drawn by the sensation of my parents’ loneliness, which I did not understand.

  My father has been working the place practically alone, so he’s let most of the fields go fallow and sold off all the stock but five milkers. Our return is already renewing his hopes, though. High on the tractor, my father goes to see what of the new hay is not yet burnt hollow, what may survive. Watching my mother’s sharp elbows swing as she backs down the bean rows, hoeing, I think that maybe what Billy said isn’t so terrible. Maybe it is not so awful to consider the reality of the situation. Maybe I should even get together with my parents and make some plans.

  But there is no need. Billy says it all. Every night, back in Dad’s office, Billy helps him straighten out the mess, helps file, and helps decide which bills to pay on and which to string along. Dad has agreed, with surprising disinterest, to let the retired people camp near an old burnt farmstead where a hand-pump well is still in operation. The end of our land bumps smack up to the reservation boundary. This was reservation, Billy says, and should be again. This was my family’s land, Indian land. Will be again. He says it flat out with a lack of emotion that disturbs me. Something’s there. Something’s different underneath.

  As one month and another month goes on, my husband, between attending to the needs of his people, guest-preaching for rain at revivals held all through the area, between learning how to run a tractor and use milking equipment and bale hay with my father, hardly sleeps. Billy seems to whirl from one thing to the next, his energy blooming, enormous, unflagging. The food he eats! Whole plates of spaghetti, pans of fresh rolls. There are nights he paces Dad’s office, late, writing sermons and signing checks, for Dad has given him the power of signature. Sometimes at dawn I stumble downstairs for coffee and he is sitting there, grinning. Still up from the day before. Billy grows as the heat withers everything else. He drinks the well dry! That summer, we borrow from the bank and sink another well. Flushed and enormous, he splits the bottom of his pants.

  “I never had parents.” He chokes up, embracing my mother as she lets out and resews the seams of his pants. “I never knew what it was like to live in a family before.”

  She smiles at his drama, her face melting in the heat like wax. Uncle Warren watches from the corner, stiff as a stick doll, his jaw alone moving as he mutters an endless indecipherable low monologue. Sssssh, says my mother, keeping Uncle quiet.

  My mother bakes a cake from scratch every day. Billy eats it. He earns money with his preaching, hires a lawyer to incorporate us all as a church, so we needn’t worry over taxes. Soon, my parents’ farmhouse becomes a focus. Each night, the rest of the congregation comes over and we all pray together, in the living room, crying and witnessing, begging forgiveness, and, when pure, sitting in a circle all together, channeling spirit. My mother is loud and extraordinary—who knew? My father more reserved, blinking at what she spills, the plenitude and triviality of her sins. As for Uncle Warren, his eyes grow pleading and he seems to cringe beneath the weight of all he hears. I begin, because Billy is so large and overpowering, to sit near my father on these nights. It is as if my dad needs protection. I think that he’s grown more frail, although perhaps it’s simply relative. He seems thinner because Billy has expanded to such a marvelous size, outweighing us all, and splendid in his new white suits.

  Another month passes and Billy’s chins double so he wears a thick flesh collar. We make love every night, but I am embarrassed. He is so loud, so ecstatic. I am tossed side to side on top of him, as if I am riding a bull whale. I make him wear a sleeveless undershirt so I can hold on to the shoulder straps like handles. The bed creaks like the timbers of a boat going down in a gale, and when he comes I feel heavy and swamped. I am afraid of getting pregnant again. I am afraid of what’s happening. The house, once calm in its barbed, brown atmosphere, once lonely and predictable, crawls with people now. They are continually praying with my mother and cleaning savagely, with harsh chemicals. Everything smells of Pine Sol. The yard is gouged with the tire marks of cars. People break the branches off the butterfly bush to fan themselves when the spirit revs their temperature. And all this time, all this time, I don’t speak in tongues or feel very much when I pray. I don’t get my pictures back. All of that’s gone.

  I don’t know who I married anymore. It’s like he’s supernatural. He is horribly tireless, exhausting everyone so much that we have to take shifts to keep up with him. I carry his shirts, socks, underwear, trousers, out to the clothesline to hang. They are so large now they do not require clothespins. I drape them like sheets and then I sit, worn-out, where I am hidden from his eye. He talks rain. He still talks Armageddon. The farm is made over to me now, and through me to Billy. He talks about the founding of the chosen. We are the ones, he says, who will walk through the fire. We are the Daniels. He holds our son up before the eyes of the congregation and the poor boy is small as a fish in his hands.

  Finally, it is the picnic table and the iron bench that brings me to the en
d of this part of our life and the bigger, uncontrollable force that Billy becomes. The table is set out in the bare backyard, and it is made of sheet metal, steel pipes, and a welded cross bar, hammered into the ground. Dad made it for days it was too humid to eat indoors, and for general celebrations, of which we never had one. The whole area is laid out where the view is nice so that Mother, fond of her pretty yard and flowers, could gaze past a row of wild orange daylilies after she worked in the garden. She could pause, rest her eyes on a bit of loveliness. There is even an iron-lace bench for sitting on, maybe reading, though nobody ever opened a book there.

  The August heat has let up briefly, then closed down again. Uncle Warren is chipping chicken shit off the perches, swearing in a low, grating tone at the hens that peck beside his feet. A few days ago, my mother crawled underneath a flowered sheet on the couch and now she will not rise. From her couch near the picture window, where she is quietly getting even thinner, my mother watches the picnic area, sees the sun rise and pass overhead. It is just a stubborn flu bug, she says, but there are times, watching as she simply lies still, her arms like straight boards placed to hold down the thin, puckery sheet, that I am afraid she’ll die and I want to climb in next to her.

  One humid afternoon I am sitting with my mother on the couch and we are watching Billy talk beneath the green ash tree with a few of the others. The babies are sleeping on the floor on folded quilts, with fans spilling air over them back and forth. Billy rarely drinks, and then, nothing stronger than wine. He is drinking wine now, a homemade variety from elderberries, made by a congregation member from a recipe passed down through her family. I suppose that the wine has got such a friendly history that Billy feels he can drink more than usual. And then, it is hot. The jars of wine are set in an icy cooler on the metal picnic table, and from time to time Billy lifts out a jar and drains it. As he talks, the sweat pours off his brow. His dark hair is wetted black, his body is huge, mounded over the iron bench. He lifts his thick arms to wrestle with a thought, drags it out of the air, thumps it on the top of his thigh. He is holding a rain prayer meeting, and as we sit in the heat of the afternoon, with the fans going, watching the others pray in the blazing sun, we notice that clouds are massing and building into fabulous castlelike and blazing shapes.

  These clouds are remarkable, pink-gold and lit within. They are beautiful things. I point them out to my mother.

  “Thunderclouds,” she says, excited. “Push my couch closer to the window.”

  I should be out praying with the group, or cooking up a dinner for them all, or working on the garden to bring in tomatoes in case it does rain, in case those clouds bring hail. But I do nothing other than place a chair next to my mother’s couch. Uncle Warren is sleeping with his eyes open, sitting straight in his chair. Lilith is limp and draped over a stuffed bear. I cover her with a crocheted afghan because a cool breeze has risen. My father enters the room. He has come to point out the clouds. Warren’s eyes sharpen. Outside, Billy continues, wringing his hands into big golden fists, sobbing with the power, drinking the wine in swigs, shouting.

  Now the wind rises, slapping the branches crazy. The clouds ride over the land, gathering and bunching, reflecting light. They are purple, a poisonous pink, a green as tender as the first buds of spring. The clouds cover the horizon and within the mass, as the thing opens over us, we see the heart of the storm, the dark side of the anvil shot through with an electric lacery of light.

  A cold wind rises out of the ditches, driving before it the odor of sour mud water and then fresh. Droplets, soft and tentative, plop down and the thunder is a cart full of stones, rumbling closer.

  Still they keep praying with their hands held up and their eyes tight shut. Beneath the whipping leaves, pelted and in danger, they huddle. Their voices are a windy murmur. His voice stands out among them, booming louder as the storm comes on.

  A burst of radiance. The flowers fly into the air and scatter in the yard. Another crack so loud we’re right inside of the sound. Billy Peace, sitting on the iron bench like an oracle, is the locus of blue bolts that spark between the iron poles and run along the lantern wires into the trees. Billy, the conductor with his arms raised, draws down the power. The sound of the next crack slams us back from the window, but we crawl forward again to see. A rope of golden fire snakes down and wraps Billy twice. He goes entirely black. A blue light pours from his chest. Then silence. A hushed suspension. Small pools of radiance hang in the air, wobble, and then disappear. A few drops fall, mixed with small, bouncing marbles of hail. Then whiteness tumbles through the air, ice balls smash down the mint and basil and lemon balm so the scents rise with the barbecue smell of burnt skin.

  We say nothing. The babies sleep. And Billy Peace?

  He is a mound, black and tattered, on all fours. A snuffling creature of darkness burnt blind. We watch as he rises, gathers himself up slowly, pushes down on his thighs with huge hands. Finally, he stands upright. I grab my mother’s fingers, shocked limp. Billy is alive, bigger than before, swollen with unearthly power. We step away from the window. He bawls into the sky, shaking his head back and forth as the clouds open. Harsh silver curtains of water close across the scene. We turn away from the window.

  “Mom,” I say, “we’ve got to stop him.”

  “No one’s ever going to stop him,” she answers.

  The Kindred

  ONE DAY, AS I am standing in a strip of shade, my uncle walks up and speaks to me, low, without looking at me.

  It’s on you, I can see it.

  What’s on me?

  It’s on you, I can see it.

  What? What?

  I can see it.

  What?

  You’re gonna kill.

  Shut up.

  It’s on you. You’re gonna kill.

  We put him in the state hospital and I stayed on the farm while my parents died. Billy left and toured his ideas until at last he developed a religion. Not a servant-to-God relationship, not a Praise Your Lord, not a Bagwam, not a Perfect Master, not a dervish or a mahara-ji. It was a religion based on what religion was before it was religion. Of course it had to be named and organized as soon as Billy Peace discovered it, but he tried not to use the trigger words. There was no God after Billings, no savior, for instance, by Minneapolis, where others told me Billy could have used it. By the time he and his followers backtracked across the border and then down, zigzagging home, there was only spirit. Most people did not understand this. Billy even let go of the concept of an Antichrist. The devil implied its opposite, and worshippers found the devil more attractive, Billy felt, than the woolly bearded father figure in their childhood dreams. It was like this, though it always changed. There was spirit, and that was vast, vast, vast, so vast we had to shut out the enormousness of it. We were like receivers, Billy said; our brains were biochemical machines, small receptors that narrowed down the hugeness of spiritual intelligence into something we could handle.

  Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely. The task, as Billy saw it, was not to stretch the individual’s barriers, as you might expect—not exactly that. Billy believed that a group of minds living together, thinking as one, had the potential to expand further than any individual. If we opened ourselves, all at once, in one place, we might possibly brush the outskirts, the edges of that vastness of spirit. A circle of linked rubber bands, touching fingertips, we sat some nights, all night, into morning, humming on the edge of that invert field, that sky. He took his time organizing his strategy and his purpose. He took care smoothing out the rough spots in the Manual of Discipline. And planning, raising money, finding people who met his standards. At first, he took the strong-willed, the purposeful, the cerebral, the experimental. Then he took the ones with rational explanations. Lately, he took the wounded, the ones with something missing, though they had to be organized at the same time. He looked for the ones who held down long-term jobs, especially. They had to have t
yped rsums. He took no one on faith. They had to sit with him, thinking, for hours. He had to test their quality of mind. They were not superstitious, they were not fundamentalists. They might believe the world was coming to an end and that the end would be an economic nightmare. They might believe in god if god was indivisible from light. They were never former Roman Catholics—it was like those were inoculated. Sometimes they were Jews a generation or two away from their own religious practice. Or Protestants, though few had ever been solid Lutherans. No Baptists, no Hindus, no Confucians, no Mormons. No adherents of any other tribe’s religion. No millenarians, no survivalists.

  As for me, I didn’t fit into any of those categories. On our travels south, I’d met a family who kept serpents and who believed they were directed to cast out devils by handling poisons. I’d stayed on in their church half a year, I’d sat with their grandmother Virginie, whose white hair reached to her waist. She said I never should cut mine. She’d grown eyes like a snake, a crack of darkness for a pupil, lips thin. One hand was curled black as a bone from the time she was bitten. The other lacked a ring finger. You will get bit, she told me, but you will live through it in the power. She gave me two of her serpents, one a six-foot diamondback, the other a northern copperhead with red skin and hourglass markings. They have judgment in them, she said. And they have love.

  So judge me, I said when I held the snakes for the first time, take me, and they did. I found my belief. I knew from the first time that this was my way of getting close to spirit. Their cool dry bodies moved on me, skimmed over me, indifferent, curious, flickering, heavy, showing the mercy of spirit, loving me, sending a blood tide of power through me. I could set myself loose when I held the snakes. I became cold in my depth while my skin bloomed warm, calming them, and also I used pictures. I gave them the lovely heat, the flat rocks, the black rocks, the steady beating of the sun.