The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  “I CAN TELL it was a good trip,” Billy said.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He put his hands on either side of my face, gazed into my eyes. He didn’t really see me. He was looking at his own reflection. He was watching himself watch me and between him and his own regard of himself I was invisible.

  “I like train rides,” I said, so relieved I could taste blood in my mouth.

  Then he said, “If you ever leave me, Marn, I will take the children. I will keep them. And you know what I will do with them.”

  He smoothed his hands across my hair, closed me against him, and then we shut the door to our room and he did as he sometimes did, one of the ways. He stood me next to the bed, took off my clothing piece by piece, then made me climax just by brushing me, slowly, here, there, just by barely touching me until he forced apart my legs and put his mouth on me hard. It took almost an hour, by the bedside clock. It took a long time after that. He came into me without taking off his clothes, the zipper of his pants cut and scratched. I cried out. He pushed harder, then withdrew. He held my wrists behind my back and forced me down onto the carpet. Then he bent over me and gently, fast and slow, helplessly, without end or beginning, he went in and out until I grew bored, until I wanted to sleep, until I moaned, until I cried out again, until I wanted nothing else, until I wanted him the way I had the very first time, that first dry summer.

  The next morning, I took out the money in circle, counted it, and offered it to Billy. He set it in a pile before him, blessed it, and handed it over to Bliss, our treasurer. She was a heavy blond woman out of Aberdeen, South Dakota, very competent and self-proud. She had a bulldog’s heavy face, drooping cheeks, a big ugly smile. And to think, sometimes I had to laugh, I’d brought Bliss here. I had saved this woman from venereal disaster. She had been a sexual dynamo, full of blasted encounters, confessions, and still a kind of raw blood energy leached right from her through the boards of the floor. She was diabetic and used long needle syringes for her injections, not the short kind I’d seen others use. She gave the pain up, an offering, she said. I thought she gave off a charred smell, myself. I thought she reeked, but she professed to like me, and because she was also my children’s spirit mother I was forced to like her too, with all my heart. In fact, she was a woman I was pledged to give my life to if she ever asked me for it. Billy Peace had chosen Bliss, but she had, I thought, looking at her that new morning, the thick and punished hands of a butcher.

  She rose now, a larded green warrior in her sweat suit and army jacket. She held out her thick hands and for a long moment we put ours out, too, returning the energy. A song started and we had to let it go around twice. Then she put her hands down and gave the financial report. She shouted it out as though it were a kind of prayer, and since it was all numbers and dizzy quotes of percentages and tax advantages and ways that the money would go in here, come out there, look nice, still work for us, we all nodded at the right time, any time she asked for it, and smiled.

  “All right,” she said at last. “Bottom line. We need three to work a day job and give assistance with the profits.”

  “Let’s all meditate on who,” suggested Frenchie, lowering his head.

  We did, all of us. Deborah’s hand in mine was cold, cold as light. If I had anyone whom I counted as a friend it probably was Deborah, whose children were close in age to mine, and with whom I’d battled small temptations in the garden and the kitchen. She was a dark longhaired meek woman with exhausted eyes. My skin was pale, the palest it could be, Snow White pale, ghost pale, grass pale. Good skin, nice skin, not marred by a vein or freckle. Lilith had the same fine skin, the perfect covering, the wonderful elastic veneer that allowed for every interior change, compensated, stretched or shrank at will, smoothed or roughened with each change in weather. Sensitive skin that wrapped itself exquisitely over our bones. I sat there, holding hands, letting the energy pass through me and over me, absorbing the invisible rays of ardor and togetherness that we shoveled from ourselves into the middle of the circle. We basked in this communion, wallowed in it like animals on those mornings when we woke bereft.

  I squeezed light from Deborah’s palm, and she startled in surprise or pain.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, just the day before my cleansing,” I whispered back.

  She nodded and lowered her head again, into the steaming twilight of the morning’s meditations. I looked up, a thing I’d never done before in circle. I unbolted my eyes and from under the edges of my scarf I looked straight into the eyes of Bliss, who was watching me with the money eyes. Empty eyes. I knew better than to meet those eyes. I had nearly tipped my hand. If she knew what I was thinking, what I wanted to do, it would be over before it started. If she even suspected. Bliss, the one I had to watch, the undoer, the stone turner. I smiled vaguely, as though I was confused, waking from and then submerging once again in my dream. I closed my eyes again and from inside my own dark consciousness I stared down, far down, into the shaft of an empty mine.

  We were imaging gold. We were visualizing total and complete original support. We were seeing chunks, flakes, beads, veins, whole nuggets. We were seeing through the rock and gumbo, through igneous peat and shale, through the vestiges of lost black time, through the ivory teeth and petrified wood, through the bones and the tarry blood of dinosaurs. We were seeing gold, tasting it, biting gold coins, believing. We were going to start digging in the back field pretty soon.

  I BEGAN TO keep a diary—not the usual written record, but a mental diary of important moments. Here is a list I memorized:

  Billy walked into the bedroom one night and took a deep breath and sucked all of the air out of it.

  Billy waited until I came out of the shower and stood outside the door and as I stood there naked and streaming water he dried me with the heated iron of his gaze.

  Billy came toward me with his arms out, weeping, saying that no one could comfort him but me.

  Billy made the children and me kneel until we fell over gasping.

  We drank sour, clotted milk as he grabbed our necks, hissed in our ears.

  He said he loved us to the very death, me, the children, that’s why he would not take his eyes off us. He watched us sleep all night.

  Billy put his head in my lap the next morning, and snored while I sat still for hours, thinking.

  Billy caressed me until I fainted inside and then he stopped and fell asleep.

  Billy said he wanted me and then he made himself come.

  Billy brought me a little tray on which he’d placed a cup of steaming hot chocolate. With a boy’s pride he watched me drink it.

  Billy made me come with my eyes shut, with my mouth taped, with my ears sealed, with my legs and arms bound.

  Billy said he was going to make me his forever. Wait right here.

  Billy scratched the moving figure-eight sign of eternal life into the inside of my thigh with a needle. He sang to me to soothe me while I wept. He licked the blood away and pressed his mouth to my center to distract me while he touched the wound with alcohol. He rubbed raw ink, dark red ink, into the sign.

  His was there, even darker.

  The next night after he marked me, I brought my serpents into bed with me, naked. Get in, I said when my husband entered the room. Billy stretched his hand toward his pillow and the rattle shook.

  Gentle, gentle, I said.

  You get them out of there, said Billy. You get them out of here, Marn, please do it.

  They loved to curl in my armpits where my heat was strongest. It brought out their scent, which was a powerful, raw odor pure as sex.

  Look at them, Billy. They’re my lambs of god, I said.

  You get them out of here, Marn. They don’t like me.

  It’s because your flesh is cold and you sweat cold, I said. They don’t like the smell of sweat. And you’re too full of light. Me, I’m dark inside. Hot.

  There is something bad in you, said Billy. I wish that I could cast it out.r />
  No you don’t, I laughed. You wouldn’t cast out what you needed worst. It’s the bad in me you need so bad.

  Put them away, put them away right now, he said.

  But he loved to fuck me with the musk of the snakes on me. He was smelling his fear.

  WORK BEGAN AFTER the meditation. I was on kitchen attention. This was work we all did, even Billy, though at rare intervals. Cooking was done with love of spirit, and because Deborah was my partner I had looked forward to the tasks, especially since, in the middle of the afternoon, we were allowed to bring our children from the binding compound.

  We were careful and precious about the things we ate and what we fed to one another. We had to be. There wasn’t much. We tried to grow hothouse and hydroponic produce and failed. Our chickens were picked off by hawks. Our turkeys looked up in the rain and drowned. The geese flew off. The goats ate the garden. Weasels got the baby pigs and coyotes got the calves. Nobody knew how to farm except me and I missed my dad. Every two months we bought a fattened hog or steer and butchered it in the big cement killing room—an ugly process. I’d bought a bolt gun so I could kill efficiently, and after the moment of slaughter I always left. I couldn’t stand watching the others hack the animals apart. It was nothing but chaos and waste.

  Whenever Deborah and I had our children for the afternoon, we cooked. At least there were two of us who knew how to cook. We connected the big pasta machine and mixed up our dough for that, as well as for our breads and cookies. We peeled and riced our carrots for a creamed soup with dill. Our other vegetable was store-bought broccoli and we worried over it until we realized that if we mashed it with bread crumbs we could bake it with cheese and milk and it would go around further. When, at two, we went to get our children, we were exhausted and happy with our work and I could almost have forgotten myself in the flower of the day except that I couldn’t stop my eyes from catching on certain things—the lock on the gate of the play area, the intercom in diapering, the way the windows shut and locked from inside, the walls built heavy, reinforced, a bunker.

  A year ago I would have said the bunker kept the children from harm, from the outside, from corrupting influences, from the clouds and confusion of all that lived and breathed and moved outside the kindred. Now, gathering Judah, now, holding Lilith, stroking her unbearable warmth, bearing the joy of her arms hard and fierce at my waist, her whisper, small and vehement, Mother, a word banned except in secret, between us, I thought different. I kept my eyes fixed empty and smiled with careful neutrality over her shoulder. Anguish, their caretaker, gleamed in dull bereavement, a woman who’d lost all of hers. Drunk, she’d dived out of the flaming trailer. Left, her children burnt. Not mine. She wouldn’t get mine. I was gathering myself in order to escape with them.

  Judah breathed, hot, against my neck. Something had happened, again. Maybe the thing with Anguish, her prying touch, which I had complained about to Billy. I could not afford to complain again and alert any suspicion in his heart, so when I questioned Judah I begged for it not to be Anguish.

  “Did she?”

  “No, uh-uh, it was just, I disappointed Father, just now, just a few minutes ago, he was here and I got so nervous, got so nervous I forgot the week’s maxim from the manual and he derided me.”

  “Derided?”

  “He gave me schedule.”

  I held Judah, grabbed him close. Schedule! It meant that instead of school, Judah would be on schedule. There was always one of us in the room where we held our circle. One of us had to stay there and suffer. Pain kept the room clear for spirit, Billy had been told. But Judah was too young!

  When?

  Tomorrow.

  You’re sick. I’ll do it for you.

  There was a rule that another of us could suffer for the scheduled if they were too ill or being cleansed. I took Lilith and Judah back to the kitchen and smiled and joked and held them, as did Deborah, her children, while I searched the cabinet.

  “What are you looking for?”

  It was Billy, behind me, his voice deep and musical. But I had already hidden the soy sauce—a bottle of it choked down and Judah would run a slight fever. Enough to keep him off schedule, while I went on.

  TO STAND STILL for an entire day, to lose yourself in immobility, to feel your blood pump painfully, pool—I feared schedule so much that adrenaline surged up in me at the certainty. To get ready for schedule I ran. I ran my long route, my rattlesnake route, my porcupine grass route. To run is to revel in a pretend freedom. I spring along slowly, matching my breathing to my stride, passing the usual fences and fence lines, and thinking. Running is like riding on a train after a while, a motion that allows thoughts to drop down clear from a place in your mind that surprises you.

  I saw that I was running in a wide false circle, hopelessly awakened.

  Awakened, things had changed in me. Schedule, I’d never questioned. And the harm and the casual pain. Part of processing spirit was a discipline of the afflictions, for we only meet our maker in the unmaking, Billy would say. We mainly chose for ourselves. Bliss had a calcified heart. She beat her chest, and instead of a tiny diabetic’s needle she used a Novocain plunger, long and satisfyingly grim. Anguish mortified her fingernails. Frances slept on bare boards, no blanket. Ate flesh only, therefore stank. My friend Deborah practiced servile and incomplete sex and welcomed her migraines. Billy practiced—just being who he was. Pain enough.

  I ran farther and faster, in the loop I was allowed, perfectly warm in my light clothes, in the strengthening sun. The prairie garter snakes were out that day, warming themselves on rocks tilted toward the sharpest rays. They were black with yellow stripes and innocent yellow bellies. If you touched them, held them, they smelled of rotted flowers. I knew some of them by size and temperament. They were not poisonous like my lambs in their aquarium, but I loved the harmless ones too. They coiled up in balls to ride the winters out. Now they were stretched out lank and warm. Sage jabbed the air where the snow had sunk away from the earth in hot patches. I jumped burnished old hanks of grass and ran cow pasture nipped down to the meek and sorry ground, and still the sage, the sage, that flammable green, and farther over the fence a formation of snow geese returning.

  I stopped and flung my arms wide and I turned in six circles. Sky over me, sky under me, sky to my north and south. Sky to my west. One person underneath it all alive and wondering, soaked in the great surround. When I wheeled and bucked dust from my feet I was running for the pure joy of moving in the air, in this life, in this goodness soaking up through the dirt.

  That, I brought back to my discipline.

  The first two hours of schedule were the worst. The standing motionless seemed impossible. Every muscle that would ache hurt and every bone protested and the heart, bored with so much reverse direction and taut stillness, beat sullenly in my chest. I could hear it and the feeling of that bird moving in the cage of my ribs was a whir of sickness. The third hour, that was better, and the fourth was nothing. It passed like a hand on my forehead, for I was lost in what I was seeing. A warm curtain of pain billowed in, out with each breath, and then parted. Through the jammed sensation a door opened and my serpents slid out to speak with me. My prince of diamonds, my queen of red dust. They talked to me in low, protective whispers, and told me what to do.

  I listened and questioned and made certain that I understood each step. Then I bowed to them for my freedom. I thanked them for my life. I saw how I’d hold my prince rattler’s head to the cloth, and how I’d carefully milk the venom from his fangs into the small spice jar I’d cleaned and washed. I’d use three snakes more that way until I had enough venom to fill the syringe I’d taken out of Bliss’s medical cabinet—she had a whole box in there. I’d let the snakes go. I’d break their aquarium to pieces and grind the glass up and pour it down the well. I’d stick the tip of the loaded syringe into an apple and I’d roll it in a piece of coloring paper. I’d carry it. Anguish would demand to see what kind of picture Lilith had drawn, but I wou
ld paste on a great glittering grin and tell her that I couldn’t, that it was a surprise for her father, which was true.

  IT’S ON YOU, I can see it.

  What’s on me? What?

  It’s on you, I can see it, you’re gonna kill.

  I WAS DOWN, I’d collapsed, and the only way I could possibly get out of my situation was to have professed a vision, which I did. I’d learned from Billy about telling what I was going to do in advance. I whispered in his ear. I saw how I was going to fuck you. The hatred was an animal so big I wanted to let it take Billy in its jaw. But I couldn’t, not yet. There would be days and there would be days. There would be a time to run and a time to halt, a time to kill and a time to harvest. There would be a time to assemble and dissemble, a time to understand my vision and a time to carry it out. A time to hold myself away and hold myself away and a time very finally to give.

  That time finally came.

  I climbed my husband hotly and set my two thumbs at the pulse beneath his jawbone and I pressed and stroked until I had him cornered and weak and then like a cat I stole his breath. All that night I robbed him with my greed, making him hard with my mouth and drawing from him with all the rest of me, furious and careful, instructive when he waned, and punishing. Then good to him. Ironing. He lay still under me as under a warm iron. I drew myself over and over the sheet of his back and across and down his legs, molding to every part of him, soothing the evil twin away, unwrinkling that bad one who’d crumpled himself into Billy like an igniting wad and me the kerosene. I tied his hands to the sides of the bed and I measured his face with my own faceless hunger. Kissed him with my speechless lips. Set him task after task and then, when he’d finished, as the light increased, I decided that I hated him so much that I would not let him breathe until I’d soldered myself inside of him. Until I ruled him so that he could hurt no one. Until I entered his bowels like a stream of lead and hardened in his guts and drove him even crazier. No, I would not let him go until I sank through his bones like a wasting disease. Ate him from the inside, devouring his futility, filling him with a beautiful craving.