The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  “Well, you are French, aren’t you?”

  “La zhem feey katawashishiew,” said Mooshum.

  “Watch out,” I said to Marn, “he’s going to flirt with you.”

  “Aren’t French girls pretty? You are.”

  “I’d rather be chic,” I said. “Of course, I have to wear this uniform. But my brother Joseph is at the University of Minnesota. I’ve visited him twice. He’s in science. I’m going to go into literature. I’m learning French, see?”

  I showed her the Berlitz book I’d found on a stellar day in the mission rummage, brand-new, not a mark in it.

  “Say something, say something!” Marn cried.

  “La nord, le sud, l’ouest, et l’est sont les quatre points cardinaux!”

  Mooshum looked disgusted. “That’s not how it goes! She tries to speak Michif and she sounds like a damn chimookamaan.”

  “I sound French, Mooshum. Je parle franais!”

  “Ehhh, the French, Lee Kenayaen!” He swiped his hand at me and bit daintily, gingerly, into his pie. His new teeth had been hard to fit and loosened easily. I still missed his old teeth, how he used to shovel the food right past them. He seemed happier then, even when they hurt. And the toothaches had always been a good excuse for whiskey.

  “You!” he said. “My girl, you’re going to be famous in school. Like your brother.” He nodded at Marn and winked. “No surprise coming from such forebears. She’s outta the royal line, anyway, on both sides. The great chiefs and the blue blood Scots, she’s related to Antoinette herself and through that the German—”

  “The Mormons have come around the house again with their genealogy charts and they’re trying to suck Mooshum into their religion by telling him that he’s got kingly ancestors,” I told Marn.

  “I know it to be so,” said Mooshum firmly, licking his fork. “And the Chippewa side, we’re also hereditary chiefs. And we’re quick. I escaped from Liver-Eating Johnson—he just got half my ear.”

  He tugged his damaged ear.

  “What?”

  “Listen,” I said to Marn. Her children had gotten up and were coloring quietly in the next booth. “We’ll split up the hours, you’ve got kids, so you take first pick.”

  “We’ll adjust,” she smiled, a little wan now. “And I think I’ll cut my hair.”

  “What’s this I hear,” said Mooshum, “about a snake ranch?”

  Marn opened her eyes wide at me and blinked.

  “I need to see the judge, Evey.”

  “Come and live with us for a while,” said Mooshum. “La michiinn li doctoer ka-ashtow ita la koulayr kawkeetuhkwawkayt.”

  “He says the doctor will treat your snakebites. He’s the doctor, I’m sure. Just come over tomorrow and we’ll visit Geraldine’s. Judge Coutts will be there.”

  Marn laughed, but she looked spooked, too, and gathered up her children. After she left, I said to Mooshum, “You scared her away with that snake stuff.”

  He looked at me. “The old women talk about her. The old women know.”

  “So you’ve been with the old women again?”

  “Not my precious lovey. Your mama won’t bring me over there to visit. They have even hid the stamps on me! I cannot write to her!”

  “I’ll get you stamps,” I said. “The worst Aunt Neve can do is not open the letter.”

  “You are a very good granddaughter,” Mooshum beamed. “And for sure! You look more French than any girl around here.”

  Judge Antone Bazil Coutts

  Shamengwa

  FEW MEN KNOW how to become old. Shamengwa did. Even if Geraldine hadn’t been his niece, I would have visited Shamengwa. I admired him and studied him. I thought I’d like to grow old the way he was doing it—with a certain style. Other than his arm, he was an extremely well-made old person. Anyone could see that he had been handsome, and he still cut a graceful figure, slim and medium tall. His fine head was covered with a startling white mane of thick hair, which he was proud of and every few weeks had carefully trimmed and styled—by Geraldine, who still traveled in from the family land just to do it.

  He was fine-looking, yes, but there were other things about him. Shamengwa was a man of refinement who practiced clean habits. He prepared himself carefully to meet life every day. Ojibwe language in several dialects is spoken on our reservation, along with Cree, and Michif—a mixture of all three. Owehzhee is one of the words used for the way men get themselves up—neaten, scrub, pluck stray hairs, brush each tooth, make precise parts in our hair, and, these days, press a sharp crease down the front of our blue jeans—in order to show that although the government has tried in every way possible to destroy our manhood, we are undefeatable. Owehzhee. We still look good and know it. The old man was never seen in disarray, but yet there was more to it.

  He played the fiddle. How he played the fiddle! Although his arm was so twisted and disfigured that his shirts had to be carefully altered and pinned on that side to accommodate the gnarled shape, yet he had agility in that arm, even strength. With the aid of a white silk scarf, which he chose to use rather than just any old rag, Shamengwa tied his elbow, ever since he was very young, into a position that allowed the elegant hand and fingers at the end of the damaged arm full play across the fiddle’s strings. With his other hand and arm, he drew the bow.

  Here I come to some trouble with words. The inside became the outside when Shamengwa played music. Yet inside to outside does not half sum it up. The music was more than music—at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we’d lived through and didn’t want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can’t live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.

  Thus, Shamengwa wasn’t wanted at every party. The wild joy his jigs and reels brought forth might just as soon send people crashing on the rocks of their roughest memories and they’d end up stunned and addled or crying in their beer. So it is. People’s emotions often turn on them. Geraldine sometimes drove him to fiddling contests or places where he could perform in more of a concert setting. He was well-known. He even won awards, prizes of the cheap sort given at local or statewide musical contests—engraved plaques and small tin loving cups set on plastic pedestals. These he kept apart from the other objects in his house. He placed them on a triangular scrap of shelf high in one corner. The awards were never dusted. When his grandniece, Clemence’s girl, was young, she asked him to take them down for her to play with. They came apart and had to be reglued or revealed patches of corrosion in the shiny gilt paint. He didn’t care. He was, however, somewhat fanatical about his violin.

  He treated this instrument with the reverence we accord our drums, which are considered living beings and require from us food, water, shelter, and love. They have their songs, which are given to their owners in sleep, and they must be dressed up according to their personalities, in beaded aprons and ribbons and careful paints. So with the violin that belonged to Shamengwa. He fussed over his instrument, stroked it clean with a soft cotton hankie, kept it in a cupboard from which he had removed two shelves, laid it carefully away every night in a case constructed to its shape, a leather case that he kept well polished as his shoes. The case was lined with velvet that was faded by time from heavy blood-red to a watery streaked violet. I don’t know violins, but his was thought to be exceptionally beautiful; its sound was certainly human, and exquisite. It was generally understood that the violin was old and quite valuable. So when Geraldine came to trim her uncle’s hair one morning and found Shamengwa still in bed with his feet tied to the posts, she glanced at the cupboard even as she unbound him and was not surprised to see the lock smashed an
d the violin gone.

  Things will come to me through the grapevine of the court system or the tribal police. Gossip, rumors, scuttlebutt, b.s., or just flawed information. I always tune in and I even take notes on what I hear around. It’s sometimes wrong, or exaggerated, but just as often there is contained a germ of useful truth. For instance, in this case, the name Corwin Peace was on people’s lips, although there was no direct evidence he had committed the crime.

  Corwin was one of those I see again and again. Of course, I knew more than I really should have about his origins. It would have been a miracle, I suppose, if he’d turned out well. He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen. A mistake, but one that we kept trying to salvage because he was so young. Some thought him of no redeeming value whatsoever. A sociopath. A borderline. A clever manipulator drugged dangerous ever since he’d dropped out of school. Others pitied him and blamed his behavior on his father’s spectacular crime, or his mother’s subsequent drinking. Still others thought they saw something in him that could be saved—perhaps the most dangerous idea of all. He was a petty dealer with a car he drove drunk and a string of girlfriends. He was, unfortunately, good-looking, with the features of an Edward Curtis subject, though the hard living was already beginning to make him puffy.

  Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin would have sat high on a bale of buffalo robes or beaver skins and sung traveling songs to the screeching wheels of an oxcart, now he drove a banged-up Chevy Nova with hubcaps missing and back end dragging. He drove it hard and he drove it all cranked up, but he was rarely caught because he traveled such odd and erratic hours, making deals, whisking to Minneapolis, heading out the same night. He drove without a license—that had been taken from him. And he was always looking for money—scamming, betting, shooting pool, even now and then working a job that, horrifyingly, put him on the other side of a counter frying Chinese chicken strips. I kept careful track of Corwin because it seemed I was fated from the beginning to witness the full down-arcing shape of his life’s trajectory. I wanted to make certain that if I had to put him away, I could do it and sleep well that same night. Now, although the violin was never seen in his possession and we had impounded the Nova, the police kept an eye on him because they were certain he would show his hand and try to sell the instrument.

  As days passed, Corwin laid low and picked up his job at the deep-fryer. He probably knew that he was being watched because he made one of those rallying attempts that gave heart to so many of his would-be saviors. He straightened out, stayed sober, used his best manner, and when questioned was convincingly hopeful about his prospects and affable about his failures.

  “I’m a jackass,” he admitted, “but I never sank so low as to rip off the old man’s fiddle.”

  Yet he had, of course. We just didn’t know where he could be hiding it or whether he had the sense ultimately to bring it to an antiques dealer or an instrument shop somewhere in the Cities. While we waited for him to make his move, there was the old man, who quickly began to fail. I had not realized how much I’d loved to hear him play—sometimes out on his scrubby back lawn after dusk, sometimes, as I’ve mentioned, at those little concerts, and other times just for groups of people who would gather round at Clemence and Edward’s house. It wasn’t that I heard him more than once or twice a month, but I found, like many others, that I depended on his music. After weeks had passed a dull spot opened and I ached with a surprising poignancy for Shamengwa’s loss, which I honestly shared, so that I had to seek him out and sit with him as if it would help to mourn the absence of his music together. One thing I wanted to know, too, was whether, if the violin did not turn up, we could get together and buy him a new, perhaps even a better instrument. I hesitated to ask him, as though my offer was a selfish thing. I didn’t know. So I sat in Shamengwa’s little front room one afternoon, and tried to find an opening.

  “Of course,” I said, “we think we know who took your fiddle. We’ve got our eye on him.”

  Shamengwa swept his hair back with the one graceful hand, and said, as he had many times, “I slept the whole damn time.”

  Yet in trying to free himself from the bed, he’d fallen half off the side. He’d scraped his cheek and the white of his eye on that side was an angry red. He moved with a stiff, pained slowness, the rigidity of a very old person. It took him a long time to straighten all the way when he tried to get up.

  “You stay sitting. I’ll boil the tea.” Geraldine was gentle and practical. No one ever argued with her. Shamengwa lowered himself piece by piece back into a padded brown rocking chair. He gazed at me—or past me, really. I soon understood that, although he spoke quietly and answered questions, he was not fully engaged in the conversation. In fact, he was only half present, and somewhat disheveled, irritable as well, neither of which I’d ever seen in him. His shirt was buttoned wrong, the plaid askew, and he hadn’t shaved the smattering of whiskers from his chin that morning. The white stubble stood out against his skin. His breath was sour and he didn’t seem glad at all that I had come.

  We sat together in a challenging silence until Geraldine brought two mugs of hot, strong, sugared tea and got another for herself. Shamengwa’s hand shook as he lifted the cup, but he drank. His face cleared a bit as the tea went down, and I decided there would be no better time to put forth my idea.

  “Uncle,” I said, “we would like to buy a new fiddle for you.”

  Shamengwa took another drink of his tea, said nothing, but put down the cup and folded his hands in his lap. He looked past me and frowned in a thoughtful way. I did not think that was a good sign.

  “Wouldn’t he like a new violin?” I appealed to Geraldine. She shook her head as if she was both annoyed with me and exasperated with her uncle. We sat in silence. I didn’t know where to go from there. Shamengwa had closed his eyes. He leaned far back in his chair, but he wasn’t asleep. I thought he might be trying to get rid of me. But I was stubborn and did not want to go. I wanted to hear Shamengwa’s music again.

  “Oh, tell him about it, Uncle,” said Geraldine at last.

  Shamengwa leaned forward, and bent his head over his hands as though he were praying.

  I relaxed now and understood that I was going to hear something. It was that breathless gathering moment I’ve known just before composure cracks, the witness breaks, the truth comes out, the unsaid is finally heard. I am familiar with it and although this was not exactly a confession, it was, as it turned out, something not generally known on the reservation. Shamengwa had owned his fiddle for such a long while that nobody knew, or remembered anyway, a time when he had been without it. But there had actually been two fiddles in his life. There was his father’s fiddle, which he played while he was a boy, and then another, which came to find him through a dream.

  The First Fiddle

  MY MOTHER LOST a baby boy to diphtheria when I was but four years old, said Shamengwa, and it was that loss which turned my mother strictly to the church. Before that, I remember my father playing chansons, reels, jigs, but after the baby’s death my mother made him put the fiddle down and take Holy Communion. We moved off our allotment for a time and lived right here, but in those days trees and bush still surrounded us. There were no houses to the west. We were not considered to live in the settlement at all and we pastured our horses where the Dairy Queen now stands. My mother out of grief became rigid and tightly ordered with my father, my older brother and sister, and me. Our oldest brother, or half brother, had already left home. He went beyond her and became a priest. We understood why she held to strange laws, and we let her rule us, but we all thought she would relent once the year of first mourning was up. Where before we had a lively house that people liked to visit, now there was quiet. No wine and no music. We kept our voices down because our noise hurt, she said, and there was no laughing or teasing by my father, who had once been a dancing and hilarious man. I missed the little one too. We had put him in the Catholic cemetery underneath a small, rounded,
white headstone, where he lies to this day.

  I don’t believe my mother meant things to change so, but she and my father had lost everything once already, and this sorrow she bore was beyond her strength. As though her heart was buried underneath that stone as well, she turned cold, turned away from the rest of us, lost her feelings. Now that I am old and know the ways of grief I understand she felt too much, loved too hard, and was afraid to lose us as she had lost my brother. But to a little boy these things are hidden. It only seemed to me that along with that baby I had lost her love. Her strong arms, her kisses, the clean-soap smell of her face, her voice calming me, all of this was gone. She was like a statue in a church. Every so often we would find her in the kitchen, standing still, staring through the wall. At first we touched her clothes, petted her hands. My father kissed her, spoke gently into her ear, combed her short hair—she was a full-blood and in the traditional way had cut off her hair in mourning. It made a fat bush around her head. Later, after we had given up, we just walked around her as you would a stump. Our oldest, my half brother, came and visited. He took my brother away with him to serve at Holy Mass. The house went quiet, my sister took up the cooking, my father became a silent, empty ear, and gradually we accepted that the lively, loving mother we had known wasn’t going to return. If she wanted to sit in the dark all day, we let her. We didn’t try and coax her out. More often, she spent her time at the church. She attended morning Mass and stayed on, her ivory and silver rosary draped in her right fist, her left hand wearing the beads smoother, smaller, until I thought for sure they would disappear between her fingers.

  Just after the great visitation of doves, we heard that Seraph had run away. While the rest of the family went to church to pray for his return, one day, I became restless. I wished that I could run away too. I’d been left home with a cold and my sister had instructed me to keep the stove hot—I wasn’t really all that sick but had produced a dreadful, gravelly cough to fool my sister into letting me skip church. I began to poke around, and soon enough I came across the fiddle that my mother had forced my father to stop playing. So there it was. I was alone with it. I was now five or six years old, but I could balance a fiddle and before all of this I had seen my father use the bow. That day, I got sound out of it all right, but nothing satisfactory. Still, the noise made my bones shiver. I put the fiddle back carefully, well before they came home, and climbed underneath the blankets when they walked into the yard. I pretended to sleep, not because I wanted so badly to keep up the appearance of being sick, but because I could not bear to return to the way things were. Something had happened. Something had changed. Something had disrupted the nature of all that I knew. You might think it had to do with my brother running away. But no. This deep thing had to do with the fiddle.