The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  Warren enters the patients’ lounge. He sees me sitting on the sofa and he walks over, in his careful and dignified way, and he stands before me. He is wearing a rust-colored jacket and gray woolen slacks. He has dressed in his best clothes today. Maybe it is Sunday. He is wearing a striped tie of rich, burgundy, figured silk, and a shirt with turned-back French cuffs. Instead of cuff links, I see that he has used two safety pins.

  “You should have cuff links,” I mutter.

  “I’ll slaughter them all,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I answer.

  I LIE THERE days, and more days and days. I do not get out of bed. I do not read Anas Nin—she cannot possibly help me now. I am past all that and, anyway, she helped get me into trouble by providing the treacherous paradigm of a life I was always too backwards, or provincial, or Catholic, or reservation-or family-bound to absorb and pull off. I no longer want adventure. The thought of Paris is a burden. I’ll never see the back of Notre-Dame or visit the bird market or eat a croissant. The coffee I drink will always be transparent. Which is all right, as I am sick of endless coffee here. No, I’d better figure out where I am in this life. So I lie there trying to work it out in my mind.

  I try to start with the beginning—my family. When Joseph comes to visit me I decide that we should be more honest with each other, resume the depth of our relationship, and so I start by telling him about my drug experience and the days of watching reptiles.

  “What species?” he asks. He is studying to be a biologist.

  “Well, the usual. But I also saw cobras.”

  “That surprises me.”

  “They were so real, too.”

  “I wonder what part of the brain harbors such acute hallucinatory details, I mean, of something you’ve never seen in real life?”

  “The reptile brain, asshole.”

  “I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” he says after a pause. “I took drugs too.”

  “What?”

  “Marihootiberry. It didn’t do much.”

  “Probably because it was oregano.”

  “I got A’s in botany,” he reminds me.

  “You got A’s in everything. You’re not helping my depression. Look around you, it sucks, contrary to what the fans of suicidal poets think. Why don’t you go discover some kind of cure?”

  Joseph looks at me thoughtfully, then turns his attention to the people around us in the lounge. There is Lucille, glaring at linoleum tile, disheveled, and Warren, pacing, and others so dull and gray, slumped in torpor. Seeing the ward through his eyes, I am all of a sudden very disturbed. I’ve grown used to being part of this.

  “You’re not one of the crazies,” he says then, half-choking, a little desperate. I can tell now that it is dawning on him something might really be wrong. His sympathy wrecks me. Joseph quietly takes my hand, which is even worse. For your brother to hold your hand. This is like some deathbed experience. I shake his hand away but pat his wrist. He sits with me for a long time and we don’t talk and that is peaceful. After a while he gets choked up again and says that he will go into drug research. I whack him on the arm as hard as I can, and he smiles at me in relief.

  MY MOTHER AND father come down every weekend to see me. All I do when they visit is cry in sympathy for their worry over me, or fall asleep, and after they go home I miss them—my father who left the bank knowing that he didn’t have the stomach to turn down loans or foreclose like old Murdo. My father who like his uncle Octave collected only stamps. He went away to the war—came back for love—left money for love—my father the schoolteacher hero.

  And there is my mother, who loves Mooshum and keeps him going by taking away the bottle and walking him around the yard or down the road every day. I realize that I can only think of her in relation to other persons, and I am pained all over again at what seeing me in this hospital must do to her. I try to think of one thing that is all about Clemence, like my father with his stamps, Joseph’s salamanders, Mooshum telling stories, but I can’t think of anything.

  I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.

  I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.

  I think of Billy Peace, whose meek and shattered-looking members included at least one Buckendorf, a Mantle also. One or another of the kindred would materialize sometimes beside a person in the grocery store and seemed lost in wonder at the aisles of plentiful food. Some adherents blended back in with the other town and reservation people as they took modest little jobs. Billy’s radio hour was taken by another voice. The little tracts we used to find in the Pluto or Hoopdance phone booths, or tucked in wayside rests, were more and more rare, then tattered, just souvenirs of the existence of Billy Peace, perhaps on another plane, those gone too.

  Light falls through the wire-glass windows in a gentle swell. Mooshum told me how the old buffalo hunters looked beneath the robe of destruction that blanketed the earth. In the extremity of their hunger they saw the frail crust of white commerce lifting, saw the green grass underneath the burnt wheat, saw the buffalo thick as lice again, saw the great herds moving, flattening that rich grass beneath their hooves. Looking up, they saw the sky darkening with birds that covered it so that you could not see from one end to another. They flew low, a thunder. Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

  I’m just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged, half-Chippewa. I think of Mooshum and Shamengwa sitting long into the afternoon. In the bed where Nonette curled—so warm, so golden—I see the beauty of women holding out their Latin missals and walking through the wheat in white dresses, praying away the doves in an ancient, foreign, magisterial tongue. And Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, for whom my passion should have clued me, and Corwin Peace, who also had a hand in this, I think of them.

  I might go back and visit Sister Mary Anita. It might be a good thing to do. To speak to that monstrous, gentle face, to tell her that I’ve fallen from the church but that I still have visions, sometimes, of the mad swirl of her habit as she made adroit backhand catches and threw out a black-shod foot for balance. How the black wool snapped out in the air and then eddied back down around her ankles as she took a skipping hop and blazed the ball back to the catcher.

  The Concert

  ONE DAY, CORWIN Peace comes to visit me.

  I am surprised, but not embarrassed. He’s learned where I am from my aunt, and is feeling bad about my desperate phone calls. He remembers the acid he fed me, and how I locked myself into my room for days after I took it. He says he decided that he should look me up. So one day as I am slowly crushing one cigarette after another into a sand-filled coffee can—there are six or seven cans in the patients’ lounge, always full of butts—in walks Corwin. He is dressed in a long, black sheriff ’s riding duster, but he wears a strange orange woolen hunting cap with a low brim over his eyes. He has on high-top tennis shoes, bellbottom jeans, a ripped T-shirt. Under the dramatic duster, he is carrying his new violin.

  “Sit down.” I gesture with a newly lighted cigarette. I try to look bored, but actually I am excited. Corwin sits down in a plastic armchair and rests the violin case on his lap. His face is long and beautiful, his Peace eyes black and haunted. He has a short scraggle of unmowed beard. His ponytail flows down under his cap and snakes down his back. Corwin has always had lush brown lashes and those straight-across dramatic eyebrows. He can look at you steadily from under those minky brows, like his mother. He has some of what his uncle must
have had to attract so many followers—that odd magnetism. When he smiles, his crooked teeth look very white. He doesn’t smoke.

  “So,” he says.

  “So,” I say.

  We nod for a while like two sages on a hill. Then he opens the case and picks up his fiddle. As he tunes it, making such unfamiliar noise, the patients come out of their rooms or are attracted from down the corridor. The nurses venture from their station and stand, arms folded, chewing gum. Their mouths stop moving when he starts playing, and some of the patients sit down, right where they are, a couple of them on the floor, as if the music has cut through the big room like a scythe. After that first run of notes, the music gathers. Corwin plays a slow and pretty tune that makes people’s eyes unfocus. Lucille’s mouth forms a big O and she huddles into herself. Warren stands rooted, stiff and tall. Others sway, they look like they might weep, but that changes quickly as Corwin picks up tempo and plucks out a lively jig that has a sense of humor in the phrasing. At this point, Warren leaves his wall and begins to walk around and around the room, faster and faster. The music ticks along in a jerky way, a Red River jig. Then something monstrous happens. All sounds merge for a moment in the belly of the violin and fill the room with distress. My throat fills. I jump up. Alarm strikes through us. Warren stops walking and backs up flat against the wall. But Corwin draws some note out of the chaos in his hands, and then draws it further up and up, further, until it is unbearable, and at that very point where it might become a shriek, the note changes key a fraction and breaks into the most lucid sweetness.

  Warren slides down the wall, his hand over his heart like he is taking the pledge. His head slumps down onto his chest. The rest of us sit back down, too. Calm rains upon us and a strange peace fills our stomachs and slows our hearts. The playing goes on in the most penetrating, lovely, endless way. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t know when or if it ever really ends. Warren has fallen over. A nurse plods over to check his pulse. The playing of the violin is the only thing in the world and in that music there is dark assurance. The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful. I am small. I am whole. Nothing matters. Things are startling and immense. When the music is just reverberations, I stand up. The nurse is checking her watch and frowning at it first, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stand next to Corwin as he carefully replaces his violin in its case and snaps the latches down. I look at my cousin and he looks at me—under those eyebrows, he gives his wicked, shy grin and points his lips in a kiss, toward the door.

  “I can’t leave here,” I say.

  And I walk out of that place.

  WHEN I LEFT the hospital with Corwin, I took my purse and my diary and nothing else. I left Anas—the entire boxed set—annotated. In the margins where she described tall buildings—phallic? And where she noted the cast of light on a Paris afternoon—impressionistic? Where she loved a woman, question marks, exclamation points, checks, and stars. I didn’t know if I could actually bear leaving the safety of the hospital, but I just kept going until we reached Corwin’s car. I’d lost a lot of weight and hardly exercised, so I was dizzy and had to ask Corwin to stop the car once so I could puke. Corwin was living with my aunt and Judge Coutts, and he said that the two of them had changed his life and given him self-confidence. When he first moved in, he hadn’t entirely stopped using or supplying (of course the two of them didn’t know this), but after I went to the mental hospital he meditated on this form of commerce and ended up laying it down for good. He was straight now, he said, which gave me an opening.

  “Well, I’m not. I’m a lesbian,” I told him.

  He said I couldn’t be. I didn’t dress like one.

  “Like you’d know,” I said.

  He says he did know. He’d been around. “They dress like me, aaaay.”

  We drove along quietly for a while.

  “I’m really sorry I gave you that acid, man,” he said. “Did it, you know, change your head around?”

  “You mean did it make me a lesbian?”

  He nodded.

  “I don’t think so.”

  We drove some more. We’d known each other stoned, sick, drunk. We’d beaten each other up in Catholic school, so silence between us was comfortable, even a relief. I looked out the cracked car window—the world was beautiful all along the road. Some of the fields were great mirrors of melted water. Golden light blazed on the slick surface. I started feeling better. Sitting in a car with the boy whose name I had written a million times on my body, and besides that, in blood, and telling him about Nonette and having him take it pretty much in stride took some of the dark glamour from my feelings.

  “Do you actually know any lesbians?” I asked.

  “Not to talk to,” he said. Then, a moment later, “Or any I could set you up with, if that’s what you want.”

  A heated flush rose along my collarbone.

  “Hey,” Corwin said after a while, “you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy.”

  I didn’t answer, but I felt better thinking I did not have to rush out and do anything about being a lesbian. I could just exist with it and get used to it for as long as I wanted. Nobody could tell from looking at me. I looked basically the same, though frail. And I looked sad. I knew because my mother said my sadness made her cry. But sitting in the car knowing I looked sad made me feel self-consciously sad, which isn’t really sadness at all.

  As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear spring stubble, and the thin smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off at our house, I sat with Mooshum outside, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. After a while, I thought I’d be all right. Something about those cans—maybe the galvanizing—always made the water taste good.

  As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us and off to the west orange gold. A strange, unsettling radiance crept up the sides of the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched until the light began to recede. The air turned fresh and blue. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and Mama came to the door.

  “Come in here, you two,” she said, her voice gentle.

  Walking on Air

  A FEW DAYS later, I rang the bell at St. Joseph’s convent. About two feet up a dog had scratched to get in many times, scoring it white. I waited, rang again, and heard a faint tink-tonk sound deep inside. There was a firm step, and then Mary Anita herself pulled the door open. She no longer wore the strict black habit, but regular clothes. Nunnish clothes, a baggy cream sweater set and a long blue A-line skirt. Soft tie shoes instead of elegant black nun boots. Her hair surprised me, a foresty brown with gray streaks and swirls, vigorous and beautiful, though she had cut it short. She peered steadily at me. Her eyes had weakened, perhaps, and she blinked behind round glasses, then took them off as she opened the door.

  “Evelina Harp!”

  Her huge face lighted, but her eyes were still. She gestured me inside and so I entered, wiping my feet carefully on the rough mat. The walls were a calming tan color and the place smelled clean, like there were no old or extra things in it. I followed her into a small receiving room, which contained a couch, an easy chair, a box of Kleenex balanced on the chair’s arm. On the wall, there was an arrangement of dried flowers in a red willow basket. A crucifix hung over the dark television. She told me that she was happy to see me and asked me to sit down. She was much smaller now—the weight of her jaw had pulled her face down and changed the angle of her neck so she hunched and peered up from underneath her delicate brows, giving her look a penetrating gravity.

  We fell into an awkward silence, and then she asked me how I was.

  “Not so good,” I said.

  There was another silence, longer now, and I wished that I hadn’t come.

  “What is wrong?” Her gaze was tender and lingered on me. S
he was very happy that I’d visited, I could see, and now she was worried about me, one of her endless flock. I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth, so I said something else.

  “I’ve been thinking about becoming a nun!”

  “Oh!” She clapped her milk-white hands. Her skin was pure and clear, translucent almost. A frightening joy shone out of her, then faded.

  “It would be extraordinary if you had a vocation.” Her voice was hesitant.

  “I’m really thinking about it.”

  “Truly?” She folded her hands like the wings of birds. We both looked at her hands and I thought of the Holy Spirit, the dove settling to sleep, silent and immaculate.

  “I think not,” she said suddenly, raising her eyes to mine. “It’s just that I don’t see you in the convent,” she continued, gently. “Have you had some sort of special experience you’d like to share with me?”

  I smiled in dumb surprise and had really no idea what was going to pop out of my mouth. “I was in a mental hospital.”

  She looked at me sharply when I said that, but when I smiled, she laughed, that tinkly musical laugh that surprised people. “Yes, yes…. Were you cured?”

  “I guess so.” I paused, less awkward now. “Maybe you’re right about the convent. The problem is, I don’t believe in God anymore.”

  Her eyes narrowed under the silky brows. Her gaze, though quiet and neutral, unsettled me.

  “Sometimes I don’t either,” she said. “It’s hardest when you don’t believe.”

  “I imagined that you, I mean of all people…”

  “No,” she said, “not a firm faith.”

  “So the reason you became a nun”—my voice was low, I felt I might be pressing her too far now, but I wanted to know—“was it because you’re a Buckendorf? Because a Buckendorf hung Corwin’s great-uncle?”