The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  As for Geraldine, if she knew about what I had done, and whom I’d loved, she never spoke, and I was always grateful to her for that. But although I have never told her the truth of my before, what occurred in Pluto, I’m sure that she knew why I stayed single for so long, and lived so quietly with my mother all those years before I met her. I never told her that it started when I was a boy not out of high school. I never told her about my first love or explained the difficult hold it had on me—I never told her about C.

  I wish that I could say on the night following our wedding I thought of only Geraldine. But the crumbs in our bed and the honey in our tea reminded me of other times, and a different bed. I do not think it was disloyal of me to lie next to Geraldine and recall that history, so sad in many ways. For at the same time I was quickened with wonder, and gratitude. After I was stung, I never thought that love would come my way again. I never thought I would love anyone but C.

  Demolition

  THE FIRST WOMAN I loved was slightly bigger than me. In bed, C. moved with the agility of a high school wrestler; she was incredibly quick. First she’d be on top and then in a split second underneath me with no break in the fluidity of our motion. It was like we were going somewhere every time we got in bed, cross-country or on a train trip, and we’d have trouble with hunger while making love. In certain favorite positions I’d get famished and weak. She’d make a sandwich or two and bring the food to bed. Sometimes there would be a glass of milk on the wooden table beside the headboard, and there was always a little squeeze bear full of honey, which she drank from like a bottle. She was a great believer in the restorative powers of milk and honey. On occasion, to rejuvenate me, she’d squirt the honey into my mouth, then dip a cloth into the cool glass of milk, and wipe me down. In summer, I soured in the heat, and one day my mother noticed when I walked in the door. My love affair with C. was clandestine, and I told my mother on the spur of the moment that I’d gotten work at the creamery.

  She misheard me.

  “What? The cemetery?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Which is how I really did end up working in the Pluto cemetery. So that my lie would not be found out, I walked over there the next day hoping to get a job. I was hired by a man named Gottschalk, who had been there most of his life. His little office was plastered with news clippings and obituaries. He had mapped out the graveyard and knew everything about each person buried there: when they’d come to the town and what they had done, how the family had come to choose that particular stone or monument, cause or moment of death, what property they’d left behind. My grandfather Coutts was buried there already, his grave marked by a tall limestone obelisk with these words at the base: Qui finem vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae. It is as natural to die as to be born. There was a space next to him for his wife. She’d remarried and never taken it. There was my father, too, with a nice dark stone wide enough for two. He also was given to quotes, though not in Latin. He liked Thoreau (perhaps why he stayed in North Dakota), and he detested all trivialities. Blessed are they who never read a Newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and, through her, God. My mother had already had her name incised next to his, along with her birth date. There was a blank for her death date, which I didn’t like, but she was comforted.

  Gottschalk pointed out some additional space and observed that my grandfather had bought a large family plot. There was room for me and my wife, even a couple of kids. It seemed far off and laughable then, but as time has passed I have become increasingly grateful that those places next to my ancestors lie empty and waiting. I have also looked at Geraldine and wondered if she would consent to be buried next to me, but have not yet had the courage to ask.

  I was seventeen when I began digging graves for the Pluto dead. I measured with string and used four tent pegs to anchor the string in a rectangle. Later, we bought a chalk roller of the same sort they used to mark the high school football field. I took the grass off in sections, peeling it like a scalp, and laid the squares on a piece of wet burlap. I used a toylike backhoe and finished the graves by hand with a straight spade. After the burials, I’d cover up the coffins and make a mound so that the ground wouldn’t dent once the dirt had settled. I cut the grass, too, with a finicky gas mower, and learned how to trim the trees so that they would grow in a graceful, natural shape. I learned how to keep the death records in order, and after a while I knew the cemetery map as well as Gottschalk did. I could easily guide people when they needed assistance finding a relative, or wanted to see the war memorial, the ornate Russian ironwork crosses, or the humble, common fieldstones that marked the graves of a family murdered here long ago.

  The thing is, this was just supposed to be a summer job before I went to college. But once I started having sex with C., I couldn’t leave sex, or leave her, or leave the town. Besides, once I started spending my days among the dead, I grew used to the peace and quiet, as Gottschalk had told me I would. I even started adding to his clippings of interesting people, places, or events. One controversy at the time was the proliferation in our town of bars that featured striptease dancers. There was a community battle as to exactly how naked they should be allowed to get. We clipped and posted all of the editorials.

  “If people could see things as we do,” said Gottschalk. “No matter how small the G-string or how big the pasty, we all end up in the ground.”

  Six months after that remark, I dug his grave. I prepared his last resting place with unusual care, as befitted one who had so precisely cared for the journey of his fellow citizens. There was really no one else to take Gottschalk’s place, and so at the age of twenty I became the manager of the Town of Pluto Cemetery, which helped a great deal in keeping my love secret—nobody wanted to date me.

  I don’t mean that women were put off by my line of work. On the contrary, it often seemed to fascinate them. But there was a certain lack of future in it, which girls could see. Once it was discovered that I was contented with my work, I wasn’t bothered, even though I went to bars and such. I got on the radical pro side of going entirely topless because I liked watching Candy, who took suckers from her regulation G-string and tossed them to us. They were hygienically wrapped safety pops. At one time a patron of the bar had inhaled a straight stem sucker, perhaps in delight at one of Candy’s novel moves. I hadn’t had to bury him, but it was close. So she gave out the same kind of suckers as grocery stores give kids. In fact, that’s where she got them—free. I got to know Candy, wanted her to stay in business, and was delighted to make C. jealous enough to fight with me.

  While I was seeing Candy, or actually, just flirting with her, C. renovated her old house in order to be near me.

  At one time the cemetery was set on the western edge of town, but the neighborhood has grown and now it is bounded by blocks of houses, all with their backs turned, politely or in dread, away from the gravestones and monuments. After the fight about my friend the stripper, C. moved her office to her house, which had a yard abutting the cemetery. She remodeled the living rooms and built-in the porch as a reception area. She left the back leafy and private. I could leave Gottschalk’s old office, which had become mine, or walk from our equipment shed, which was set just outside a windbreak of pines, and enter C.’s back door without being seen. The thing is, we never could part, though C. did lose weight, shrink down considerably, and after a while she was no longer bigger than me.

  MY LIFE WENT calmly along for five years after Gottschalk died. One day in early June, just after the lilacs and the mock orange had folded, I started, as always, working among the roses, the iris, and then the peonies. This succession of color and scent has always taken me out of myself, sent me spinning. As soon as I got up each morning, I started working in the gardens around the house. The bees were out, their numbers unusual in our yard, and I was surrounded by their small vibrating bodies. They followed me as I worked, but I like bees. They seem to know that I respect their nature, admire their industry, and understand that they are essentia
l to all that grows. I brushed them off gently, as I always do. In fact, I have been stung only twice in my whole life. After I finished weeding and watering, I went quietly into Mother’s room, where she slept upright with a canister of oxygen. The rigors of her condition made her sharp and bitter for a time, but even when she was feeling awful, we still enjoyed each other’s company. She was a sharp-boned little Chippewa woman. She liked to joke, had been very dedicated to my father, and was to me.

  “Where are you going?” Her voice was a rasp by then. Of course she knew where I was going, but wanted to get her line in.

  “To work.”

  “You’ll be digging a grave for me soon!”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Yes, you will!”

  She cried this out with baleful joy in her voice. I wheeled her to the bathroom door and she rose, supported herself on the railing I’d installed.

  “Shoo!”

  I closed the door. We were both dreading the day when even this last piece of privacy would be taken from between us. We were both thinking about the Pluto Nursing Home, but to get her in there we would have to sell the house, which was a beautiful and comforting old place on a double lot, where I’d gardened and planted all my life. Mother wanted to leave the house to me. To that end, she was cheerfully trying to die. Mother weakened herself by not eating and hoped to suffocate herself in her sleep by not using her oxygen. Her natural toughness was not fooled by these tricks.

  “All right, I’m done,” she called out. In the kitchen, she ate a bit of toast and sipped a cup of coffee. I tried to get her to drink some water, but she was trying to dehydrate herself, too. As she did every day, she asked me what I’d be doing in the evening. It worried her that I hardly went out anymore.

  “I’m going to play poker with you, Mom, then I’m watching the news and turning out the lights.”

  “You really need a wife, you know.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You’re not going to find one by sitting home with your mother.”

  “I know the one I want.”

  “Give up on that old, tough hen!” she said, swiping at me. She had found about C. quite some time ago. “Get yourself a spring chicken and give me a grandchild, Bazil. She cured your cancer, but she’s no good for you otherwise.”

  As a boy, I’d had a strange series of lumps on my head. They came and went until C. had affected a miracle cure—which was painless, as I remember, and left no mark. My mother has always been convinced that I had brain cancer, though it couldn’t have been much more than cysts or warts. Still, I don’t correct my mother as she thinks I owe my life to C., and that confuses the issue about our being lovers. I even say, sometimes, “Well, I’d be dead without her,” when my mother begins to pester me.

  I WAS ALWAYS eager to get to the graveyard in early summer. So few people died then. Mostly, there were just visitors. When I was working there, we had the most picturesque cemetery in the state. We were in brochures. Where the full sun hit, the peonies were just bursting from their compact balls into spicy, shredded, pink confettipetaled flowers. I brought a Mason jar to fill for C. I usually went over to her place just after five o’clock, when her receptionist left. I was careful to pass quickly through her backyard, along the fence.

  I remember that day specifically, because it was the day that she told me that she was getting married to the man who had remodeled her office.

  “It’s the only way I can break this off,” she said.

  I was bewildered. “I’m old enough now. Why don’t you marry me?”

  “You know the answer. I’m so much older.”

  I was twenty-five.

  “I thought it was going to stop mattering, some day.”

  “I used to think so, too.”

  “You think I care what people think? I don’t care what people think!”

  “I know that.”

  She had her profession, her standing, the trust of her patients to think about. I’d heard all of that again and again.

  “Can’t it be over now?” she asked, her voice weary.

  “No,” I told her, my voice as hard as hers was tired.

  And it wasn’t over, although she married Ted Bursap, a general contractor. Ted was only five years younger than C. He believed that there was a future in Pluto, and his wife had just conveniently died. I’d buried her myself—in plain pine. I’d taken that as a sign of Ted’s cheapness, though it’s possible that’s what she’d wanted. C.’s marriage so grieved me that I started correspondence courses in my father and grandfather’s profession, and found I liked the law. Of course, there was a terrific law library in the house, two generations of law and philosophy books. Not to mention fiction and poetry, but I’d already gone through those. I disappeared in the evenings. That is when I discovered my grandfather’s papers, and when because of him I began reading Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Plotinus. For a while, everything written since A.D. 300 seemed useless, except case law, which fascinated me and told me that nothing had changed since those men had written.

  Now that I was getting myself ahead, my mother approved of my not going out in the evenings. For a year after C.’s wedding, she and I were finished. I tried not to even look in the direction of her house. But we could not stay apart. One dusty summer evening, I watched from the cemetery as the sun turned white hot and then red. Through the pine trees, I followed this enormous ball of fire as it sank in the west. I looked in the direction that I had resisted looking, and saw Ted pull out of the driveway in his pickup. I walked between the graves and through the backyard the way I used to do, and there she was, waiting for me on the back kitchen steps. She had waited there every afternoon at five o’clock, all that year. She couldn’t help herself, she said, but she’d promised herself she never would let me know, that she’d let me get on with my life.

  Ted, it turned out, had gone to Hoopdance to work out a bid on some small construction job, and he would be an hour there and an hour back, at least. Those two hours were different from any we had ever spent before. The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other’s faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.

  The only problem with those old philosophers, I thought as I was walking back through the graves, was that they didn’t give enough due to the unbearable weight of human sexual love. It was something they correctly saw, though, as hindering deliberation, at war with reason, and apt to stain a man’s honor, which of course I accepted.

  Ted never found out, but I told myself that he might not even have cared. From what I had seen, love and sentiment had never interested him much.

  Ted had built many of those newer houses in Pluto, those with only a backyard cemetery view, and he was also responsible for many of the least attractive buildings in town. I’d hated Ted even before he married the woman I loved, but afterward, of course, I thought often of how happy I would be to bury him, how fast I’d dig his grave. And then after I began seeing C. again, coming home, knowing that Ted got to sleep with her all night, I’d imagine how satisfying it would be to cover Ted up and put a stone on his head. Just a cheap flawed rock. No quote. Next to his poor pine-boxed wife. I had also hated Ted Bursap because of the way he ruined this town—Ted bought up older properties—graceful houses beginning to decay and churches that had consolidated their congregations or lost them to time. He stripped them of their oak trim or carved doors or stained-glass windows, and sold all that salvage to people in the cities. He tore down the shells and put up apartment buildings that were really so hideous, aluminum-sided or fake-bricked, with mansard shingled roofs or flimsy inset balconies, it was a wonder the town council couldn’t see it. But they wouldn’t. Pluto has no sense of character. New is always best no matter how ugly or cheap. Ted Bursap tore down the old railroad depot, put up a Quonset hut. He was always smiling, cheerful. He did not love his wife the wa
y I did; she had not saved his life, either—she had only fixed his hernia. They never had passion, she told me, although Ted was a patient man and treated her well.

  Once we got back together, I had Ted to avoid, as well as C.’s receptionist and all of her patients—the whole town, in fact. But C. was the shout and I was the echo. I loved her even more. There were times we were so happy. One afternoon, she let me into the darkened entryway between the garage and kitchen. Inside, she had the blinds pulled, too.

  “You want some eggs?” she asked. “Some coffee?”

  “I’ll take some coffee.”

  “A sandwich?”

  “That sounds good. What kind?”

  “Oh…” She opened the refrigerator and leaned into its humming glow. “Sardines and macaroni.”

  “Just the sardines.”

  She laughed. “A sardine sandwich.”

  She made the sandwich for me carefully, placing the sardines just so on the bread, the lettuce on top, scraping the mustard onto both slices with a steak knife. She put the plate before me. This part of my day—five to six o’clock—was always spent in her kitchen with the window blinds shut and the lights on, no matter if it was sunny or dark. And although Ted could walk in almost any time and find nothing objectionable in our conversation or behavior with each other, we had continued as lovers. Just not often, like before. We were the main connection, the one who saw and understood. I told C. everything that was happening to me, from dreams to books I’d read to my mother’s health, and C. did the same with me. We never talked about the future anymore—she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.