The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  I’d already picked my quote: The universe is transformation.

  I watched C.’s hair change from a sun-stroked blond, darkening as she delivered one baby after another in Pluto. I saw her wear it clipped short, and then she let it grow into a wavy mass that vibrated against her neck as she cooked, as she turned her head, as she walked, as she lay beside me or swayed on top of me or held me from beneath. Gray strands and shoots arched from her side part back into a loose topknot. Her hair turned back to sunny blond, as she began to touch it up. She grew it longer. By that time, its silken luster had dulled. I saw her eyes go from a direct blue, the shade of willowware china, dark and earnest, to a sadder washed-out color. Her eyes faded from all they saw as she healed and failed, and failed and healed. I even watched her clothes change, the newly bought shirts with the sizing in them go limp over time, losing status; from dress-up blouses that she wore to church, they became the paint-spattered clothes she threw on to water the lawn. I saw her skin freckle, her throat loosen, her teeth chip, her lips crease. Only her bones did not change; their admirable structure stayed sharp and resonant. Her bones fitted marvelously beneath her nervous skin.

  That day, since Ted was in Fargo on business, we decided it was one of our rare days and we went down to the basement. There was a back door and side door to the basement. There was a way out of the room that we used, and a kind of alarm, which was her dog, Pogo, who would bark at anyone who entered the house, even Ted. We were very careful. We did not upset the balance of things. We were never discovered. Only, because our times were so far between and our caution was so great, the intensity built.

  Where before it was like we were taking a trip, now making love became a homecoming. We realized that we were lost in the everyday world. So lost that we didn’t even know it. And when we made love, it was as though we had come a long distance. As though all the days and weeks apart we were traveling, staving off weariness, and at last we had arrived. When we were at home, in each other’s arms, lying in the cool of the basement afterward, it seemed that the world had spun into place around us. It seemed our harmony should be reflected in the order of the house, yard, and town. But when I left, I saw that only the cemetery was in perfect order, as I’d always kept it. Only the dead were at equilibrium.

  As I walked home, I thought about C.’s skin, the tiny freckles, and the scent of dish soap on her hands, the sardine oil, the white bread, the animal closeness when she opened her legs. I was used to the smothered emptiness, the sick longing I went through every time we parted. It would smooth out, it would even out, over the weeks. The universe is transformation. But for us, nothing changed.

  THE MOMENT I walked in the door, I knew that something was different. Something had happened—to Mother. The silence was peculiar. The suspension. As if we were playing some game where she was waiting to be found. I walked through each room, calling for her. As I’ve said, the house was wonderfully built, and large. At last I saw that she was crumpled at the foot of the basement stairs. The lights were off. She’d stumbled, or, more likely, thrown herself down on purpose. She moaned a bit and I grabbed the phone and called the ambulance. Then I crouched next to her, squeezing and straightening out each limb, checking for breaks.

  No, she didn’t have a broken limb. But she was as brittle as dried sticks, and the fall had jolted her mentally. She went in and out of what was real. Because she was in good health, she might live years, I was told, or only hours, as she was anxious and ready to die. No one could tell me much over the days she was in the hospital, so I finally made the call. I decided it was time to sell the house and put her in a safe place where she could talk to other old people and live easier, where she could perhaps improve.

  “It’s all right,” I said. Her eyes were empty and her pupils had dilated until it seemed I was staring into the blackness of her mind.

  I called the real estate agent from the hospital, and made arrangements for Mother to enter the Pluto Nursing Home. There was a double room available, and we got on the waiting list for a single. The van from the home came to the hospital, and I rode along with a brown leather suitcase of her things. That suitcase had belonged to my father, and I remembered her packing it for his trips to Bismarck. All the way to the retirement home, she would not speak. As we were settling her into her room, she suddenly barked, “This is not what I had in mind!”

  She was terribly frail. If I’d brought her home, I was sure she would succeed in killing herself and maybe, even at the home, she would starve herself anyway. She looked at the tray of pudding with contempt. Sipped a little coffee and said, again, “I tell you, this is not what I had in mind.”

  It was surprising how quickly she got used to the place. Over the next couple of months, she made a friend of her roommate and began to join the others playing cards and sharing shows she always liked to watch on television. She even gained a few pounds, and got her hair done and a manicure from the stylist who donated her time every week. I had to say that Mother looked good, that the decision was right. I had forgotten how social she was before her decline. Only, the house was not selling and I had already dropped the price.

  “Nobody with the income level that we need is moving here,” said the agent. “And the doctors, lawyers, and so on, they all build new at the edge of town.”

  “Maybe we could sell it to the town. It could be a museum. See how carefully I’ve kept it?”

  “You’ve done a beautiful job. I wish I could afford it, myself. We do have one interested party, but I’ve hesitated to mention him because he’s right up front talking about demolition.”

  “Ted.” I knew. That he would want the house had, of course, occurred to me. I’d never sell it to him.

  “Ted Bursap,” the realtor said, nodding. “He’ll give you your asking price.”

  “The tear-down king. I don’t think so.”

  “Well.” The real estate agent shrugged. “At least we’ve got him in our back pocket.”

  “Yeah, sit on him! William Jennings Bryan stayed in this house when he came through on a stump speech. The windows were made out east and shipped here in huge sawdust crates. The interior moldings and woodwork are mahogany, the library panels—”

  “You’re real attached, I know.”

  I was too attached to give up the house—it was true. I figured and finagled, but all we had ever had was the house. My salary from the cemetery endowment was just enough through the years to maintain us, pay medical bills and my tuition, and keep the house in good shape, even though I did most of the repairs myself and had let the back wall go to the bees. I knew they were in there. In summer the wall vibrated with their sensuous life. All winter it was quiet as they slept. I had finished my law degree as I was waiting for the house to sell, and I decided to take the state bar exam. Perhaps I’d try to get a loan, I would take out a homeowner’s loan and pay it off once I’d hung out my shingle. In the evenings, I sat on the back porch studying like mad, listening to the bees gather the last sweetness before going to sleep. Their hum made the whole house awaken and I could not abandon it or them. After dusk, I sat in the paneled library, appreciating the stillness and the clean odor of the swept and dusted rooms. I thought how nice it would be to live there with C. I imagined it; I got lost in imagining it. I dreamed it when I fell asleep in my chair. All of a sudden I woke in blackness, alive to desolate knowledge.

  In that moment, I knew what those who kill themselves over love know; I saw what passed before the eyes of dying men who fought idiotic duels. I’d wasted my life on a woman. All I had was this house. I called the agent.

  “Okay,” I told him. “Sell the place to Ted.”

  THE VERY NEXT day, I put all that my parents and I had ever owned into storage, and I moved out of the house into a motel. I soon heard that Ted had begun. I knew how he worked. His crew would dismantle the inside, prying off even the old bead board in the pantry, yanking out light fixtures, chipping the shadowy gold tiles from around the fireplace, disassembling the
elegant staircase, packing up the stained glass. Once the inside was gutted, Ted would rent a giant new machine with a great toothed bucket that he operated to claw the shell of lath and plaster to splinters.

  I sat in my room at the Bluebird, trying to read. I was scheduled to take the bar that week, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was as though the house was calling out to me, telling me that it loved me, that its destruction was a cruel and unnecessary adjunct to my decision to break things off with C. I couldn’t see what was happening to the house, but I could feel what Ted was doing as though it was happening to me. The poor motel room, so shabby with its faded wallpaper of fluttering swallows, the sagging mattress on its rickety bed, the sink of chipped gray porcelain, and worst of all—an attempt at cheer—a paper bluebird in a glassless frame, only filled me with low dread. I could feel myself chopped into, gutted, chipped out, destroyed. Finally, on the third day, reduced to bones or beams, I decided to act.

  I left the Bluebird and walked in the warm summer air to C.’s. For the first time, I went in through the front door, the office door, without knocking. Her receptionist told me that she was busy with a patient, and squawked when I walked right past her into the examining room, which was empty. I shut that door and went out into the back, into her kitchen, where I surprised her as she was loading a brand-new dishwasher. She had shed her white coat and was wearing a light cotton sweater the color of cantaloupe. Her pants were honeydew green. Her glass earrings and her necklace combined both colors.

  We stared at each other, and the sun went behind a cloud. The light in the kitchen changed from amber to gray. Her clothes deepened in color to rusted iron and bitter sage.

  “Did Ted tell you that I sold him my house?”

  From the look of shock on her face, I knew that he hadn’t, and I also knew, because I’d told her repeatedly of the situation with my mother, that she understood immediately what had happened.

  “Is he…”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll stop him!”

  “Just let him.”

  “Just let him?”

  “Pack your stuff,” I said. “We’ll go now. Our age won’t be an issue in the city, and you can start a new practice. Leave Ted the house. Let’s go.”

  Behind her, the dishwasher swished on, the water purred in and heated up. She turned away from me and faced the counter.

  “I forgot to add the cups,” she said.

  A cloud of steam shot out as she opened the door to put in two coffee mugs, but when she closed it and looked at me, I loved her again and I could not give her up.

  “Buy my house from Ted. I’ll pay you back, and we can live there.”

  “Is he working over there now?”

  “Yes.”

  She wiped her hands carefully, the way doctors do.

  What had she decided? She walked out the front door and I followed her. The walk to my house was about a mile, and this was the first time that we had ever been seen in public together, which, for a moment, made me happy. And then, when we were almost at the house, I understood that the fact that she’d allowed herself to be seen in public with me meant our love was over for good.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED, I saw that one crew was pulling out the front-porch columns, and another had started work on the rear wall of the house. Ted was in the back, in the gardens, and I tried not to gasp at the way he had allowed the workers to trample the blooms of portulaca and the still-green clumps of sedum into the mulched ground. The bees were everywhere, more than usual, and I felt a terrible guilt at having betrayed them. I apologized in a whisper as I looked around the back, as I saw Ted on the machine that he would use to tear into the back wall of the house.

  C. shouted for him to quit. He turned off the engine and she walked over and began to talk to him, her back to me. But he was at an angle and I could see that although he was listening to what she was saying, he was actually looking at me. He looked at me as if I’d taken something from him. A hard look, an easy flicker. Although I was unaccustomed to seeing Ted with her, I did understand that he knew. On some level, not a conscious level but deep down, he knew, as a man knows. He turned from C. and restarted the machine—he rammed it forward. Its claw made a rip in the wall and he backed it up to make another, but before he could move forward again, there was a roar louder than the motor. A darkness poured from my house. A ripsaw whined. A sweetness exploded from the back wall, and Ted and C. were swarmed by the bees.

  I was stung only twice, I think by young bees that did not know me.

  I retrieved C. and carried her straight to the garage. When I went back for Ted, I saw that he had fallen under a moving cloud that had stung him into silence. Honey dripped from the gash he made in the clapboards; honey dripped from the backhoe. I walked over to him and stood there and watched the bees moving across his back. They seemed finished with their fury; some flew off to repair the hive. As I waited for him to move, I reached out and tasted the honey from the claw of his machine. It was dark in the comb, and rich with the care I’d put into the flowers. I took a bigger piece of comb, brushed off a bee or two, and stuffed the dripping wax into my mouth. C., who had come to the door of the garage, saw me do this. She said it was the most cold-blooded act she’d ever witnessed—me eating honey while I watched Ted lie unconscious underneath the moving bees.

  I’ve always known that in her life she witnessed far worse; still, it was my simple tasting of the honey that caused her to allow Ted to continue with his teardown once he recovered and went back to work. The strange thing is, although he survived a massive number of bee stings then, one single bee sting did him in about a year later. His throat closed, and he was gone before he could even shout for help.

  I passed the bar exam and decided to practice Indian law. I got some land back for one tribe, went to Washington, helped with a case regarding tribal religion, one thing and another, until I jumped at the chance to come back. Only not to Pluto, but to the reservation where I would marry Geraldine and where, all along, the truth was waiting.

  Although we asked Mother to live with us, she refused, and insisted on remaining in Pluto. When I visited her, I would walk the town and invariably pass the empty lot where our house had stood. Ted had died before deciding what flimsy box to erect, and the lot had gone to weeds.

  One day as I was standing there, a car drove past and then stopped. An aged woman in a baggy summer dress got out and began to walk back toward me. Her dress, a lurid pink floral pattern, threw me off. As she drew near, I recognized C. She’d never worn a flower print before, only solid colors, and she had let her hair go white. Also, she had developed the hunch of an elderly, soft-boned woman. She looked pleased when she saw the look on my face.

  “Didn’t I tell you I would get old?”

  “I didn’t believe you,” I said.

  C. didn’t seem concerned in the least at my awkwardness. Rather, it confirmed her belief, I suppose, and she said in a taunting voice, “Did you think I’d stay beautiful? Age gracefully?”

  Staring into her face, I saw expressions—shame, defiance, maybe satisfaction—but no tenderness that I could recognize.

  “You did what you did,” I said, at last.

  “I had to so you’d leave.”

  I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother’s cards on the table.

  I could
see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.

  ABOUT A MONTH after our wedding, I was sitting with Geraldine. Between segments of the national news, we were chatting about some illness she’d once had, or I’d once had. C.’s name came up and Geraldine said, “Oh, that doctor who won’t treat Indians.”

  “What?”

  In all the time that I knew C., in all the time that I’d made love to her, I never knew such a thing. And there I was, a member of our tribe—which proved how off-reservation my mind-set was, growing up. But it was also strange I hadn’t heard this in my capacity as a judge, or from my mother. Then I remembered my head bumps.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, she won’t.”

  “How so?”

  Geraldine switched off the television, then returned to sit down beside me. By talking of C. we had already violated our tacit rule in which she was not mentioned. And it had gone further. Geraldine did not believe me.

  “You must have known.”

  It was the first time that my involvement with C. was acknowledged between us. Part of me wanted to drop the subject forever, but another part insisted I defend my innocence.

  “I didn’t know.”

  My words sounded false even in my own ears. There was a sudden cleft of space between us. Stricken, I said something I’ve always wished I could take back.