The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  I hadn’t known there was mail service then, but Neve assured me that mail was extremely old, and that it was Herodotus who’d coined the motto “Neither snow nor rain nor dead of night etc.” over five hundred years before the date she’d just referred to, the year Mount Vesuvius blew up and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. “As you may know,” she went on, “the site was looted and picked through by curiosity seekers for a century and a half after it was discovered, before anything was done about preservation. By then, quite a number of recovered objects had found their way into the hands of collectors. A letter that may have been meant for Pliny the Younger, from the Elder, apparently surfaced for a tantalizing moment in London, but by the time Octave could contact the dealer the parchment had been stolen. The dealer tracked it, however, through a shadowy resale into the hands of a Portuguese rubber baron’s wife, a woman with obsessions similar to Octave’s—though she was not a stamp collector. She was interested in all things Pompeii, had her walls painted in exact replicas of Pompeii frescoes—women whipping each other, and so on.”

  “Imagine that. In Brazil.”

  “No stranger than a small-town North Dakota banker amassing a world-class collection of stamps.”

  I agreed with her, and tried to remember what I could of Neve’s uncle.

  “Octave was, of course, a bachelor.”

  “And he lived very modestly, too. Still, he hadn’t money enough to come near purchasing the Pliny letter. He tried to leave the country with the bank’s money and his stamp collection, but the stamps held him back. I think the customs officials became involved in questions regarding the collection—whether it should be allowed to leave the country, and so on. The Frank Baptist stamps were an interesting side note to American history, for instance. Murdo caught up with him in New York City. Octave had had a breakdown and was paralyzed in some hotel room. He was terrified that his collection would be confiscated. When he returned to Pluto, he began drinking heavily, and from then on he was never the same.”

  “And the Pompeii letter, what became of it?”

  “There was a letter from the Brazilian lady, who had still hoped to sell the piece to Octave, a wild letter full of cross-outs and stained with tears.”

  “A disaster letter?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could say so. Her three-year-old son had somehow got hold of the Pompeii missive and in his play reduced it to dust. So in a way it was a letter from a woman that broke his heart.”

  There was nothing more to say and we were both in thoughtful moods by then. Our sandwiches were before us and we ate them.

  Neve and I spend our evenings quietly, indoors, reading or watching television, listening to music, eating our meager suppers alone. If a volcano should rise out of the ancient lake-bed earth and blow, covering us suddenly with killing ash, ours would be calm forms, preserved sitting gravely as the fates, staring transfixed at a picture or a word. I have seen other plaster forms in books. I know the ones from Pompeii were first noted as mysterious absences in the solid ash. When the spaces were filled with plaster, and the volcanic debris chipped away, the piteous nature of those final human moments were revealed. Sometimes, I think I am more akin to that absence, before the substance. I am less the final gesture than the void preceding it. I have already disappeared, as one does when long accustomed to one’s own company.

  Yet, I find my time from dusk to midnight wonderful. I am not lonely. I know I haven’t long to enjoy the luxuries of privacy and silence and I cherish my familiar surroundings. Neve, however, misses her two stepchildren and stepgrandchildren from the last marriage. She spends many evenings on the telephone, although they only live in Fargo and she sees them often. Both Neve and I find it strange that we are old, and we are both amazed at how quickly our lives went—Neve with her abduction and her multiple marriages and I with my own painful ecstasies. We are often surprised when we catch sight of ourselves.

  As I often remind myself, I am fortunate in my age to have a good companion like Neve, though she does luxuriate in dark thoughts sometimes.

  That night, she does have an episode of black moodiness brought on by the sugar in her coffee, though I do not say so, when I answer her first phone call. She speaks as she sometimes does of the strange beauty of her kidnapper, and what she taught him, or he taught her, on the mattress in the back room of his house. He became a decorated veteran and, when he returned from Korea, grew in charismatic perversity—he became the leader of a religion marked by unfathomable laws. A few leftovers have migrated, worn out and twisted, into the local churches over the years. But I’ve heard about Billy’s insatiable penis way too many times. I divert her, and she finally hangs up. But later on, she makes an odd discovery.

  Flanked by two bright reading lamps, I am quietly absorbing a rather too sweet novel sent by a book club that I subscribe to, when the telephone rings again. Speaking breathlessly, Neve tells me that she has been looking through albums all evening with a magnifying glass. She has understood something that she should have realized long ago.

  “My brother has the real collection,” she says, her voice squeaking in huge distress. “I took the money and let him paw through the stamps. At the time, I didn’t know. I hadn’t any idea that he knew what he was looking for. The upshot is: mine are worthless. His are worth…” She cannot speak. Her voice catches and she mews softly. Her lips are pressed against the receiver. “A million. Maybe. He cheated me.”

  I restrain my laughter and do not say, “Everybody knows you cheated him!”

  As she has continued to sift through Octave’s papers and letters, she has found something else that distresses her. In a file that she had never before opened, a set of eight or nine letters, all addressed to the same person, with canceled stamps, the paper distorted as though it had been wet, the writing smudged, each varying from the other by some slight degree—a minor flaw in the cancellation mark, a slight rip. She had examined them in some puzzlement and noticed that one bears a fifty-cent violet Benjamin Franklin issued two years after the cancellation, which was dated just before the sinking of the Titanic.

  “I am finding it very hard to admit the obvious,” she said, “because I had formed such a sympathetic opinion of my uncle. But I believe he was experimenting with forged disaster mail, and that what I found was no less than evidence.” She sounds furious, as though he had tried to sell her the item himself. (Perhaps, I think, she has.) “He was offering his fake authenticated letter to a dealer in London. There were attempts at, and rejections of, certification letters, too.”

  I try to talk Neve down, but when she gets into a mood like this all of her rages and sorrows come back to her and it seems she must berate the world or mourn each one. True, she has some tenuous family outside the area and will not be trapped here like me. But I do not want her to say it. As soon as possible, I put the phone down, and my insipid novel as well. Neve’s moods are catching. I try to shake off a sudden miasma of turbulent dread, but before I know it I have walked into my bedroom and am opening the chest at the foot of my bed and I am looking through my family’s clothes—all else was destroyed or taken away, but the undertaker washed and kept these (kindly, I think) and he gave them to me when I moved into this house. I find the somber envelope marked Jorgenson’s Funeral Parlor, and slip from it the valentine, within its own envelope, that must have been hidden in a pocket. It is a hideous thing, all schmaltz and paper lace. I note for the first time the envelope bears a commemorative stamp of the Huguenot monument in Florida. What a bloody piece of history to place on a valentine, I think, and yet, inadvertantly appropriate.

  Sometimes I wonder if the sounds of fear and anguish, the thunder of the shotgun, is hidden from me somewhere in my brain, the most obscure corner. I might have died of dehydration as I wasn’t found for three days, but I don’t remember that, either—not at all—and have never been abnormally afraid of thirst or obsessed with food or water. Apparently, so I’ve been told, I was fed by one of the Indians later hanged. No, my child
hood was very happy and I had everything—a swing, a puppy, doting parents. Nothing but good things happened to me. I loved getting high marks and having friends. I was chosen queen of the prom. I never underwent a shock at the sudden revelation of my origins, for I was told the story early on and came to accept who I was. The only thing is, I was allowed to believe that the lynched Indians had been the ones responsible. I believed that until Neve Harp set me straight—in fact, showed me all the clippings. Told me all the points of view. And now I think that my adopted mother even suspected that somewhere in our area there still might reside the actual killer, not Tobek but another—invisible, remorseful. For we’d find small, carefully folded bills of cash hidden outdoors in places Electa or I would be certain to find them—beneath a flowerpot, in my tree house, in the hollow handles of my bicycle—and we’d always hold the wadded square up and say, “Santa Claus has been here again.” But truly, I am hard-pressed to name more than the predictable sadnesses that pass through one’s life. It is as though the freak of my survival charged my disposition with gratitude. Or as if my family absorbed all of the misfortune that might have come my way. I have loved intensely. I have lived an ordinary and a satisfying life, and I have been privileged to be of service to people. Most people. There is no one I mourn to the point of madness and nothing I would really do over again.

  So why when I stroke my sister’s valentine against the side of my face, and why when I touch the folded linen of her vest, and when I reach for my brothers’ overalls and the apron my mother died in on that day, and bundle these things with my father’s ancient, laundered, hay-smelling clothes to my stomach, and press, and why, when I gather my family into my arms, do I catch my breath at the wild upsurge, as if a wind had lifted me, a black wing of air? And why, when that happens, do I fly toward some blurred and ineradicable set of features that seems to rush away from me as stars do? At blinding speeds, never stopping?

  When Pluto’s empty at last and this house is reclaimed by earth, when the war memorial is toppled and the bank/caf stripped for its brass and granite, when all that remains of Pluto is our collected historical newsletters bound in volumes donated to the local collections at the University of North Dakota, what then? What shall I have said? How shall I have depicted the truth?

  The valentine has always told me that the boy’s name should not have been scratched from the war memorial. Not only were innocent people hanged, unbearably murdered for nobody’s justice, but even that boy was not the killer after all. For my dead sister loved him in return, or she would not have carried his message upon her person. And if he had her love, he probably fled out of grief and despair. Perhaps he’d been there. Perhaps he’d seen her dead. Poor Tobek. But if not the boy, who was it? My father? But no, he was felled from behind. There is no one to accuse. Somewhere in this town or out in the world, then, the being has existed who stalked after my brothers and destroyed them as they fled toward the barn, who saw the beauty of my sister and mother and shot them dead. And to what profit? For nothing was taken. Nothing gained. To what end the mysterious waste?

  An extremely touchy case came my way about twenty years ago. The patient was an old farmer who’d lived his life on acreage that abutted the farthest edges of our land. Warren Wolde was a taciturn crank, who nevertheless had a way with animals. He had a number of peculiar beliefs, I am told, regarding the United States government. Certain things were never mentioned around him—Congress being one, and all of the amendments to the Constitution. It got so his opinion was avoided, for fear he would fly into a sick, obliterating rage. Even if one stuck to safe topics with him, he looked at people in a penetrating way they found disquieting. But Warren Wolde was in no condition to disquiet me when I came onto the farm to treat him. Two weeks before, the farm’s expensive blooded bull had hooked then trampled him, concentrating most of the damage on one thigh and leg. He’d absolutely refused to see a doctor and now a feverish infection had set in and the wound was necrotic. He was very strong, and fought being moved to a hospital so violently that his family had decided to call me instead and see whether I could save his leg.

  I could, and did, though the means was painful and awful and it meant twice-daily visits, which I could ill afford in my schedule. At each change of the dressing and debridement, I tried to dose Wolde with morphine, but he resisted. He did not trust me yet and feared that if he lost consciousness he’d wake without his leg. Gradually, I managed to heal the wound and also to quiet him. When I first came to treat him, he’d reacted to the sight of me with a horror unprecedented in my medical experience. It was a fear mixed with panic that had only gradually dulled to a silent wariness. As his leg healed, he opened to my visits, and by the time he was hobbling on crutches, he seemed to anticipate my presence with an eager pleasure so tender and pathetic that it startled everyone around him. But he’d shuck off his forbidding and strange persona just for me, they said, and sink back into an immobilizing fury once I’d left. He never quite healed enough to take on all of his old tasks, but lasted pretty well for another few years before he went entirely senile and was sent down to the state hospital. At an advanced age he died naturally, in his sleep, of a thrown blood clot. To my surprise, I was contacted several weeks later by a lawyer.

  The man said that his client, Warren Wolde, had left a package for me, which I asked him to send in the mail. When the package arrived, addressed in an awkward script that certainly could have been Wolde’s, I opened the box immediately. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of wadded bills of assorted (mainly small) denominations, and of course I recognized their folded pattern as identical to the bills that had turned up for me all through my childhood. I called the lawyer, who connected me with the nurse who’d found Wolde dead, and I asked if she could shed any light on his state of mind.

  It was the music that killed him, she said.

  I asked what music and she told me that Wolde had collapsed when a visitor named Peace had played a little violin concert in the common room. He’d died that night. I thanked her. The name Peace upset me. I could perhaps believe that the money gifts and the legacy were only marks of Wolde’s sympathy for the tragic star of my past, and, later, gratitude for what I’d done. I might be inclined to think so, were it not for so many small, strange truths. The name, the violin that belonged to the name, the music that spoke the name. And the first few times I had come to treat Wolde, I remember, he reared from me in a horror that seemed too personal, and pitiable. There had been something of a recalled nightmare in his face—I’d thought so even then—and I’d not been touched later on by the remarkable change in his character. On the contrary, it had given me a chill.

  THOSE OF YOU who have faithfully subscribed to this newsletter know that our dwindling subscription list has made it necessary to reduce the length of our articles. So I must end here. But it appears, anyway, that since only the society’s treasurer, Neve Harp, and I, have convened to make any decisions at all regarding the preservation and upkeep of our little collection, and as only the two of us are left to contribute more material to this record, our membership is now closed. We declare our society defunct. We shall, however, keep walking the perimeter of Pluto until our footsteps wear our orbit into the earth. My last act as the president of Pluto’s historical society is this: I would like to declare a town holiday to commemorate the year I saved the life of my family’s murderer.

  The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.

  Oh my, too apocalyptic, I think as I leave my house to walk over to Neve’s to help her cope with her sleepless night. Dust on dust! There are very few towns where old women can go out at night and enjoy the breeze, so there is that about Pluto. I take my cane to feel the way, for the air is so black I think already we are invisible.

  THANK YOU: Terry Karten, this book’s editor; Trent Duffy, this book’s copy editor; Deborah Treisman; Jane Beirn; and Andrew Wylie. Thanks also
to Sandeep Platel, M.D.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the editors of the magazines and anthologies in which parts of this novel have appeared in different form: “The Plague of Doves,” The New Yorker and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2006; “Sister Godzilla,” The Atlantic Monthly; “Shamengwa,” The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories 2003; “Town Fever,” North Dakota Quarterly; “Come In” (as “Gleason”), The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories 2007; “Satan: Hijacker of a Planet,” The Atlantic Monthly and Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards; “The Reptile Garden” and “Demolition,” The New Yorker; and “Disaster Stamps of Pluto,” The New Yorker and The Best American Mystery Stories of 2005.

  As in all of Louise Erdrich’s books, the reservation, towns, and people depicted are imagined places and characters, with these exceptions: Louis Riel, and also the name Holy Track. In 1897, at the age of thirteen, Paul Holy Track was hanged by a mob in Emmons County, North Dakota. The section “Town Fever” draws upon a Red River town-site speculation in 1857 by Daniel S. B. Johnston.

  Any mistakes in the Ojibwe or Michif language are the author’s and do not reflect upon her patient teachers.

  Part of the proceeds of this and all of Louise Erdrich’s books help fund Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore, and Birchbark Press, an Ojibwe-language publishing venture, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota (www.birchbarkbooks.com). This book is printed on recycled paper.

  About the Author