The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  Father Cassidy’s lips turned purple and he tried to roar, though it came out a gurgle. “Heresy! What you describe. Heresy. The bread does indeed become the body. The wine does indeed become the blood. Yet it does not compare in any way to the eating of another human.” Father Cassidy wagged a finger. “I fear you’ve gone too far now! I fear you have stepped over the edge with this talk! I fear you will be required to make a very special, and grave, confession for us to allow you back into the church.”

  “Then back to the blanket I go!” Mooshum was incensed with delight. “The old ways are good enough for me. I’ve seen enough of your church. For a long time I have had my suspicions. Why is it you priests want to listen to dirty secrets, anyway?”

  “All right, be a pagan, burn in hell!” Father Cassidy restrained a belch and put out his cup for another shot. The bottle was nearly empty now.

  “We don’t believe in the everlasting kind of hell, remember that?” Shamengwa said primly.

  “We put our faith in a merciful hell,” said Mooshum.

  “Then there’s nothing for me to do!”

  Father Cassidy threw his hands up and staggered to the door, fumbled his way out, made it down the steps. Joseph and I sat on the couch still sipping cold water. Shamengwa and Mooshum stared musingly at the door. Shamengwa had just stirred himself to pick up his fiddle when there was a terrific sound from outside, a resounding thud, like a dropped beef. I was closest to the door and got out first. Father Cassidy was laid out on the grass like a massive corpse. He looked quite dead, but when I bent over him I saw that his breath still moved the froth bubbles at his lips.

  “Oh no!” Joseph cried out, kneeling at the other end of Father Cassidy. He peeled something from the sole of Father Cassidy’s black cleric’s shoe, and cradled it in his two hands. He walked away with the flattened salamander, glaring back once at the felled priest.

  Mooshum gaped at us, holding on to the wood railing. He and Shamengwa did not trust their feet to negotiate the front steps and were picking their way down sideways, as if descending a steep hill.

  “He slipped on a salamander,” I said.

  “Does he live yet?”

  “He’s breathing.”

  “Payhtik, mon frère,” he said as Shamengwa stepped carefully down the road to his own house. Shamengwa waved his good arm without turning back. Mooshum went out to his car seat on the back lawn, lay down across it, and fell asleep. I stayed with Father Cassidy, who snored in the grass for a little while. I helped him to his feet when he came to, and then to his car, which he drove wanderingly up the hill.

  Things would be harder, now, for Father Cassidy. As I went back inside to stash the empty bottle and wash out Mama’s cups I knew that word would spread—the priest drunk, tripped up by the devil in the form of a mud puppy, cursing an old man to hell, all of these things would be recounted by Mooshum and Shamengwa when talking to their cronies. And Mooshum really did follow through with what had seemed like a drunken threat. He cast his lot in with the traditionals not long afterward and started attending ceremonies, which took place out on the farther reaches of the reservation and to which our dad drove him secretly. For Clemence was furious with Mooshum’s defection. When I asked my grandfather why he’d decided to change so drastically, so late in his years, Mooshum told me.

  “There is a moment in a man’s life when he knows exactly who he is. Old Hop Along did not mean to, but he helped me to that moment.”

  “You were drunk, though, Mooshum.”

  “Awee, tawpway, my girl, you speak the truth. But my drunkenness had cleared my mind. Seraph Milk had a full-blood mother who died of sorrow with no help from the priest. I saw that I was the son of that good woman, silent though she was. Also, I was getting nowhere with the Catholic ladies. I thought that I might find a few good-looking ones out in the bush.”

  “That’s not much of a reason.”

  “You are wrong there, it is the best reason.”

  And Mooshum winked at me as if he knew that I went to church because I hoped to see Corwin.

  Sister Godzilla

  MY LOVE FOR Corwin Peace turned to outraged betrayal when he told the other boys that he had kissed me. I was wretchedly angry with love now, determined to revenge myself on Corwin no matter how much my heart broke to do it. But I soon found that my heart didn’t break at all, and I enjoyed tormenting Corwin. That whole summer, I struck him out whenever he dared join a game, and I looked forward to the moment when he slung his bat behind him in despair, sometimes cracking the shins of his teammates, turning their jeers to cries of pain. I shot at him with a BB gun. Years later, he claimed that my BB had migrated through his body and came out his kidney, causing him agony. My brother and I rode our ponies everywhere and took turns giving everybody rides except Corwin, around whom I barrel-raced one day in a circle, slowly obscuring him with dust as he stood and watched, hands out, helpless.

  Yet, no matter how I tried to humiliate him, Corwin stayed in love with me. We grew side by side. I don’t know what happened to him underneath his clothes, but that summer my breasts turned to sore buds, and I almost cried when I found hair where it didn’t belong. Stoically, I endured my body’s new secrets. Summer went and the air cooled. I got a new dress, saggy in the bust. We were in the sixth grade, at last, and it was the first day of school. Mama got us up and shoved us onto the dirt road that led up the hill. We dawdled until we heard the other children on the playground, then we ran. Two lines formed as always. We went in, already knowing our classroom. The door banged shut and we were alone with our teacher.

  The habits of Franciscan nuns still shrouded all but their faces, and so each of the new nun’s features were emphasized, read forty times over in astonishment. Outlined in a stiff white frame of starched linen, Sister’s eyes, nose, and mouth leapt out, a mask from a dream, a great raw-boned jackal’s muzzle.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Corwin, just loud enough for me to hear.

  I had decided to ignore him for the first month, at least, but the nun’s extreme ugliness was irresistible.

  “Godzilla,” I whispered, turning to him, raising my eyebrows.

  The teacher’s name was really Sister Mary Anita. People who knew her from before she was a nun said she was a Buckendorf. She was young, in her twenties or thirties, and so swift of movement for all her hulking size that, walking from the back of the room to the front, she surprised her students, made us picture athlete’s legs and muscles concealed in the flow of black wool. When she swept the air in a gesture meant to include all of us in her opening remarks, her hands fixed our gazes. They were the opposite of her face. Her hands were beautiful, white as milk glass, the fingers straight and tapered. They were the hands in the hallway print, of Mary underneath the cross. They were the hands of the apostles, cast in plastic and lit at night on the tops of television sets. Praying hands.

  Ballplayer’s hands. She surprised us further by walking onto the gravel field at recess, the neck piece cutting hard into the flesh beneath her heavy jaw. When, with a matter-of-fact grace, she pulled from the sleeve of her gown a mitt of dark mustard-colored leather and raised it, a thrown softball dropped in. Her skill was obvious. Good players rarely seemed to stretch or change their expressions. They simply tipped their hands toward the ball like magnets, and there it was. As a pitcher, Mary Anita was a swirl of wool, graceful as the windblown cape of Zorro, an emotional figure that stirred something up in me. By the time I got up to bat, I was so thoroughly involved in the feeling that, as I pounded home plate, a rubber dish mat, beat the air twice in practice swings, and choked up on the handle, I decided that I would have no choice but to slam a home run.

  I did not. In fact I whiffed worse than Corwin, in three strikes never ticking the ball or fouling. Disgusted with myself, I sat on the edge of the bike rack and watched as Sister gave a few balls away and pitched easy hits to the rest of the team. It was as if, from the beginning, the two of us had sensed what was to come. Or then again perhaps Mary Ani
ta’s information simply came from my former teachers, living in the redbrick convent across the road from school. Hard to handle. A smart-off. Watch out when you turn your back. They were right. After recess, my pride burned, I sat at my desk and drew a dinosaur encased in a nun’s robe, the mouth open in a roar. The teeth, long and jagged, grayish white, absorbed me—I wanted to get the shadows right, the dark depth of the gullet behind them. I worked so hard on the picture that I didn’t notice as the room hushed around me. I felt the presence, though, the tension of regard that dropped over me as Mary Anita stood watching. As a mark of my arrogance, I kept drawing.

  I shaded in the last tooth and leaned back to frown at my work. The page was plucked into the air before I could pretend to cover it. There was silence. My heart sped with excitement.

  “You will remain after school,” the nun pronounced.

  The last half hour passed. The others filed past me, smirking and whispering. And then the desk in front of me filled suddenly. There was the paper, the carefully rendered dinosaur caught in mid-roar. I stared at it furiously, my thoughts a blur of anticipation. I was not afraid.

  “Look at me,” said Mary Anita.

  It was at that moment, I think, that it happened. I couldn’t lift my head. My throat filled. I traced the initials carved into the desktop, my initials.

  “Look at me,” Mary Anita said to me again. My gaze was drawn upward, upward on a string, until I met the eyes of my teacher. Her eyes were the deep blue of Mary’s cloak, electrically sad. Their stillness shook me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  When those two unprecedented words dropped from my lips, I knew that something terrible had occurred. The blood rushed to my head so fast that my ears ached, yet the tips of my fingers fell asleep. My eyelids prickled and my nose wept, but at the same time my mouth went dry. My body was a thing of extremes, contradicting itself.

  “When I was young,” said Sister Mary Anita, “young as you are, I felt a great deal of pain when I was teased about my looks. I’ve long since accepted my…deformity. A prognathic jaw runs in our family. But I must admit, the occasional insult, or a drawing such as yours, still hurts.”

  I began to mumble, then stopped, my throat raw. Sister Mary Anita waited, then handed me her own handkerchief. I buried my face in the cloth. She’d used it to mop her brow when beads of sweat crept down beneath the starched white square that cut into her forehead. There was no perfume whatsoever, of course, but something cleaner. Maybe lavender. Or marigold. Some pungent leaf.

  “I’m sorry.” I was intoxicated by the handkerchief. I wiped my nose. I asked to keep the square of white material, but Sister Mary Anita shook her head and retrieved the crumpled ball.

  “Can I go now?”

  “Of course not,” said Mary Anita.

  I was confounded. The magical two words, an apology, had dropped from my lips. Yet more was expected. What?

  “I want you to understand something,” said the nun. “I’ve told you how I feel. And I expect that you will never hurt me again.”

  Again the nun waited, and waited, until our eyes met. My mouth fell wide. My eyes spilled over again. I knew that the strange feelings that had come upon me and transfixed me were the same feelings that Mary Anita felt. I had never felt another person’s feelings, never in my life.

  “I won’t do anything to hurt you,” I babbled in a fit of startled agony. “I’ll kill myself first.”

  “I’m sure that will not be necessary,” said Sister Mary Anita.

  I tried to rescue my pride, then, by turning away very quickly. Without permission, I ran out the schoolroom door, down the steps and on, into the road, where at last the magnetic force of the encounter weakened and I suddenly could breathe. Even that was different, though. As I walked I realized that my body still fought itself. My lungs filled with air like two bags, but every time they did so, a place underneath them squeezed so painfully the truth suddenly came clear.

  “I love her now,” I blurted out. I stopped on a crack in the earth, stepping on it, then stamped down hard, sickened. “Oh God, I am in love.”

  CORWIN TRIED EVERYTHING to win me back. He almost spoiled his reputation by eating tree bark. Then he put two crayons up his nose, pretend tusks. The pink got stuck and Sister Mary Anita sent him to visit the Indian Health Service clinic. He only rescued his image by getting his stomach pumped in the emergency room. I now despised him, but that only seemed to fuel his adoration.

  Walking into the school yard the second week of September, on a bright cool morning, Corwin ran up to me and skidded to a halt like he was stealing base.

  “Godzilla,” he cried. “Yeah, not too shabby!”

  He picked himself up and wheeled off, the laces of his tennis shoes flapping. I looked after him and felt the buzz inside my head begin again. I wanted to stuff that name back into my mouth, or at least into Corwin’s mouth.

  “I hope you trip and murder yourself,” I screamed.

  But Corwin did not trip. For all of his recklessness, he managed to stay upright, and as I stood rooted in the center of the walk I saw him whiz from clump to clump of children, laughing and gesturing, filling the air with small and derisive sounds. Sister Mary Anita swept out the door, a wooden-handled brass bell in her hand. When she shook it up and down, the children who played together in twos and threes swung toward her and narrowed or widened their eyes and turned eagerly to one another. Some began to laugh. It seemed to me that all of them did, in fact, and that the sound, jerked from their lips, was large, uncanny, totally and horribly delicious. It rose in my own throat, its taste was vinegar.

  “Godzilla, Godzilla,” they called underneath their breath. “Sister Godzilla.”

  Before them on the steps, Sister Mary Anita continued to smile into their faces. She did not hear them…yet. But I knew she would. Over the bell, her eyes were brilliantly dark and alive. Her horrid jagged teeth showed in a smile. I ran to her. Thrusting my hand into my lunch bag, I grabbed the cookies that my mother had made from recipes she clipped from oatmeal boxes and molasses jars.

  “Here!” I shoved a sweet, lumpy cookie into the nun’s hand. It fell apart, distracting her as my classmates pushed past.

  MY FELLOW STUDENTS seemed to forget the name off and on all week. Some days they would seem to have passed on to new disasters—other teachers occupied them, or some small event occurred within the classroom. But then Corwin Peace would lope and careen among them at recess; he’d pump his arms and pretend to roar behind Sister Mary Anita’s back as she stepped up to the plate. As she swung and connected with the ball and gathered herself to run, her veil lifting, the muscles in her shoulders like the curved hump of a raptor’s wings, Corwin would move along behind her, rolling his legs the way Godzilla did in the King Kong movie. In her excitement, dashing base to base, her feet long and limber in black-laced nun’s boots, Mary Anita did not notice. But I looked on, helpless, the taste of a penny caught in my throat.

  “SNAKES LIVE IN holes. Snakes are reptiles. These are Science Facts.”

  I read to the class, out loud, from my Discovery science book.

  “Snakes are not wet. Some snakes lay eggs. Some have live young.”

  “Very good,” said Sister. “Can you name other reptiles?”

  My tongue fused to the back of my throat.

  “Yes,” I croaked.

  She waited, patient eyes on me.

  “There’s Chrysemys picta,” I said, “the painted turtle. And the Plains garter snake, Thamnophis radix, and also T. sirtilis, the red-sided garter snake. They live right here, in the sloughs, all around here.”

  Sister nodded in a kind of thoughtful surprise, but then seemed to remember that my father was a science teacher and smiled her kind and frightful smile. “Well, that’s very good.

  “Anyone else?” Sister asked. “Reptiles from other parts of the world?”

  Corwin Peace raised his hand. Sister recognized him.

  “How about Godzilla?”

 
; Gasps. Small noises of excitement. Mouths opened and hung open. Admiration for Corwin’s nerve rippled through the rows of children like a wind across a field. Sister Mary Anita’s great jaw opened, opened, then snapped shut. Her shoulders shook. No one knew what to do at first, then she laughed. It was a high-pitched, almost birdlike sound, a thin laugh like the highest keys played on the piano. The other students’ mouths opened, they all hesitated, then they laughed with her, even Corwin. Eyes darting from one of us to the next, to me, Corwin laughed.

  But I was near to puking with anxious rage. When Sister Mary Anita turned to new work, I crooked my fist beside me like a piston, then I leaned across Corwin’s desk.

  “I’m going to give you one right in the bread box,” I said.

  Corwin looked pleased, and so with one precise jab—which I had learned from my uncle Whitey, who fought in the Golden Gloves—I knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping. I turned to the front, my face clear and heart calm, as Sister began her instruction.

  FURIOUS SUNLIGHT. BLACK cloth. I sat on the iron trapeze, the bar pushing a sore line into the backs of my legs. As I swung, I watched Sister Mary Anita. The wind was harsh and she wore a pair of wonderful gloves, black, the fingers cut out of them so that her hand could better grip the bat. The ball arced toward her sinuously, dropped, her bat caught it with a clean sound. Off the ball soared, across the playground boundaries, over into the yard of the priest’s residence. Mary Anita’s habit swirled open behind her. The cold bit her cheeks red. She swung to third and glanced, panting, over her shoulder and then sped home. She touched down lightly and bounded off.

  My arms felt heavy, weak. I dropped from the trapeze and went to lean against the brick wall of the school building. My heart thumped in my ears. I saw what I would do when I grew up. Declare my vocation, enter the convent. Sister Mary Anita and I would live over in the nuns’ house together, side by side. We would eat, work, eat, cook. Sometimes we’d have to pray. To relax, Sister Mary Anita would hit pop flies and I would catch them.