The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  After I began to handle them in circle, the kindred stayed clear of me, and that was also a relief.

  Still, I considered myself weak-willed, a follower, never speaking up if I could help it. I felt that I had no strong purpose or quality of mind. I was nice-looking but not anywhere near beautiful, I was young, I was younger than I had a right to be. I considered myself helpless, except when I held my serpents. Also, I had these pictures, and because I had them Billy would not let me go.

  “Show me Milwaukee,” Billy said one night.

  That was where his family spent two years on relocation before his parents died. So I gave him Milwaukee as best I could. I lay there and got the heft of it, the green medians in June, the way you felt entering your favorite restaurant with dinner reservations, hungry, knowing that within fifteen minutes German food would start to fill you, German bread, German beer, German schnitzel. I got the neighborhood where Billy had lived, the powdery stucco, the old board-rotting infrastructure and the backyard, all shattered sun and shade, leaves, got Billy’s mother lying on the ground full length in a red suit, asleep, got the back porch, full of suppressed heat and got the june bugs razzing indomitable against the night screens. Got the smell of Billy’s river, got the first-day-of-school smell, the chalk and wax, the cleaned-and-stored-paper-towel scent of Milwaukee schools in the beginning of September. Got the milk cartons, got the straws. Got Billy’s sister, thin and wiry arms holding Billy down. Got Billy a hot-dog stand, a nickel bag of peanuts, thirst.

  “No,” said Billy, “no more.”

  He could feel it coming though I avoided it. I steered away from the burning welts, the scissors, pinched nerves, the dead eye, the strap, the belt, the spike-heeled shoe, the razor, the boiling hot spilled tapioca, the shards of glass, the knives, the chinked armor, the sister, the sister, the basement, anything underground.

  “Show me, show me.” Billy was half asleep. He didn’t know what he wanted to see, and of course I don’t mean to imply that he would see the whole of my picture anyway. He would walk the edge of it, get the crumbs, the drops of water that flew off when a bird shook its feathers. That’s how much I got across, but that was all it took. When you share like that, the rest of the earth shuts. You are locked in, twisted close, braided, born. And I could do it, just that much, and he needed it. Escape.

  “Show me.”

  So I showed him, and I showed him. Another year passed and the discipline grew tighter and more intense as the spirit ripped into Billy and wouldn’t spare us, either.

  ONE JANUARY NIGHT he came into the room and talked to the children and me all night, squeezing our faces in his thick, hot palms, slapping us to stay awake, urging us to stay aware.

  “Listen up! Last things are on us!”

  I wept and the children wept, but he would not let us sleep.

  “There’s something incongruent, something in you, something blocking the channel, something blacking out the peephole, narrowing the frequency.”

  “No, there isn’t. These are your children.”

  “You are mine. Your lives are mine. I will do with you as spirit wills. Get down! Get down! Get down on the floor!”

  He looked at us with a skeptical loathing, and the black hours passed. Finally, he nodded off. The children fell across my lap. By then I was all nerved up and wide awake, so I went to my glass boxes. I took out my serpents to pray with. They curled around me, in and out of my clothing, comforting. The serpents were listening, and I heard it, too. The chinook blew in. Just like that.

  The temperature shifted radically. The warm wind could melt the deep snow packs in hours. I heard the rafters groan, the snow already dripping. I smelled dirt and rain. It was blowing through, and soon the winter grass, deep gray, blond, would poke through the drifts, The air was flowing, moving, warm currents of dark air heaving fresh out of the southwest across wet roads, slick roads. And then the wolf dogs came out, raising long muzzles to the air.

  I started up in a moment of fear, and as I did, my copperhead struck me full on, in the shadow of my wing, too close to my heart not to kill me. In the Lord, I said, as I was taught, and I gathered up my red-back beauty. She wore time itself in those hourglasses and I felt the sand rush through them as I let her flow back into her case. Then I lay down. I let the poison bloom into me. Let the sickness boil up, and the questions, and the fruit of the tree of power. I let the knowing take hold of me. The understanding of serpents. My heart went black and rock hard. It stopped once, then started again. When the life flooded back in I knew that I was stronger. I knew that I’d absorbed the poison. As it worked in me, I knew that I was the poison and I was the power.

  Get away from him and take the children, the serpent said to me from her glass box, as she curled back to sleep in her nest of grass.

  LONG TRAIN RIDES, the slow repetitive suspense of travel. I had persuaded Billy to let me go all the way out to Seattle in order to raise money for the kindred. I took my snakes along, well fed in their pouches, curled to my body’s warmth. If they became too active I’d set them back inside their leather cases on the cold floor by my feet. I’d made him let me go, although in some way I knew I would not return all the way, not after I was bit.

  All the whole trip, I let it gather. On the way back, I let it come. Curled double among the sighs and groans of other passengers, I dozed and woke, cramped and sore, stiff in the bounds of my two-seater. In the dark Cascades I understood I was a darkness blacker than these mountains. The knowledge sank into my joints like something viral, and I sat from then on in quiet pain. That changed to fear somewhere in the Kootenai.

  Outside the window, black and motionless, without limit, deep forest bowed in fresh snow. I considered what came next and hit a wall packed white. My children were behind it. My love for them was brute love. I would never let them go. Light broke just outside of Whitefish, Montana. Breakfast was announced. I made up my mind and secured myself within my decision. Once I had done this, my thoughts cleared. I sat down in the dining car and ordered eggs. They came with piles of browned cottage potatoes, buttered toast, grape jam in little cartons. I ate a few bites and drank milky coffee from a plastic cup. I watched the dark lodge pole, the yellow larch go by, more trees than some people see their whole lives. They turned like spokes, reached like arms, sifted snow like powder through their needles. Great spumes of whiteness puffed, crashing from their boughs.

  Where a big derailment and grain spill had occurred two years before, a fat bear stood, a blackie stirred from hibernation, probably drawn by the lye-soaked and fermented wheat that the railroad workers had buried underground, behind an electric fence, out of reach. Everyone else in the car was deep in conversation or concentrating on burnt pancakes, mild tea. I was the only one who saw the bear and I said nothing. It swung its head, smelling diesel, harsh metal, maybe steam of boiling oatmeal. Perhaps it was used to the eastbound number 28 because it didn’t lope off, didn’t move away, just waited in its own shadow while we passed. My future seemed impenetrable, a cloud pack, fog socked in. And freedom seemed unreachable, like all that sweet grain bulldozed into the hill. My life was a trap that had closed on me with soft teeth, from under snow. Up here seems endless and free, so wide it hurts. It does hurt. For we are narrow, bound tight, hobbled, caught in sorrow out of mind.

  Grass, water, summer fireweed and thistle, come save me now, I thought. I didn’t call on god, though. He was on my husband’s side.

  When Frenchie picked me up at the station, I was gone already. Evidently, I looked and acted the same though, because Frenchie helped put my things into the back of the truck and got in front without comment. Billy didn’t do things like pick passengers up at the depot, because that might have meant waiting around and he never sat still. Every moment of his time was now dedicated. Valuable.

  “I’ll buy you a meal,” I said to Frenchie, “I raised a good ten thou.” And I had.

  Besides the waitressing job, which I used to pick up money when it was needed for some kind
of equipment or spiritual campaign, I raised money for Billy by speaking at the big tent meetings and writing pamphlets and handling my snakes in the spirit-trance. All in all, I preferred waitressing. Just that the money at the stadium and tent revivals was so good. I knew that once I entered the compound it would be a long time before I saw much of the outside world again. That was why I got Frenchie to walk through the door of the 4-B’s, home of the all-day breakfast, where I had worked a year and left with no hard feelings, even offers of a raise. It was as though I was a normal person there, any woman, and I needed to feel that now. Maybe I’d show a picture of my daughter, son, and nobody would comment on their gunnysack clothes, know their meaning, nobody would ask whether they had yet processed spirit.

  Frenchie looked from side to side as he sat down, afraid. There was no rule exactly, about going to a restaurant to eat, but we both knew that we weren’t supposed to, that we should be driving straight back to our home, to the kindred, that we should be saving money and not spending it on the second order of eggs that I wouldn’t eat, or the weak black coffee that Frenchie would drink looking down into the brown pottery cup, refusing refills, feeling the hand of my husband on his shoulders, my husband’s eyes heavy at the back of his neck, and Billy’s voice, his voice always, radio-trained, pure and deep, full as thunder, round as hope. My husband’s voice was perfect as he was perfect. Made in God. My husband’s voice was redemption, a rope to hold in a whiteout. My husband’s voice would change my mind as it had before, when I got back and entered into the mellow gold light surrounding him. I would sink in, go under, resistless in the dream that he dreamed with me in it. I would be a shadow, once more, a light thrown lovingly against a wall.

  I drank my coffee slowly. I had to test myself by watching how I acted in front of one of us kindred. I was glad that it was Frenchie, who wasn’t so observant. There was something scared and sidling about him, something not quite authentic. He had a handsome face if you really looked at it, nice bones, rich green eyes with thick brush eyelashes, firm mouth, straight nose. But he acted like a beaten animal—hunched, crept, spoke in an excusing lilt and never addressed you, just waited for you to speak. He took what he could get. That was his motto, I suppose. I didn’t want to make him any trouble and so I didn’t exchange more than a few polite words with another waitress I had known while employed at the 4-B’s. I paid up with extra money I had been given in Seattle and not declared, and I said that we could go now, we could go home. But just before we left, I looked around the place, and even though it was a spare room, big and functional, with orange plastic booths and the usual salad island, even though in the realm of restaurants and cafs it was nothing special, light from outside the windows falling in rich bands of smoke was almost piercing to me in its promise.

  When it was over, I would return here, I decided. I would sit down and unfold the silly napkin with the black and yellow bee, spread it out carefully onto my lap. I would order the all-day breakfast for my children. They would eat. And when I saw them eating, I would be able to eat too.

  Until that time, no food would cross my lips but that I needed to gain strength, no movement would be wasted, no coin, no breath. From that moment on, I was a closed secret. I was everything the mountain knew. I was the unturned stone.

  And the snake under it, that too.

  SOME OF US lived in chicken coops, some of us lived in storage barrels, some of us lived outdoors beneath the solstice sun. Some of us lived deep inside the hills, some of us lived out on the range with cattle, or on tractors, or in an old Burlington boxcar. Some of us lived with husbands or wives, some with children, only children. Some of us were saved in heat, some of us were saved in winter’s cold. Some of us were simply curious and had never been saved at all. Some of us lived right with Billy, back in the new log house, behind the fireplace, and all day our clothes smelled of pine pitch and smoke of midnight fires. I was his only true wife, with his name on me and my children, and that was my reward. His greater fidelity, that is—not the lesser, the procreation he quietly affirmed with others. He belonged to me in the greatest sense and held that fact to my face, a shining mirror.

  By the time we got to the turn-off road, narrow and perfectly kept (not the rutted road the heavy equipment used), my hands were cold inside my knitted gloves. The ranch buildings came into distant view and, inside, I felt empty, hungry, ravenous but not for food. My skin was desperate to hold my children. We reached the guardhouse. Sweat trailed the inside of my arms. My face felt rigid with the effort of posing my features. I was cold all through, chilled to an ache, to the center. In the Manual of Discipline, to which all kindred must adhere, a guilty heart is a dead heart, burnt to a cindery knob, and it is to be rejected. Cast out. As we rode the curved drive, gravel crackling against the tires, I began to shake. My legs felt watery, unstable. My jaws hurt. I knew that Billy would look deep into me at first glance and see the black smoke, the steam, the blue radiance of betrayal. He would pray. He would look at me with triumph and take me back into our marriage, into the faith.

  He called out to me, waving an arm in the air, pleased with me and pleased at the picture of the welcoming husband that he made. He was standing on the long porch of the two-story log house, the gray log house with the chinks cemented fast. He had not been waiting. He’d sent Deborah, the eternal penitent, his personal secretary. She had probably given him a blow job underneath his desk, then blotted her lips on a hankie and done the waiting. She had watched for us on the road and then summoned him from his office and the bank of phones and our all-night steno crew that never shut down. Deborah had come to get him and he had left his office, just in time to greet us, and he was impatient. I left the cab of the pickup like I was jumping off a high board into a pool of water, not knowing whether I could swim at all. Here was a new element, deep green, emotional, treacherous. I ran straight to him. Impetuous joy was what I wanted to convey. I ran to him and he held me against his tired, his soft, his body of the solid current. His was the only man’s body I had known. I felt its frightful goodness, its secret extravagance of love for me. His heart beat hard underneath my cheek. I couldn’t turn away.

  Huge, soft, yet muscled with a hopeless power, Billy surrounded me. Not vast as he’d been when he’d absorbed the lightning, but big enough. I lost myself in the familiarity of flesh and voice. His voice was pink as the sky. His eagerness and pleasure at my return bloomed all around me as we went into the room where the children were playing, and where I was allowed to surprise them at their games.

  I watched them for a moment, before they turned. I still had names for my children, though children’s names were now forbidden. Mine were their old names, now secret names. I think that their father had forgotten what they were called.

  Judah was sand-haired and tough. It always seemed that his wires were pulled tighter, sharper, that the connections were raw and quick, that he was not just more intelligent in mind but throughout his entire body. His eyes were large, sad, warm, his father’s changing colors. Sometimes his deepened under strong emotion to a deep-set black. He had my features, people said, though I couldn’t see it. I could tell Lilith’s though; she looked like me. She looked like my grade school pictures, brows drawn together, frowning, always unprepared. She was shy and stubborn, both at once, and her sudden attacks of laziness were pure will, never helpless. I thought she was terribly intelligent, but there was no outside testing. I had no way of knowing exactly what she knew in relation to other children. Now she ran to me, gave herself to me with completeness, melting to me, smelling of salt and snow. I held them both close, put my face in the warm coarse hair. I breathed in their radiance, and we began to rise, light as cake. We hovered just an inch above the woven rug, turning, holding. From the door behind us, freezing air swirled around us and tightened.

  DEEP IN THE night, every night, through the space across the great open center of the house, I woke to the comfort of the stuttering rings of telephones, the messages of the converted that cam
e in after the monthly broadcasts that he taped here or in Grand Forks or Fargo or Winnipeg, then broadcast all over the world. Each ring brought cash. Women called to say they’d seen a light in the east, heard a voice rise from the laundry chute, felt power boil up between their knuckles, understood another exquisite language that hovered in the air all around them. Women called to say their loaves fell in the shape of Billy’s face, their uncooked raw meat muttered his name. The little notes clipped around their checks told about their children, how when changing diapers they had known the call. Or how, when baking cakes, the straw came out of the batter with a continuous musical tone that signified salvation. They answered their home phone. Their own voice said Be Saved. Their washing machines refused to wash unless Billy’s broadcast was playing. Their hands hurt with the knowledge and their sex lives were numbing them, hurting them. They were dying of dyspepsia, of cancer, of deadly warts, of an unusual virus, of hives, of internal parasites, of cerebral palsy, of cancer, of cancer.

  Men wrote and called telling Billy their car radios exploded in the word, their power tools cried out, their names went dead, all of a sudden no one remembered who they were. They did not remember their own names either. Their fillings played his broadcasts in their heads. Their mothers had warned them and they hadn’t listened. Men called trusting Billy with outrageous infidelities. Men wrote dying of enlarged hearts, enlarged prostates, of deep boils, of foul weather, of senile madness, of a wasting virus, of the kiss of tsetse flies, of food, of garden herbicides, of home-owner’s accidents, of thrombosis, of clotted veins, of black depression, of cancer, of cancer. All night, through the whole night, the bank of telephones doodled and whined, and our people recorded these salvations. In the morning cheap onionskin littered the desks and floors and the testimonials were dragged across the carpet on the feet of tired typists to the bottom of the stairs.