The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  Freedom, I found, is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands. After that day, I contrived, as often as I could, to stay alone in the house. As soon as everyone was gone I took the fiddle from its hidden place beneath the blankets in the blanket chest, and I tuned it to my own liking. I learned how to play it one note at a time, not that I had a name for each distinct sound. I started to fit these sounds together. The string of notes that I made itched my brain. It became a torment for me to have to put away the fiddle when my parents or my sister came home. Sometimes, if the wind was right, I sneaked the fiddle from the house even if they were home and I played out in the woods. I was always careful that the wind should carry my music away to the west, the emptiness, where there was no one to hear it. But one day the wind might have shifted. Or perhaps my mother’s ears were more sensitive than either my sister’s or my father’s. Because when I had come back into the house, I found her staring out the window, to the west. She was excited, breathing fast. Did you hear it? She cried out. Did you hear it? Terrified to be discovered, I said no. She was very agitated and my father had a hard time to calm her. After he finally had her asleep, he sat an hour at the table with his head in his hands. I tiptoed around the house, did the chores. I felt terrible not to tell him that my music was the source of what she heard. Even then, though I would not have understood all that my father despaired of, sitting there in the lamplight with his head in his hands, I did know that it had to do with my mother and my secret music and that my father thought she heard something she had not. I did know it would have helped him had I admitted the truth. But now, as I look back, I consider my silence the first decision I made as a true musician. An artist. That I must play was more important to me than my father’s pain. I said nothing, but was all the more sly and twice as secretive.

  It was a question of survival, after all. If I had not found the music, I would have died of the silence. The rule of quiet in the house became more rigorous and soon my sister fled to the government boarding school. But I was still a child, and if my mother and father sat for hours uttering no word, and required me to do the same, where else was my mind to take itself but music? I saved myself by inventing songs and playing them inside my mind where my parents could not hear them. I made up notes that were not music, exactly, but the pure emotions of my childish heart. As of yet, nobody had thought of school. The stillness in my mother had infected my father. There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

  We had two cows and I did the milking in the morning and evening. Lucky, because if my parents forgot to cook at least I had the milk. Sometimes I made my supper on a half a warm, foamy bucket. Maybe a little bannock to soften in the milk and chew. I can’t say I really ever suffered from a stomach kind of hunger, but another kind of human hunger bit me. I was lonely. It was about that time I received a terrible kick from the cow, an accident, as she was usually mild. A wasp sting, perhaps, caused her to lash out in surprise. She caught my arm, and although I had no way to know it, shattered the bone. Painful? Oh, for certain it was, I remember, but my parents did not think to take me to a doctor. They did not notice, I suppose. I did tell my father about it, but he only nodded, pretending that he had heard, and went back to whatever he was doing.

  The pain in my arm kept me awake, and I know that at night, when I couldn’t distract myself, I moaned in my blankets by the stove. But worse was the uselessness of the arm in playing the fiddle. I tried to prop it up, but it fell like a rag-doll arm. I finally hit upon the solution, a strip of cloth, that I have used ever since. I started tying up my broken arm at that early age, just as I do now. I had of course no idea that it would heal that way and that as a result I would be considered a permanent cripple. I only knew that with the arm securely tied up I could play, and that I could play saved my life. So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped.

  There was bound to come a time when I slipped up, but it didn’t come for a while, and by the time it did I was already twelve years old. My father, my mother, and I had gotten used to our strangeness by then. I went to school because the truancy agent finally came and got me. School is where I got the name I carry now. The full-blood children gave it to me as a kind of blessing, I think. Shamengwa, the black and orange butterfly. It was an acceptance of my “wing arm.” Yet, even though a nun told me that a picture of a butterfly in a painting of our lady was meant to represent the Holy Spirit, I didn’t like the name at first. But I was too quiet to do anything about it. My bashfulness about the shape of my arm caused me to avoid people even once I was older, and I made no friends. Human friends. My true friend was hidden in the blanket chest, anyway, the only friend I really needed. And then I lost that friend.

  My parents had gone to church, but there was on that winter’s day some problem with the stove there. Smoke had filled the nave at the start of Mass and everyone was sent straight home. So my mother and father arrived when I was deep into my playing. They listened, standing at the door rooted by the surprise of what they heard, for how long I do not know. I had not heard the door open and with my eyes shut not seen the light thereby admitted. I finally noticed the cold breeze that swirled around them, turned, and we stared at one another with a shocked gravity that my father broke at last by asking, “How long?”

  I did not answer, though I wanted to. Seven years. Seven years!

  He led my mother in. They shut the door behind them. Then he said, in a voice of troubled softness, “Keep on.”

  So I did play, and when I quit he said nothing.

  Discovered, I thought the worst was over. I put the fiddle away that night. But next morning, waking to a silence where I usually heard my father’s noises, hearing a vacancy of presence before I even knew it for sure, I knew the worst was yet to come. My playing woke something in him. That’s what I think. That was the reason he left. But I don’t know why he had to take the violin. When I opened the blanket box and saw that it was missing, all breath left me, all thought, all feeling. For months after that I was the same as my mother. In our loss, we were cut off from all the true, bright, normal routines of living. I might have stayed that way, gone even deeper into the silence, joined my mother on the dark bench from which she could not return. I would have lived on in that diminished form except that I had a dream.

  The dream was simple. A voice. Go to the lake and sit by the southern rock. Wait there. I will come.

  I decided to follow these direct orders. I took my bedroll and a scrap of jerky, a loaf of bannock, and sat myself down on the scabby gray lichen of the southern rock. That plate of stone jutted out into the water, which dropped off deeply from its edges into a green-black depth. From that rock, I could see all that happened on the water. I put tobacco down for the spirits. All day, I sat there waiting. Flies bit me. The wind boomed in my ears. Nothing happened. I curled up when the light left and I slept. Stayed on the next morning. As a matter of fact, the next day too. It was the first time I had ever slept out on the shores, and I began to understand why people said of the lake there is no end to it, when of course, as I always thought, it was bounded by rocks. But there were rivers flowing in and flowing out, secret currents, six kinds of weather working on its surface and a hidden terrain underneath. Each wave washed in from somewhere unseen and washed right out again to go somewhere unknown. I saw birds, strange-feathered and unfamiliar, passing through on their way to somewhere else. Listening to the water, another music, I was for the first time comforted by sounds other than my fiddle playing. I let go. I nibbled the bannock, drank the lake water, rolled in my blanket. I saw three dawns and for three nights I watched the stars take their positions in the crackling black heavens. I thought I might just stay there forever, staring at the blue thread of the horizon. Nothing mattered. When a small bit of the horizon’s thread detached, darkened, proceeded forward slowly, I observed it with only mild interest. The speck seemed both to advance and retreat. It wavered back and forth. I lost sight of it for long
stretches, then it popped closer, over a wave.

  It was a canoe. But either the paddler was asleep in the bottom, or the canoe was drifting. As it came nearer, I decided for sure it must be adrift. It rode so light in the waves, nosing this way, then the other. Always, no matter how hesitant or contradictory, it ended up advancing straight toward the southern rock and straight toward me. I watched until I could clearly see there was nobody in it before I recalled why I had come to that place. Then the words of my dream returned. I will come to you. I dove in eagerly, swam for the canoe—this arm does not prevent that. I have learned, as boys do, to compensate and although my stroke was peculiar I was strong. I thought perhaps the canoe had been badly tied and slipped its mooring, but no rope trailed. The canoe had lost its paddler somehow, gotten away from its master. Perhaps high waves had coaxed it off a beach where its owner had dragged it up, thinking it safe. I somehow pushed the canoe ashore, then pulled it up behind me, wedged it in a cleft between two rocks. Only then did I look inside, at the gear it held. There, lashed to a crosspiece in the bow, was a black case of womanly shape that fastened on the side with two brass locks.

  That is how my fiddle came to me, said Shamengwa, raising his head to look steadily at me. He smiled, shook his fine head and spoke softly. And that is why no other fiddle will I play.

  Silent Passage

  CORWIN SHUT THE door to the room in the basement where his mother’s boyfriend was letting him stay, temporarily. Standing on a door propped on sawhorses, he pushed his outspread fingers against the foam panel of the false ceiling. He placed the panel to one side and groped up behind it among wires and underneath a pad of yellow fiberglass insulation, until he located the handle of the carrying case. Corwin dragged it toward him, overhead, bit by bit until he could tip the case and instrument through the hole into his arms. He bore it down, off the unstable, hollow-core door, to the piece of foam rubber that served as his mattress and through which, every night, he felt the hard cold of the concrete floor seep into his legs. He had taken the old man’s fiddle because he needed money, but he hadn’t thought much about where he would sell it. Who would buy it. Then he had an inspiration. He’d hitch down to Fargo with the fiddle. He’d get out at West Acres Mall and he’d bring the violin there in its case and sell it to a music lover.

  Corwin got out of the car and carried the violin into the mall. In his own mind, he liked to quote himself. There are two kinds of people—the givers and the takers. I’m a taker. Render unto Corwin what is due him. His favorite movie of recent times was about a cop with a twisted way of looking at the world so you couldn’t tell if he was evil or good you only knew that he could seize your mind up with language. Corwin had a thing for language. He inhaled it from movies and rock lyrics, television. It rubbed around inside him, word against word. He thought he was writing poems sometimes in his thoughts, but the poems would not come out of his hands. The words stuck in odd configurations and made patterns that raced across the screen of his shut eyes and off the edge, down his temples into the darkness of his neck. So when he walked through the air-lock doors into the warm cathedral space of the central food court, his brain was a mumble of intentions.

  He was very proud of his leather jacket which had most of what he owned inside of it, in the inner pockets. And as always he was hyperaware of his own good looks. People treated him like a good-looking person. Others, who knew him well or whom he had burned, avoided him. But this problem was nothing he could fix now. The only way, he imagined, to redeem himself was through impressing people on a level he had not yet reached. He fantasized. As a rock star, the subject of a Rolling Stone interview. Who was the real Corwin Peace? Now, taking a seat in the central court, peering at the distracted-looking customers, he understood that none of them was going to outright buy the fiddle. He got up and walked into a music store and tried to show the instrument to the manager, who only said, “Nah, we don’t take used.” Corwin walked out again. He tried a few people. They shied away or turned him down flat.

  Gotta regroup, Corwin told himself, and went back to sit on the central length of bench he had decided to call his own. That was where he got the idea that became a gold mine. It was from a TV show, a clip of a woman passing a musician in a city street and he was playing a saxophone or something of that sort, and at his feet there was an open instrument case. She stopped, and smiled, and threw a dollar in the case. Corwin took the violin out of the case, laid the open case at his feet. He took the violin in one hand and the bow in the other. Then he drew the bow across the string and made a terrible, strange sound.

  The screech echoed in the food court and several people raised their lips from the waxed-paper food wrappers, then lowered the wrapped food when they saw Corwin. He looked back at them, poised and frozen. It was a moment of drama—he had them. An audience. He had to act instantly or lose them. He made a flowery, low bow. His move was elegant, the bow in one hand and the instrument in the other. It just came out of him. As though he was accepting an ovation. There were a few murmurs of amusement. Someone even applauded. These sounds acted on Corwin Peace at once, more powerfully than any drug he had yet tried. A surge of zeal filled him and he took up the instrument again, threw back his hair, and began to play a silent, swift passage of music.

  His mimicry was impeccable. Where had he learned it? He didn’t know. He didn’t touch the bow to the strings, but he played music all the same. Music ricocheted around between his ears. He could hardly keep up with what he heard. His body spilled over with drama. He threw every move he’d ever seen and then some. When the music in his head stopped, he dipped low, did the splits, which he’d practiced not knowing why. He held the violin and bow overhead. Applause broke over him. A skein of dazzling sound.

  The Fire

  THEY PICKED UP Corwin Peace pretending to play the fiddle in a Fargo mall and brought him to me. I have a great deal of latitude in sentencing. In spite of my conviction that he was probably incorrigible, I was intrigued by Corwin’s unusual treatment of the instrument. I could not help thinking of his ancestors, the Peace brothers, Henri and Lafayette. Perhaps there was a dormant talent. And perhaps as they had saved my grandfather, I was meant to rescue their descendant. These sorts of complications are simply part of tribal justice. I decided to take advantage of my prerogative to use tribally based traditions in sentencing and to set precedent. First, I cleared my decision with Shamengwa. Then I sentenced Corwin to apprentice himself with the old master. Six days a week, three hours in the morning. Three hours of practice after work in the early evening. He would either learn to play the violin, or he would do time. In truth, I didn’t know who was being punished, the boy or the old man. But now at least, from the house we began to hear the violin.

  IT WAS THE middle of September on the reservation, the mornings chill, the afternoons warm, the leaves still thick and poignant in their final sweetness. All the hay was mown. The wild rice was beaten flat. The radiators in the tribal offices went on at night but by noon we still had to open the windows to cool off. The woodsmoke of parching fires and the spent breeze of diesel entered, then, and sometimes the squawl of Corwin’s music from just down the hill. The first weeks were not promising, and I was reminded of the fact that in order to play any instrument well, a person usually must begin as a child. Perhaps, I thought, it was just too late. Then the days turned uniformly cold, we kept the windows shut, and until spring the only news of Corwin’s progress came through Geraldine and from reports made by Corwin’s probation officer. I didn’t expect much. But Corwin showed up at Shamengwa’s every day at eight A.M. It was not until the first hot afternoon in early May that I opened my window and actually heard Corwin playing.

  “Not half bad,” I said that night when I visited Shamengwa. “I listened to your student.”

  “He’s clumsy as hell, but he’s got the fire,” said Shamengwa, touching his chest. He had improved, physically, along with Corwin’s musicianship. I could tell that he was proud of Corwin, and I allowed mys
elf to consider the possibility that history is sometimes on our side, and an act as idealistic as putting an old man and a hard-core juvenile delinquent together had worked, or had had some effect, or hadn’t ended up, anyway, a disaster.

  The lessons and the relationship outlasted, in fact, the sentence and through the summer we heard further slow improvement. Fall came and we closed the windows again. In spring we opened them, and one or two times heard Corwin playing. The summer went, and we heard assurance in the music, so much so that we were reminded, sometimes, of the master. Then Shamengwa died.

  His was an ideal and peaceful death, the sort of death we used to pray to Saint Joseph to give us all. Asleep, his violin next to the bed, covers pulled to his chin. Found in the morning by Geraldine. There was a large funeral with the usual viewing, at which people filed up to his body and tucked flowers and pipe tobacco and small tokens into his coffin to accompany Shamengwa into the earth. Everybody said, as they do, Oh, he looks at peace, the old man. Geraldine placed a monarch butterfly upon her uncle’s shoulder. She said she had found it that morning on the grille of her car. Clemence and Whitey held each other outside the church. Then I saw Clemence was holding Whitey up—he was drunk. Edward came and supported Whitey from the other side and went in and got into one pew. Shamengwa’s brother, Seraph, was settled in between Evelina and Joseph. They were patting his shoulders and arms. He was speechless for once. He looked broken, or brokenhearted. He didn’t even look up when Father Cassidy walked to the pulpit and solemnly, with much grinding of the gears, clearing of the throat, and springing up and down on his toes, began the eulogy.