The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  I come now before you in the holy spirit of forgiveness to bless the soul of Seraph Milk

  “What?” hissed Geraldine, “he’s got the wrong brother!” She tried to signal the priest with a wave of her hand. But Father Cassidy was on his own track now, and Seraph had perked up a little.

  Seraph Milk who died unhouseled, refusing Extreme Unction or the anointment of holy oils. Though his soul may be in hell we have no way of knowing for sure as he was always good at getting out of sticky situations, his family tells me, and moreover, sometimes the saints intercede for sinners on a whim. The Virgin Mary could be looking after him, although in my very presence Seraph Milk expressed doubt upon two specific foundations of our Catholic faith—the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth. His own words were and I quote: I think she pulled a fast one!

  The old reprobate improved remarkably. His lip drooped open in a smile. He motioned those around us ready to stand up and protest that he was happy to listen. And anyway, the priest was gathering power, his voice boomed and nobody could have stopped him.

  Seraph Milk is now discovering whether or not his other hero, Louis Riel, was right when he proposed the belief that hell was neither infinite nor very hot. We have argued this many times! The Metis believed in a merciful God, you see, but it is my sorry duty to report that God is also just and although His Almighty Compassion may war with his sense of righteousness, he must consider whether we on earth would take him seriously were he not to punish sinners, heretics, liars, fornicators, drunkards, and those who celebrate the Feast of the Ass, as Seraph Milk informed me he did regularly with his brother, who may be greeting him one day in the future, playing a fiddle that spouts the devil’s flames and wringing holy torment from its bow. But all of this is not to say that Seraph Milk necessarily deserves the hell he does not anticipate.

  A few people got up from their pews and made furious motions but were pulled back down by others.

  Nay! Father Cassidy raised his fingers. There was much good in this man, too, much virtue. Seraph Milk was a true patriarch and was said to love and indulge his children. Though heavily addicted to drink in his youth, he gave it up to some degree, perhaps too late in life to really matter to his wife, but all the same he cut back. From time to time he’d even taper off. Fortunately his young grandchildren, Joseph and Evelina, were not unduly influenced and have turned out as well as can be expected. Their mother is of course a regular communicant in this church, and the Church in its mercy decided to bury her father. No, it is really not for me to say that Seraph Milk belongs in hell, as I am but a servant of God the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost. Seraph spoke of doves, so I ask that upon his soul there may rest the most generous spirit of blessing by the Holy Spirit, which is represented by the person of a pure white dove. I ask this blessing in spite of Seraph Milk’s expressed wish that I “keep my trap shut about the pagans.” In spite of his secret tippling and his open disregard for the laws and dispensation of our mother the Holy Catholic Church I ask that in His mercy God the Father excuse the sins and degradations of Seraph Milk and allow him to join his long suffering wife, Junesse, who has surely earned her way through her own gentle guidance of Seraph.

  It was Clemence who couldn’t take it anymore. She shook Whitey and Mooshum’s hands off her and strode to the front. She actually opened the coffin and plucked the violin from where it had been tucked up close to Shamengwa. Father Cassidy fell silent as she brandished the instrument at him. He then saw Seraph/Mooshum waving from the second pew, and his jaw fell slack. Clemence looked like she might take a swing at the priest, but instead she gave the violin to Geraldine, who rose and stood before the parish, motioning to the paralyzed Father Cassidy that it was now her turn to speak.

  “A few months ago, Uncle told me that when he died, I was to give this violin to Corwin Peace,” Geraldine told everyone, “and so I’m offering it to him now. And I’ve already asked will he play us one of Shamengwa’s favorites today?”

  Mooshum was still waving and smiling at Father Cassidy, who’d staggered backwards and sat down against the nave wall, wiping his head.

  Corwin had been sitting in the rear of the church and now he walked up to the front, his shoulders hunched, hands shoved in his pockets. He was extremely sad. The sorrow in his face surprised me. It made me uneasy to see such a direct show of emotion from one who had been so volatile. But Corwin’s feelings seemed directed once he took up the fiddle and began to play a chanson everyone knew, a song typical of our people because it began tender and slow, then broke into a wild strangeness that pricked our pulses and strained our breath. Corwin played with passion, if imprecision, and there was enough of the old man’s energy in his music and stance so that by the time he finished everybody was in tears.

  Then came the shock. Amid the rustling of Kleenex, the dabbing of eyes and discreet nose blowing, Corwin stood, gazing into the coffin at his teacher, the violin dangling from one hand down at his side. Beside the coffin there was an ornate communion rail. Corwin raised the violin high and smashed it on the rail, once, twice, three times to do the job right. Father Cassidy squeezed his eyes shut. His lips moved in prayer. I was in the front pew and suddenly I found myself standing next to Corwin. I’d jumped from my seat as though I’d been prepared for this type of thing. I grasped Corwin’s arm as he laid the violin carefully back into the coffin beside Shamengwa, but then I let him go, for I recognized that his gesture was spent. He walked to his place at the back. My focus changed from Corwin to the violin itself because I saw, sticking from its smashed wood, a small roll of paper. I drew the paper out. The stuff was old and covered with an antique, stiff flow of writing. Wholly shaken, Father Cassidy began the service all over again. People sat still, dazzled by the entertainment of it all. I fit the roll of paper into my jacket pocket and returned to my seat. I didn’t exactly forget to read the paper—there was just so much happening directly after the funeral, what with the windy burial and then the six-kinds-of-frybread supper in the Knights of Columbus hall, that I didn’t get the chance to sit still and concentrate. It was evening and I was at home, finally sitting in my chair with a bright lamp turned on behind me, so the radiance fell across my shoulder, before I finally read what had been hidden in the violin all these years.

  Letter

  I, HENRI BAPTISTE Parentheau, also known as Henri Peace, leave to my brother, Lafayette, this message, being a history of the violin which on this day of Our Lord August 20, 1888, I send out onto the waters to find him.

  A recapitulation to begin with: Having read of LaFountaine’s mission to the Iroquois, during which that priest avoided having his liver plucked out before his eyes by nimbly playing the flute, our own Father Jasprine thought it wise to learn to play a musical instrument before he ventured forth into the wastelands past Lac du Bois. Therefore, he set off with music his protection. He studied and brought along his violin, a noble instrument, which he played less than adequately. If the truth were told, he’d have done better not to impose his slight talents on the Ojibwe. Yet, as he died young and left the violin to his altar boy, my father, I should say nothing against good Jasprine. I should, instead, be grateful for the joys his violin afforded my family. I should be happy in the happy hours that my father spent tuning and then playing our beauty, our darling, and in the devotion that my brother and I eagerly gave to her. Yet, as things ended so hard between my brother and myself because of the instrument, I find myself wishing we never knew the violin, that she never had been brought before us, that I’d never played its music or understood her voice. For when my father died, he left the fiddle to both my brother Lafayette and me, with the stipulation that were we unable to decide which should have it, then we were to race for it as true sons of the great waters, by paddling our canoes.

  When my brother and I heard this declaration read, we said nothing. There was nothing to say, for as much as it was true we loved each other, we both wanted that violin. Each of us had given years of practice, each of us had whis
pered into her hollow our despairs and taken hold of her joys. That violin had soothed our wild hours, courted our wives. But now we were done with the passing of it back and forth. And if she had to belong to one of us two brothers, I determined it would be myself.

  Two nights before we took our canoes out, I conceived of a sure plan. When the moon slipped behind clouds and the world was dark, I went out to the shore with a pannikin of heated pitch. I decided to interfere with Lafayette’s balance. Our canoes were so carefully constructed that each side matched ounce for ounce. By thickening the seams on only one side with a heavy application of pitch, I’d throw off my brother’s paddle stroke—enough, I was sure, to give me a telling advantage.

  Ours is a wide lake and full of islands. It is haunted by birds who utter sarcastic or sorrowing human cries. One loses sight of others easily and sound travels, skewed, bouncing off the rock cliffs. There are caves containing the spirits of little children, flying skeletons, floating bogs, and black moods of weather. We love it well, and we know its secrets, in some part at least. Not all. And not the secret that I put in motion.

  We were to set off on the far northern end of the lake and arrive at the south, where our uncles had lighted fires and brought the violin, wrapped in red cloth, set in its fancy case. We started out together, joking. Lafayette, you remember how we paddled through the first two narrows, laughing as we exaggerated our efforts and how I said, as what I’d done with the soft pitch weighed on me, “Maybe we should share the damn thing after all.”

  You laughed and said that our uncles would be disappointed, waiting there, and that when you won the contest things would be as they were before, except all would know that Lafayette was the faster paddler. I promised you the same. Then you swerved behind a skim of rock and took what you perceived to be your secret shortcut. As I paddled, I had to stop occasionally and bail. At first I thought that I had sprung a slow leak, but in time I understood. While I was painting on extra pitch you were piercing the bottom of my canoe. I was not, in fact, in any danger, and when the wind shifted all of a sudden and it began to storm, no thunder or lightning, just a buffet of cold rain, I laughed and thanked you. For the water I took on actually helped steady me. I rode lower, and stayed on course. But you foundered—it was worse to be set off balance. You must have overturned.

  The bonfires die to coals on the south shore. I curl in blankets but I do not sleep. I am keeping watch. At first when you are waiting for someone, every shadow is an arrival. Then the shadows become the very substance of dread. We hunt for you, call your name until our voices are worn to whispers. No answer. In one old man’s dream everything goes around the other way, the not-sun-way, counterclockwise, which means that the dream is of the spirit world. And then he sees you there in his dream, going the wrong way too.

  The uncles have returned to their cabins, hunting, rice beds, children, wives. I am alone on the shore. As the night goes black I sing for you. As the sun comes up I call across the water. White gulls answer. As the time goes on, I begin to accept what I have done. I begin to know the truth of things.

  They have left the violin here with me. Each night I play for you, Brother, and when I can play no more, I’ll lash our fiddle into the canoe and send it out to you, to find you wherever you are. I won’t have to pierce the bottom so it will travel the bed of the lake. Your holes will do the trick, Brother, as my trick did for you.

  HERE WAS AT least a partial answer to my grandfather’s question of what had happened to the two Peace brothers, Henri and Lafayette, who had once promised to bury him, but who instead had found him meat and hung a crucifix around his neck. More than that, the canoe did not sink to the bottom of the lake, that was one thing. Nor did it stray. That was another. Sure enough, the canoe and its violin had eventually found a Peace through the person and the agency of Shamengwa. That fiddle had searched long for Corwin. I had no doubt. For what stuck in my mind, what woke me in the middle of the night, after the fact of reading it, was the date on the letter. 1888 was the year. But the violin spoke to Shamengwa and called him out onto the lake in a dream almost twenty years later.

  “How about that?” I said to Geraldine. “Can you explain such a thing?”

  She looked at me steadily.

  “We know nothing” is what she said.

  I was to marry her. We took in Corwin. The violin lies deep buried, while the boy it also saved plays for money in a traveling band now, and prospers here on the surface of the earth. I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am. Mii’sago iw.

  Evelina

  The Reptile Garden

  IN THE FALL of 1972, my parents drove me to college. Everything I needed was packed in a brand-new royal blue aluminum trunk—a crazy-quilt afghan my mother had crocheted for my bed, a hundred 4-B’s dollars’ worth of brand-new clothes, my Berlitz Self-Teacher, the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (a paperback copy from Judge Coutts), a framed photograph, a beaded leather tobacco pouch that Mooshum had owned since I could remember, and which he casually handed to me, the way old men give presents, and from my father a stack of self-addressed envelopes each containing a new dollar bill. He had special stamps on each envelope that he wanted postmarked—some on particular days.

  The other freshmen were moving into their dormitory rooms with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment. Dylan albums and acoustic guitars of golden varnished wood. Home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine. Janis posters. Bowie posters. Brightly splashed print sheets, hacky-sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs, dread invaded me. In spite of my determination to go to Paris, I had actually dreaded leaving home even to go as far as Grand Forks, and in the end my parents did not want me to, either. But I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too miserable to cry and I do not remember our final embraces, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car. They waved to me, and that moment is a clear, still picture. I can call it up as if it was a photograph.

  My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face, and my father’s face, were naked with love. It wasn’t something that we talked about—love—and I was terrified of its expression from the lips of my parents. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. Their love blazed from them. And then they left. I think now that everything that was concentrated in that one look—their care in raising me, their patient lessons in every subject they knew to teach, their wincing efforts to give me freedoms, their example of fortitude in work—allowed me to survive myself.

  The trunk was quickly emptied, my room was barely filled. I had framed a picture of Mooshum dressed up in his traditional clothes. He had a war club in one hand, but he was smiling in a friendly way, his dentures a startling snow-white. His headdress, a roach with two eagle feathers, bobbed on ballpoint-pen springs attached to fishing swivels. His head was cocked at a jaunty angle. A heart-shaped mirror in the middle of his forehead was supposed to snare the hearts of ladies in the crowd. I had a picture of my great-uncle, too, a modest black-and-white photo in which he held his violin. Books to my chest, I curled up beneath the afghan and looked first at Mooshum, then at Shamengwa, and then out the window. I think I realized right then that this place was where I’d spend most of my first semester.

  The white girls I knew listened to Joni Mitchell, grew their hair long, smoked impatiently, frowned into their poetry notebooks. The other girls—Dakota, Chippewa, and mixed-blood like me—were less obvious on campus. The Indian women I knew were shy and very studious, although a couple of them swaggered around furious in ribbon shirts with AIM-looking boyfriends. I didn’t really f
it in with anybody. We were middle-class BIA Indians, and I wanted to go to Paris. I missed my parents and my uncles and was afraid that Mooshum would die while I was gone.

  My roommate was a stocky blond girl from Wishek who was so dead set on becoming a nurse that she practiced bringing me things—a cup of water or, when I had a headache, aspirin. I let her take my blood pressure and temperature, but would not let her practice on me with a shot needle. I spent most of my time in the library. I hid out there and read in the poetry section. My favorites were all darkly inspired, from Rimbaud to Plath. It was the era of romantic self-destruction. I was especially interested in those who died young, went crazy, disappeared, and went to Paris. Only one survivor of edgeless experience interested me, and she became my muse, my model, my everything. Anas Nin.

  I was lost in soul-to-soul contact. I checked her out of the library, over and over, but when summer came I needed her, worse than ever. I had to bring her back with me to keep at my side while I worked at the 4-B’s, while I hung out the family laundry, while I rode Geraldine’s old pinto with Joseph. Anas. I bought all of her diaries—the boxed set. A huge investment. Hard to explain—she was so artistically driven, demure and yet so bold, and those swimming eyes! I made it through the summer. By the time I came back in the fall to live off-campus in a beautiful old half-wrecked farmhouse, I was soaked in the oils of my own manufactured delirium.