The Plague of Doves

by Louise Erdrich

  She concealed her reaction behind a lifted hand, and took some time to answer.

  “To live my life atoning for another person’s sin?” She said at last, her voice scratchy and faint. “I wouldn’t have had the strength. But then again, the hanging undoubtedly had something to do with my decision, growing up and finding out. Knowing one could be capable.”

  “One could be?”

  “Anyone, perhaps. My father said that his grandfather was very kind, the kindest one of all. And yet he always knew he’d been one of the lynching party. My father was never able to put him there, in his thoughts. A couple of times he said he spoke of it. He spoke of your grandfather.”

  “Mooshum?”

  I leaned forward and waited, but she hesitated.

  “I’m not sure…but you asked. You want to know.” Her lucid eyes combed me over. “All right, dear, I’ll tell you. I believe your grandfather used to drink in those days. Your Mooshum told Eugene Wildstrand that he and the others were at the farmhouse. Mooshum told how they had found that poor family.”

  I couldn’t look at her suddenly. I could only see Mooshum. A ragged flush rose from deep inside of me, a flood of pure distress. “He must have been stinking drunk to tell that,” I said.

  Nowhere in Mooshum’s telling of the events did he make himself responsible. He never said that he had been the one who betrayed the others, yet instantly I knew it was true. Here was why the others would not speak to him in the wagon. Here was the reason he was cut down before he died.

  Although I knew Mary Anita spoke the truth, I could not help arguing, and my voice rose. “They put a rope around his neck! He almost died. They tried to hang him, too.”

  Sister Mary Anita’s hands twisted in agitation. “Yes, my dear. Wildstrand cut him down at the last moment, yes. From what I heard, though, they never meant to hang him all the way. They wanted to terrify him, to intimidate him. A false hanging will do that.”

  Sister Mary Anita touched the bottom of her face lightly with her knuckles, then gazed over my head, at the crucifix I thought. She was looking at the basket of dried flowers—black-eyed Susans, the little brown thumbs of prairie coneflowers, rusty Indian paint, cattails—all recently gathered from the ditches and pastures.

  “The boy made that basket,” said Mary Anita.

  I rose, stepped across the room, and examined the basket—the wands, brittle and ancient, were more widely spaced than the best baskets, and a bit loose, the weaving not tight but irregular; it was a basket that a boy might make. Sister Mary Anita scraped out of the room, her feet uncertain on the floor now, and while she was gone I sat down, bent over, and held my head in my hands. Mooshum. When she came back, she had a brown paper bag, folded over on top. She didn’t sit down and when I stood up to take the bag in my arms, I saw that she was tired and wanted me to leave. She remembered at the door.

  “I’ll pray for your vocation,” she said. “And your sanity. too.” She brightened and made a small joke. “They are not mutually exclusive.”

  I walked back down the hill and entered our house. Joseph and I still had our tiny alcove bedrooms—though his was full of all of his things now, plus Mama’s sewing. Mooshum still slept in the little pantry off the kitchen. I went to my room, sat down on the bed, opened the paper bag, and peered inside. There was a pair of laceless boots, tongues dragging, leather dark and cracked with age. I took the boots out of the bag and held them in my arms. If I lifted one out and turned it over to look at the bottom, I knew I would see the nailed-on cross.

  When I’d walked into the house, I had awakened Mooshum and now I heard him making his unsteady old man’s way down the hall to my room. Nobody else was home.

  “Want to play cards?” he said at my door.

  I turned around and held the boots out, one gripped in each hand. Mooshum looked at me strangely, arrested by my attitude. He pushed his fingers through his scraggly hair, touched his sparse unshaven bristles, white against his skin, but of course he didn’t recognize Holy Track’s boots.

  “Evey?”

  I shook the boots at him. He cocked his head to the side, opened his long fingers, and took the boots when I shoved them toward him.

  “Turn them over,” I said.

  He did and as he stared at the soles he bent slightly forward, as if they had gotten heavy. He turned away from me in silence and made his way back down the hall to his couch, which he fell into with the boots still in his hands. I thought that I’d maybe killed him. But he was frowning at the wall. I sat down next to him on the lumpy cushions. He put the boots carefully between us.

  After a while, he spoke.

  “I passed out cold, so I never knew when they cut me down. I lay there I don’t know how long. When I came to, I looked up and there was these damn boots with the damn crosses on, walking, the boy was still walking, on air.”

  “They let him dangle there, choking to death, and watched him.”

  Mooshum shrugged and put his hands to his eyes.

  A dizziness boiled up in me. I jumped to my feet.

  “You’re the only one left,” I said.

  “Tawpway,” said Mooshum, complainingly, “and now you killed me some, too. I am sick to look on these old boots and think of Holy Track.”

  “You’re the one who told!”

  He rifled his pockets, took out his grubby, balled-up handkerchief, and tried to give it to me. I pushed it back.

  “I did sober up for a long time, though, after that, some.”

  We looked down at the splayed boots.

  After a while Mooshum picked up the boots and said he wanted me to drive him someplace. So I got the keys and helped him out of the house and into the car.

  “Where am I going?”

  “To the tree.”

  I knew where the tree was. Everybody knew where the tree was. The tree still grew on Marn’s land, where Billy Peace’s kindred used to stay. People had stopped going there for a while, but come back now that the kindred had disappeared. The tree took up the very northwest corner of the land, and it was always full of birds. Mooshum and I drove silently over the miles, then parked the car on a tractor turnout. When we slammed the car doors, a thousand birds startled up at the same instant. The sound reverberated like a shot bow. They flew like arrows and disappeared, sucked into the air.

  We walked over dusty winter-flattened grass into the shadow of the tree. Alone in the field, catching light from each direction, the tree had grown its branches out like the graceful arms of a candelabra. New prayer flags hung down—red, green, blue, white. The sun was flaring low, gold on the branches, and the finest of new leaves was showing.

  Mooshum knotted the laces, handed the boots to me. I threw them up. It took three times to catch them on a branch.

  “This is sentiment instead of justice,” I said to Mooshum.

  The truth is, all the way there I’d thought about saying just this thing.

  Mooshum nodded, peering into the film of green on the black twigs, blinking, “Awee, my girl. The doves are still up there.”

  I stared up and didn’t have anything to say about the doves, but I hated the gentle swaying of those boots.

  All Souls’ Day

  SO AFTER ALL, Mooshum saw in the skies of North Dakota an endless number of doves cluttering the air and filling heaven with an eternity of low cries. He imagined that the blanket of doves had merely lifted into the stratosphere and not been snuffed out here on earth. By this flurry of feathers, he was connected to the great French writer whose paperback I picked up again after abandoning Anas Nin. I read it so often that I sometimes thought of Judge Coutts as the judge-penitent, who bore my mother’s name, and waited at a bar in Amsterdam for someone like me. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. Albert Camus had once worked in a weather bureau, which made me trust his observations of the sky.

  It was a warm Halloween night, and I had come home from school to help celebrate Mooshum’s favorite holiday. To get ready for the trick-or-treaters, I driz
zled warm corn syrup onto popcorn, larded my hands, and packed popcorn into balls until we had about a hundred or more stacked in a big steel bowl. We had backup—two vast bags of sticky peanut butter kisses. Our house was first on the road and everyone from out in the bush came into town on Halloween nights. Mooshum glared sadly at the treats. He didn’t like peanut butter and the popcorn balls would be a problem, as he had never adjusted to his dentures.

  “I could not bite the liver out of anyone with these dull choppers,” Mooshum said.

  I pulled out a bag of pink peppermint pillows. He plucked one out, set it on his tongue, and closed his eyes. The little wisps of his hair fluttered in the breeze from the door.

  “I miss my brother,” said Mooshum, fingering his mangled ear. “I even miss how he shot me.”

  “What?”

  “Oh yai,” he said, “this ear, didn’t you know? It was him.”

  Mooshum told me that the fall after he and Junesse returned to the reservation he followed his younger brother out hunting. Somewhere in the woods Mooshum had hidden the bear’s skin that ordinarily draped the family couch. Pulling the skin over himself, Mooshum managed a convincing ambush, rising suddenly from a patch of wild raspberry pickers and flinging himself forward in a mighty charge. Shamengwa fled as Mooshum pursued, fled with a loaded gun, but turned and shot with an awful cry as he tripped and fell.

  “That bullet took my ear,” Mooshum said, chopping the side of his hand at his head. “Clipped me good.”

  My mother sat down with us, and stirred sugar into a cup of tea.

  “My brother pissed himself all the way down his legs that time. Did you ever know that?” Mooshum said.

  “No!”

  They started snuffling behind their hands. “Shame on you, Daddy,” said Mama. “You’re the one who peed himself.” They suddenly fell silent. Mooshum rocked back on his chair’s rear legs. He’d shrunk so that his soft, old green clothes were like bags, and his body inside was just lashed-together sticks.

  Mama finished her tea, got up, and threw a couple of big hunks of dough on the cutting board. She started kneading, thumping them hard and shoving the heels of her hands in, a practiced movement I’d seen a thousand times. She was setting the dough to rise before going out with my father. They were attending some church-sponsored event that was supposed to be an alternative to the devil’s inspiration, trick-or-treating. Father Cassidy still worked on the family, though more by habit than with any real hope.

  Mooshum chewed and spat; his new coffee can was a red Folger’s.

  “They still won’t give me a stamp!” He hissed behind Mama’s back.

  “Give me the letter,” I said. “I’ll mail it.”

  Mama was leaving, a spiderwebby lace scarf at the collar of her neat navy blue coat. My father wore a starched green shirt and a plaid jacket. His face was tired and resigned.

  “He’d rather of stuck here with us,” Mooshum said as they went out the door.

  “He needs some relief,” I said.

  My father’s class that year was dominated by two big unstable Vallient boys, who were uncontrollable. Most of my father’s days were filled with conflict. He said that he couldn’t take teaching anymore and had decided to sell his stamp collections and retire. Of course, we thought it was just talk, but he was conducting an auction by mail. Letters with the crests of stamp dealers appeared in the post office box.

  After they left, Mooshum and I sat beside the door. Mama had wrapped each popcorn ball in waxed paper and twisted the ends shut. I opened one and began to eat it. There was an excited knock and the first wave of trick-or-treaters hit. We got the usual assortment of bums and pirates, some sorry-looking astronauts, a few vampires out of Dark Shadows, ghosts in old sheets, nondescript monsters, and bedraggled princesses with cardboard crowns. A lot of the older kids were motley werewolves or rugaroo with real fur stuck on their faces and wrists.

  “This ain’t no fun yet,” said Mooshum.

  For the next ones who came, I hid around the back of the door while Mooshum sat in darkness with the bowl of popcorn balls in his lap and a flashlight held under his chin. The kids had to approach and pluck the treat from the bowl, but only the toddlers were anywhere scared enough for Mooshum. A couple of older kids even laughed. He tried moaning some, rolling his eyes to the whites.

  “They are hardened!” he said when they left.

  “It’s not easy to scare kids these days with all they see.” I attempted to comfort him, but he was downcast. We tried the same thing with the next bunch, but not until he bit into a popcorn ball as one little boy approached, and his dentures stuck, and he took the ball out and held it toward the kid with the teeth in it, did we get a real satisfying shriek.

  After that, when a child approached, I turned the flashlight on Mooshum and he bit into the popcorn ball, leaving his teeth in the gluey syrup. The kids had to reach underneath the hand and the popcorn ball with the teeth in it. We kept it up until one mom, who was carrying her two-year-old in a piece of white sheet, said, “You’re unsanitary, old man!” That hurt Mooshum’s feelings. He put his dentures back in sulkily and gave out peanut butter kisses with a stingy fist to the next three groups. There was a short hiatus, and I ate a kiss, which tasted faintly of peanut butter, more of glue. Mooshum’s dentures were so loose now that he clacked and spat.

  I finished handing out the treats, shut the door, and turned back with the bowl of candy. Mooshum was gone.

  “Don’t look yet!” he cried from the kitchen.

  I walked straight back to see what he was up to, and nearly dropped over. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts made of tissue-thin cotton, and he was stretching a big wet hunk of Mama’s fresh, soft, new-risen bread dough over his head. He’d plopped it there and now it oozed horribly down his face, his neck, over his shoulders. His ears stuck out of the dripping mask. Strings of dough hung around his arms and he’d taken more bread dough and slapped it on his chest and stomach and thighs. His eyes peered out of the white goo, red and avid as a woodpecker’s. He’d filled his mouth with ketchup. When he grinned, it leaked from his toothless mouth and down his chin. He saw my face, whirled, and ran out the back door. There was a clamor of voices yelling trick or treat. I dropped the bowl and chased him out the back door, but he’d already disappeared. I was creeping around the front when I saw him rise from the yew bush, the flashlight trained on himself from underneath. He shrieked—a barely human, shocking squeal. He tottered toward the kids and I knew when he grinned the ketchup grin, because the five boys yelled in fright and broke ranks. Three bolted and sprang off quick as jackrabbits. One dashed a little way before he tripped. The last one picked up a rock and winged it.

  The rock hit Mooshum square in the center of his forehead. He fell full length, the flashlight skidding out of his fist, just as my parents drove up and jumped out of the car. I picked up the flashlight and trained it on Mooshum as Dad turned him over. Mama fell to her knees. Mooshum’s eyes were wide-open, staring, and his forehead was bleeding all down his nose and cheeks. Mama put her arms around Mooshum’s shoulders and shook him, trying to make his eyes focus. I knelt beside him and tried to take his pulse, but I can hardly find my own pulse so I couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. I put my ear to his chest.

  “Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Dad.

  Mooshum woke and trained his eyes with great affection on my mother. “A good one, that.”

  Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. He snored once. Mom said, “What’s he covered with?” I answered, “Bread dough.” We waited for the next snore. There wasn’t one. Dad bent over Mooshum, pinched his nose shut, tipped his head back and opened his jaw with his thumb. He blew a long breath into Mooshum. Ketchup bubbled and leaked down Mooshum’s neck.

  “Did his chest move?” Dad wiped the ketchup off his mouth. He didn’t even ask about the ketchup.

  “Yeah.”

  He bent over and blew four more times into Mooshum. Then Mooshum stirred a
nd coughed himself back to consciousness.

  We decided to load him into the car, and in the relief of the moment we seemed to carry Mooshum effortlessly. I sat in the backseat with his head in my arms, and as we sped toward the hospital I felt his breath go out, and not come in, but then start up, like a sputtering outboard.

  In the emergency room, he caused a stir. The nurses called everyone else over to look at him in his bread dough until Dad got mad, said, “Quit gawking. You’re supposed to be professionals!” and shut the curtain around us. The doctor on call made it to the emergency room in five minutes. He was a young doctor, doing his government payback with the IHS, and he stepped around the curtain still shrugging on his white coat. The nurses must not have told him about the ketchup and the bread dough, but the doctor did pretty well. His mouth shook but he withheld laughter. Mooshum frowned in the bread dough mask, the ketchup drooling out the corners of his mouth, down his neck. Mama touched his hands tenderly and lightly as she folded them onto his chest. As we stood there looking at Mooshum, it seemed that his face slowly changed, relaxing into contemplation; contentment at the corners of his mouth. Dad gasped and wiped his face. The nurses were out there again, listening to us. We stood there for an endless amount of time, in a buzzing suspension.

  “He looks happy,” said Mama. “He looks like he’s coming back.”

  Mooshum started breathing steadily.

  “I’m going to die now,” he sighed.

  “No you’re not, Daddy.”

  “Yes, I am. I want my lovergirl to visit me. Here in the hospital. Call Neve! It is my final request!”

  “They’re not even going to keep you here, Daddy. They’re letting us take you home.”

  “No, baby girl, I am gone.” He appeared to pass out, and Mama shook him, but just then Father Cassidy bounded lightly between the curtains. He had a spark in his eye and the good book in his hands. Mama would not step aside, so the priest had to crane to look into Mooshum’s face.

  “Am I still in time?” he asked loudly. “One of the nurses sent word.”