The Plague of Doves (5 page)

“Is your sister fond of flowers? What is her favorite?”

“Stinging nettles.”

“Would you say she favors a certain color?”

“Fish-belly white.”

“What were her charming habits when she was young?”

“She could fart the national anthem.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes.”

“Howah! Did she always have such pretty hair?”

“She dyes it.”

“How did she come to have so many husbands?”

“Obscene talents.”

“What does she think? What is her mind like?”

Our dad would just laugh wearily. “Mind?” he’d say. “Thoughts?”

“She’s got her teeth, no? All of them?”

“Except the ones she left in her husbands.”

“I wonder if she would be interested in memories of my horse-racing days here on the reservation. Those could be considered historical.”

“You only quit two years ago.”

“But they go way back…”

And so it would continue until Mooshum was satisfied with his letter. He folded the paper, setting each crease with his thumb, fit it into an envelope, and carefully tore a stamp from a sheet of commemoratives. He would keep the letter in his breast pocket until Mama went to the store, then he’d go along with her and put it di
rectly into the hands of the post lady, Mrs. Bannock. He knew that his pursuit of Neve Harp was frowned upon, and he believed that Clemence would throw his letters in the garbage.

I PROBABLY DID
not fully realize or appreciate our family’s relative comfort on the reservation. Although everyone in the family except my father was some degree of Chippewa mixed with some degree of French, and although Shamengwa’s wife had been a traditional full-blood and Mooshum abandoned the church later to pursue pagan ways, the fact is, we lived in Bureau of Indian Affairs housing. In town, there was electricity and plumbing, as I’ve mentioned, even an intermittent television signal. Aunt Geraldine still lived in the old house, out on the land, and hauled her water. Her horses were the descendants of Mooshum’s racers. We also had shelves of books, some of which were permanent, others changed every week. But because we lived in town we were visited more often by the priest. There was, in fact, one final visit from Father Cassidy, a drama that had far-reaching effects in our family. For one, our mother blamed the argument on liquor and banned Mooshum from drinking it as best she could. For another, the grip of the church on our family was weakened as Mooshum thrillingly broke away.

It was a low and drizzly summer day. Joseph and I had caught a number of salamanders after a rain and were busy restocking the back pond from a galvanized tin bucket, when Father Cassidy appeared in the yard and skipped his bulk along the grass to inspect our work. We looked up from beneath his vast belly, and were surprised to see him crossing himself double time.

“What’s wrong?” asked Joseph.

“There are some who believe those creatures represent the devil,” said the priest. “I, of course, do not hold with superstitions.”

But perhaps there was something to it, as we later found.

By the time Joseph and I had finished releasing the salamanders and come back in the house, the conversation was in full swing and
the bottle, too, was out because Mama was out. The three men nodded happily at us. They were drinking not from shot glasses, but from hard plastic coffee cups, Mama’s favorite new set, harvest gold.

“We better stay here and watch over them,” said Joseph to me, low, and I dipped out cold water for us to drink. We sat down on the couch. There was no doubt things were preceding swiftly. Father Cassidy had asked of Mooshum a particular question, one he never answered the same way twice. The question was this: What had happened to Mooshum’s ear? The ear had not actually, he’d tell us later, been pecked away by doves.

Mooshum squinted, curled his lip out, and asked Father Cassidy if he’d ever heard of Liver-Eating Johnson.

Father Cassidy smiled indulgently and tried a weak joke: “He must have been from Montana!”

“Tawpway,” said Mooshum.

“Paint the picture in words, mon frère!” said Shamengwa.

Mooshum made himself into a hulking beast and clawed at his chin to show the man’s scraggly blood-soaked beard. He then related the horrifying story of Liver-Eating Johnson’s hatred of the Indian and how in lawless days this evil trapper and coward jumped his prey and was said to cut the liver from his living victim and devour that organ right before their eyes. He liked to run them down, too, over great distances.

Father Cassidy gulped and laughed weakly. “That’s enough!” But Mooshum drank from the coffee cup and barged ahead.

“Me, I was a young boy, not yet a man, alone on the prairie hunting for some scrap to eat. Turned out of my family, eh? Away across in the distances I see a someone running, a hairy and desperate man. But me, I have no fear of anything.”

Shamengwa glanced at us, tapped his head, and winked.

“I kept to my own pace, as I was searching for something to eat. A rabbit, maybe, a grouse, even a rattlesnake would have set me up good. I myself was very hungry.”

“Boys get hungry,” said Shamengwa.

“I glance around in hopes that maybe this stranger has some food to spare. He’s coming at me, still running. He’s covered with ragged skins and he has a scrawly beard and that beard, eh? I suddenly see, when he gets close enough, how that beard is all crusted with old blood. And I know it’s him.”

“Liver Eater,” said Shamengwa.

“I see that light in his eyes. He’s very hungry, too! And I begin to spring, I’ll tell you, I take off like a rabbit, quick. I’ve got speed, but I know Liver Eater’s got endurance. He’ll outrun me if we go all day, he’ll exhaust me. And sure enough, the minute I slow my pace, he’s on me. I speed up. It’s cat and mouse, lynx and rabbit. Then he puts a burst on and he jumps me!”

Father Cassidy looked aghast, forgot to drink. Mooshum slowly touched what was left of his ear.

“Yes, he got that. His teeth were sharp. But he must have lost his hunting knife, for he did not stab me. I struggled out of his grip.” Mooshum struggled out of his own arms, burst free of his own clutching hands. “I hopped out, running once again, just ahead of him, but as I charge along, blood from my ear flying in the wind, I get to thinking. Riel, if he’d won there would be some justice! This devil would not dare to chase an Indian. Hey, I think, I’m hungry too! Let’s give Liver Eater some of his own medicine, anyway. I’ve got sharp teeth. So I stop, quick.”

Mooshum jolted in his chair.

“The hairy white man flips over me, and as he does, I bite off one of his fingers.”

“Which one?” said Shamengwa.

“I just got the pinkie,” said Mooshum. “But now he’s foaming mad, so I let him come at me again. This time, I strike like a weasel. Snap, a thumb comes off!”

“Did you eat it?” said Joseph.

“I had to swallow it down whole, no chewing. It tasted foul,” said Mooshum. “I needed it for strength, my boy. We blasted out again. The next time I slowed he went for my liver—but only ripped a chunk out of my left cheek here.” Mooshum pointed at the baggy seat of his
pants. “I tore a bite from his hindquarters, too, and wrestled him down and got a piece of thigh, next. I kept after him. I was young. We must of ran for twenty, thirty miles! And over those miles I whittled him down.”

“Howah!” cried Shamengwa.

“By the time he dropped from blood loss, he was down six fingers. I got one of his ears, the whole thing. I took a couple of his toes just to slow him down. Those, I spit right out. And I got his nose.”

“Yuck,” I said.

“It’s my lucky piece,” said Mooshum. “Want to see it, Father?”

“No, I do not!”

But Mooshum had already drawn his handkerchief from his pocket, and with an air of reverence he unwrapped it to show a blackened piece of leatherlike gunk.

“A bit of
Thamnophis radix
,” said Joseph, peering at it over Mooshum’s shoulder. “Why’d you keep it?”

“It’s his love charm,” Shamengwa said.

“That is…positively pagan!” Father Cassidy spluttered the words out and Mooshum’s eye lighted.

“In what way, dear priest?” he asked with an air of curious innocence, pouring whiskey into the coffee cup that Father Cassidy gripped in his shuddering fingers.

“A nose!” cried Father Cassidy.

“And what piece of good Saint Joseph is lodged in our church’s altar?” asked Mooshum. He spoke in a nunlike voice, gentle and reproving.

Father Cassidy’s mouth shut hard. He frowned. “To
compare
, even to
compare
…”

“I was told,” said Joseph readily, “as he is my name saint of course, I was told that our altar contains a bit of Saint Joseph’s spinal material.”

Father Cassidy drank the whole cup back.

“Sacrilege.” He shook his head. Wagged his empty cup, which Mooshum promptly filled again.

“It saddens and outrages me,” Father Cassidy said, sipping moodily
off the brim. “Saddens and outrages me,” he repeated in a fainter voice. Then he got all stirred up, as if some thought pierced the fog. It was the same thought he’d had already.

“To
compare
…” he blurted out, almost tearful.

“Compare, though, I must,” said Mooshum. “When you stop to consider how the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, is eaten at every Mass.”

Father Cassidy’s tears vanished in a wash of rage. He blew up at this—his cheeks puffed out and he swayed monumentally to his feet.

“That is the
transubstantiation
, which is to say you speak of the most sacred aspect of our Mother the Church as represented in the Holy Mass.”

Father Cassidy was building up more and more gas, and soon a froth of fresh bubbles dotted the corners of his mouth. Mooshum leaned forward, questioning.

“Then do you mean to tell me that the body and the blood is just, eh, in your head, like? The bread stands in for the real thing? Then I could see your point. Otherwise, the Eucharist is a cannibal meal.”

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.

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 Anita’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.