The Plague of Doves (14 page)

After a while, Neve came to the window. She looked at him as he got out of the car, and he looked at her, through the window, which was like the glass of a dim aquarium. When she vanished, he was not sure whether she would come to the door or be absorbed into the gloom. But she did open the door at last, and beckoned him inside. They stood in the entry, quite close. Her hair had gone from gray to silver-white. A pulse beat in her slender throat. Her arms were stick thin, but she seemed to generate an unusual light. Wildstrand could feel it, this odd radiance. It seemed to emanate from her translucent skin. It occurred to him that he would sink down at the feet of this beautiful, wronged woman and kiss the hem of the wide-skirted dress that she was wearing.

“You filed a claim on all my stuff. I’m bringing it back,” he said.

“No. I want the money. I need the money,” she told him.

“Why?”

“We’re sunk. They’re not going to buy the bank out. They’re opening a new one next to it.”

“What about your father’s accounts?”

“He’ll live to be a hundred,” said Neve. “John, he told me that you were seeing another woman all along.”

“I don’t know where he got that idea.”

Neve waited.

“All right. Yes.”

Her eyes filled with terrible tears and she began to shake. Before he knew it, Wildstrand was holding her. He shut the door. They made love in the entry, on the carpet where so many people paused, and then on the bench where visitors removed their boots and shoes. His remorse and shame was confusingly erotic. And her need for him was so powerful it seemed that they were going over a rushing waterfall together, falling in a barrel, and at the bottom Wildstrand cracked open and told her everything.

He had to, because of Billy Peace. On the entryway floor next to the boot rack, Wildstrand realized with utter instinctive certainty that Billy had helped himself to his wife’s body when she was tied up and utterly helpless, kidnapped, on the mattress beside the junked pots and cast-off clothing. Wildstrand clung to Neve with the blackness washing over him, and talked and talked.

“I know he violated you,” Wildstrand said, after he’d spilled everything else.

“Who? That boy? He was just a twerp,” said Neve. “He never touched me. I said all of that stuff out of desperation, to try and make you jealous. Why, I do not know.” She sat up and eyed him with calm assessment. “Possibly, I thought you loved me way deep down. I think I believed there was something in you.”

“There is, there is,” Wildstrand said to her, strangling on a surge of hope, touching her ankles as she got to her feet.

“When the snow was covering me, out in the ditch, I saw your face. Real as real. You bent over me and pulled me out. It wasn’t the farmer, it was you.”

“It was me,” said Wildstrand, lifting his arms. “I must have always loved you.”

She looked down at him for a long time, contemplating this amazing fact. Then she went upstairs and called the police.

A Shiver of Possibility

IN THE YEARS
after he was caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced, Wildstrand was sometimes asked by friends he made behind bars, and other lawyers (of course, I asked him myself ), what had caused him to admit what he had done. What caused him to tell Neve and, to boot, assume all responsibility? Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said that he guessed that it would never end; he saw that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment he had opened his door to Billy Peace, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the shining porch light, in the snow, with the dull gun and the sad face, he felt a shiver of possibility, and said, “Come in.”

IT WAS A
drought-dry summer when I met Billy Peace, and in the suspension of rain everything seemed to flex. The growthless spruce had dropped their bud-soft needles. Our popples stretched their full lengths, each heart-lobed leaf still and open. The great oak across the field reared out, its roots sucking water from the bottom of the world. On an afternoon when rain was promised, we sat on the deck and watched the sky pitch over reservation land. I could almost feel the timbers shake under my feet, as its great searching taproots trembled. Still, the rain held off. I left my mother sitting in her chair and went to the old field by the house, up a low rise. There, the storm seemed likelier. The wind came off the dense-grassed slough, smelling like wet hair, and the hot ditch grass reached for it, butter yellow, its life concentrated in its fiber mat, each stalk so dry it gave off a puff of smoke when snapped. Grass-hoppers sprang from each step, tripped off my arms, legs, eyebrows. There was a small pile of stones halfway up the hill. Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.

I was watching the wash of ink, rain on the horizon, when his white car pulled into our yard. A tall man, thin and tense, but with a shy and open smile. His eyes were brown and melting, rich as sweet milk caramel. I would find out later that they could freeze black or turn any color under the sun. He was dressed very neatly, wearing a tie and a shirt that was not sweat through, still ironed crisp. I noticed this as I was walking back down to the yard. I was starting to notice these things about men, the way their hips moved when they hauled feed, checked fence lines, the way their forearms looked so tanned and hard when they rolled up their white sleeves. I was looking at men, not with intentions, because I didn’t know what I would have done with one yet if I got him, but with a studious mind.

I was looking at them just to figure, for pure survival, the way a girl does. It is like a farmer, which my dad is, gets to know the lay of the land. He loves his land so he has got to figure how to cultivate it. What it needs in each season, how much abuse it will sustain, what in the end it will yield to him.

And I, too, in order to increase my yield and use myself right was taking my lessons. I never tried out my information, though, until Billy Peace arrived. He looked at me where I stood in the shade of my mother’s butterfly bush. I’m not saying that I flirted right off. I still didn’t know how to. I walked into the sunlight and stared him in the eye.

“What are you selling?” I smiled, and told him that my mother would probably buy it since she bought all sorts of things—a pruning saw you could use from the ground, a cherry pitter, a mechanical apple peeler that also removed the seeds and core, a sewing machine that remembered all the stitches it had sewed. He smiled back at me, walked with me to the steps of the house.

“You’re a bright young lady,” he said, though he was young himself. “Stand close. You’ll see what I’m selling by looking into the middle of my eyes.”

He pointed his finger between his eyebrows.

“I don’t see a thing.”

My mother came around the corner holding a glass of iced tea in her hand. While they were talking, I didn’t look at Billy. I felt chal
lenged, like I was supposed to make sense of what he did. At sixteen, I didn’t have perspective on the things men did. I’d never gotten a whiff of that odor, the scent of it that shears off them like an acid. Later, it would require just a certain look, a tone of voice, a word, no more than a variation in the way he drew breath. A dog gets tuned that way, sensitized to a razor degree, but it wasn’t that way in the beginning. I took orders from Billy like I was doing him a favor, the way, since I’d hit my growth, I took orders from my dad.

Except my dad only gave orders when he was tired. All other times, he did the things he wanted done by himself. My dad was not the man I should have studied, in the end, if I wanted to learn cold survival. He was too worn-out. All my life, my parents had been splitting up. I lived in a no-man’s-land between them and the ground was pitted, scarred with ruts. And yet, no matter how hard they fought each other they had stuck together. He could not get away from my mother somehow, nor she from him. So I couldn’t look to my father for information on what a man was. He was half her. And I couldn’t look at the old man they took care of, his uncle whose dad originally bought the farm, my uncle Warren, who would stare and stare at you like he was watching your blood move and your food digest. Warren’s face was a chopping block, his long arms hung heavy. He flew into disorderly rages and went missing, for days sometimes. We’d find him wandering the farm roads bewildered and spent of fury. I never saw Warren as the farmer that my dad was—you should have seen my father when he planted a tree.

“A ten-dollar hole for a two-bit seedling,” he said. That was the way he dug, so as not to crowd the roots. He kept the little tree in water while he pried out any rocks that might be there, though our land was just as good as the best Red River soil, dirt that went ten feet down—rich, black clods you felt like holding in your fist and biting. My father put the bare-root tree in and sifted the soil around the roots, rubbing it to fine crumbs between his fingers. He packed the dirt in, he watered until the water pooled. Looking into my father’s eyes you would see the knowledge, tender and offhand, of the ways roots took hold in the earth.

I believed, at first, that there was that sort of knowledge in Billy’s eyes. I watched him from behind my mother. I discovered what he had to sell.

“It’s Bibles, isn’t it,” I said.

“No fair.” He put his hand across his heart, grinned at the two of us. He had seen my eyes flicker to the little gold cross in his lapel.

“Something even better.”

“What?” My mother scoffed.

“Spirit.”

My mother turned and walked away. She had no time for conversion attempts. I was only intermittently religious, but I suppose I felt that I had to make up for her rudeness, and so I stayed a moment longer. I was wearing very short cutoff jeans and a little brown T-shirt, tight, old clothes for dirty work. I was supposed to help my mom clean out her brooder house that afternoon, to set new straw in and wash down the galvanized feeders, to destroy the thick whorls of ground-spider cobwebs and shine the windows with vinegar and newspapers. All of this stuff was scattered behind me on the steps, rags and buckets. And as I said, I was never all that religious.

“There is a meeting tonight,” he said. “I’m going to tell you where.”

He always told in advance what he was going to say. That was the preaching habit in him, it made you wait and wonder in spite of yourself.

“Where?” I said finally.

He told me the directions, how to get where the tent was pitched. He spoke to me looking full on with sweetness of intensity. Eyes brown as burnt sugar. I realized I’d seen his picture before in my grandparents’ bedroom. Billy’s was the face of Jesus leaning his head forward just a little to listen for an answer as he knocked on a rustic door. I decided that I would go, without anyone else in my family, to the fairground field that evening. Just to study. Just to see.

THE RAIN DROPPED
off the edge of the world. We got no more than a slash of moisture in the air that dried before it fell. After the storm
veered off, I decided to go to town. I drove a small sledge and tractor at the age of eleven, and a car back and forth into Pluto with my mother in the passenger’s seat when I was fourteen years old. So it was not unusual that I went where I wanted to go.

As I walked over to the car, I passed Uncle Warren. He was sitting on a stump in the yard, looking at me, watching me, his gray hair tufted out, his chin white stubble, his eye on me, green and frozen.

Where are you going?

Town.

After that?

Back home.

Then?

I dunno.

Hell.

Maybe.

Hell, for sure.

Sometimes he would say that I was just like him, that I maybe was him, he could see it. He could see my whole structure. I couldn’t hide. I told him shut up and leave me alone. He always said to me, you are alone. I always answered, not as alone as you.

In town, the streets were just on the edge of damp, but the air was still thin and dry. White moths fluttered in and out under the rolled flaps of the tent, but as the month of August was half spent there were no more mosquitoes. Too dry for them, too. Even though the tent was open-sided, the air seemed close, compressed, and faintly salty with evaporated sweat. The space was three-quarters full of singing people and I slipped into one of the hind rows. I sat in a gray metal folding chair, kept my eyes open, and my mouth shut.

He was not the first speaker, as it turned out. I didn’t see him until the main preacher finished his work and said a prayer. He called Billy to the front with a little preface. Billy was newly saved, endowed with a message by the Lord, and could play several musical instruments. We were to listen to what the Lord would reveal to us through Billy’s lips. He came on the stage. Now he wore a vest, a three-piece suit, a red silken shirt with a pointed collar. He started talking. I could tell
you just about what he said, word for word, because after that night and long away into the next few years, sometimes four, five times in one day, I’d hear it over and over. You don’t know preaching until you’ve heard Billy Peace. You don’t know god loss, a barbed wire ripped from your grasp, until you’ve heard it from Billy Peace. You don’t know subjection, the killing happiness of letting go. You don’t know how light and comforted you feel, how cherished.

I was too young to stand against it.

THE STARS ARE
the eyes of God and they have been watching us from the beginning of the earth. Do you think there isn’t an eye for each of us? Go on and count. Go on and look in the Book and total up all the nouns and verbs, like if you did somehow you’d grasp the meaning of what you held. You can’t. The understanding is in you or it isn’t. You can hide from the stars by daylight but at night, under all of them, so many, you are pierced by the sight and by the vision.

Get under the bed!

Get under the sheet!

I said to you, stand up, and if you fall, fall forward!

I’m going to go out blazing. I’m going to go out like a light. I’m going to burn in glory. I said to you, stand up!

And so there’s one among them. You have heard Luce, Light, Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. You have seen it with your own eyes and you didn’t know he came upon you. In the night, and in his own disguises like the hijacker of a planet, he fell out of the air, he fell out of the dark leaves, he fell out of the fragrance of a woman’s body, he fell out of you and entered you as though he’d reached through the earth.

Reached his hand up and pulled you down.

Fell into you with a jerk.

Like a hangman’s noose.

Like nobody.

Like the slave of night.

Like you were coming home and all the lights were blazing and the ambulance sat out front in the driveway and you said,

Lord, which one?

And the Lord said,
All of them.

You too, follow, follow, I’m pointing you down. In the sight of the stars and in the sight of the Son of Man. The grace is on me. Stand up, I said.
Stand.
Yes and yes I’m gonna scream because I like it that way. Let yourself into the gate. Take it with you. In four years the earth will shake in its teeth.

Revelations. Face of the beast. In all fairness, in all fairness, let us quiet down and let us think.

Billy Peace looked intently, quietly, evenly, at each person in the crowd and quoted to them, proving things about the future that seemed complicated, like the way the Mideast had shaped up as such a trouble zone. How the Chinese armies were predicted in Tibet and that had come true and how they’ll keep marching, moving, until they reached the Fertile Crescent. Billy Peace told about the number. He slammed his forehead with his open hand and left a red mark.
There
, he yelled, gut-shot,
there it will be scorched
. He was talking about the number of the beast and said that they would take it from your Social Security, your checkbooks, these things called credit cards—American Express, he cried, to Oblivion, they would take the numbers from your tax forms, your household insurance. That already, through these numbers, you are under the control of Last Things and you don’t know it.

The Antichrist is among us.

He is the plastic in our wallets.

You want credit? Credit?

Then you’ll burn for it and you will starve. You’ll eat sticks, you’ll eat black bits of paper, your bills, and all the while you’ll be screaming from the dark place,
Why the hell didn’t I just pay cash?

Because the number of the beast is a fathomless number and banking numbers are the bones and the guts of the Antichrist, who is Lucifer, who is pure brain.

Pure brain gonna get us to the moon, get us past the moon.

The voice of lonely humanity in a space probe calling Anybody
Home? Anybody Home Out There? Antichrist will answer. Antichrist is here, all around us in the tunnels and webs of radiance, in the transistors, the great mind of the Antichrist is fusing in a pattern, in a destiny, waking up nerve by nerve.

Serves us right. Don’t it serve us right not to be saved?

It won’t come easy. Not by waving a magic wand. You’ve got to close your eyes and hold out those little plastic cards.

Look at this!

He held a scissors high, turned it to every side so the light gleamed off the blades.

The sword of Zero Interest! Now I’m coming. I’m coming down the aisle. I’m coming with the sword that sets you free.

Billy Peace started a hymn going and he walked down the rows of chairs, singing, and every person who held a credit card out he embraced, then he plucked that card out of their fingers. He cut once, crosswise. Dedicated to the Lord! He cut again. He kept the song flowing, walked up and down the rows, cutting, until the tough, trampled grass beneath the tent was littered with pieces of plastic. He came to me, last of all, and noticed me, and smiled.