The Plague of Doves (23 page)

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.

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 fit 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.

Like Anas, I reviewed every thought, all visual trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger. I kept Anas with me at all times, though the difference in our lives had become a strain. Anas had had servants to feed her and clean up after her. Even her debauched lovers picked her clothing off the floor; her dinner parties were full of social dangers and alarms, but afterward, she didn’t have to do the dishes. All the same, I, too, kept careful and replete diaries. Each notebook had a title taken from a diary entry by Anas. That fall’s diary was called “Sprouting in the Void.”

As Anas would have done, I wrote long letters to Joseph. He wrote short ones back. Corwin drove me to school and I read aloud from her diary all the way. He only liked it when she had sex—otherwise he said she was “way up in her head.” Corwin visited from time to time. Our grade school romance was a joke between us, and his theft of my
uncle’s violin forgiven after the funeral. He was a dealer, and supplied my friends.

I’d moved in with a household of local poets, hippies, and everyone was dirty. I tried to be, too, but my standards of cleanliness kept me from truly entering into the spirit of the times. I had learned from my mother to keep my surroundings in order, my dishes washed, my towels laundered. The sagging clapboard house where we lived had one bathroom. Periodically, as nobody else ever did, I broke down and cleaned. It made me hate my friends to do this, and resent them as I watched the filth build up afterward, but I couldn’t help it. My fastidiousness always overwhelmed my fury.

Late that fall, past midnight, I had one of my bathroom-cleaning fits. I got a bucket, a scrub brush, and a box of something harsh-smelling called Soilax. I ripped an old towel in four. I wet the bathtub down, the toilet and the sink, and then shook the Soilax evenly across every surface. I looked around for a moment and remembered the putty knife I’d stashed in the basement closet. I fetched it, and a plastic bag, and then I began to scrape away the waxlike brown patches of grease, hair, soap, scum, the petrified ropes of toothpaste, the shit, the common dirt.

The cleaning took a couple of hours and the light over me seemed harsh once I quit, because I’d emptied the fixture of dead flies. But when the light poured down out of its clean globe, a few lines of poetry occurred to me.

I jotted those lines in the notebook, which I always carried in the hip pocket of my jeans. “Sprouting in the Void” was almost filled. I wanted to take a hot bath to remove the disinfectant stink, but what I’d done in patches just made the tub look dirtier, and wrong, like I’d disturbed an ecosystem. So I showered very quickly, then went downstairs, where there was as usual an ongoing party. This one was a welcome-home
party for a fellow poet who’d walked back across the Canadian border that day and was going underground, as he kept saying, loudly. He was also going to shower in my clean bathroom. I deserved to drink wine. I remember that it was cheap and very pink and that halfway through a glass of it Corwin took a piece of paper from a plain white envelope and tore off a few small squares, which I put in my mouth.

She tried everything, Anas;
she
would have tried this!
Spanish dancer
, I cried to Corwin—he was my third or fourth cousin. She was in love with her cousin.
Eduardo!
I said to Corwin, and kissed him. This all came back to me much later. For because of the wine, I was not aware that I had taken blotter acid, even after all of its effects were upon me—the hideous malformations of my friends’ faces, the walls and corridors of sound, the whispered instructions from objects, a panicked fear in which I became speechless and could not communicate at all. I locked myself into my room, which I soon realized was a garden for local herpetofauna and some exotics like the deadly hooded cobra, all of which passed underneath the mop board and occasionally slid out of the light fixtures. I was in my room for two days, sleepless, watching red-sided garter snakes, chorus frogs, an occasional Great Plains toad. I passed in and out of terror, unaware of who I was, unremembering of how I’d come to be in the state I was in. My reclusiveness was so habitual and the household so chaotic that no one really noticed my absence.

On the third day, only one eastern tiger salamander appeared,
Abystoma tigrinum
. It was comforting, an old friend. I began to sense a reliable connection between one moment and the next, and to feel with some security that I inhabited one body and one consciousness. The terror lessened to a milder dread. I ate and drank. On the fourth day, I slept. I wept steadily the fifth day and sixth. And so gradually I became again the person I had known as myself. But I was not the same. I had found out what a slim rail I walked. I had lost my unifier of sensations, lost mind, lost confidence in my own control over my sanity. I’d frightened myself and it was all the more a comfort to return to the diaries. Anas was so deeply aware of her inner states. She was descriptive of the effects of the world upon her—the time of day, the sky, the weather, all affected her moods. I began to shake as I read some of
her entries, so filled with detail. I needed someone to pay close attention to the world I had nearly left behind.

“Everything. The house bewitches me. The lamps are lighted. The fantastic shadows cast by the colored lights on the lacquered walls…”

That was her bedroom in September 1929.

No reptiles for Anas. My own dread kept returning. It was as though in those awful days I’d switched inner connections and now the fear seemed wired into me. Panic states. Temporary shocks—if I were even slightly startled, I could not stop shaking. Frightful but momentary breaks with reality. Daydreams so vivid they made me sick. I managed to function. Because I was so quiet anyway, I hid these dislocations of mind. Only, I had determined that I did not somehow belong with the careless well of the world anymore. I belonged with…Anas. On campus, I watched the well-fed, sane, secure, shining-haired and leather-belted ribbons of students pass me by. I would never be one of them! Instead, as I could not dance—what was Spanish dancing anyway?—and as I could not yet go to Paris, I decided that I must live and work in a mental hospital.

I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position just for one term. I was hired as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a small room in a staff dormitory.

Warren

MY ROOM WAS
small, the walls a deep pink. In my diary I wrote:
I shall cover them with scarves
. I had a single bed with an oriental print spread. The lush landscape had pagodas, small winding streams, bent willows. This, I liked. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. Blue! My secondary muse—the color blue. I took the refrigerator off the table, and made myself a desk. I put everything away, my long skirts and the hand-knitted turquoise sweater I wore constantly. I’d
met none of the other aides yet. There was someone in the next room. The walls were thin and I could hear the other person moving about quietly, rustling the clothes in her closet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at six
A.M.
So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, the heavy white rayon dress with deep pockets, the panty hose, the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought at JC Penney.

As always, I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. The sky was a pre-dawn indigo. I put on a long, black coat I’d bought at the Goodwill, a coat with curly fur of some sort, like dog fur, on the collar and cuffs. It was lined with satin, and maybe wool blanketing, too, for it was heavy as a shield. The air prickled in my nose, my skin tightened, and an intense subzero pain stabbed my forehead.

I walked across the frozen lawn to the ward and sat down in the lighted office. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L. because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a baggy tan cardigan along with her uniform, and a nurse’s cap was pinned into her fluffy pink-blond hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a waxed-paper bag.

“Want some?” Her voice was dull. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she’d had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. They all knew one another, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.

“What am I supposed to do? Can you give me something to do?” I asked in a too bright, nervous voice.

“Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”