The Plague of Doves (12 page)

Lafayette Peace

THE BUDS SOON
opened and the trees were wearing a denser film of green one week later, when B. J. Bolt arrived on foot, looking not much better than had Bull. Over a month before, B. J. Bolt had started with four men, three pack ponies, plus their own mounts, only to run into the melt. From then on, there was nothing but half-frozen mush and icy slough. After an argument over whether to continue, the other men deserted B. J. and left him just one horse, who ran right off. B. J. had eaten what he could of the food but then—remarkably, given that he could have made it back to St. Cloud—he strapped the rest of the food onto himself and headed west. There were times he waded chest-deep through ice water, holding the food over his head. Other times he cracked through fragile ice. Somehow, he continued. But he had to eat in order to walk. So by the time he arrived at the camp and unbuckled his pack, there was nothing left but a dozen hard biscuits. The men divided them and that night, as he slowly let each crumb dissolve on his tongue, Joseph thought of the otter and of his saved book, which he knew by heart. One phrase whirled in his head:
Wait for death with a cheerful mind
.

If only there was something afterward. Bull hadn’t seemed to see anything in the branches and Marcus Aurelius had left that question up in the air.

“I envy your faith,” Joseph said to Henri. The Buckendorfs slept in a heap. The night was clear and the flames of the outdoor fire snapped high. The two guides took turns playing soft music, and Joseph thought that if only they were not near death this would be a very pleasant night.

“Me,” said Henri, putting down the fiddle and slowly stirring the fire with a stick, “I haven’t much faith. The saints love my brother here.”

Lafayette smiled, polishing his gun, and leaned over to breathe on the barrel. He had grown extremely beautiful and frail. Yet of them
all he had remained most like himself in wit and action. His music had gained in depth. He alone seemed capable of effort.

“Do you believe we will die?” Joseph asked Lafayette, who continued to clean the gun with an absorption much like prayer. “Will you promise to bury me if I do?”

Lafayette suddenly leaned over, took the crucifix from around his neck, and with a tender gesture put it onto Joseph. The fire leapt in his extraordinary, sharp-bladed face. Three times he tapped Joseph on the chest and Joseph felt his heart leap, then Lafayette turned and walked off into the woods.

“Where is he going?” said Joseph, touching the cross at his throat. “What is he going to do?”

“We will have meat tomorrow,” said Henri. That was all.

The Buckendorfs’ eyes glowed with hunger like mystic stones and their yellow fangs had grown. There had been talk of eating Bull, and the guides had promised to kill anyone who tried. They were the ones who buried poor Bull and set a great pile of stones over his grave. They knelt with their rosaries and prayed to the Virgin Mary to rest his soul. Joseph had tried to help them, but had fallen down repeatedly. He was really asking Lafayette and Henri to do the same for him as for Bull. He was very tired now. Sitting beside Henri, he took the locket that held Dorea’s picture from his inner pocket and he opened it to show the guide. Before this, he’d always looked at her picture when he was alone, ashamed, perhaps, of the fact that she was plain and older. Ashamed, perhaps, that someone might think she was his mother.

Henri placed the fiddle with great care into its velvet nest, and stroked it before he shut the lid. Then he took the locket from Joseph’s hands, and looked into the face of Dorea for a very long time. At last he gave her back to Joseph.

“Such a pretty woman,” he said. “Très jolie. You will be happy. She will give you many children and keep you warm at night.”

This was the only untruth that Joseph heard Henri Peace to utter, for after that night in which Lafayette killed a crazed old female moose, and after the next week in which another outfit arrived with
flour and they all stuffed themselves sick on pancakes and syrup then rolled in agony out in the woods, and after Joseph made his way back to St. Anthony more broke than he’d started out and with a deed for two hundred acres of worthless land in his pocket, he showed up at Dorea’s doorstep only to be met by a man who introduced himself as her new husband, to whom he wordlessly gave the locket.

The Saint

FOR A LONG
time after the expedition, Joseph was sick, in a general way, and he gazed long at Lafayette’s crucifix nailed onto his wall. He wondered where English Bill, his dog, the Buckendorfs, and Lafayette and Henri Peace were now. Except for B. J. Bolt, who looked in on him sometimes, the only one whose whereabouts he was sure of was Bull. So after he recovered, Joseph went to visit the doctor’s housekeeper with the dark brown hair, sweet, coffee-milk skin, and freckled nose. She sat with him in the receiving parlor where the doctor’s patients waited. From behind the shut door they could hear the clack of instruments and some muffled yelps. Joseph told the doctor’s housekeeper all about Bull and how he had spoken of her looking at the horizon and how he had set off to walk across the dead swamp of the late winter prairie to be with her. She gazed at him with clear brown eyes and nodded when he had finished telling her about the turtle soup and how Bull had died looking up into the budding branches, with her name on his lips. The last part about the name was, he hoped, a pardonable embroidery. She did look sad, and a bit surprised. At last, she spoke.

“I was going to marry him, it’s a fact. I loved him, I think, but the truth is I cannot recall what he looked like. Our affection came on sudden and he was gone so fast. He hadn’t a picture of himself. But I do think I miss him and I am very sorry that he is dead.”

She was so lucid in her puzzlement and her speech was so calm that Joseph nearly asked her to marry him right then and there. He held his tongue out of respect for Bull, and went back to the room B. J. Bolt had insisted he be given out behind Poolcaugh’s establishment.
There, he pondered, as he had many times, the mystery of his survival and the meaning of the otter. He took down the crucifix and touched it to his forehead.
Alexander and Pompeium and Caius Caesar, after so completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared all over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritas; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out!

He put the book down. He pressed the cross into his forehead as if to absorb its meaning. He thought of Bull’s calm fiance. Again the otter looked at him, an innocent saint. And Bull’s fathomless eyes stared into the leaves.

“Well,” he said out loud, “I’m cured of town fever.”

He went out, bought a vested suit, and decided to become a lawyer.

HE WHO GOES
to law holds a wolf by the ear
, said Robert Burton. So there I was, here I am, the clichd mixed-blood with a wolf by the ear. One of my advantages in holding on to the wolf is that I grew up dividing my time between my mother’s family on the reservation, and the big house in Pluto. Thus, I know something about both sides of many cases I hear. My father built our house on land he had inherited from Joseph Coutts, whose own survey stones the railroad company tried to search out and steal when they came through, named, and platted out the town. That was some years after the town fever ordeal. Joseph Coutts was his own attorney, by then. In his first big case, he got back land for himself, therefore benefiting the Buckendorfs and any other of those original party members who cared to make a living near Pluto. Some did come back, drawn to where they’d lived the hardest, maybe, or where like Bull they had seen the truth of things flutter away in the pale leaves above them.

English Bill returned for a short time to open a saloon, but his terrier dog was thrown across the room in a poker dispute, shot right out of the air, and never did quite recover its vitality. Bill’s liquor was as remarkably bad as his food. I don’t know where he next tried his skill. As for the Buckendorfs, three of the four stayed on and were of course party to the lynching murder of the youngest Peace, whose older brothers had saved their lives.

After he got his land back, my grandfather was asked to move to Pluto and open a practice in what was thought of, after the mob had its way, as a town not quite fit to count itself part of the civilized new state of North Dakota. He did so, my father also went to law, and as they both married Chippewa women we became a family of lawyers who were also tribal members, an unusual combination at the time, but increasingly handy as tribal law and the complications of federal versus state jurisdiction were just beginning to become manifest.

As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation. It is the same with all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth. By drawing a line and defending it, we seem to think we have mastered something. What? The earth swallows and absorbs even those who manage to form a country, a reservation. (Yet there is something to the love and knowledge of the land and its relationship to dreams—that’s what the old people had. That’s why as a tribe we exist to the present.) It is my job to maintain the sovereignty of tribal law on tribal land, but even as I do so, I think of my grandfather’s phrase for the land disease, town fever, and how he nearly died of greed, its main symptom.

I have tried to keep some things about my Pluto self a secret here—my long defeat in love, for instance, by a woman who demolished my house, a few (mostly pardonable) youthful escapades, and a verbal mistake that resulted in my lengthy term of work digging graves in the town cemetery—a place for which I still have fond regard. But in one of my first law cases, I defended the perpetrator of a crime that had taken place in Pluto. This crime had also resulted in Corwin Peace. John Wildstrand was the perpetrator; he was also Corwin’s father. He was tangled in with the rest of the family in complex ways as his grandfather had also fathered Mooshum’s wife—but enough. Nothing that happens,
nothing
, is not connected here by blood.

I trace a number of interesting social configurations to the Wildstrand tendency to sexual excess, or “deathless romantic encounters,”
as Geraldine’s niece, Evelina, puts it when listening to the histories laid out by Seraph Milk. But of course the entire reservation is rife with conflicting passions. We can’t seem to keep our hands off one another, it is true, and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to excite transgression.

At any rate, the entire story of the case, which became lurid in its endless aftermath and was snapped up and salivated over by the Fargo and even Minneapolis newspapers, began a chain of events that worked its way through cultic religion full of inner dramas and hypocrisies, and eventually ended up pretty well, considering that it may be said to have started years ago when Corwin’s uncle, Billy, decided to defend his sister’s honor with a jammed gun.

I represented John Wildstrand, Corwin’s father, after the law caught up with him on a Florida racetrack. That was years after the crime. It was a disastrous criminal case—frustrating because Wildstrand was a jack-in-the-box. He continually popped out of his seat during the proceedings and blurted out wildly incriminating blather—he could not control himself. I debated whether to plead insanity, or simply gag him, and ended up settling for what he seemed to wish for—a conviction. He’d always wanted, I saw later, some sort of containment or certainty that would prevent self-harm. Of course, in the interview process, he told me everything. He told me too much. He told me things about himself that I could not forget.

Wildstrand’s sinned-upon wife, Neve Harp, whom I still see now and then when I visit my mother in the Pluto Retirement Home, hates me for defending the man who so insulted their marriage. Neve is not a resident there, she goes around collecting interviews for her historical newsletter. Neve glares at me, and looks away before I can catch her eye, then she sneaks a look back. She cannot help herself either. It is as if she wonders what I know about her, through him; she intuits that I have an intimate level of information, and she both resents and is curious about my knowledge of her former husband’s life. In spite of everything, I don’t think Neve actually stopped loving John Wildstrand, and I understand that for many years she was the only person who visited him in prison.

Burton’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, believed it was only due to Justice that man can be a God to man and not a wolf. But what is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases, justice is prey to unknown dreams. And besides, there was a woman.

JOHN WILDSTRAND OPENED
his front door wide and there was Billy Peace, his girlfriend Maggie’s little brother. The boy stood frail and skinny in the snow with a sad look on his face and a big gun in his hand. As president of the National Bank of Pluto, John Wildstrand had trained his employees to stay relaxed in such a situation. Small-town banks were vulnerable, and John had actually been held up twice. One of the robbers had even been a jumpy drug addict. He did not flinch now.

His voice loud and calm, Wildstrand greeted Billy Peace as though he didn’t see the gun. His wife, Neve, was reading in the living room.

“What can I do for you?” John Wildstrand continued.

“You may come with me, Mr. Wildstrand,” said Billy, leading slightly to the left with the barrel of the gun. Beyond him, at the curb, a low-slung Buick idled. Wildstrand could see no one else in it. Billy was just seventeen years old and Wildstrand wondered if, and then wished that, Billy had joined the army as Maggie had said he was going to do. She was just a year or two older or younger than her brother. She would never tell. Her age was just one of the dangerous things about her. From the living room Neve called, “Who is it?” and Billy whispered, “Say kids selling Easter Seals.”

“Kids selling Easter Seals,” John Wildstrand called back.

“What? Tell them we don’t want any,” Neve yelled.

“Say you’re going for a little walk,” said Billy.

“I’m going for a little walk!”

“In this snow? You’re crazy!” his wife cried.

“Put your coat on,” said Billy. “So she doesn’t see it’s still hanging on the rack. Then come with me. Shut the door.”

John Wildstrand went out into the snow and Billy pulled the door closed behind him. As Billy followed him down the walkway, presumably with the gun still out or slightly hidden, Wildstrand’s confusion turned to a prayerful wish that he might find Maggie hidden in the car. That this was some odd prank. Some way of her seeing him. The windows of his house sprayed a soft, golden light all the way down the landscaped twist of pavers. There was a band of utter darkness where a stone wall and close-grown arborvitae cast a shadow onto the boulevard. The car sat beyond in the wintry shimmer of a street lamp.

“Get in,” said Billy.

Wildstrand stumbled a bit in the icy snow and let himself into the passenger’s side. The backseat was empty, he saw. Billy held the gun just inside the sleeve of a large topcoat, and kept it pointed at the windshield as he rounded the front of the car and ducked quickly into the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to ease out of this light,” he said.

Billy kept his gun out and his mild eyes trained on Wildstrand as he put the car in Drive and rolled forward into the darkness beyond the street lamp’s glow.

“Time to talk.” He put the car in Park.

Billy was a nervous-looking boy with deep brown eyes and a thin face. Toast-brown hair flopped over one eye and bent into his collar. There were little wisps of down on his chin. He was artistic. This sort of action, Wildstrand knew, did not come naturally to Billy Peace, though he was descended of the famous guide Lafayette Peace, who’d also fought with Riel. He might have gotten slightly drunk to force himself to drive to the Wildstrand residence with a gun and ring the bell. And what if Neve had answered? Would Billy have pretended to be selling candy bars for some high school trip? Would he have tried something else? Did he have an alternate plan? John Wildstrand stared
at the gaunt little face of Billy. The boy really didn’t seem likely to put a bullet in him. Wildstrand knew, also, that Billy’s success in getting him into the car had depended on some implicit collaboration on his own part.

“So,” Wildstrand repeated, using the patient voice he used with jumpy investors, “how can I help you?”

“I think ten thousand dollars should be just about right,” said Billy.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

Billy was silently expectant. Wildstrand shivered a little, then pulled his coat tight around him and felt like crying. He had cried a lot with Maggie. She had brought all of his tears up just beneath his skin. Sometimes they rushed out and sometimes they trickled in slow tracks down his cheeks, along his throat. She said there was no shame in it and cried along with him until their weeping slowed erotically and sent them careening through each other’s bodies. Crying with her was a comfortable, dark act, like being painlessly absolved in church. There was an element of forgiveness in her weeping with him, he felt, and sometimes he became sentimental and sad about what his grandfather had done to a member of her family, long ago.

John Wildstrand heard himself make a sound, an
ah
of doubt. There was something about the actual monetary figure that struck him as wretched and sorrowful.

“It’s just not enough,” he said.

Billy looked perplexed.

“Look, if she keeps the baby, and you know I want her to keep the baby, she’s going to need a house, a car. Maybe in Fargo, you know? And then there are clothes, and, what, swing sets, that sort of thing. I’ve never had a child, but they need certain equipment. Also, she needs a good doctor, hospital. That’s not enough for everything. It’s not a future.”

“Okay,” Billy said, after a while. “What do you suggest?”

“Besides,” Wildstrand went on, still thinking out loud, “the thing is, in for a penny in for a pound. This amount will be missed just as much as a larger amount will be missed. My wife sees our accounts.
There needs to be an amount like, say, let me think. If it’s just under a hundred thousand, the papers will say nearly a hundred thousand anyway. If it’s a hundred thousand, they’ll say that. So it might as well be over fifty thousand. But not seventy because they’ll call that nearly a hundred.”

Billy Peace was quiet. “That’s just over fifty thousand,” he said finally.

Wildstrand nodded. “See? But that’s a doable thing. Only there must be a reason. A very good reason.”

“Well maybe,” said Billy, “you were going to start some kind of business?”

John Wildstrand looked at Billy in surprise. “Well, yes, that’s good, a business. Only then we’ll need to actually have the business, keep it going, make a paper trail and that will lead to more deception and the taxes…it all leads back to me. It gets too complicated. We need one catastrophic reason.”

“A tornado,” said Billy. “I mean in winter maybe not. A blizzard.”

“And where does the money come in?”

“The money gets lost in the blizzard?”

Wildstrand looked disappointed and Billy shrugged weakly.

“A cash payment?”

They both cast about for a time, mulling this over. Then Billy said, “Question.”

“Yes?”

“How come you don’t get divorced from your wife and marry Maggie? A while ago, she said you loved her and now it sounds to me like you still love her. So maybe I didn’t have to come here and threaten you with this.” He wagged the gun. “I’m not getting why you don’t leave your wife and go with Maggie, like run off together or something. You love her.”

“I do love her.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Look at me, Billy.” John Wildstrand put his hands out. “Do you think she’d stay with me just for me? Now be honest. Without the money. Without the job. Just me.”

Billy Peace shrugged. “You’re not so bad, man.”

“Yes, I am,” said Wildstrand. “I’m…a lot of years older than Maggie and I’m half-bald. If I had my hair, then maybe, or if I was either good-looking or athletic. But I’m a realist. I see what I am. The money helps. I’m not saying that’s the only reason Maggie cares for me, not at all. Maggie is a pure soul, but the money helps. I’m not losing one of my biggest assets—if I divorced Neve now I wouldn’t have a job. All gone. I took over from her father, who is, yes, old and in a nursing home. But perfectly lucid. Neve is a fifty-one percent shareholder. Besides, here’s the thing. Neve has done nothing wrong. She has never, to my knowledge, betrayed me with another man, nor has she neglected me within her own powers. It is not her fault. Until I really
saw
Maggie, you understand, one year ago, I was reasonably happy. Neve and I had sex for twenty minutes once a week and went to Florida on winter vacations; we gave dinner parties and stayed two weeks out of every summer at the lake. In the summer we had sex twice a week and I cooked our meals.”

Billy looked uncomfortable.

“Besides, we’re a small bank and we could get bought out. That would change my situation. I’d like to be with Maggie. I plan to be with Maggie. If she’ll have me.”

Now Wildstrand leaned questioningly toward Billy.

“What does your presence here mean, actually? Did she send you?”

“No.”

“What happened? She won’t talk to me, you know.”

“Well, she told me about her being pregnant. She was kind of upset and I thought you were ditching her. That’s what I thought. You know there’s always been just the two of us. Our mother froze in the woods when I was eleven. Maggie raised me in our grandparents’ house. I would die for her.”

“Of course,” said John Wildstrand. “Of course you would. Let that be our bond, Billy. Both of us would die for her. But here’s the thing. Only one of us…right now anyway, only one of us can provide for her.”

“What should we do?”

“Something has come to me,” said Wildstrand. “Now I’m going to propose an act that may startle you. It may seem bizarre, but give it a chance, Billy, because I think it will work. Hear me out? Say nothing until I’ve laid out a possible plan. Are you ready?”

Billy nodded.

“Say you kidnap my wife.”

Billy gave a strangled yelp.

“No, just listen. Tomorrow night you do the very same thing. As if tonight was just practice. You come to the door. Neve answers. You show her the gun and you come into the house! You have some strong rope. A pair of scissors. At gunpoint you order me to tie up Neve. Once she’s taken care of, you tie me up and say to me, in her hearing, that if I don’t deliver fifty thousand dollars in cash to you tomorrow you will not let her go. Otherwise you’ll kill her…you have to say that, I’m afraid. Then you bring her out to the car. Don’t let her see the license plates.”

“I don’t think so,” Billy said. “I think you’re describing a federal crime.”

“Well, yes,” said Wildstrand. “But is it really a crime if nothing happens? I mean you’ll be really, really nice to Neve. That’s a given. You’ll take her to a secure out-of-town location, like your house. Keep her blindfolded. Put her in the back bedroom where you keep the junk. Lay down a mattress there so she’s comfortable. It’ll just be for a day. I’ll drop off the money. We’ll time it. Then you’ll let her out somewhere on the other side of town. She may have a long walk. Be sure she brings shoes and a coat. You’ll drive back to wherever and turn in the car. I don’t think we should tell Maggie.”

“Maggie’s gone, anyway.”

Wildstrand’s heart lurched, he’d somehow known it. “Where?” he managed to ask.

“Her friend Bonnie took her to Bismarck, just to clear out her head. They’ll be back on Friday.”

“Oh, then, this is perfect,” said Wildstrand.

Billy looked at him with great, silent, dark eyes. His and Maggie’s eyes were very similar, thought Wildstrand—that impenetrable In
dian darkness. They had some white blood and both were cream-skinned with heavy brown hair. Wildstrand felt extremely sorry for Billy. He was so frail, so young, and what would he do with Neve? She worked outside shoveling snow all winter and in summer she gardened, dug big holes, planted trees even. Billy kept shifting the gun from hand to hand, probably because his wrist was getting tired.

“By the way, where did that gun come from?” Wildstrand said.

“It belonged to my mother’s father.”

“Is it loaded?”

“Of course it is.”

“You don’t have ammunition for it, do you,” said Wildstrand. “But that’s good. We don’t want any accidents.”

The Gingerbread Boy

WHEN BILLY PEACE
knocked on the door the next evening, John Wildstrand pretended to have fallen asleep. His heart beat wildly and his throat closed as the quiet transaction occurred in the entryway. Then Neve walked into the room with her arms out and her square little honest face blanched in shock. She made a gesture to her husband, asking for help, but Wildstrand was looking at Billy and trying not to give everything away by laughing. Billy wore a child’s knitted winter face mask of cinnamon brown with white piping around the mouth, nose, and eyes. His coat and his pants were a baked-looking brown. He looked like a scrawny gingerbread boy, except that he wore flowered gardening gloves, the sort that women used for heavy chores.

“Oh no, I’m going to throw up,” Neve moaned when Billy ordered John Wildstrand to tie up his wife.

“No, you’ll be okay,” said Wildstrand, “you’ll be okay.” Tears dripped down his face and onto her hands as he tried firmly but gently to do his job. His wife’s hands were so beautifully cared for, the nails lacquered with soft peach. Let nothing go wrong, he prayed.

“Look, he’s crying,” Neve said accusingly to Billy, before her hus
band tied a scarf between her teeth, knotting it hard behind her head. “Nnnnnn!”

“I’m sorry,” said Wildstrand.

“Now it’s your turn,” said Billy.

The two of them suddenly realized that Billy would have to put down the gun and subdue Wildstrand, and their eyes got very wide. They stared at each other.

“Sit down in that chair,” Billy said at last. “Take that rope and loop it around your legs, not around the chair legs,” and then he gave instructions for Wildstrand to do most of the work himself, even had him test the knots, all of which Wildstrand thought quite ingenious of Billy.

Once Wildstrand had secured himself to the chair and Billy had gagged him, Billy told Neve to get on her feet. But she refused. Even as anxiety coursed through him, Wildstrand felt obscurely proud of his wife. She rolled around on the floor, kicking like a dolphin until Billy Peace finally pounced on her and pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple. Straddling her, Billy untied the cloth gag in her mouth and rummaged in his pocket. He drew out a couple of pills.