The Plague of Doves (16 page)

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.

“You're too young to have established a line of credit,” he said, “but I'm glad to see you here.”

Then he stared at me, his eyes hardened to the black of winter ice, cold in the warmth of his tan skin, so chilling I just melted.

“Stay,” he said, “stay afterward and join us in the trailer. We're going to pray over Ed's mother.”

 

SO I DID
stay. It doesn't sound like a courting invitation, but that was the way I thought of it at the time, and it turned out I was right. Ed was the advertised preacher, and his mother was a sick, sick woman. She lay flat and still on a couch at the front of this house trailer, where she just fit end to end. The air around her was dim, close with the smell of sweat-out medicine, and what the others had cooked and eaten, hamburger, burnt onions, coffee. The table was pushed to one side and the chairs were wedged around the couch. And Ed's mother,
poor old dying woman, was covered with a white sheet that her breath hardly moved. Her face was caved in, sunken around the mouth and cheeks. She looked to me like a bird fallen out of its nest before it feathered, her shut eyelids bulging blue, wrinkled, beating with tiny nerves. Her head was covered with white wisps of hair. Her hands, just at her chest, curled like little bloodless claws. Her nose was a large and waxen bone.

I drew a chair up, the farthest to the back of the eight or so people who had gathered. One by one they opened their mouths and rolled their eyes or closed them tight and let the words fly out of them until they begin to garble and the sounds from their mouths resembled some ancient, dizzying speech. At first, I was so uncomfortable with all of the strangeness, and even a little faint from the airlessness and smells, that I breathed in with shallow gulps, and I shut the language out. But gradually, slowly, it worked its way in and I felt dizzy until I was seized.

 

The words are inside and outside of me, hanging in the air like small pottery triangles, broken and curved. But they are forming and crumbling so fast that I'm breathing dust, the sharp antibiotic bitterness, medicine, death, sweat. My eyes sting and I'm starting to choke. All the blood goes out of my head and down, along my arms, into the ends of my fingers. My hands feel swollen, twice as big as normal, like big puffed gloves. I get out of the chair and turn to leave, but he is there.

“Go on,” he says. “Go on and touch her.”

The others have their hands on Ed's mother. They are touching her with one hand and praying, the other palm held high, blind, feeling for the spirit like antennae. Billy pushes me, not by making any contact, just by inching up behind me so I feel the forcefulness and move. Two people make room and then I am standing over Ed's mother. She is absolutely motionless, still, as though she is a corpse, except that her pinched mouth has turned down at the edges so she frowns into her own dark.

I put my hands out, still huge, prickling. I am curious to see what will happen when I do touch her, if she'll respond. But when I place
my hands down on her stomach, low and soft, she makes no motion at all. Nothing flows from me, no healing powers. Instead, I am filled with the rushing dark of what she suffers. It fills me suddenly as water from a faucet brims a jug, and spills over.

This is when it happens.

I'm not stupid, I have never been stupid. I have pictures. I can get a picture in my head at any moment, focus it so brilliant and detailed it seems real. That's what I do. That's what my uncle does when he's just staring. It's what I started when my mom and dad went for each other. When I heard them downstairs I always knew there'd be a moment. One of them would scream, tear through the stillness. It would rise up, that howl, and fill the house, and then one would come running. One would come and take hold of me. It would be my mother, smelling of smoked chicken, rice, and coffee grounds. It would be my father, sweat-soured, scorched with cigarette smoke from in the garage, bitter with the dust of his fields. Then I would be somewhere in no-man's-land, between them, and that was the unsafest place in the world. Except for the gaze grip of my uncle. So I would leave it. I would go limp and enter my pictures.

I have a picture. I go into it right off when I touch Ed's mother, veering off her thin pain. She grew up in Montana and now I see what she sees. Here's a grainy deep blue range of mountains hovering off the valley in the west; their foothills are blue, strips of dark blue flannel, and their tops are cloudy halls. The sun strikes through, once, twice, a pink radiance that dazzles patterns into their corridors so they gleam back, moon-pocked. Watch them, watch close, Ed's mother, and they start to walk. I keep talking until I know we are approaching these mountains together. She is dimming her lights, she is turning thin as tissue under my hands. She is dying as she goes into my picture with me, goes in strong, goes in willingly. And once she is in the picture she gains peace from it, gains the rock strength, the power, just like I always do.

WE WANDERED IN
the desert three years, and I bore two children in the daze and rush of Billy's traveling visions. His cognitions came on us like Mack trucks, bowling us from tent to tent and town to town. He would howl with the signal, then writhe at tremendous sights he saw, shout for a pen and paper, growl and puke and wrestle with the knowledge until he lay calm on the bathroom floor, spent, saying to me,
Now, do you doubt
?

I never did. I had faith in Billy from that first night I heard him speak. I had faith and I cleaved to him, utterly. But as the months and then the years went by, I missed my mother and my father. I missed their ordinary routine, their low drama, even the familiarity of their quarrels. I missed that I could read their danger, and knew a safe place to be around them—in my pictures. I was having trouble with the pictures. I had to stay on this plane of existence with my babies, that was why. And because I could not disappear into my pictures I needed to go home.

 

JUDAH IS FLUSHED
and peaceful, lips red and soft as petals, his cheeks bright and marked with the seams of the fabric of my blouse. And Lilith, so small and hot, pressed into the folds of my skirt, sighs and falls into a glutted sleep.

“Let's go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I say to my babies, thinking of my mother's face. She hasn't seen them yet.

Nothing can pry this idea loose, I am bent on it.

“Billy,” I say when he walks in. “We're going home.”

“No,” he says without a beat of hesitation.

“We've got to,” I tell him.

I've never crossed him before and my fierceness surprises, then shakes him.

“Your parents died when you were young,” I tell him. “Your sister raised you until you went into the army, then she went to the dogs, I guess. So you don't really understand the idea of home, or folks, or a place you grew up in that you want to return to. But now it's time.”

He sits down on the edge of the little bed in our motel room. I have made him a hot pot of coffee, which he drinks like he is listening.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

I tell him that I have spoken to my parents on the telephone more often lately. As their grandchildren came along, they grew more resigned to Billy, and even will say hello to him on holidays and birthdays. I know if we go back home and bring the babies, things will be all right. My parents will come around. It seems to me that it is time for this to happen, for the break to be mended.

“I've never asked you for anything before,” I say to Billy, and that is true. “I'm going home,” I repeat.

“But I've just started my ministry here. I can't leave behind our membership.”

We have signed on eight retired persons, who have liquidated all of their assets to join our congregation. We are based in motor homes, on land one of them has donated, in the Gallatin Valley near Bozeman. It's just two acres, and we're crowded together, always listening to the whine of someone else's radio.

“You've got reservation land,” I said, “and we could get a bigger parcel of land out near my folks. We could buy up a building in town and open a God-based bookstore. But I want to live back where my family lives, close to the farm. I miss all that flat land, green crops, those clouds. We grew everything,” I tell him. “The big crops, soybeans,
flowers, flax. I miss the blue fields. The yellow mustard fields. Sunflowers turning all day to catch the light. I miss the house garden. Mint for iced tea. Tomatoes big as your foot.”

Billy thinks about it. Maybe, in the end, it is the mention of the farm's acreage, 888 acres, although he knows about my two brothers. It's not like I'm going to inherit the thing, or so it seems then. For one week, I can tell he's mulling it over and I say nothing, worried I'll tip the balance if I do speak, say the wrong thing or say too much.

Then one night, at meeting, he raises his arms and he makes the announcement. We are going to move. And I feel happy, so lucky, so proud as he is standing slim and handsome, fresh-faced and smiling, before his followers, that I don't think right then where they will live. The eight of them, the four of us, hold hands tight and pray in a circle. We sing for an hour, then split up. That night we all begin packing and several days later we set off in a caravan. It is not until we cross the county line that I realize with a jolt, though nothing is expressed, that the place Billy has in mind to park the trailers is my parents' farm. Where else?

When I ask him, he says, “I'll take care of their objections. I'll talk to them.”

He grins. His silvery, curved sunglasses reflect me and reflect the land to either side, now absolutely flat. The sky is gray-gold with dust. The sun is huge and blurred, and seems to hang above us longer here and cast a richer and more diffused light. My parents have told me that there was a long, terrible heat wave this early May. It was a record spring, rainless and merciless. Although the temperatures have gone down somewhat, there has still been no rain, and the earth is suffering.

It is just like when I first met Billy. Another drought. But we'll end it.

“We'll bring rain,” I say, excited, when we are just a few miles away from the farm. It is just something to say at the time, but Billy looks at me and starts to get reflective. We are waiting for the Armageddon that never came on Billy's date, which was just a preliminary date anyway, says Billy. This Armageddon we are waiting for is a different one than the usual, and the signs for it are multiplying, according to Billy's
correlation between the Bible and the business pages. But while we are waiting for the universe to end, Billy gets the notion, as we turn down the road, that we should pray for rain to delay the inevitable. That is what he tells my folks, not fifteen minutes later. We have left the others parked at the turnoff.

I'm hugging and crying with my father and mother, and they're exclaiming over the babies. Uncle Warren is in the background, strained and vigilant. He's shaking with the volume of emotion set loose around him. And with his own thoughts. I am careful not to meet his raving eye. It is a prodigal's return. They are forgiving of me—it's each other they are hard on. They do not hold a grudge about my absence, even after all the trouble they've been through. They seem to accept Billy. Politely, in a grave voice, my mother beckons him up the stairs and into her domain. She is a glass collector—bowls, figurines, vases, tableaus. I hold Judah firmly in my grasp and give Lilith to my father. We walk into the living room and hear Billy exclaiming over the glass. He notices each and every artifact, runs his fingers along the curves of my mother's green unicorn, polishes a heavy blue egg with the side of his cuff. And after he has finished with the glass, he goes out to the sheds and the barns with my father. I don't know what they do out there, or what Billy says, but as they return Billy's hand is firm on my father's back and my father is frowning in concentration, ducking his head up and down. My father's face is long and tired. His eyes are the washed-out white-blue of an overworked German. His shock of white hair hangs thick between his eyes like the forelock of a horse.

“What did you speak to Dad about?” I ask Billy that night, as we're curled together on the three-quarter bed I slept in all my life. The children are down beside us in a trundle. I can hear their whimpering baby sighs.

“We talked about your brothers. One's hit the skids and the other would rather join the navy than go into farming. Plus they are having trouble taking care of your uncle. He wanders off. They found him half dead of exposure. Found him taking an ax to a cow.”

“Ax to a cow?”

Billy shrugs and his voice gets intense now, the voice he uses at the ends of his sermons, the saving voice. “We could help them put your uncle in the state home, and you could have the farm if we just stayed here, you know that.”

I do not answer for a long time. Outdoors, the night is still, just the sound of black crickets sawing in the cracks of the foundation, just the thin tangle of windbreaks and the dew forming and collecting on the powder-dry earth. I have been with Billy three years and I have spoken an unearthly language. I have spoken directly in the power, to spirit, but I'm still only nineteen, the age some girls start college. Some girls just finish high school then. I feel so old, so captured by life already. As we lay together in the dark, the yard lights off to save on the electric bills, as the moonless night covers us all, I feel something else, too. Half-awake and drifting, I feel the stark bird that nests in the tree of the Holy Ghost descend and hover.

I open my mouth to call Billy's name, but nothing. The wings flutter lower, scored white, and the down of its breast crackles faintly as the sparks jump between us. The bird flattens its wings across my breast, brushing my nipples. Then it presses itself into me, heated and full. Its wings are spread inside of me and I am filled with fluttering words I cannot yet pronounce or decipher. Some other voice is speaking now, a constant murmur in my head. Something foreign that I will hide from Billy until I understand its power. I'll hide it from everyone, I think, because it's rich and disturbing and something about it reminds me of my uncle and I wonder if his rage is catching.

 

The next morning, I put Lilith in her playpen outdoors, by the garden, and I set into weeding. The garden is in reach of the hose, so there's carrots feathering, and purple bush beans that will turn green when boiled. There's about ten rows of sweet corn, surrounded by a string fence hung with glittering can lids, to keep out raccoons. Later on in the summer, I'll walk the windbreaks looking for currants and juneberries, and still later chokecherries, wild plums to make a tart jam.

My mother comes out and stoops to the hoe, chopping the earth fine then carving in a little trench, putting in a late crop of Sugar Anns. She's leaner, and wrinkled with sudden age. Lines have webbed her cheeks and pulled down her eyelids, and even her full, pretty mouth is scored and creased. My first brother only calls for money, my other brother left three months ago and made his decision never to return. They didn't even mention that on the phone, but I do think I sensed the change occurring, the desolation. It is why I returned out of the blue, drawn by the sensation of my parents' loneliness, which I did not understand.

My father has been working the place practically alone, so he's let most of the fields go fallow and sold off all the stock but five milkers. Our return is already renewing his hopes, though. High on the tractor, my father goes to see what of the new hay is not yet burnt hollow, what may survive. Watching my mother's sharp elbows swing as she backs down the bean rows, hoeing, I think that maybe what Billy said isn't so terrible. Maybe it is not so awful to consider the reality of the situation. Maybe I should even get together with my parents and make some plans.

But there is no need. Billy says it all. Every night, back in Dad's office, Billy helps him straighten out the mess, helps file, and helps decide which bills to pay on and which to string along. Dad has agreed, with surprising disinterest, to let the retired people camp near an old burnt farmstead where a hand-pump well is still in operation. The end of our land bumps smack up to the reservation boundary. This was reservation, Billy says, and should be again. This was my family's land, Indian land. Will be again. He says it flat out with a lack of emotion that disturbs me. Something's there. Something's different underneath.

As one month and another month goes on, my husband, between attending to the needs of his people, guest-preaching for rain at revivals held all through the area, between learning how to run a tractor and use milking equipment and bale hay with my father, hardly sleeps. Billy seems to whirl from one thing to the next, his energy blooming, enormous, unflagging. The food he eats! Whole plates of spaghetti, pans of fresh rolls. There are nights he paces Dad's office, late, writing
sermons and signing checks, for Dad has given him the power of signature. Sometimes at dawn I stumble downstairs for coffee and he is sitting there, grinning. Still up from the day before. Billy grows as the heat withers everything else. He drinks the well dry! That summer, we borrow from the bank and sink another well. Flushed and enormous, he splits the bottom of his pants.

“I never had parents.” He chokes up, embracing my mother as she lets out and resews the seams of his pants. “I never knew what it was like to live in a family before.”

She smiles at his drama, her face melting in the heat like wax. Uncle Warren watches from the corner, stiff as a stick doll, his jaw alone moving as he mutters an endless indecipherable low monologue. Sssssh, says my mother, keeping Uncle quiet.

My mother bakes a cake from scratch every day. Billy eats it. He earns money with his preaching, hires a lawyer to incorporate us all as a church, so we needn't worry over taxes. Soon, my parents' farmhouse becomes a focus. Each night, the rest of the congregation comes over and we all pray together, in the living room, crying and witnessing, begging forgiveness, and, when pure, sitting in a circle all together, channeling spirit. My mother is loud and extraordinary—who knew? My father more reserved, blinking at what she spills, the plenitude and triviality of her sins. As for Uncle Warren, his eyes grow pleading and he seems to cringe beneath the weight of all he hears. I begin, because Billy is so large and overpowering, to sit near my father on these nights. It is as if my dad needs protection. I think that he's grown more frail, although perhaps it's simply relative. He seems thinner because Billy has expanded to such a marvelous size, outweighing us all, and splendid in his new white suits.

Another month passes and Billy's chins double so he wears a thick flesh collar. We make love every night, but I am embarrassed. He is so loud, so ecstatic. I am tossed side to side on top of him, as if I am riding a bull whale. I make him wear a sleeveless undershirt so I can hold on to the shoulder straps like handles. The bed creaks like the timbers of a boat going down in a gale, and when he comes I feel heavy and swamped. I am afraid of getting pregnant again. I am afraid of what's
happening. The house, once calm in its barbed, brown atmosphere, once lonely and predictable, crawls with people now. They are continually praying with my mother and cleaning savagely, with harsh chemicals. Everything smells of Pine Sol. The yard is gouged with the tire marks of cars. People break the branches off the butterfly bush to fan themselves when the spirit revs their temperature. And all this time, all this time, I don't speak in tongues or feel very much when I pray. I don't get my pictures back. All of that's gone.