The Plague of Doves (17 page)

I don't know who I married anymore. It's like he's supernatural. He is horribly tireless, exhausting everyone so much that we have to take shifts to keep up with him. I carry his shirts, socks, underwear, trousers, out to the clothesline to hang. They are so large now they do not require clothespins. I drape them like sheets and then I sit, worn-out, where I am hidden from his eye. He talks rain. He still talks Armageddon. The farm is made over to me now, and through me to Billy. He talks about the founding of the chosen. We are the ones, he says, who will walk through the fire. We are the Daniels. He holds our son up before the eyes of the congregation and the poor boy is small as a fish in his hands.

Finally, it is the picnic table and the iron bench that brings me to the end of this part of our life and the bigger, uncontrollable force that Billy becomes. The table is set out in the bare backyard, and it is made of sheet metal, steel pipes, and a welded cross bar, hammered into the ground. Dad made it for days it was too humid to eat indoors, and for general celebrations, of which we never had one. The whole area is laid out where the view is nice so that Mother, fond of her pretty yard and flowers, could gaze past a row of wild orange daylilies after she worked in the garden. She could pause, rest her eyes on a bit of loveliness. There is even an iron-lace bench for sitting on, maybe reading, though nobody ever opened a book there.

The August heat has let up briefly, then closed down again. Uncle Warren is chipping chicken shit off the perches, swearing in a low, grating tone at the hens that peck beside his feet. A few days ago, my mother crawled underneath a flowered sheet on the couch and now she will not rise. From her couch near the picture window, where she
is quietly getting even thinner, my mother watches the picnic area, sees the sun rise and pass overhead. It is just a stubborn flu bug, she says, but there are times, watching as she simply lies still, her arms like straight boards placed to hold down the thin, puckery sheet, that I am afraid she'll die and I want to climb in next to her.

One humid afternoon I am sitting with my mother on the couch and we are watching Billy talk beneath the green ash tree with a few of the others. The babies are sleeping on the floor on folded quilts, with fans spilling air over them back and forth. Billy rarely drinks, and then, nothing stronger than wine. He is drinking wine now, a homemade variety from elderberries, made by a congregation member from a recipe passed down through her family. I suppose that the wine has got such a friendly history that Billy feels he can drink more than usual. And then, it is hot. The jars of wine are set in an icy cooler on the metal picnic table, and from time to time Billy lifts out a jar and drains it. As he talks, the sweat pours off his brow. His dark hair is wetted black, his body is huge, mounded over the iron bench. He lifts his thick arms to wrestle with a thought, drags it out of the air, thumps it on the top of his thigh. He is holding a rain prayer meeting, and as we sit in the heat of the afternoon, with the fans going, watching the others pray in the blazing sun, we notice that clouds are massing and building into fabulous castlelike and blazing shapes.

These clouds are remarkable, pink-gold and lit within. They are beautiful things. I point them out to my mother.

“Thunderclouds,” she says, excited. “Push my couch closer to the window.”

I should be out praying with the group, or cooking up a dinner for them all, or working on the garden to bring in tomatoes in case it does rain, in case those clouds bring hail. But I do nothing other than place a chair next to my mother's couch. Uncle Warren is sleeping with his eyes open, sitting straight in his chair. Lilith is limp and draped over a stuffed bear. I cover her with a crocheted afghan because a cool breeze has risen. My father enters the room. He has come to point out the clouds. Warren's eyes sharpen. Outside, Billy continues, wringing
his hands into big golden fists, sobbing with the power, drinking the wine in swigs, shouting.

Now the wind rises, slapping the branches crazy. The clouds ride over the land, gathering and bunching, reflecting light. They are purple, a poisonous pink, a green as tender as the first buds of spring. The clouds cover the horizon and within the mass, as the thing opens over us, we see the heart of the storm, the dark side of the anvil shot through with an electric lacery of light.

A cold wind rises out of the ditches, driving before it the odor of sour mud water and then fresh. Droplets, soft and tentative, plop down and the thunder is a cart full of stones, rumbling closer.

Still they keep praying with their hands held up and their eyes tight shut. Beneath the whipping leaves, pelted and in danger, they huddle. Their voices are a windy murmur. His voice stands out among them, booming louder as the storm comes on.

A burst of radiance. The flowers fly into the air and scatter in the yard. Another crack so loud we're right inside of the sound. Billy Peace, sitting on the iron bench like an oracle, is the locus of blue bolts that spark between the iron poles and run along the lantern wires into the trees. Billy, the conductor with his arms raised, draws down the power. The sound of the next crack slams us back from the window, but we crawl forward again to see. A rope of golden fire snakes down and wraps Billy twice. He goes entirely black. A blue light pours from his chest. Then silence. A hushed suspension. Small pools of radiance hang in the air, wobble, and then disappear. A few drops fall, mixed with small, bouncing marbles of hail. Then whiteness tumbles through the air, ice balls smash down the mint and basil and lemon balm so the scents rise with the barbecue smell of burnt skin.

We say nothing. The babies sleep. And Billy Peace?

He is a mound, black and tattered, on all fours. A snuffling creature of darkness burnt blind. We watch as he rises, gathers himself up slowly, pushes down on his thighs with huge hands. Finally, he stands upright. I grab my mother's fingers, shocked limp. Billy is alive, bigger than before, swollen with unearthly power. We step away from
the window. He bawls into the sky, shaking his head back and forth as the clouds open. Harsh silver curtains of water close across the scene. We turn away from the window.

“Mom,” I say, “we've got to stop him.”

“No one's ever going to stop him,” she answers.

ONE DAY, AS
I am standing in a strip of shade, my uncle walks up and speaks to me, low, without looking at me.

It's on you, I can see it.

What's on me?

It's on you, I can see it.

What? What?

I can see it.

What?

You're gonna kill.

Shut up.

It's on you. You're gonna kill.

 

We put him in the state hospital and I stayed on the farm while my parents died. Billy left and toured his ideas until at last he developed a religion. Not a servant-to-God relationship, not a Praise Your Lord, not a Bagwam, not a Perfect Master, not a dervish or a mahara-ji. It was a religion based on what religion was before it was religion. Of course it had to be named and organized as soon as Billy Peace discovered it, but he tried not to use the trigger words. There was no God after Billings, no savior, for instance, by Minneapolis, where others told me Billy could have used it. By the time he and his followers backtracked across the border and then down, zigzagging home, there
was only spirit. Most people did not understand this. Billy even let go of the concept of an Antichrist. The devil implied its opposite, and worshippers found the devil more attractive, Billy felt, than the woolly bearded father figure in their childhood dreams. It was like this, though it always changed. There was spirit, and that was vast, vast, vast, so vast we had to shut out the enormousness of it. We were like receivers, Billy said; our brains were biochemical machines, small receptors that narrowed down the hugeness of spiritual intelligence into something we could handle.

Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely. The task, as Billy saw it, was not to stretch the individual's barriers, as you might expect—not exactly that. Billy believed that a group of minds living together, thinking as one, had the potential to expand further than any individual. If we opened ourselves, all at once, in one place, we might possibly brush the outskirts, the edges of that vastness of spirit. A circle of linked rubber bands, touching fingertips, we sat some nights, all night, into morning, humming on the edge of that invert field, that sky. He took his time organizing his strategy and his purpose. He took care smoothing out the rough spots in the Manual of Discipline. And planning, raising money, finding people who met his standards. At first, he took the strong-willed, the purposeful, the cerebral, the experimental. Then he took the ones with rational explanations. Lately, he took the wounded, the ones with something missing, though they had to be organized at the same time. He looked for the ones who held down long-term jobs, especially. They had to have typed rsums. He took no one on faith. They had to sit with him, thinking, for hours. He had to test their quality of mind. They were not superstitious, they were not fundamentalists. They might believe the world was coming to an end and that the end would be an economic nightmare. They might believe in god if god was indivisible from light. They were never former Roman Catholics—it was like those were inoculated. Sometimes they were Jews a generation or two away from their own religious practice. Or Protestants, though few had ever been solid
Lutherans. No Baptists, no Hindus, no Confucians, no Mormons. No adherents of any other tribe's religion. No millenarians, no survivalists.

As for me, I didn't fit into any of those categories. On our travels south, I'd met a family who kept serpents and who believed they were directed to cast out devils by handling poisons. I'd stayed on in their church half a year, I'd sat with their grandmother Virginie, whose white hair reached to her waist. She said I never should cut mine. She'd grown eyes like a snake, a crack of darkness for a pupil, lips thin. One hand was curled black as a bone from the time she was bitten. The other lacked a ring finger.
You will get bit
, she told me,
but you will live through it in the power
. She gave me two of her serpents, one a six-foot diamondback, the other a northern copperhead with red skin and hourglass markings.
They have judgment in them
, she said.
And they have love
.

So judge me
, I said when I held the snakes for the first time,
take me
, and they did. I found my belief. I knew from the first time that this was my way of getting close to spirit. Their cool dry bodies moved on me, skimmed over me, indifferent, curious, flickering, heavy, showing the mercy of spirit, loving me, sending a blood tide of power through me. I could set myself loose when I held the snakes. I became cold in my depth while my skin bloomed warm, calming them, and also I used pictures. I gave them the lovely heat, the flat rocks, the black rocks, the steady beating of the sun.

After I began to handle them in circle, the kindred stayed clear of me, and that was also a relief.

Still, I considered myself weak-willed, a follower, never speaking up if I could help it. I felt that I had no strong purpose or quality of mind. I was nice-looking but not anywhere near beautiful, I was young, I was younger than I had a right to be. I considered myself helpless, except when I held my serpents. Also, I had these pictures, and because I had them Billy would not let me go.

“Show me Milwaukee,” Billy said one night.

That was where his family spent two years on relocation before his parents died. So I gave him Milwaukee as best I could. I lay there and got the heft of it, the green medians in June, the way you felt en
tering your favorite restaurant with dinner reservations, hungry, knowing that within fifteen minutes German food would start to fill you, German bread, German beer, German schnitzel. I got the neighborhood where Billy had lived, the powdery stucco, the old board-rotting infrastructure and the backyard, all shattered sun and shade, leaves, got Billy's mother lying on the ground full length in a red suit, asleep, got the back porch, full of suppressed heat and got the june bugs razzing indomitable against the night screens. Got the smell of Billy's river, got the first-day-of-school smell, the chalk and wax, the cleaned-and-stored-paper-towel scent of Milwaukee schools in the beginning of September. Got the milk cartons, got the straws. Got Billy's sister, thin and wiry arms holding Billy down. Got Billy a hot-dog stand, a nickel bag of peanuts, thirst.

“No,” said Billy, “no more.”

He could feel it coming though I avoided it. I steered away from the burning welts, the scissors, pinched nerves, the dead eye, the strap, the belt, the spike-heeled shoe, the razor, the boiling hot spilled tapioca, the shards of glass, the knives, the chinked armor, the sister, the sister, the basement, anything underground.

“Show me, show me.” Billy was half asleep. He didn't know what he wanted to see, and of course I don't mean to imply that he would see the whole of my picture anyway. He would walk the edge of it, get the crumbs, the drops of water that flew off when a bird shook its feathers. That's how much I got across, but that was all it took. When you share like that, the rest of the earth shuts. You are locked in, twisted close, braided, born. And I could do it, just that much, and he needed it. Escape.

“Show me.”

So I showed him, and I showed him. Another year passed and the discipline grew tighter and more intense as the spirit ripped into Billy and wouldn't spare us, either.

 

ONE JANUARY NIGHT
he came into the room and talked to the children and me all night, squeezing our faces in his thick, hot palms, slapping us to stay awake, urging us to stay aware.

“Listen up! Last things are on us!”

I wept and the children wept, but he would not let us sleep.

“There's something incongruent, something in you, something blocking the channel, something blacking out the peephole, narrowing the frequency.”

“No, there isn't. These are your children.”

“You are mine. Your lives are mine. I will do with you as spirit wills. Get down! Get down! Get down on the floor!”

He looked at us with a skeptical loathing, and the black hours passed. Finally, he nodded off. The children fell across my lap. By then I was all nerved up and wide awake, so I went to my glass boxes. I took out my serpents to pray with. They curled around me, in and out of my clothing, comforting. The serpents were listening, and I heard it, too. The chinook blew in. Just like that.

The temperature shifted radically. The warm wind could melt the deep snow packs in hours. I heard the rafters groan, the snow already dripping. I smelled dirt and rain. It was blowing through, and soon the winter grass, deep gray, blond, would poke through the drifts, The air was flowing, moving, warm currents of dark air heaving fresh out of the southwest across wet roads, slick roads. And then the wolf dogs came out, raising long muzzles to the air.

I started up in a moment of fear, and as I did, my copperhead struck me full on, in the shadow of my wing, too close to my heart not to kill me.
In the Lord,
I said, as I was taught, and I gathered up my red-back beauty. She wore time itself in those hourglasses and I felt the sand rush through them as I let her flow back into her case. Then I lay down. I let the poison bloom into me. Let the sickness boil up, and the questions, and the fruit of the tree of power. I let the knowing take hold of me. The understanding of serpents. My heart went black and rock hard. It stopped once, then started again. When the life flooded back in I knew that I was stronger. I knew that I'd absorbed the poison. As it worked in me, I knew that I
was
the poison and I was the power.

Get away from him and take the children
, the serpent said to me from her glass box, as she curled back to sleep in her nest of grass.

 

LONG TRAIN RIDES,
the slow repetitive suspense of travel. I had persuaded Billy to let me go all the way out to Seattle in order to raise money for the kindred. I took my snakes along, well fed in their pouches, curled to my body's warmth. If they became too active I'd set them back inside their leather cases on the cold floor by my feet. I'd made him let me go, although in some way I knew I would not return all the way, not after I was bit.

All the whole trip, I let it gather. On the way back, I let it come. Curled double among the sighs and groans of other passengers, I dozed and woke, cramped and sore, stiff in the bounds of my two-seater. In the dark Cascades I understood I was a darkness blacker than these mountains. The knowledge sank into my joints like something viral, and I sat from then on in quiet pain. That changed to fear somewhere in the Kootenai.

Outside the window, black and motionless, without limit, deep forest bowed in fresh snow. I considered what came next and hit a wall packed white. My children were behind it. My love for them was brute love. I would never let them go. Light broke just outside of Whitefish, Montana. Breakfast was announced. I made up my mind and secured myself within my decision. Once I had done this, my thoughts cleared. I sat down in the dining car and ordered eggs. They came with piles of browned cottage potatoes, buttered toast, grape jam in little cartons. I ate a few bites and drank milky coffee from a plastic cup. I watched the dark lodge pole, the yellow larch go by, more trees than some people see their whole lives. They turned like spokes, reached like arms, sifted snow like powder through their needles. Great spumes of whiteness puffed, crashing from their boughs.

Where a big derailment and grain spill had occurred two years before, a fat bear stood, a blackie stirred from hibernation, probably drawn by the lye-soaked and fermented wheat that the railroad workers had buried underground, behind an electric fence, out of reach. Everyone else in the car was deep in conversation or concentrating on burnt pancakes, mild tea. I was the only one who saw the bear and I
said nothing. It swung its head, smelling diesel, harsh metal, maybe steam of boiling oatmeal. Perhaps it was used to the eastbound number 28 because it didn't lope off, didn't move away, just waited in its own shadow while we passed. My future seemed impenetrable, a cloud pack, fog socked in. And freedom seemed unreachable, like all that sweet grain bulldozed into the hill. My life was a trap that had closed on me with soft teeth, from under snow. Up here seems endless and free, so wide it hurts. It does hurt. For we are narrow, bound tight, hobbled, caught in sorrow out of mind.

Grass, water, summer fireweed and thistle, come save me now, I thought. I didn't call on god, though. He was on my husband's side.

When Frenchie picked me up at the station, I was gone already. Evidently, I looked and acted the same though, because Frenchie helped put my things into the back of the truck and got in front without comment. Billy didn't do things like pick passengers up at the depot, because that might have meant waiting around and he never sat still. Every moment of his time was now dedicated. Valuable.

“I'll buy you a meal,” I said to Frenchie, “I raised a good ten thou.” And I had.

Besides the waitressing job, which I used to pick up money when it was needed for some kind of equipment or spiritual campaign, I raised money for Billy by speaking at the big tent meetings and writing pamphlets and handling my snakes in the spirit-trance. All in all, I preferred waitressing. Just that the money at the stadium and tent revivals was so good. I knew that once I entered the compound it would be a long time before I saw much of the outside world again. That was why I got Frenchie to walk through the door of the 4-B's, home of the all-day breakfast, where I had worked a year and left with no hard feelings, even offers of a raise. It was as though I was a normal person there, any woman, and I needed to feel that now. Maybe I'd show a picture of my daughter, son, and nobody would comment on their gunnysack clothes, know their meaning, nobody would ask whether they had yet processed spirit.

Frenchie looked from side to side as he sat down, afraid. There was no rule exactly, about going to a restaurant to eat, but we both knew that we weren't supposed to, that we should be driving straight back to our home, to the kindred, that we should be saving money and not spending it on the second order of eggs that I wouldn't eat, or the weak black coffee that Frenchie would drink looking down into the brown pottery cup, refusing refills, feeling the hand of my husband on his shoulders, my husband's eyes heavy at the back of his neck, and Billy's voice, his voice always, radio-trained, pure and deep, full as thunder, round as hope. My husband's voice was perfect as he was perfect. Made in God. My husband's voice was redemption, a rope to hold in a whiteout. My husband's voice would change my mind as it had before, when I got back and entered into the mellow gold light surrounding him. I would sink in, go under, resistless in the dream that he dreamed with me in it. I would be a shadow, once more, a light thrown lovingly against a wall.