The Plague of Doves (29 page)

“Which cathedral?” I asked.

“The most beautiful one,” said Corwin, “the one with the best statues.”

“All right,” I said. “Which coffee shop?”

“An all-night one with very tall booths. It could happen.”

“How about the street? Which street?”

“All streets. We'll take a map.”

I had studied the map on the endpapers of my book—an astonishing maze.

“We'd better get there soon,” said Corwin. “They're probably building new streets in Paris right this minute.”

“What if I don't want to, being a lesbian?”

Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.

“So you think it might be permanent?”

 

Driving slowly home, we passed an old man shambling along, coat flapping, hair streaming. It was Mooshum. We stopped the car just ahead, then turned around on the empty highway and cruised up beside him. He continued to stumble eagerly forward, so I jumped out and pulled him over to the car.

“Hey, get in!”

He looked at me, distracted.

“Oh, it's Evey.”

“Get in the car, Mooshum, where are you going?”

“Visiting around.”

He let me put him in the car and, once he was in, he said in a grand voice, “Take me to lovey!”

“Okay.” I looked at Corwin wearily. He was staring straight ahead. “It's my aunt, Neve. He wants to go and see her.”

“Why not?” said Corwin, shifting gears with a gesture of resignation.

As we were driving to Pluto, I realized that by now my mother was probably talking to the tribal police. She would be frantic over Mooshum. So as soon as Aunt Neve answered the door—wearing a bathrobe, no makeup, hair matted flat—I told her that I needed to use her telephone. Mooshum and Corwin sat down on Aunt Neve's springy golden couch and waited while she left the room to brew some coffee. Mooshum flapped his hands at Corwin and hissed at him to leave. I turned away from them with the phone and put my hand over one ear.

“Mama? I've got Mooshum and we're at Aunt Neve's.”

Mama said a few explosive things, but was mostly relieved. She said something to Dad, then said, “Here, your dad needs to talk to you.”

“Evey? Are you at—”

“Aunt Harp's.”

“Oh!”

His voice was strained, tense, more excited than I'd ever heard. “Look,” he said, “is there any way you can take a look at her mail?”

“What?”

My father told me that Mooshum raided his stamp collection when Mama refused to send one of his letters, and he glued several valuable,
extremely valuable
(my father's voice shook a little), stamps on an envelope he sneaked into the mail two days before. I opened my mouth to say that I'd mailed the letter for Mooshum, but thought better of it.

“I got a little upset last night,” said Dad. “This morning he decided to take off…”

Just then the doorbell rang.

“Will you get that, dear?” Aunt Neve called from the bedroom, her voice a melodious trill. I was pretty sure that when she came out she would look perfectly groomed.

I set the phone down and answered the door. It was the postman with a postage-due letter among the other mail. I paid the postage with coins from my pocket and tucked the letter into my bra. I closed the door, set the rest of the mail on the neat little side table, and picked up the telephone.

“Well, I've got it. The letter has a one-cent stamp on it, blue, Benjamin Franklin.”

I could hear my father struggling with some emotion on the other end.

“It's called the Z Grill. Honey, if you get that stamp back here safely, I promise I'll send you to Paris.”

I put the phone down. My father never called me, or anyone, honey. And this was the second time that morning I had been promised a trip to Paris. I stared at Mooshum. His hair was a clean silver, swept into a neat tail. His teeth were back in, a white slash in his rumpled face. He was perfectly shaved. His clothes were spotless, shoes polished. He had his handkerchief out to touch the drip off the end of his nose.

Mooshum gave me a significant look that I understood to mean
get out of here
, so I grabbed Corwin's hand. We sneaked quickly out, back to the car, and immediately peeled out back onto the road. Once we were driving, we tried again to talk, but nothing came out right. I put my hand on Corwin's leg, but he just let it sit there and we both fell silent. It was awkward and my arm began to ache with the strain.

“We better start saving for our tickets,” he said before I got out of the car. We were parked in the road outside of my house.

I kissed him, and left. When I looked out the window of the house about ten minutes later, the car was still there. The next time I looked, it was gone.

 

Aunt Neve kept Mooshum at her house that night. Just as I was about to head back to school the next morning, she pulled up in her
yellow Buick. I watched from the doorway as Mooshum extricated himself from the passenger's side and walked around the front of the car, quick like a young man, brushing his hand across the hood and staring hawklike through the windshield at Aunt Neve. As Aunt Neve drove away, he stood waving slowly. The Buick disappeared, but he didn't move. He kept his hand in the air until he shrank and became old again. When he finally turned and shuffled toward the house, I walked down the steps and took his arm.

“Awee!” His face was full of emotion as we climbed the steps. “At last, my girl. If only Father Hop Along was here. I almost wish it. At last, I have something to confess.”

 

I WAS NAMED
for Louis Riel's first love, a girl he met soon after his release from Beauport Asylum, near Quebec in 1878. He had been locked up there for treatment after suffering an attack of uncontrollable laughter during Holy Mass. Riel's Evelina was blond, tall, humble, and a lover of sweet flowers. It was Mooshum who actually suggested to Mama that she name me for this lost love of Riel's, and he was always proud that she had taken his suggestion.

 

FOR MONTHS, ALL
winter, in fact, my father held a grudge toward Mooshum for nearly sabotaging his retirement by stealing not only the Z Grill, but a three-cent Swedish stamp issued in 1855 and colored orange instead of blue. That one was returned for insufficient postage. At least Mooshum had used a return address, I observed, looking at the envelope over Christmas break.

“Don't joke. This is our family's future,” said my father.

Mooshum had used a harmless paste of flour mixed with spit to stick it onto the envelope. The stamp did not even bear a killer or cancellation, because the postman in Pluto hadn't known quite how to handle the mistake, except to ask at the door for postage. Dad had gently soaked both stamps off the envelopes and put them back on their album pages. He showed me all of his favorite stamps. Until he
agreed to a price by mail, he planned to put the whole collection in a safe-deposit box that was not in his sister's bank.

In late March, driving to Fargo with the collection, my father hit a patch of black ice and spun off the road, rolling the family car to the edge of a beet field. It was a sudden and deceptive freeze. He was alone, and unconscious, so the stamp albums were left behind. Since the windows were shattered entirely from the frames, much of what was in the car flew out as the car rolled, popping open the doors. The albums were left somewhere in a cold drenching rain that began soon after he came to consciousness at St. John's Hospital. He asked for his stamps at once, but of course the last thing the doctors were interested in was a stamp collection.

After we got to the hospital and made certain that Dad was all right, Joseph and I went looking for the stamps. We found the albums about a hundred feet from where the car had come to rest. The leather-bound books were splayed open, warped, and ruined. We picked stamps off cattails and peeled stamps from wet clods of mud. When we brought what we'd found to his hospital bed, Dad looked sick. He pretended to fall asleep. Our mother said, “He is in despair.” We hadn't known the stamps could really be that valuable.

It was weeks before Dad was strong enough to go home. Most of the stamps we found were so fragile that once dried, when he tried to handle them, they disintegrated into a minute confetti. I saw him try to reconstruct the Benjamin Franklin Z Grill stamp myself. I'd found that stamp in the beet field attached to a rotting root. Perhaps the chemicals in the fertilized soil had attacked the paper. It was no use. When he lifted the stamp with a tweezers, it fell into a little heap of incredibly precious dust, which he caught as it sifted down.

My father took a deep breath, then looked at me.

A moment passed. He asked me to come with him to the back door and watch half a million dollars vanish.

Ready?
he said.

And we stood together in the sun as he blew across the palm of his hand.

ON THE DAY
that Aunt Geraldine finally married Judge Coutts, with all of us in attendance, there was a herringbone trail of clouds running east to west that resembled a dusty road. I noticed it before anybody else spoke of it, I think, and pointed it out to the judge.
I'll walk that road with Geraldine
, he said at once. Tears came into his eyes.

They were not married in the Catholic church (a disappointment to Geraldine and my mother). Besides his lingering outrage at Shamengwa's botched eulogy, my mother said that Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins. He told Hop Along that he could not regret having sex out of wedlock and refused to be sorry, although he said the priest could feel free to absolve him anyway. Father Cassidy said he would not solemnize their vows under such conditions. So they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy—Mooshum's old allotment land.

They said their vows and were pronounced husband and wife. Judge Coutts kissed Geraldine and people hugged all around. We could see from the judge's face that he felt immediate relief, as if he were a man coming out of surgery, still half-anesthetized, but understanding that survival was now assured.

Our respective families had become accustomed to having within
the ranks an unwed couple living in sin. Aunt Geraldine seemed surprisingly willing to accept her role as the family scandal, and Judge Coutts had always been afraid that she liked the part, in fact, too well to relinquish it. Now he kept looking at the sky, clutching Geraldine's hand and pointing upward.

Now I don't have to walk that old dusty road alone
, I heard him say, in what I guess was a slightly dizzy, maudlin fit. She touched his face with her handkerchief and said,
Buck up, Judge
. Tears were streaming from his eyes and he didn't know it. His mother was still alive enough to be there—a tiny, gnarled lump of a lady in a silver wheelchair.

“Listen,” she said, beckoning him close. “Stop crying. You can't have people thinking you're soft.”

But she was smiling, everyone was smiling, there was a giddy air of resolution. Approval arched over them like a rainbow of balloons. Corwin played for us of course—he was the only entertainment. When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn't want to go. I didn't know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way. But Corwin's playing of a wordless tune my uncle had taught him brightened the air. As I walked away I kept on hearing that music.

AFTER THE WEDDING
we got into the car bannered Just Married. White balloons, cans, and plastic fringe dragged from the bumpers. I took Geraldine's hand and held it on the seat between us as we rattled all the way to the Knights of Columbus hall. We'd been allowed to rent it even without a church wedding and now, I knew, from the KC kitchen ovens great roasters of meat soup, baked beans, frybread, potatoes, and roasted chicken were being lugged to the serving table. We'd pass by and fill our plates, eat in an exciting good-natured garble of cheer. Our wedding cake was four white-on-white layers embellished with glittering sugar roses. When it came time to cut the cake, I put my hand over Geraldine's fist as she gripped the knife. We smiled for pictures as the knife melted through the base of the cake.

Clemence removed the top for us to take home—a cakelet. The plastic groom was painted into a judge's robes and the bride wore a white suit. Her shoulder-length hair was black and waved like Geraldine's. Evelina had made the souvenir. “I'd like to keep this on my desk,” I said, plucking the tiny couple off the cake and stashing it in my pocket.

So Geraldine and I began married life, at last.

 

WE HAD DECIDED
to save our money for a real honeymoon and go somewhere exotic later on—it was enough that we'd just be allowed
to reassume our domestic life. We had the weekend before us. Someone, probably Evelina, had taped a sign on the front door. No Visitors. We left the sign up and entered our house, closed the door, stood in the little hallway. I removed Geraldine's white boxy hat with its pretty mesh veil. Then I put her hat back on, suddenly, and drew her veil down over her face and kissed her through the veil. The stiff little holes printed on her mouth then caught between our lips and tongues. In that moment, we coveted each other so intensely that we walked straight into the bedroom and did not emerge until late in the evening, dizzy and at peace. She remembered the little cake and fetched it. We froze the cake top to eat on our first anniversary. We made toast and tea and brought our plates and cups back into the bedroom, which wasn't in its usual order. Geraldine's suit was crumpled across a chair, the coat splayed open to reveal the glossy satin lining. Her small wedding hat had whirled into the corner and the veil seemed to have dissolved like sugar icing. Geraldine took a bite of toast and a light sift of crumbs scattered across the yoke of her robe and her naked collarbone. I leaned over and brushed the crumbs off; my hand lingered and then slipped inside, to her dark nipple.

I don't think
, said Geraldine,
I really don't
, but then she gave me that smile, close up, and slid over me, opening the robe.

 

I WONDERED IF
we'd ever leave that bed. I didn't want to. Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. I lay beside her in the dark. She was a silent sleeper, grave and frowning through her weighty dreams. As I do sometimes to fall asleep, I imagined myself hovering above ourselves, then rising, dissolving through the roof and taking a dark ride over the reservation and the neighboring towns. It did not work this time, but had the opposite effect. My brain became too alert. The adrenaline and unaccustomed naps had revved me. My thoughts spun. Life crowded in, the trivial and the vast. I thought of everyone who'd come to our wedding. I was moved all over again by how the Milk family had embraced our marriage. Their happiness had been genuine
and there was nothing held back, nothing of the faint disapprobation I had feared, not even from Clemence. My long involvement with a married woman off the reservation, in Pluto, was surely known to them. I had no illusions that I'd kept my doomed first love private from anyone but C.'s husband. Yet they seemed to have shrugged away my past. Geraldine, after all, had made me prove myself.

As for Geraldine, if she knew about what I had done, and whom I'd loved, she never spoke, and I was always grateful to her for that. But although I have never told her the truth of my
before
, what occurred in Pluto, I'm sure that she knew why I stayed single for so long, and lived so quietly with my mother all those years before I met her. I never told her that it started when I was a boy not out of high school. I never told her about my first love or explained the difficult hold it had on me—I never told her about C.

I wish that I could say on the night following our wedding I thought of only Geraldine. But the crumbs in our bed and the honey in our tea reminded me of other times, and a different bed. I do not think it was disloyal of me to lie next to Geraldine and recall that history, so sad in many ways. For at the same time I was quickened with wonder, and gratitude. After I was stung, I never thought that love would come my way again. I never thought I would love anyone but C.