The Plague of Doves (4 page)

Life as a boy was hard on my brother. To be the son of a science teacher in a reservation school cast him under suspicion, while it was to my advantage. It is always good for a girl to have a visible father. Worse for Joseph, he loved science and actually was teaching himself the Latin names of things. To make up for this, he rode one or the other of Aunt Geraldine’s pintos all over, way back into the bush, and got drunk on bootlegger wine whenever he could. We both had friends, as well as eight or nine Peace cousins first to third, about sixteen others that we could count, and Corwin. I had girlfriends and I did not mind going to school, but somehow the closeness of my family was enough for me outside the classroom. We were not social. Plus Joseph and our father were somewhat isolated by their fascinations—collecting stamps, of course, which was a way of traveling without leaving, but also stars and heavenly phenomena, grasses, trees, birds, reptiles and happenstance insects, which they collected methodically, pinned to white squares of cardboard, and labeled.

Joseph was particularly interested in a species of fat black salamander that he believed endemic to the region, and he’d persuaded Dad to help him follow the life cycle throughout the year by observation in the field. Thus, they would be off even in dead winter with shovel and pick to unearth a hibernating creature from the rock-hard mud of Aunt Geraldine’s slough. Or in summer, as now, they created false playgrounds for the creatures and watched their every move, taking notes in precise printing. For some reason they had agreed to avoid cursive.

Maybe the fact that I grew up admiring Joseph made him softer-hearted toward me than most brothers. We also knew that there would be no other children. Mama said so, and when we fought she shut us up by saying, “Just imagine how you’d feel if
something happened
.” Imagining the other dead helped us enjoy each other’s company. I helped Joseph collect specimens in stolen canning jars, and memo
rized a few Latin names just to please him. It helped that I also liked the salamanders—or mud puppies, as they were commonly known. They were lumps of earth, dark with yellow spots, helpless when they left the water. During heavy rains, they swarmed with slow gravity out of wet cracks in the ground. There was something grand and awful about their mute numbers. Mooshum said that the nuns had believed they were emissaries from the unholy dead, sent up by the devil, and hell was full of them. We shuffled slowly through the grass, gently kicking the plump things over. We picked them up and stashed them on higher ground, covering them with wet leaves. They dropped in piles down low wet spots around the school buildings—ten or twenty could be found in the window wells. Joseph always woke me early when the drowning rains came, late in warm spring, and we got to school first so that we could fish the creatures out before the boys found and stomped them to death.

That summer, using picks and shovels, Joseph and my father had dug a deep pond in the backyard. The water table was high that year, and it immediately filled. They planted cattails and willow around the edges, then added frogs and salamanders. The pond was not for fish, those enemies of neotenic larvae, but they stocked it well with chorus and leopard frogs transported from Geraldine’s slough, and then the salamanders, which we carried home in buckets. To Joseph’s disappointment, the salamanders seemed to vanish into the earth. Even if he did find one, they were hard to observe actually doing anything. It took all day to see one open its mouth. Joseph grew impatient and swiped a dissection kit from Dad. The cardboard box contained a scalpel, tweezers, pins, glass slides, a vial of chloroform, and some cotton balls. There was a diagram of an opened frog with all of its organs labeled.

Joseph laid the instruments out carefully on the windowsill of the small room we had divided between us. He took a jar from under the bed. It contained a specimen of
Ambystoma tigrinum
, the eastern tiger salamander. Into the jar, he dropped a cotton ball dabbed with chloroform, then he stashed it under the bed. Our father didn’t really like dissections.

That night, I moved a candle to shed more light where Joseph needed it. I watched as he sliced the belly of the salamander open and revealed the slippery muck of its insides—a tangled set of tubes filled with transparent slime.

“It was just about to release its spermatophore,” said Joseph with awe, poking at a little white piece of mush. There was a footstep outside the door. I blew out the candle. Dad opened the door.

“No candles,” he said. “Fire hazard. Hand it over.”

I rolled the candle to his feet from under the bed and he said, “Evey, get out of there and go to bed!”

The next morning, I got up before Joseph and found that the salamander had revived and tried to crawl away, unraveling the piece of entrails that Joseph had pinned into the soft wood of the dresser. The trail of its insides stretched to the windowsill, where it had managed to die with its nose pressed against the screen. That day, at the funeral, Joseph buried the dissection kit beside the salamander. He sighed a lot as we covered the plump little graying body, but he did not speak and neither did I. It was months before he dug up the dissection kit, and a year might have passed before he used it on something else.

BOTH MOOSHUM AND
Shamengwa insisted that if Louis Riel had allowed his redoubtable war chief Gabriel Dumont to make all of the decisions preceding and at Batoche, not only would he have won for the mixed-bloods and Indians a more powerful place in the world, but this victory would have inspired Indians below the border to unite at a crucial moment in history. Things would have been different all around. The two brothers also liked to speculate about the form that Metis Catholicism would have taken and whether they might have had their own priests. Mooshum insisted it would be better if the schismatic priests were allowed to marry, and Shamengwa was of the opinion that even Metis priests should keep their chastity. Both agreed that Louis Riel’s revelation, which he experienced upon learning of his excommunication and that of his followers, was probably sound.
After much meditation, Riel the mystic had announced that hell did not last forever, nor was it even very hot.

“And I believe this,” Mooshum insisted, “not only because Riel was comforted by angels, but because it stands to reason.”

“Enlighten me.”

Dad went to Mass to please Clemence and vanished at the first sight of Father Cassidy. He was a Catholic of no conviction whatsoever.

“If hell was hot enough to eat the flesh, there would be no flesh left to suffer,” said Mooshum. “And if hell was meant to burn the soul, which is invisible, it would have to be imaginary fire, the flames of which you cannot feel.”

“So either way, hell is seriously compromised.”

“Either way.” Mooshum nodded.

“I find that totally believable.” Dad nodded. “It really makes a great deal of sense. Scientifically speaking, of course, nothing can burn forever without an unlimited fuel source. So you have to wonder.”

Clemence, who said that she believed in hot fires that burned forever to the bone, shook her head in pity at the men. She considered it a weakness of character not to believe in hell, a convenient mental trick to excuse slack conduct. She had noticed the failure was most pronounced and useful in those who had no expectations of heaven. But although she wished intensely to rear her children in such a way that they would surely join the kingdom of God (her legacy), she was somehow foiled in her intentions, and by her own sympathies.

For instance, she could be persuaded to pour for Mooshum with a too liberal hand; and she took a shot herself now and then. Also, anyone could tell she did not think much of Father Cassidy. Her lack of enthusiasm in his presence, after that first visit, was obvious. She sometimes let slip a word or two behind his back. Joseph and I were certain we had heard her mutter,
Fat fool
, after one of his sermons on God’s plan for creating babies in the wombs of women. Father Cassidy preached against interference with this plan, but in terms so obscure that I couldn’t understand what he was talking about at all. When I asked Mama what it was Father Cassidy meant, she gave me a long stare and then said, “He means that God’s plan was for me to get
pregnant again and die. However, the doctor I spoke with did not agree with God’s plan and so here I am, alive and kicking.”

She saw the worry on my face and realized, I suppose, how her words sounded. “I’ll explain when you’re fourteen,” she said in a voice meant to sound reassuring. I wasn’t reassured at all and had to ask Joseph if he understood Father Cassidy.

“Sure,” said Joseph, “he’s talking about birth control. Aunt Geraldine’s the one to ask if you need sex information. She’ll draw it out on paper.”

So the next time I went to catch a horse, I came back with knowledge. Thanks to Geraldine I also understood about impure thoughts, and I realized that the miraculous feelings that were part of God’s plan for me, and which I had experienced in the bathtub with a headful of mayonnaise, were considered sins.

“Do I have to confess those?” I had been aghast at the prospect.

“I don’t,” said Geraldine.

The next time Father Cassidy appeared at the door, I greeted him with a pure conscience and took his light jacket and hat and put them on the chair beside the door. Then I retreated to a corner of the room. This time, once the priest was ushered inside to the table, Mama did not leave the bottle after she’d poured the shots. She took it with her to the other room. With the bottle gone, there came a dampness of feeling among the men.

“Ah, well,” said Mooshum, “they drank no wine in the trenches at Batoche, and the priests were halfway starved, too. Father Cassidy, are you familiar with our history?”

“I’m a Montana boy,” said the priest. “I know how they put down the rebellion.”

“Rebellion!” Mooshum puffed out his cheeks. He didn’t drink from his little glass yet.

“With a Gatling gun!” Shamengwa said. “Trucked from out east. A coward’s invention, that.”

Father Cassidy shrugged. Mooshum suddenly became very angry. His face went livid red, his mangled ear flared, his brows lowered. He grit his teeth, shivering with hatred.

“It was an issue of rights,” he cried, slapping the table. “Getting their rights recognized when they had already proved the land—the Michifs and the whites. And old Poundmaker. They wanted the government to do something. That’s all. And the government pissed about this way and that so old Riel says, ‘We’ll do it for you!’ Ha! Ha! Howah! ‘We’ll do it for you!’” He raised his glass slightly and narrowed his eyes at Father Cassidy.

A look of happiness had taken hold of Shamengwa. He took a tiny sip of the liquor on his tongue, and beamed. “Why,” he said, “this is sure smooth.”

“My lease money come in last week,” said Mooshum. “Clemence, she purchased me a special bottle. My, but she’s stingy! If we had our rights, as Riel laid ’em out, Father Cassidy, you’d be working
for
us, not
at
us. And Clemence would pour a deeper glass, too.”

“Well, I doubt that,” said Shamengwa, “but there are so many other things.” Shamengwa’s joy had stirred him to sudden life. “I’ve thought about this, brother. If Riel had won, our parents would have stayed in Canada, whole people. Not broken. We would have been properly raised up. My arm would work.”

“So many things,” said Mooshum, faintly. “So many…But there is no question about one word, my brother.”

“What is that word?”

“Respect.”

“Respect is as respect does,” Father Cassidy commented. “Have you respected Our Lord’s wishes this week?”

“Did Our Lord make us?” Mooshum asked belligerently.

“Why, yes,” said Father Cassidy.

“As we are, in our bodies,” said Mooshum.

“Of course.”

“Down to the details? Down to the male parts?”

“What are you getting at?” asked Father Cassidy.

“If Our Lord made our bodies down to the male parts, then He also made the male part’s wishes. This week, I have respected these wishes, I will tell you that much.”

Before Father Cassidy could open his mouth, Shamengwa jumped
in. “Respect,” said Shamengwa, “is a much larger subject than your male parts, my brother. You referred to political respect for our people. And in that you were correct, all too correct, for it is beyond a doubt. If Riel had carried through, we would have had respect.”

“To our nation! To our people!” Mooshum drained his glass.

“Land,” said Shamengwa, brooding.

“Women,” said Mooshum, dizzy.

“Not even the great Riel could have helped you there.”

“But our people would not have been hanged…”

“Ah, yes,” said Father Cassidy, eyeing the bottom of his glass. “The hangings! A local historian—”

“Don’t speak ill of her, Father. I am in love with her!”

“I wasn’t…”

“Let us not speak of the hanging,” said Shamengwa firmly. “Let us speak instead of requesting another glass of this stuff from Clemence. Oh niece, favorite niece!”

“Don’t favorite me.” Mama came back into the room and poured the men a round. She swept out with the bottle, again, so quickly that she didn’t see me. I had sunk down behind the couch because I didn’t feel like being stuck with weeding the beans right then. That she wasn’t more hospitable with the priest confirmed her low opinion of him, but then I realized he’d also come to see her.

“Could we have a little word?” Father Cassidy tried to loop his voice around her swift ankles, to drag her out of the kitchen, but she had passed through the back door out into the garden.

MOOSHUM WAS, INDEED,
in love with Mrs. Neve Harp, an annoying aunt of ours, a Pluto lady who called herself the town historian. She often “popped in,” as she called it. We were never free of that threat. She was what people called “fixy,” always made-up and overdressed. She was rich and spoiled, but a little crazy, too—she sometimes gave a panicky laugh that went on too long and seemed out of her control. Mama said she felt sorry for her, but would not tell me
why. Neve Harp seemed proud of having beaten down two husbands—one she had even put in prison. She was working on a third, bragging of stepchildren, but had already started using her maiden name in bylines to reduce confusion. As he was not allowed to visit Neve Harp often enough to suit his desires, Mooshum wrote letters to her. Some evenings, when the television worked, Joseph and I watched while Mooshum sat at the table composing letters in his flowing nun-taught script. He prodded our father for information.