The Plague of Doves (3 page)

Story

THE STORY COULD
have been true, for, as I have said, there really was a Mustache Maude Black with a husband named Ott. Only sometimes Maude was the one to claim Mooshum as her son in the story and sometimes she went on to claim she'd had an affair with Chief Gall. And sometimes Ott Black plugged the man in the gut. But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with facts. Saint Joseph's Church was named for the carpenter who believed his wife, reared a son not his own, and is revered as the patron saint of our bold and passionate people, the Metis. Those doves were surely the passenger pigeons of legend and truth, whose numbers were such that nobody thought they could possibly ever be wiped from the earth.

Mooshum slowed down that spring and had trouble putting in the garden. As he got more enjoyment out of his chair, our parents relaxed their boycott. More often now, our father fixed the magic circles of plastic onto their metal posts and twiddled them until the picture cleared. We sometimes watched the Three Stooges all together. The black-haired one looked a lot like the woman who saved his life, said Mooshum, nodding and pointing at the set. I remember looking at his gnarled brown finger and imagining it as the hand of a strong young man gripping the plow or a boy holding the candelabra, which, by the way, my grandparents had lugged all the way down to the badlands, where it had come in handy for killing snakes and gophers. They had given their only possession to Maude as a gesture of their gratitude. She had thrust it back at them on the night they escaped.

That tall, six-branched, silver-plated candelabra with the finish worn down to tin in some spots now stood in a place of honor in the center of our dining room table. It held beeswax tapers, which had recently been lighted during Easter dinner. The day after Easter Monday,
in the little alcove on the school playground, I kissed Corwin Peace. Our kiss was hard, passionate, strangely mature. Afterward, I walked home alone. I walked very slowly. Halfway there, I stopped and stared at a piece of the sidewalk I'd crossed a thousand times and knew intimately. There was a crack in it—deep, long, jagged, and dark. It was the day when the huge old cottonwood trees shed cotton. The air was filled with falling down and the ditch grass and gutters were plump with a snow of light. I had expected to feel joy but instead felt a confusion of sorrow, or maybe fear, for it seemed that my life was a hungry story and I its source, and with this kiss I had now begun to deliver myself into the words.

ON THE KITCHEN
wall beside the black tin clock whose hands of poisoned radium glowed in the dark, three pictures hung. John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII, and Louis Riel. The first two were color photographs that my father and mother had acquired through school and church. The last was a newspaper photograph, yellowed and frail. My mother had clipped the picture out and placed it carefully into a dime-store frame. In the picture, Riel looked morose and disheveled, a little blurry. Yet he was the visionary hero of our people, and the near leader of what could have been our Michif nation. Mooshum and our mother venerated him, even though Mooshum's parents had once lived in neat comfort near Batoche, Saskatchewan, and their huge farm would have passed to their sons, if not for Riel. That farm was put to the torch before Mooshum gained the power of speech, because the Milk family had harbored the genius of Riel, supported his cause with money, taken in his wife and child, fed his lieutenants, fought beside him, and angered the priests who threatened excommunication to Riel's followers and ultimately betrayed them to their killers.

After the rout at Batoche, the family had fled south and crossed the border in darkness, not knowing exactly where they were. As soon as they found an agreeable setting, they tried to homestead again, but the heart was out of them. They lost a baby, settled into a despondent subsistence, and were crushed when they heard Riel was tried and hanged.
Riel went to his death wearing moccasins and holding in his hand a silver-worked crucifix. His last words to the attending cleric were
Courage, mon père
. Joseph Milk, our great-grandfather, had been particularly fond of the moody prophet of the new mixed-blood Catholicism, and he cursed the priests even though his son Severine had just been ordained.

Mooshum had a younger brother, a violin player named Shamengwa, who was neat and dignified as Mooshum was happily disordered and profane. Except for his folded-up arm, Shamengwa was stark elegance. The last of their generation, these two enjoyed each other's company in spite of their differences. They had grown up in that melancholy house and the history affected them in different ways. Shamengwa was driven to music and Mooshum to stories. Both escaped as soon as possible but history followed them, of course, and now as old men they took comfort in chewing it over. When Shamengwa visited, he sat straight up in a hard kitchen chair, and often played the old tunes, while Mooshum liked to lounge or slouch beating time on his knee. Outside in summer, Mooshum claimed an old bench car seat that he refused to let Mama haul away. Inside, the nubbly, sagging, overstuffed couch was his. Sometimes the two brothers sat at the kitchen table drinking hot sugared tea into which Mooshum “slipped a little something.” But nothing made them happier than the chance to fling history into the face of a member of the hated cloth. And so, on days that the old retired priest, frail as dried flowers and all but forgotten up there on the hill, would laboriously totter down to pay the brothers a visit, or when he arrived in a kind of huge, makeshift baby carriage pushed by an obliging Franciscan sister, the brothers grew much excited. They took special pains to procure whiskey and badgered Mama or Aunt Geraldine for boulettes or the special high-risen and light galette they had learned to make from Junesse. Other foods sat heavy on their bowels, but all three of the old men claimed that the meat soup and bread unbound them wonderfully if soaked in sufficient grease. The old priest used a polished diamond willow stick to negotiate the rutted road, and would plant it hard between his feet as he lowered himself into the wine-dark billows of the couch. From there, nodding his eggshell-thin skull, he'd opinionate in whispery, gentle tones, which were maybe too agreeable to the broth
ers. Sometimes they fell silent in disappointment at the priest's lack of opposition, but the visits always ended in polite toast after toast. But then the good priest died and the brothers had no ecclesiastic to play off until a big, whey-faced, pompous, and painfully hearty priest was transferred from Montana. He was nicknamed Father Hop Along because of his cowboy origin, his real name, Cassidy, and an unfortunate tendency to pop a bit too daintily along on his pointed feet when using his aspergillum to sprinkle holy water upon worshippers at High Mass.

 

THE SUMMER AFTER
my first kiss, the TV faltered and all sound was lost. We could raise only random buzzing noises and the picture spun so rapidly it made us queasy. But we lived outdoors anyway. Joseph and I were allowed to catch and ride the paint horses belonging to Aunt Geraldine whenever we wanted. Both were swift and loved to run. The black and white was fairly good-natured, but the other, a flighty brown and white pinto, had been struck in the face and bit viciously if you stepped into her blind spot. We rode them bareback with rope halters and tied them at the edge of the yard when we stopped long enough for food. One day, as we were sopping up bowls of soup across the table from Mooshum and Shamengwa, our horses tied under the trees in the backyard, it began to rain lightly down. Sheltered by thick leaves, the horses busily cropped the long grass all around them, so when Mama answered the door and ushered in Father Cassidy we did not attempt to escape, but decided to play gin rummy against the door until the sky brightened.

The two old men greeted the priest with huge delight.

“Tawnshi! Tawnshi ta sawntee, Père Cassidy! How good of you to visit us! How well you look, please sit down, sit down with us, have a bite to eat, a bowl of soup, a crust of bread.”

“Perhaps a pour from the jar, too. Clemence?”

“I wouldn't mind,” said Father Cassidy, shivering a bit, though with anticipation, for it wasn't cold. “A little nip would take the chill off me.”

Joseph looked at me, raised his eyebrows and drew his mouth down in that way he had. It wasn't even the least bit cool outside. The air had
stayed hot and the rain made steam rise off the grass, by which it was immediately obvious that here we had a thirsty priest. Mooshum crowed with pleasure and tipped Clemence's hand up when she poured stingily.

“Daughter, be more hospitable!”

Mama frowned, and sighed huffily, but left the bottle on the table.

“So, Father Cassidy, you have been here for several months now. What do you think of our ways?”

But the priest had his head tipped back to catch the last drip from the shot glass.

“Oh yai! I remember when priests used to take their whiskey with water, but this one takes the firewater straight. My brother, let us do the same!”

“That's a Montana boy for you,” said Father Cassidy, trying to appear as though he'd not tossed his shot back too greedily. “We don't stand on ceremony and we don't water down our whiskey, but we do believe in going to Holy Mass. Now Clemence attends regularly and she drags along Edward, and the young are of course obliged to make Holy Confession every Friday and attend at least three Masses during the week. But you, now I haven't seen the two of you at church since I arrived here. So that means at the very least that your confessions are much overdue.”

“Tawpway, Père Cassidy, you speak the truth. But old men have no chance to sin much,” said Mooshum in a regretful voice. He looked at Shamengwa. “Brother, have you had a chance to sin this year yet?”

Shamengwa made a long face and sighed in reproach. “Frère, you would know it, as I would tell you immediately in order to make you jealous. Hiyn, no, I have been pure.”

“I, too, completely pure,” said Mooshum. His chin trembled.

“Are you sure,” said Father Cassidy, eyeing the bottle. His hand clutched his empty water glass. He lifted the glass toward the bottle. “Great sins are not required. Have you not, perhaps, taken the name of the Lord in vain?”

“Mon Dieu! Never!” The brothers looked quite shocked and displeased at the notion, and hastily poured the priest a double shot and refreshed their own glasses.

Father Cassidy looked thoughtful, and perhaps a little downcast to find the two old brothers sinless. But then he sipped deeply and brightened. “There are so many ways of sinning not readily apparent! You may for instance share in the guilt of another's sin without actually committing it yourself, via the Sin of Silence. Has anyone you know sinned?”

The brothers shook their heads in blank surprise. The priest cast about, waving a plump hand for inspiration. “You may have sinned against the Holy Ghost by resisting known truth—the worth for instance of Holy Mass—thus hardening your soul to the penetrations of grace!”

Father Cassidy looked extremely pleased with himself, but the brothers seemed most offended that he should imagine their souls hardening and they put their hands protectively upon their pulsing hearts. The priest did not give up, however, and quickly rattled off a list of venial sins: “a stab of envy or pride or…, no? Bad temper or even a minor untruth, no? Or even, I hesitate to say…” The priest's soft hand wobbled a bit as he closed it around the glass, and he smiled in tender delight at its contents, swirling the golden liquid gently as he spoke. He was now a bit dreamy. “Impure thoughts,” he whispered. “Very common.”

At this, Mooshum gave his brother a look of wounded puzzlement, and raised his eye questingly to the ceiling. Shamengwa made the sign of the cross with his good arm, and then took a small sip of his drink.

“We
should
know what he is talking about,” said Mooshum, touching his poor maimed ear, “but we must admit, we are completely ignorant of these…”

“Impure thoughts,” said Joseph, from the doorway, frowning at the cards in his hand.

“Gin,” I said.

“Aw.”

“Impure thoughts,” said Shamengwa. “Dear priest, could you explain to us—exactly what
are
these impure thoughts you mention? As you say, if they are common, we must have experienced them, and yet we haven't noticed somehow.”

“Perhaps we sin unknowingly,” said Mooshum, his eyes sincere as he gazed at the priest over his poised shot glass. He tried for dignity,
but his chewed-up ear always made him look ridiculous. “Which would be something…”

“Tragic!” said Joseph. He tried to cover a snorting laugh with several quick card shuffles.

“Tragic…as we'd end up in the bad place without warning, were we to die!”

“Could these impure thoughts send us to hell?”

Paralyzed with alarm, both men sat bolt upright. The priest frowned cross-eyed into his empty glass and Mooshum neatly filled it.

“Concupiscence,” said Father Cassidy, raising one finger beside the glass, which he held slightly out at the level of his clerical collar. With his other hand, he tugged at the collar itself, as though it was tightening. “From the Latin,
concu
piss
erry
, I believe, meaning, ah, to dwell upon unclean emissions in one's past or to anticipate such as…any act of imaginary or ejaculatory fornication. Bluntly speaking!”

“Ah, fornication!” The brothers grew animated and tipped their glasses to each other, then to Father Cassidy, who inadvertently tipped his in automatic fellowship and then stared confusedly down, mumbling, “from the Latin…”

“From the Latin
forn
, as in
foreign
, for relations with foreigners,” cried Joseph.

“Ho, ho!” exclaimed the brothers, toasting again as Joseph set his cards down and skimmed out the door.

I quickly followed, but Father Cassidy and Mama were out the door right behind us and Mama said, “Now you two stop right there, and apologize to Father.” But Father Cassidy, perhaps to prove what a horse-savvy Montanan he was, strode up behind us with his great chin of dough bulging over his collar and said, “No need, no need, yours, eh? Nice little docile scrub ponies, awful conformation, of course, positively knock-kneed and they do need the currycomb something worse.” A nasty light sparked in the long-necked pinto's eye. Father Cassidy stepped up to her face and put his hand out. Quick as a rattlesnake, she struck and crushed his fleshy bicep in her teeth. Father Cassidy screamed and began to skip in place. But the mare held on firmly, like a mother might grip a naughty boy. Father Cassidy
tried to swat her nose with his open hand. Her eye rolled back, she gave some coughing grunts that sounded like sobs of laughter, and bit down harder before she finally released his arm. There was hot shock in Father Cassidy's eyes.

“Oh,” said Mama, “I am so sorry, Father. Please come back in and let me ice that little nip.”

“Little nip!” cried Father Cassidy. He clapped his hand over his upper arm as if to keep the meat of it in place and was edging backwards now, heading for his automobile, which was parked in the road before our house. “Good-bye, Clemence, much gratified, the drop did no harm. Aghhh. Who knew I'd need the anesthetic!”

“From the Latin
anesthed
, meaning numskull,” said Joseph to me.

Father Cassidy got into the car. “Tell your father and his brother that they flirt with damnation by resisting Mass!”

“I'll tell them, Father, yes, don't you worry.”

Mama stepped forward to wave politely to Father Cassidy, and by the time she'd turned around to come at us full steam we'd mounted up and sped away. So I believe on that day she walked into the house and poured her frustration out on her father and her uncle, even though she was normally gentle with the two old men, whom she loved as greatly as she loved us. They were chastened and quiet when we returned for supper. Shamengwa stayed on because she had not allowed him to “slink off,” as she put it. The television blared out and the picture scrolled slowly along, edging up the screen and sticking halfway so that a woman's legs would be on top of her talking head. Then her head would rise and the legs would tremble for one moment beneath her, until her head disappeared and popped up below. The two old men leaned back and closed their eyes, unable to bear the disorienting sight. They fell asleep. They were snoring lightly in profound innocence.