The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [110]
“Well, the usual. But I also saw cobras.”
“That surprises me.”
“They were so real, too.”
“I wonder what part of the brain harbors such acute hallucinatory details, I mean, of something you’ve never seen in real life?”
“The reptile brain, asshole.”
“I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” he says after a pause. “I took drugs too.”
“What?”
“Marihootiberry. It didn’t do much.”
“Probably because it was oregano.”
“I got A’s in botany,” he reminds me.
“You got A’s in everything. You’re not helping my depression. Look around you, it sucks, contrary to what the fans of suicidal poets think. Why don’t you go discover some kind of cure?”
Joseph looks at me thoughtfully, then turns his attention to the people around us in the lounge. There is Lucille, glaring at linoleum tile, disheveled, and Warren, pacing, and others so dull and gray, slumped in torpor. Seeing the ward through his eyes, I am all of a sudden very disturbed. I’ve grown used to being part of this.
“You’re not one of the crazies,” he says then, half-choking, a little desperate. I can tell now that it is dawning on him something might really be wrong. His sympathy wrecks me. Joseph quietly takes my hand, which is even worse. For your brother to hold your hand. This is like some deathbed experience. I shake his hand away but pat his wrist. He sits with me for a long time and we don’t talk and that is peaceful. After a while he gets choked up again and says that he will go into drug research. I whack him on the arm as hard as I can, and he smiles at me in relief.
MY MOTHER AND father come down every weekend to see me. All I do when they visit is cry in sympathy for their worry over me, or fall asleep, and after they go home I miss them—my father who left the bank knowing that he didn’t have the stomach to turn down loans or foreclose like old Murdo. My father who like his uncle Octave collected only stamps. He went away to the war—came back for love—left money for love—my father the schoolteacher hero.
And there is my mother, who loves Mooshum and keeps him going by taking away the bottle and walking him around the yard or down the road every day. I realize that I can only think of her in relation to other persons, and I am pained all over again at what seeing me in this hospital must do to her. I try to think of one thing that is all about Clemence, like my father with his stamps, Joseph’s salamanders, Mooshum telling stories, but I can’t think of anything.
I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.
I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.
I think of Billy Peace, whose meek and shattered-looking members included at least one Buckendorf, a Mantle also. One or another of the kindred would materialize sometimes beside a person in the grocery store and seemed lost in wonder at the aisles of plentiful food. Some adherents blended back in with the other town and reservation people as they took modest little jobs. Billy’s radio hour was taken by another voice. The little tracts we used to find in the Pluto or Hoopdance phone booths, or tucked in wayside rests, were more and more rare, then tattered, just souvenirs of the existence of Billy Peace, perhaps on another plane, those gone too.
Light falls through the wire-glass windows in a gentle swell. Mooshum told me how the old buffalo hunters looked beneath the robe of destruction that blanketed the earth. In the extremity of their hunger they saw the frail crust of white commerce lifting, saw the green grass underneath