The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [111]
I’m just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged, half-Chippewa. I think of Mooshum and Shamengwa sitting long into the afternoon. In the bed where Nonette curled—so warm, so golden—I see the beauty of women holding out their Latin missals and walking through the wheat in white dresses, praying away the doves in an ancient, foreign, magisterial tongue. And Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, for whom my passion should have clued me, and Corwin Peace, who also had a hand in this, I think of them.
I might go back and visit Sister Mary Anita. It might be a good thing to do. To speak to that monstrous, gentle face, to tell her that I’ve fallen from the church but that I still have visions, sometimes, of the mad swirl of her habit as she made adroit backhand catches and threw out a black-shod foot for balance. How the black wool snapped out in the air and then eddied back down around her ankles as she took a skipping hop and blazed the ball back to the catcher.
The Concert
ONE DAY, CORWIN Peace comes to visit me.
I am surprised, but not embarrassed. He’s learned where I am from my aunt, and is feeling bad about my desperate phone calls. He remembers the acid he fed me, and how I locked myself into my room for days after I took it. He says he decided that he should look me up. So one day as I am slowly crushing one cigarette after another into a sand-filled coffee can—there are six or seven cans in the patients’ lounge, always full of butts—in walks Corwin. He is dressed in a long, black sheriff ’s riding duster, but he wears a strange orange woolen hunting cap with a low brim over his eyes. He has on high-top tennis shoes, bellbottom jeans, a ripped T-shirt. Under the dramatic duster, he is carrying his new violin.
“Sit down.” I gesture with a newly lighted cigarette. I try to look bored, but actually I am excited. Corwin sits down in a plastic armchair and rests the violin case on his lap. His face is long and beautiful, his Peace eyes black and haunted. He has a short scraggle of unmowed beard. His ponytail flows down under his cap and snakes down his back. Corwin has always had lush brown lashes and those straight-across dramatic eyebrows. He can look at you steadily from under those minky brows, like his mother. He has some of what his uncle must have had to attract so many followers—that odd magnetism. When he smiles, his crooked teeth look very white. He doesn’t smoke.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I say.
We nod for a while like two sages on a hill. Then he opens the case and picks up his fiddle. As he tunes it, making such unfamiliar noise, the patients come out of their rooms or are attracted from down the corridor. The nurses venture from their station and stand, arms folded, chewing gum. Their mouths stop moving when he starts playing, and some of the patients sit down, right where they are, a couple of them on the floor, as if the music has cut through the big room like a scythe. After that first run of notes, the music gathers. Corwin plays a slow and pretty tune that makes people’s eyes unfocus. Lucille’s mouth forms a big O and she huddles into herself. Warren stands rooted, stiff and tall. Others sway, they look like they might weep, but that changes quickly as Corwin picks up tempo and plucks out a lively jig that has a sense of humor in the phrasing. At this point, Warren leaves his wall and begins to walk around and around the room, faster and faster. The music ticks along in a jerky way, a Red River jig. Then something monstrous happens. All sounds merge for a moment in the belly of the violin and fill the room with distress. My throat fills. I jump up. Alarm strikes through us. Warren stops walking and backs up flat against the wall. But Corwin