The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [114]
“I imagined that you, I mean of all people…”
“No,” she said, “not a firm faith.”
“So the reason you became a nun”—my voice was low, I felt I might be pressing her too far now, but I wanted to know—“was it because you’re a Buckendorf? Because a Buckendorf hung Corwin’s great-uncle?”
She concealed her reaction behind a lifted hand, and took some time to answer.
“To live my life atoning for another person’s sin?” She said at last, her voice scratchy and faint. “I wouldn’t have had the strength. But then again, the hanging undoubtedly had something to do with my decision, growing up and finding out. Knowing one could be capable.”
“One could be?”
“Anyone, perhaps. My father said that his grandfather was very kind, the kindest one of all. And yet he always knew he’d been one of the lynching party. My father was never able to put him there, in his thoughts. A couple of times he said he spoke of it. He spoke of your grandfather.”
“Mooshum?”
I leaned forward and waited, but she hesitated.
“I’m not sure…but you asked. You want to know.” Her lucid eyes combed me over. “All right, dear, I’ll tell you. I believe your grandfather used to drink in those days. Your Mooshum told Eugene Wildstrand that he and the others were at the farmhouse. Mooshum told how they had found that poor family.”
I couldn’t look at her suddenly. I could only see Mooshum. A ragged flush rose from deep inside of me, a flood of pure distress. “He must have been stinking drunk to tell that,” I said.
Nowhere in Mooshum’s telling of the events did he make himself responsible. He never said that he had been the one who betrayed the others, yet instantly I knew it was true. Here was why the others would not speak to him in the wagon. Here was the reason he was cut down before he died.
Although I knew Mary Anita spoke the truth, I could not help arguing, and my voice rose. “They put a rope around his neck! He almost died. They tried to hang him, too.”
Sister Mary Anita’s hands twisted in agitation. “Yes, my dear. Wildstrand cut him down at the last moment, yes. From what I heard, though, they never meant to hang him all the way. They wanted to terrify him, to intimidate him. A false hanging will do that.”
Sister Mary Anita touched the bottom of her face lightly with her knuckles, then gazed over my head, at the crucifix I thought. She was looking at the basket of dried flowers—black-eyed Susans, the little brown thumbs of prairie coneflowers, rusty Indian paint, cattails—all recently gathered from the ditches and pastures.
“The boy made that basket,” said Mary Anita.
I rose, stepped across the room, and examined the basket—the wands, brittle and ancient, were more widely spaced than the best baskets, and a bit loose, the weaving not tight but irregular; it was a basket that a boy might make. Sister Mary Anita scraped out of the room, her feet uncertain on the floor now, and while she was gone I sat down, bent over, and held my head in my hands. Mooshum. When she came back, she had a brown paper bag, folded over on top. She didn’t sit down and when I stood up to take the bag in my arms, I saw that she was tired and wanted me to leave. She remembered at the door.
“I’ll pray for your vocation,” she said. “And your sanity. too.” She brightened and made a small joke. “They are not mutually exclusive.”
I walked back down the hill and entered our house. Joseph and I still had our tiny alcove bedrooms—though his was full of all of his things now, plus Mama’s sewing. Mooshum still slept in the little pantry off the kitchen. I went to my room, sat down on the bed, opened the paper bag, and peered inside. There was a pair of laceless boots, tongues dragging, leather dark and cracked with age. I took the boots out of the bag and held them in my arms. If I lifted one out and turned it over to look at the bottom, I knew I would see the nailed-on cross.
When I’d walked into the house, I had awakened Mooshum and now I heard him making his unsteady old man’s way down the hall to my room. Nobody else was home.
“Want to play cards?