The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [115]
I turned around and held the boots out, one gripped in each hand. Mooshum looked at me strangely, arrested by my attitude. He pushed his fingers through his scraggly hair, touched his sparse unshaven bristles, white against his skin, but of course he didn’t recognize Holy Track’s boots.
“Evey?”
I shook the boots at him. He cocked his head to the side, opened his long fingers, and took the boots when I shoved them toward him.
“Turn them over,” I said.
He did and as he stared at the soles he bent slightly forward, as if they had gotten heavy. He turned away from me in silence and made his way back down the hall to his couch, which he fell into with the boots still in his hands. I thought that I’d maybe killed him. But he was frowning at the wall. I sat down next to him on the lumpy cushions. He put the boots carefully between us.
After a while, he spoke.
“I passed out cold, so I never knew when they cut me down. I lay there I don’t know how long. When I came to, I looked up and there was these damn boots with the damn crosses on, walking, the boy was still walking, on air.”
“They let him dangle there, choking to death, and watched him.”
Mooshum shrugged and put his hands to his eyes.
A dizziness boiled up in me. I jumped to my feet.
“You’re the only one left,” I said.
“Tawpway,” said Mooshum, complainingly, “and now you killed me some, too. I am sick to look on these old boots and think of Holy Track.”
“You’re the one who told!”
He rifled his pockets, took out his grubby, balled-up handkerchief, and tried to give it to me. I pushed it back.
“I did sober up for a long time, though, after that, some.”
We looked down at the splayed boots.
After a while Mooshum picked up the boots and said he wanted me to drive him someplace. So I got the keys and helped him out of the house and into the car.
“Where am I going?”
“To the tree.”
I knew where the tree was. Everybody knew where the tree was. The tree still grew on Marn’s land, where Billy Peace’s kindred used to stay. People had stopped going there for a while, but come back now that the kindred had disappeared. The tree took up the very northwest corner of the land, and it was always full of birds. Mooshum and I drove silently over the miles, then parked the car on a tractor turnout. When we slammed the car doors, a thousand birds startled up at the same instant. The sound reverberated like a shot bow. They flew like arrows and disappeared, sucked into the air.
We walked over dusty winter-flattened grass into the shadow of the tree. Alone in the field, catching light from each direction, the tree had grown its branches out like the graceful arms of a candelabra. New prayer flags hung down—red, green, blue, white. The sun was flaring low, gold on the branches, and the finest of new leaves was showing.
Mooshum knotted the laces, handed the boots to me. I threw them up. It took three times to catch them on a branch.
“This is sentiment instead of justice,” I said to Mooshum.
The truth is, all the way there I’d thought about saying just this thing.
Mooshum nodded, peering into the film of green on the black twigs, blinking, “Awee, my girl. The doves are still up there.”
I stared up and didn’t have anything to say about the doves, but I hated the gentle swaying of those boots.
All Souls’ Day
SO AFTER ALL, Mooshum saw in the skies of North Dakota an endless number of doves cluttering the air and filling heaven with an eternity of low cries. He imagined that the blanket of doves had merely lifted into the stratosphere and not been snuffed out here on earth. By this flurry of feathers, he was connected to the great French writer whose paperback I picked up again after abandoning Anas Nin. I read it so often that I sometimes thought of Judge Coutts as the judge-penitent, who bore my mother’s name, and waited at a bar in Amsterdam for someone like me. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. Albert Camus had once worked in a weather bureau, which made me trust his observations of the sky.
It was a warm Halloween night, and I had come