The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [123]
As for Geraldine, if she knew about what I had done, and whom I’d loved, she never spoke, and I was always grateful to her for that. But although I have never told her the truth of my before, what occurred in Pluto, I’m sure that she knew why I stayed single for so long, and lived so quietly with my mother all those years before I met her. I never told her that it started when I was a boy not out of high school. I never told her about my first love or explained the difficult hold it had on me—I never told her about C.
I wish that I could say on the night following our wedding I thought of only Geraldine. But the crumbs in our bed and the honey in our tea reminded me of other times, and a different bed. I do not think it was disloyal of me to lie next to Geraldine and recall that history, so sad in many ways. For at the same time I was quickened with wonder, and gratitude. After I was stung, I never thought that love would come my way again. I never thought I would love anyone but C.
Demolition
THE FIRST WOMAN I loved was slightly bigger than me. In bed, C. moved with the agility of a high school wrestler; she was incredibly quick. First she’d be on top and then in a split second underneath me with no break in the fluidity of our motion. It was like we were going somewhere every time we got in bed, cross-country or on a train trip, and we’d have trouble with hunger while making love. In certain favorite positions I’d get famished and weak. She’d make a sandwich or two and bring the food to bed. Sometimes there would be a glass of milk on the wooden table beside the headboard, and there was always a little squeeze bear full of honey, which she drank from like a bottle. She was a great believer in the restorative powers of milk and honey. On occasion, to rejuvenate me, she’d squirt the honey into my mouth, then dip a cloth into the cool glass of milk, and wipe me down. In summer, I soured in the heat, and one day my mother noticed when I walked in the door. My love affair with C. was clandestine, and I told my mother on the spur of the moment that I’d gotten work at the creamery.
She misheard me.
“What? The cemetery?”
“Yes,” I said.
Which is how I really did end up working in the Pluto cemetery. So that my lie would not be found out, I walked over there the next day hoping to get a job. I was hired by a man named Gottschalk, who had been there most of his life. His little office was plastered with news clippings and obituaries. He had mapped out the graveyard and knew everything about each person buried there: when they’d come to the town and what they had done, how the family had come to choose that particular stone or monument, cause or moment of death, what property they’d left behind. My grandfather Coutts was buried there already, his grave marked by a tall limestone obelisk with these words at the base: Qui finem vitae extremum inter munera ponat naturae. It is as natural to die as to be born. There was a space next to him for his wife. She’d remarried and never taken it. There was my father, too, with a nice dark stone wide enough for two. He also was given to quotes, though not in Latin. He liked Thoreau (perhaps why he stayed in North Dakota), and he detested all trivialities. Blessed are they who never read a Newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and, through her, God. My mother had already had her name incised next to his, along with her birth date. There was a blank for her death date, which I didn’t like, but she was comforted.
Gottschalk pointed out some additional space and observed that my grandfather had bought a large family plot. There was room for me and my wife, even a couple of kids. It seemed far off and laughable then, but as time has passed I have become increasingly grateful that those places next to my ancestors lie empty and