The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [131]
I passed the bar exam and decided to practice Indian law. I got some land back for one tribe, went to Washington, helped with a case regarding tribal religion, one thing and another, until I jumped at the chance to come back. Only not to Pluto, but to the reservation where I would marry Geraldine and where, all along, the truth was waiting.
Although we asked Mother to live with us, she refused, and insisted on remaining in Pluto. When I visited her, I would walk the town and invariably pass the empty lot where our house had stood. Ted had died before deciding what flimsy box to erect, and the lot had gone to weeds.
One day as I was standing there, a car drove past and then stopped. An aged woman in a baggy summer dress got out and began to walk back toward me. Her dress, a lurid pink floral pattern, threw me off. As she drew near, I recognized C. She’d never worn a flower print before, only solid colors, and she had let her hair go white. Also, she had developed the hunch of an elderly, soft-boned woman. She looked pleased when she saw the look on my face.
“Didn’t I tell you I would get old?”
“I didn’t believe you,” I said.
C. didn’t seem concerned in the least at my awkwardness. Rather, it confirmed her belief, I suppose, and she said in a taunting voice, “Did you think I’d stay beautiful? Age gracefully?”
Staring into her face, I saw expressions—shame, defiance, maybe satisfaction—but no tenderness that I could recognize.
“You did what you did,” I said, at last.
“I had to so you’d leave.”
I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother’s cards on the table.
I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.
ABOUT A MONTH after our wedding, I was sitting with Geraldine. Between segments of the national news, we were chatting about some illness she’d once had, or I’d once had. C.’s name came up and Geraldine said, “Oh, that doctor who won’t treat Indians.”
“What?”
In all the time that I knew C., in all the time that I’d made love to her, I never knew such a thing. And there I was, a member of our tribe—which proved how off-reservation my mind-set was, growing up. But it was also strange I hadn’t heard this in my capacity as a judge, or from my mother. Then I remembered my head bumps.
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, she won’t.”
“How so?”
Geraldine switched off the television, then returned to sit down beside me. By talking of C. we had already violated our tacit rule