The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [132]
“You must have known.”
It was the first time that my involvement with C. was acknowledged between us. Part of me wanted to drop the subject forever, but another part insisted I defend my innocence.
“I didn’t know.”
My words sounded false even in my own ears. There was a sudden cleft of space between us. Stricken, I said something I’ve always wished I could take back.
“But she treated me.”
Geraldine raised her eyes to mine, then looked away. I had seen disappointment.
“They always need an exception,” she said.
Geraldine then told me of several cases, over the years, where the doctor had turned people down—even in a crisis—and how she had let it be known, generally, that she would not treat our people. They all knew why. It was more than your garden-variety bigotry. There was history involved, said Geraldine. I understood, then, that I’d known everything and nothing about the doctor. Only later did I realize: if I had been the same age as C., it would not have mattered. Even though she’d cured my head bumps, become my lover, I’d always be her one exception. Or worse, her absolution. Every time I touched her, she was forgiven. I thought the whole thing out—as Geraldine says, I took in the history. I had to swallow it before I accepted why Cordelia loved me and why she could not abide that she loved me. Why she would not be seen with me. Why tearing down my house was her only option. Why to this day she lives alone.
Doctor Cordelia Lochren
Disaster Stamps of Pluto
THE DEAD OF Pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill I can see from my kitchen, in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes only once a week to the church. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted, so by summer the weeds are thick in the old beds. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town caf to feed.
That there is a town caf is something of a surprise, and it is no run-down questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money and named it the 4-B’s. The granite faade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make our caf seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change people might donate to the hospital care and surgeries of a local boy whose hand was amputated in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the caf. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the caf serves as office space for town council and hobby club members, meeting place for church society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall—sixty-eight miles south—and a place for the few young mothers in town to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left childless or, like me, spouseless, due to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons who, for one reason or another, ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, as their only major possession.
We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original value would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing less. Our town is dying. I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in the year of my retirement, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.
At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then our fertilizer