The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [28]
Mooshum shook his head slowly back and forth, shifting his wad of chew, frowning as he did. “The old man meant that we were not worthy to step in the boy’s tracks. Evil had us in those days.”
The Lochren Farm
THEY WALKED DOWN the wagon path into a farmyard bounded by a scraggle of cottonwood. The farm was set near the town of Pluto, but the entrance was obscured by a low rise and the brushy tangle of a slough. When they got to the farm, Mooshum said he wished they had not followed the boy’s tracks. He said he knew there was something wrong from the beginning, with the smeared door to the house wide open and no smoke from the chimney. When they got close, the cows in the barn set up a sudden groaning to be milked. The desperation in their resonant bawls stopped the men in the trampled yard.
Asiginak set down his baskets. One of the cows screamed like a woman in pain, and everything went abruptly quiet. After a moment the frogs started up again, trilling and sawing in the slough.
“Let’s not go any closer,” said Asiginak. “The devil has this place.”
And then they heard the baby crying. It was a scratchy cry, a thin, exhausted wail from inside the house.
Asiginak picked up his baskets and turned to leave.
“That’s a baby,” said Cuthbert, and he grabbed Mooshum’s shirt and stood rooted, staring, his stained jaw working.
The baby continued to cry as if it knew they were out there, but they did not move and soon the little sound died away. The wind struck up in the leggy young cottonwoods. Bits of fluff whirled high above them. There was the clatter of stiff, new leaves. As Asiginak started to walk away, the cows started up even louder. Maybe the baby did, too, but now they couldn’t hear it over the vast moans from the barn.
“I feel the devil,” Asiginak cried. “Look there!”
But Cuthbert had gone through the door marked with blood. He vanished into the house. When he came out, he was carrying the baby and his eyes were bugging out—that’s how Mooshum put it, his eyes were bugging out. Cuthbert staggered to the barn with the baby. It wore a tiny white dress and a reeking diaper. The others followed. On the way there, they saw two boys curled on their sides, in the weeds, like they were sleeping, and then a man, his fingers clutched in the green black grass, his head up and still staring at the boys when he died crawling. His back was blasted out.
“Don’t look in that direction,” Asiginak told Holy Track.
The men cracked the barn doors wide and entered the mad wall of sound.
There were ten cows, one dead. Mooshum helped Holy Track put down the baskets somewhere in the dark, and blinked until he could see the nearest cow. He began on that one, then found another. Soon there was just the hiss of milk and a few last cows. The milked ones sounded like they were weeping, softly, in relief. Cuthbert cradled the baby in one arm and squeezed a teat to its lips—the bud of its mouth was hardly big enough, but he squirted the milk in deftly. At last the baby relaxed and its head lolled back. A smile played around its chapped scarlet lips. Mooshum turned the cows out to pasture and the men fled outside, rubbing their eyes, dazzled.
“I’ll carry this baby back,” said Cuthbert, peering anxiously into its face.
“Back where?” said Asiginak.
“To the sheriff.”
“The white sheriff?”
Asiginak saw that his nephew was gaping at the yard. He gently pushed the boy’s face so that Holy Track was facing not the sleeping forms but the watery blue line of the horizon.
Asiginak turned back to Cuthbert. “You’re not drunk, so why do you say this? We are no-goods, we are Indians, even me. If you tell the white sheriff, we will die.”
“They will hang us for sure,” said Mooshum. He picked up Holy Track’s baskets.
“It’s all right,” said Holy Track. “I know what to do. I will tell the priest.”
The other men looked at him.
“Do not tell the priest,” said Mooshum.
Cuthbert held the baby tight. “We cannot put this little one back. If we go, we take it with us.”
“We cannot,” said Asiginak.
“I will not go in that house again,” said Cuthbert.