The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [39]
“There were no Harps at the lynching,” I said without thinking. “But there was a Wildstrand. She married one.”
It surprised me that Mama didn’t question the fact that I knew what she had warned Mooshum not to tell us. She just took a little breath.
“Well,” she said, “and Buckendorfs. That was a long time ago. And look how Mary Anita has come back to help the young children of the parish.” Her voice took on that overcareful pious quality that always made me step away from her. I stepped away.
“Oh, her,” I pretended, and we were quiet for a little while. Just before the tea boiled, Mama shook herself.
“Evelina, you know that your grandma, Junesse, was not all Chippewa.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Her father left her and of course she was raised by her aunt. Her father’s name was Eugene Wildstrand.”
I just kept looking out the window, as if I hadn’t heard what she said. But inside I thought I now understood the reason that they hadn’t hanged Mooshum to death, as his brother put it. Behind me, I heard her take the kettle off the stove. The handle rattled a bit as she set it down. She scooped the tea leaves out of a tin with her fingers, then dropped them in the teapot and tapped the lid back onto the tea can. I heard the pour of steaming water as she filled the brown teapot and then she came back to stand beside me. This time, when she put her hand on my back, I did not shrug it off. We waited, together, for the tea to brew the way the two old brothers liked it, dark and bitter. Neve Harp could add a pound of sugar and she’d never get it sweet enough.
“Oh, anyway,” said Mama, “I might as well tell you everything. You’ll hear it anyway. Your aunt Geraldine and Judge Coutts are having…” But she couldn’t say it. She just gave a great, cracking sigh and put her hand on her chest.
“A baby?” I said.
Mama looked at me in surprise, then realized I didn’t really know what I was saying.
“Your aunt can’t have babies,” she said, in a somber way.
“Oh?” I said. “Then what? What are they having?”
But Mama regretted her moment, I could tell, and sent me outside with the teacups.
Lines
THE STORY MOOSHUM told us had its repercussions—the first being that I could not look at anyone in quite the same way anymore. I became obsessed with lineage. As I came to the end of my small leopard-print diary (its key useless as my brother had broken the clasp), I wrote down as much of Mooshum’s story as I could remember, and then the relatives of everyone I knew—parents, grandparents, way on back in time. I traced the blood history of the murders through my classmates and friends until I could draw out elaborate spider webs of lines and intersecting circles. I drew in pencil. There were a few people, one of them being Corwin Peace, whose chart was so complicated that I erased parts of it until I wore right through the paper. Still, I could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help. He bore interrogation with a vexed wince and silence. I persisted, kept on asking for details, but he answered in evasions, to get rid of me. He never spoke with the direct fluidity of that first telling. His medicine bottle, confiscated by our mother, had held whiskey. No one knew from what source. She’d never get him to stop. I still loved Mooshum, of course, but with this tale something in my regard of him was disturbed, as if I’d stepped into a clear stream and silt had billowed up around my feet.
Judge Antone Bazil Coutts
The Way Things Are
THE MOMENT I passed Geraldine Milk in the narrow hallway of the tribal offices, I decided I had to marry her. As we swerved slightly sideways, nodding briefly, her breasts in a modest white blouse passed just under my line of sight. I was intensely aware of them and forced myself to keep my eyes level with hers, but still, I caught the delicate scent of her soap mixed with a harsh thread of female sweat. The hair at the back of my neck prickled, I stopped dead, swiveling like a puppet on strings, to watch her as she passed on down the