The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [47]
“Who? Where?” asked Bull.
“Ginimoshe! Is she there?”
But Bull could not be teased. He hadn’t the stiff pride of Emil Buckendorf. He spoke in a kind of innocence.
“If she were. If she only were there!”
The guides nodded in approval at his devotion. The other men went quiet out of respect and envy. Bull had nearly dropped out at the last minute for reason of having fallen in love. It was not just any love, he’d told Joseph, it was unbearable, it was heaven. She had been introduced to him by the guides, and was the housekeeper and general assistant to a local doctor who advertised “Surgeries with or without chloroform, the latter on bargain terms!” Joseph had in fact thought the doctor’s advertising card an excellent reason to become rich. He had also seen the girl Bull loved. She was a niece of the Peace brothers, daughter of their younger sister, a Metis Catholic whose family was very strict. Her skin was a dark cream. She was round and sweet as caramel, with brown-black hair and tiny cinnamon-colored freckles sprinkled across a sensible nose. Nice enough, a forthright look about her, but hard to see as the object of deathless passion. But then, thought Joseph, who was he to talk? He kept Dorea’s locket in the heart pocket of his innermost shirt and fished it out in secret.
Batner’s Powders
THEY REACHED THE area they wanted to claim one month after they’d started off with just six oxen left and an alarming lack of flour. English Bill had insisted three barrels be provided and yet just one had been loaded. He cursed Poolcaugh up and down and spat till he was livid over the flour and then the quality of the beans, which he insisted were shriveled and had been switched on him. By now, though, having eaten one meal more scorched and strange than the next, the men had understood that English Bill’s cooking was as big a challenge as the weather. Both were soon to get worse. The first blizzards had been nothing, and they were met at their destination by a four-day howler, which they survived only through the cleverness of their guides in choosing a camp, setting up their tent, and banking it with brush and snow so that it became quite snug by the end of the blow. With the flour nearly gone, they decided, after they emerged, to feed the oxen elm slash and keep the feed—rough corn and ground cob—to sustain themselves. They divided it up equally. Joseph filled his extra pair of socks with the stuff—hard as sand pebbles. There were still plenty of beans, but the men had now developed bowel trouble and ate their suppers with slow despair. By morning, beneath their suffocating quilt, they wanted to murder one another. In the beginning the men had coveted the warmest interior sleeping spots, but now they craved to sleep on either end, where at least they could gasp fresh air. They became so weak from the trots that Bull at last decided to break into the store of drug remedies he’d procured from his sweetheart’s employer.
One night, consulting written instructions from the doctor, he prepared a solution of Batner’s Powders for each of the men. Joseph took his ten drops like the others and crawled into bed. The effect upon them all was nothing short of magical. They slept like babes, dreamed lusciously, woke in the morning refreshed, pleasant, and actually did some surveying. Using a hand compass, a tape and chain, they completed the main lines, which would be filled in back in St. Paul. Joseph had dreamed a banquet so detailed that he thought for part of the morning he’d really eaten it. That night they boiled ox and hog meat with the last of the flour into a thick mush that Henri called booyeh. They ate as well as they could and eagerly accepted their treatment. Over the next weeks, the food dwindled. Lafayette killed a lynx and the guides replaced the broken strings of the fiddle with its entrails, but the rank meat sat hard in their scoured guts. At last they killed the final ox, and were glad the medicine helped also with hunger pains. Joseph noticed how loose