The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [52]
He put the book down. He pressed the cross into his forehead as if to absorb its meaning. He thought of Bull’s calm fiance. Again the otter looked at him, an innocent saint. And Bull’s fathomless eyes stared into the leaves.
“Well,” he said out loud, “I’m cured of town fever.”
He went out, bought a vested suit, and decided to become a lawyer.
The Wolf
HE WHO GOES to law holds a wolf by the ear, said Robert Burton. So there I was, here I am, the clichd mixed-blood with a wolf by the ear. One of my advantages in holding on to the wolf is that I grew up dividing my time between my mother’s family on the reservation, and the big house in Pluto. Thus, I know something about both sides of many cases I hear. My father built our house on land he had inherited from Joseph Coutts, whose own survey stones the railroad company tried to search out and steal when they came through, named, and platted out the town. That was some years after the town fever ordeal. Joseph Coutts was his own attorney, by then. In his first big case, he got back land for himself, therefore benefiting the Buckendorfs and any other of those original party members who cared to make a living near Pluto. Some did come back, drawn to where they’d lived the hardest, maybe, or where like Bull they had seen the truth of things flutter away in the pale leaves above them.
English Bill returned for a short time to open a saloon, but his terrier dog was thrown across the room in a poker dispute, shot right out of the air, and never did quite recover its vitality. Bill’s liquor was as remarkably bad as his food. I don’t know where he next tried his skill. As for the Buckendorfs, three of the four stayed on and were of course party to the lynching murder of the youngest Peace, whose older brothers had saved their lives.
After he got his land back, my grandfather was asked to move to Pluto and open a practice in what was thought of, after the mob had its way, as a town not quite fit to count itself part of the civilized new state of North Dakota. He did so, my father also went to law, and as they both married Chippewa women we became a family of lawyers who were also tribal members, an unusual combination at the time, but increasingly handy as tribal law and the complications of federal versus state jurisdiction were just beginning to become manifest.
As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation. It is the same with all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth. By drawing a line and defending it, we seem to think we have mastered something. What? The earth swallows and absorbs even those who manage to form a country, a reservation. (Yet there is something to the love and knowledge of the land and its relationship to dreams—that’s what the old people had. That’s why as a tribe we exist to the present.) It is my job to maintain the sovereignty of tribal law on tribal land, but even as I do so, I think of my grandfather’s phrase for the land disease, town fever, and how he nearly died of greed, its main symptom.
I have tried to keep some things about my Pluto self a secret here—my long defeat in love, for instance, by a woman who demolished my house, a few (mostly pardonable) youthful escapades, and a verbal mistake that resulted in my lengthy term of work digging graves in the town cemetery—a place for which I still have fond regard. But in one of my first law cases, I defended the perpetrator of a crime that had taken place in Pluto. This crime had also resulted in Corwin Peace. John Wildstrand was the perpetrator; he was also Corwin’s father. He was tangled in with the rest of the family in complex ways as his grandfather had also fathered Mooshum’s wife—but enough. Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.
I trace a number of interesting social configurations to the Wildstrand tendency to sexual excess, or “deathless romantic encounters,” as Geraldine’s niece, Evelina, puts it when listening to the histories laid