The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [66]
I have a picture. I go into it right off when I touch Ed’s mother, veering off her thin pain. She grew up in Montana and now I see what she sees. Here’s a grainy deep blue range of mountains hovering off the valley in the west; their foothills are blue, strips of dark blue flannel, and their tops are cloudy halls. The sun strikes through, once, twice, a pink radiance that dazzles patterns into their corridors so they gleam back, moon-pocked. Watch them, watch close, Ed’s mother, and they start to walk. I keep talking until I know we are approaching these mountains together. She is dimming her lights, she is turning thin as tissue under my hands. She is dying as she goes into my picture with me, goes in strong, goes in willingly. And once she is in the picture she gains peace from it, gains the rock strength, the power, just like I always do.
The Daniels
WE WANDERED IN the desert three years, and I bore two children in the daze and rush of Billy’s traveling visions. His cognitions came on us like Mack trucks, bowling us from tent to tent and town to town. He would howl with the signal, then writhe at tremendous sights he saw, shout for a pen and paper, growl and puke and wrestle with the knowledge until he lay calm on the bathroom floor, spent, saying to me, Now, do you doubt?
I never did. I had faith in Billy from that first night I heard him speak. I had faith and I cleaved to him, utterly. But as the months and then the years went by, I missed my mother and my father. I missed their ordinary routine, their low drama, even the familiarity of their quarrels. I missed that I could read their danger, and knew a safe place to be around them—in my pictures. I was having trouble with the pictures. I had to stay on this plane of existence with my babies, that was why. And because I could not disappear into my pictures I needed to go home.
JUDAH IS FLUSHED and peaceful, lips red and soft as petals, his cheeks bright and marked with the seams of the fabric of my blouse. And Lilith, so small and hot, pressed into the folds of my skirt, sighs and falls into a glutted sleep.
“Let’s go see Grandma and Grandpa,” I say to my babies, thinking of my mother’s face. She hasn’t seen them yet.
Nothing can pry this idea loose, I am bent on it.
“Billy,” I say when he walks in. “We’re going home.”
“No,” he says without a beat of hesitation.
“We’ve got to,” I tell him.
I’ve never crossed him before and my fierceness surprises, then shakes him.
“Your parents died when you were young,” I tell him. “Your sister raised you until you went into the army, then she went to the dogs, I guess. So you don’t really understand the idea of home, or folks, or a place you grew up in that you want to return to. But now it’s time.”
He sits down on the edge of the little bed in our motel room. I have made him a hot pot of coffee, which he drinks like he is listening.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
I tell him that I have spoken to my parents on the telephone more often lately. As their grandchildren came along, they grew more resigned to Billy, and even will say hello to him on holidays and birthdays. I know if we go back home and bring the babies, things will be all right. My parents will come around. It seems to me that it is time for this to happen, for the break to be mended.
“I’ve never asked you for anything before,” I say to Billy, and that is true. “I’m going home,” I repeat.
“But I’ve just started my ministry here. I can’t leave behind our membership.”
We have signed on eight retired persons, who have liquidated all