The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [67]
“You’ve got reservation land,” I said, “and we could get a bigger parcel of land out near my folks. We could buy up a building in town and open a God-based bookstore. But I want to live back where my family lives, close to the farm. I miss all that flat land, green crops, those clouds. We grew everything,” I tell him. “The big crops, soybeans, flowers, flax. I miss the blue fields. The yellow mustard fields. Sunflowers turning all day to catch the light. I miss the house garden. Mint for iced tea. Tomatoes big as your foot.”
Billy thinks about it. Maybe, in the end, it is the mention of the farm’s acreage, 888 acres, although he knows about my two brothers. It’s not like I’m going to inherit the thing, or so it seems then. For one week, I can tell he’s mulling it over and I say nothing, worried I’ll tip the balance if I do speak, say the wrong thing or say too much.
Then one night, at meeting, he raises his arms and he makes the announcement. We are going to move. And I feel happy, so lucky, so proud as he is standing slim and handsome, fresh-faced and smiling, before his followers, that I don’t think right then where they will live. The eight of them, the four of us, hold hands tight and pray in a circle. We sing for an hour, then split up. That night we all begin packing and several days later we set off in a caravan. It is not until we cross the county line that I realize with a jolt, though nothing is expressed, that the place Billy has in mind to park the trailers is my parents’ farm. Where else?
When I ask him, he says, “I’ll take care of their objections. I’ll talk to them.”
He grins. His silvery, curved sunglasses reflect me and reflect the land to either side, now absolutely flat. The sky is gray-gold with dust. The sun is huge and blurred, and seems to hang above us longer here and cast a richer and more diffused light. My parents have told me that there was a long, terrible heat wave this early May. It was a record spring, rainless and merciless. Although the temperatures have gone down somewhat, there has still been no rain, and the earth is suffering.
It is just like when I first met Billy. Another drought. But we’ll end it.
“We’ll bring rain,” I say, excited, when we are just a few miles away from the farm. It is just something to say at the time, but Billy looks at me and starts to get reflective. We are waiting for the Armageddon that never came on Billy’s date, which was just a preliminary date anyway, says Billy. This Armageddon we are waiting for is a different one than the usual, and the signs for it are multiplying, according to Billy’s correlation between the Bible and the business pages. But while we are waiting for the universe to end, Billy gets the notion, as we turn down the road, that we should pray for rain to delay the inevitable. That is what he tells my folks, not fifteen minutes later. We have left the others parked at the turnoff.
I’m hugging and crying with my father and mother, and they’re exclaiming over the babies. Uncle Warren is in the background, strained and vigilant. He’s shaking with the volume of emotion set loose around him. And with his own thoughts. I am careful not to meet his raving eye. It is a prodigal’s return. They are forgiving of me—it’s each other they are hard on. They do not hold a grudge about my absence, even after all the trouble they’ve been through. They seem to accept Billy. Politely, in a grave voice, my mother beckons him up the stairs and into her domain. She is a glass collector—bowls, figurines, vases, tableaus. I hold Judah firmly in my grasp and give Lilith to my father. We walk into the living room and hear Billy exclaiming over the glass. He notices each and every artifact, runs his fingers along the curves of my mother’s green unicorn, polishes a heavy blue egg with the side of his cuff. And after he