The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [72]
Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely. The task, as Billy saw it, was not to stretch the individual’s barriers, as you might expect—not exactly that. Billy believed that a group of minds living together, thinking as one, had the potential to expand further than any individual. If we opened ourselves, all at once, in one place, we might possibly brush the outskirts, the edges of that vastness of spirit. A circle of linked rubber bands, touching fingertips, we sat some nights, all night, into morning, humming on the edge of that invert field, that sky. He took his time organizing his strategy and his purpose. He took care smoothing out the rough spots in the Manual of Discipline. And planning, raising money, finding people who met his standards. At first, he took the strong-willed, the purposeful, the cerebral, the experimental. Then he took the ones with rational explanations. Lately, he took the wounded, the ones with something missing, though they had to be organized at the same time. He looked for the ones who held down long-term jobs, especially. They had to have typed rsums. He took no one on faith. They had to sit with him, thinking, for hours. He had to test their quality of mind. They were not superstitious, they were not fundamentalists. They might believe the world was coming to an end and that the end would be an economic nightmare. They might believe in god if god was indivisible from light. They were never former Roman Catholics—it was like those were inoculated. Sometimes they were Jews a generation or two away from their own religious practice. Or Protestants, though few had ever been solid Lutherans. No Baptists, no Hindus, no Confucians, no Mormons. No adherents of any other tribe’s religion. No millenarians, no survivalists.
As for me, I didn’t fit into any of those categories. On our travels south, I’d met a family who kept serpents and who believed they were directed to cast out devils by handling poisons. I’d stayed on in their church half a year, I’d sat with their grandmother Virginie, whose white hair reached to her waist. She said I never should cut mine. She’d grown eyes like a snake, a crack of darkness for a pupil, lips thin. One hand was curled black as a bone from the time she was bitten. The other lacked a ring finger. You will get bit, she told me, but you will live through it in the power. She gave me two of her serpents, one a six-foot diamondback, the other a northern copperhead with red skin and hourglass markings. They have judgment in them, she said. And they have love.
So judge me, I said when I held the snakes for the first time, take me, and they did. I found my belief. I knew from the first time that this was my way of getting close to spirit. Their cool dry bodies moved on me, skimmed over me, indifferent, curious, flickering, heavy, showing the mercy of spirit, loving me, sending a blood tide of power through me. I could set myself loose when I held the snakes. I became cold in my depth while my skin bloomed warm, calming them, and also I used pictures. I gave them the lovely heat, the flat rocks, the black rocks, the steady beating of the sun.
After I began to handle them in circle, the kindred stayed clear of me, and that was also a relief.
Still, I considered myself weak-willed, a follower, never speaking up if I could help it. I felt that I had no strong purpose or quality of mind. I was nice-looking but not anywhere near beautiful, I was young, I was younger than I had a right to be. I considered myself helpless, except when I held my serpents. Also, I had these pictures, and because I had them Billy would not let me go.
“Show me Milwaukee,” Billy said one night.
That was where his family spent two years on relocation before his parents died. So I gave him Milwaukee as best I could. I lay there and got the heft of it, the green medians in June, the way you felt entering your favorite restaurant with dinner reservations, hungry, knowing that within fifteen minutes German food would start