The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [73]
“No,” said Billy, “no more.”
He could feel it coming though I avoided it. I steered away from the burning welts, the scissors, pinched nerves, the dead eye, the strap, the belt, the spike-heeled shoe, the razor, the boiling hot spilled tapioca, the shards of glass, the knives, the chinked armor, the sister, the sister, the basement, anything underground.
“Show me, show me.” Billy was half asleep. He didn’t know what he wanted to see, and of course I don’t mean to imply that he would see the whole of my picture anyway. He would walk the edge of it, get the crumbs, the drops of water that flew off when a bird shook its feathers. That’s how much I got across, but that was all it took. When you share like that, the rest of the earth shuts. You are locked in, twisted close, braided, born. And I could do it, just that much, and he needed it. Escape.
“Show me.”
So I showed him, and I showed him. Another year passed and the discipline grew tighter and more intense as the spirit ripped into Billy and wouldn’t spare us, either.
ONE JANUARY NIGHT he came into the room and talked to the children and me all night, squeezing our faces in his thick, hot palms, slapping us to stay awake, urging us to stay aware.
“Listen up! Last things are on us!”
I wept and the children wept, but he would not let us sleep.
“There’s something incongruent, something in you, something blocking the channel, something blacking out the peephole, narrowing the frequency.”
“No, there isn’t. These are your children.”
“You are mine. Your lives are mine. I will do with you as spirit wills. Get down! Get down! Get down on the floor!”
He looked at us with a skeptical loathing, and the black hours passed. Finally, he nodded off. The children fell across my lap. By then I was all nerved up and wide awake, so I went to my glass boxes. I took out my serpents to pray with. They curled around me, in and out of my clothing, comforting. The serpents were listening, and I heard it, too. The chinook blew in. Just like that.
The temperature shifted radically. The warm wind could melt the deep snow packs in hours. I heard the rafters groan, the snow already dripping. I smelled dirt and rain. It was blowing through, and soon the winter grass, deep gray, blond, would poke through the drifts, The air was flowing, moving, warm currents of dark air heaving fresh out of the southwest across wet roads, slick roads. And then the wolf dogs came out, raising long muzzles to the air.
I started up in a moment of fear, and as I did, my copperhead struck me full on, in the shadow of my wing, too close to my heart not to kill me. In the Lord, I said, as I was taught, and I gathered up my red-back beauty. She wore time itself in those hourglasses and I felt the sand rush through them as I let her flow back into her case. Then I lay down. I let the poison bloom into me. Let the sickness boil up, and the questions, and the fruit of the tree of power. I let the knowing take hold of me. The understanding of serpents. My heart went black and rock hard. It stopped once, then started again. When the life flooded back in I knew that I was stronger. I knew that I’d absorbed the poison. As it worked in me, I knew that I was the poison and I was the power.
Get away from him and take the children, the serpent said to me from her glass box, as she curled back to sleep