The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [78]
She rose now, a larded green warrior in her sweat suit and army jacket. She held out her thick hands and for a long moment we put ours out, too, returning the energy. A song started and we had to let it go around twice. Then she put her hands down and gave the financial report. She shouted it out as though it were a kind of prayer, and since it was all numbers and dizzy quotes of percentages and tax advantages and ways that the money would go in here, come out there, look nice, still work for us, we all nodded at the right time, any time she asked for it, and smiled.
“All right,” she said at last. “Bottom line. We need three to work a day job and give assistance with the profits.”
“Let’s all meditate on who,” suggested Frenchie, lowering his head.
We did, all of us. Deborah’s hand in mine was cold, cold as light. If I had anyone whom I counted as a friend it probably was Deborah, whose children were close in age to mine, and with whom I’d battled small temptations in the garden and the kitchen. She was a dark longhaired meek woman with exhausted eyes. My skin was pale, the palest it could be, Snow White pale, ghost pale, grass pale. Good skin, nice skin, not marred by a vein or freckle. Lilith had the same fine skin, the perfect covering, the wonderful elastic veneer that allowed for every interior change, compensated, stretched or shrank at will, smoothed or roughened with each change in weather. Sensitive skin that wrapped itself exquisitely over our bones. I sat there, holding hands, letting the energy pass through me and over me, absorbing the invisible rays of ardor and togetherness that we shoveled from ourselves into the middle of the circle. We basked in this communion, wallowed in it like animals on those mornings when we woke bereft.
I squeezed light from Deborah’s palm, and she startled in surprise or pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, just the day before my cleansing,” I whispered back.
She nodded and lowered her head again, into the steaming twilight of the morning’s meditations. I looked up, a thing I’d never done before in circle. I unbolted my eyes and from under the edges of my scarf I looked straight into the eyes of Bliss, who was watching me with the money eyes. Empty eyes. I knew better than to meet those eyes. I had nearly tipped my hand. If she knew what I was thinking, what I wanted to do, it would be over before it started. If she even suspected. Bliss, the one I had to watch, the undoer, the stone turner. I smiled vaguely, as though I was confused, waking from and then submerging once again in my dream. I closed my eyes again and from inside my own dark consciousness I stared down, far down, into the shaft of an empty mine.
We were imaging gold. We were visualizing total and complete original support. We were seeing chunks, flakes, beads, veins, whole nuggets. We were seeing through the rock and gumbo, through igneous peat and shale, through the vestiges of lost black time, through the ivory teeth and petrified wood, through the bones and the tarry blood of dinosaurs. We were seeing gold, tasting it, biting gold coins, believing. We were going to start digging in the back field pretty soon.
I BEGAN TO keep a diary—not the usual written record, but a mental diary of important moments. Here is a list I memorized:
Billy walked into the bedroom one night and took a deep breath and sucked all of the air out of it.
Billy waited until I came out of the shower and stood outside the door and as I stood there naked and streaming water he dried me with the heated iron of his gaze.
Billy came toward