The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [80]
A year ago I would have said the bunker kept the children from harm, from the outside, from corrupting influences, from the clouds and confusion of all that lived and breathed and moved outside the kindred. Now, gathering Judah, now, holding Lilith, stroking her unbearable warmth, bearing the joy of her arms hard and fierce at my waist, her whisper, small and vehement, Mother, a word banned except in secret, between us, I thought different. I kept my eyes fixed empty and smiled with careful neutrality over her shoulder. Anguish, their caretaker, gleamed in dull bereavement, a woman who’d lost all of hers. Drunk, she’d dived out of the flaming trailer. Left, her children burnt. Not mine. She wouldn’t get mine. I was gathering myself in order to escape with them.
Judah breathed, hot, against my neck. Something had happened, again. Maybe the thing with Anguish, her prying touch, which I had complained about to Billy. I could not afford to complain again and alert any suspicion in his heart, so when I questioned Judah I begged for it not to be Anguish.
“Did she?”
“No, uh-uh, it was just, I disappointed Father, just now, just a few minutes ago, he was here and I got so nervous, got so nervous I forgot the week’s maxim from the manual and he derided me.”
“Derided?”
“He gave me schedule.”
I held Judah, grabbed him close. Schedule! It meant that instead of school, Judah would be on schedule. There was always one of us in the room where we held our circle. One of us had to stay there and suffer. Pain kept the room clear for spirit, Billy had been told. But Judah was too young!
When?
Tomorrow.
You’re sick. I’ll do it for you.
There was a rule that another of us could suffer for the scheduled if they were too ill or being cleansed. I took Lilith and Judah back to the kitchen and smiled and joked and held them, as did Deborah, her children, while I searched the cabinet.
“What are you looking for?”
It was Billy, behind me, his voice deep and musical. But I had already hidden the soy sauce—a bottle of it choked down and Judah would run a slight fever. Enough to keep him off schedule, while I went on.
TO STAND STILL for an entire day, to lose yourself in immobility, to feel your blood pump painfully, pool—I feared schedule so much that adrenaline surged up in me at the certainty. To get ready for schedule I ran. I ran my long route, my rattlesnake route, my porcupine grass route. To run is to revel in a pretend freedom. I spring along slowly, matching my breathing to my stride, passing the usual fences and fence lines, and thinking. Running is like riding on a train after a while, a motion that allows thoughts to drop down clear from a place in your mind that surprises you.
I saw that I was running in a wide false circle, hopelessly awakened.
Awakened, things had changed in me. Schedule, I’d never questioned. And the harm and the casual pain. Part of processing spirit was a discipline of the afflictions, for we only meet our maker in the unmaking, Billy would say. We mainly chose for ourselves. Bliss had a calcified heart. She beat her chest, and instead of a tiny diabetic’s needle she used a Novocain plunger, long and satisfyingly grim. Anguish mortified her fingernails. Frances slept on bare boards, no blanket. Ate flesh only, therefore stank. My friend Deborah practiced servile and incomplete sex and welcomed her migraines. Billy practiced—just being who he was. Pain enough.
I ran farther and faster, in the loop I was allowed, perfectly warm in my light clothes, in the strengthening sun. The prairie garter snakes were out that day, warming themselves on rocks tilted toward the sharpest rays. They were black with yellow stripes and innocent yellow bellies. If you touched them, held them, they smelled of rotted flowers. I knew some of them by size and temperament. They were not poisonous like my lambs in their aquarium, but I loved the harmless ones too. They coiled up in balls to ride the winters out. Now they