The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [90]
“Oh, tell him about it, Uncle,” said Geraldine at last.
Shamengwa leaned forward, and bent his head over his hands as though he were praying.
I relaxed now and understood that I was going to hear something. It was that breathless gathering moment I’ve known just before composure cracks, the witness breaks, the truth comes out, the unsaid is finally heard. I am familiar with it and although this was not exactly a confession, it was, as it turned out, something not generally known on the reservation. Shamengwa had owned his fiddle for such a long while that nobody knew, or remembered anyway, a time when he had been without it. But there had actually been two fiddles in his life. There was his father’s fiddle, which he played while he was a boy, and then another, which came to find him through a dream.
The First Fiddle
MY MOTHER LOST a baby boy to diphtheria when I was but four years old, said Shamengwa, and it was that loss which turned my mother strictly to the church. Before that, I remember my father playing chansons, reels, jigs, but after the baby’s death my mother made him put the fiddle down and take Holy Communion. We moved off our allotment for a time and lived right here, but in those days trees and bush still surrounded us. There were no houses to the west. We were not considered to live in the settlement at all and we pastured our horses where the Dairy Queen now stands. My mother out of grief became rigid and tightly ordered with my father, my older brother and sister, and me. Our oldest brother, or half brother, had already left home. He went beyond her and became a priest. We understood why she held to strange laws, and we let her rule us, but we all thought she would relent once the year of first mourning was up. Where before we had a lively house that people liked to visit, now there was quiet. No wine and no music. We kept our voices down because our noise hurt, she said, and there was no laughing or teasing by my father, who had once been a dancing and hilarious man. I missed the little one too. We had put him in the Catholic cemetery underneath a small, rounded, white headstone, where he lies to this day.
I don’t believe my mother meant things to change so, but she and my father had lost everything once already, and this sorrow she bore was beyond her strength. As though her heart was buried underneath that stone as well, she turned cold, turned away from the rest of us, lost her feelings. Now that I am old and know the ways of grief I understand she felt too much, loved too hard, and was afraid to lose us as she had lost my brother. But to a little boy these things are hidden. It only seemed to me that along with that baby I had lost her love. Her strong arms, her kisses, the clean-soap smell of her face, her voice calming me, all of this was gone. She was like a statue in a church. Every so often we would find her in the kitchen, standing still, staring through the wall. At first we touched her clothes, petted her hands. My father kissed her, spoke gently into her ear, combed her short hair—she was a full-blood and in the traditional way had cut off her hair in mourning. It made a fat bush around her head. Later, after we had given up, we just walked around her as you would a stump. Our oldest, my half brother, came and visited. He took my brother away with him to serve at Holy Mass. The house went quiet, my sister took up the cooking, my father became a silent, empty ear, and gradually we accepted that the lively, loving mother we had known wasn’t going to return. If she wanted to sit in the dark all day, we let her. We didn’t try and coax her out. More often, she spent her time at the church. She attended morning Mass and stayed on, her ivory and silver rosary draped in her right fist, her left hand wearing the beads smoother, smaller, until I thought for sure they would disappear between her fingers.
Just after the great visitation of doves, we heard that Seraph had run away. While the rest of the family went to church to pray for