The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [92]
The pain in my arm kept me awake, and I know that at night, when I couldn’t distract myself, I moaned in my blankets by the stove. But worse was the uselessness of the arm in playing the fiddle. I tried to prop it up, but it fell like a rag-doll arm. I finally hit upon the solution, a strip of cloth, that I have used ever since. I started tying up my broken arm at that early age, just as I do now. I had of course no idea that it would heal that way and that as a result I would be considered a permanent cripple. I only knew that with the arm securely tied up I could play, and that I could play saved my life. So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped.
There was bound to come a time when I slipped up, but it didn’t come for a while, and by the time it did I was already twelve years old. My father, my mother, and I had gotten used to our strangeness by then. I went to school because the truancy agent finally came and got me. School is where I got the name I carry now. The full-blood children gave it to me as a kind of blessing, I think. Shamengwa, the black and orange butterfly. It was an acceptance of my “wing arm.” Yet, even though a nun told me that a picture of a butterfly in a painting of our lady was meant to represent the Holy Spirit, I didn’t like the name at first. But I was too quiet to do anything about it. My bashfulness about the shape of my arm caused me to avoid people even once I was older, and I made no friends. Human friends. My true friend was hidden in the blanket chest, anyway, the only friend I really needed. And then I lost that friend.
My parents had gone to church, but there was on that winter’s day some problem with the stove there. Smoke had filled the nave at the start of Mass and everyone was sent straight home. So my mother and father arrived when I was deep into my playing. They listened, standing at the door rooted by the surprise of what they heard, for how long I do not know. I had not heard the door open and with my eyes shut not seen the light thereby admitted. I finally noticed the cold breeze that swirled around them, turned, and we stared at one another with a shocked gravity that my father broke at last by asking, “How long?”
I did not answer, though I wanted to. Seven years. Seven years!
He led my mother in. They shut the door behind them. Then he said, in a voice of troubled softness, “Keep on.”
So I did play, and when I quit he said nothing.
Discovered, I thought the worst was over. I put the fiddle away that night. But next morning, waking to a silence where I usually heard my father’s noises, hearing a vacancy of presence before I even knew it for sure, I knew the worst was yet to come. My playing woke something in him. That’s what I think. That was the reason he left. But I don’t know why he had to take the violin. When I opened the blanket box and saw that it was missing, all breath left me, all thought, all feeling. For months after that I was the same as my mother. In our loss, we were cut off from all the true, bright, normal routines of living. I might have stayed that way, gone even deeper into the silence, joined my mother on the dark bench from which she could not return. I would have lived on in that diminished form except that I had a dream.
The dream was simple. A voice. Go to the lake and sit by the southern rock. Wait there. I will come.
I decided to follow these direct