The Best American Mystery Stories 2005

Louise Erdrich Disaster Stamps of Pluto

From The New Yorker

the dead of pluto now outnumber the living, and the cemetery stretches up the low hill east of town in a jagged display of white stone. There is no bar, no theater, no hardware store, no creamery or car repair, just a gas pump. Even the priest comes to the church only once a month. The grass is barely mowed in time for his visit, and of course there are no flowers planted. But when the priest does come, there is at least one more person for the town café to feed.

That there is a town café is something of a surprise, and it is no rundown questionable edifice. When the bank pulled out, the family whose drive-in was destroyed by heavy winds bought the building with their insurance money. The granite facade, arched windows, and twenty-foot ceilings make the café seem solid and even luxurious. There is a blackboard for specials and a cigar box by the cash register for the extra change that people might donate to the hospital care of a local boy who was piteously hurt in a farming accident. I spend a good part of my day, as do most of the people left here, in a booth at the café. For now that there is no point in keeping up our municipal buildings, the café serves as office space for town-council and hobby-club members, church-society and card-playing groups. It is an informal staging area for shopping trips to the nearest mall — sixty-eight miles south — and a place for the town’s few young mothers to meet and talk, pushing their car-seat-convertible strollers back and forth with one foot while hooting and swearing as intensely as their husbands, down at the other end of the row of booths. Those left spouseless or childless, owing to war or distance or attrition, eat here. Also divorced or single persons like myself who, for one reason or another, have ended up with a house in Pluto, North Dakota, their only major possession.

We are still here because to sell our houses for a fraction of their original price would leave us renters for life in the world outside. Yet, however tenaciously we cling to yards and living rooms and garages, the grip of one or two of us is broken every year. We are growing fewer. Our town is dying. And I am in charge of more than I bargained for when, in 1991, in the year of my retirement from medicine, I was elected president of Pluto’s historical society.

At the time, it looked as though we might survive, if not flourish, well into the next millennium. But then came the flood of 1997, followed by the cost of rebuilding. Smalls’s bearing works and the farm-implement dealership moved east. We were left with flaxseed and sunflowers, but cheap transport via the interstate had pretty much knocked us out of the game already. So we have begun to steadily diminish, and, as we do, I am becoming the repository of many untold stories such as people will finally tell when they know that there is no use in keeping secrets, or when they realize that all that’s left of a place will one day reside in documents, and they want those papers to reflect the truth.

My old high school friend Neve Harp, salutatorian of the class of 1942 and fellow historical-society member, is one of the last of the original founding families. She is the granddaughter of the speculator and surveyor Frank Harp, who came with members of the Dakota and Great Northern Townsite Company to establish a chain of towns along the Great Northern tracks. They hoped to profit, of course. These townsites were meticulously drawn up into maps for risktakers who would purchase lots for their businesses or homes. Farmers in every direction would buy their supplies in town and patronize the entertainment spots when they came to ship their harvests via rail.

The platting crew moved by wagon and camped where they all agreed some natural feature of the landscape or general distance from other towns made a new town desirable. When the men reached the site of what is now our town, they’d already been platting and mapping for several years and in naming their sites had used up the few words they knew of Sioux or Chippewa, presidents and foreign capitals, important minerals, great statesmen, and the names of their girlfriends and wives. The Greek and Roman gods intrigued them. To the east lay the neatly marked-out townsites of Zeus, Neptune, Apollo, and Athena. They rejected Venus as conducive, perhaps, to future debauchery. Frank Harp suggested Pluto, and it was accepted before anyone realized they’d named a town for the god of the underworld. This occurred in the boom year of 1906, twenty-four years before the planet Pluto was discovered. It is not without irony now that the planet is the coldest, the loneliest, and perhaps the least hospitable in our solar system — but that was never, of course, intended to reflect upon our little municipality.

Dramas of great note have occurred in Pluto. In 1924, five members of a family — the parents, a teenage girl, an eight- and a four-year-old boy — were murdered. A neighbor boy, apparently deranged with love over the daughter, vanished, and so remained the only suspect. Of that family, but one survived — a seven-month-old baby, who slept through the violence in a crib wedged unobtrusively behind a bed.

In 1934, the National Bank of Pluto was robbed of seventeen thousand dollars. In 1936, the president of the bank tried to flee the country with most of the town’s money. He intended to travel to Brazil. His brother followed him as far as New York and persuaded him to return, and most of the money was restored. By visiting each customer personally, the brother convinced them all that their accounts were now safe, and the bank survived. The president, however, killed himself. The brother took over the job.

At the very apex of the town cemetery hill, there is a war memorial. In 1951, seventeen names were carved into a chunk of granite that was dedicated to the heroes of both world wars. One of the names was that of the boy who is generally believed to have murdered the family, the one who vanished from Pluto shortly after the bodies were discovered. He enlisted in Canada, and when notice of his death reached his aunt — who was married to a town-council member and had not wanted to move away, as the mother and father of the suspect did — the aunt insisted that his name be added to the list of the honorable dead. But unknown community members chipped it out of the stone, so that now a rough spot is all that marks his death, and on Veterans Day only sixteen flags are set into the ground around that rock.

There were droughts and freak Accidents and other crimes of passion, and there were good things that happened, too. The seven-month-old baby who survived the murders was adopted by the aunt of the killer, who raised her in pampered love and, at great expense, sent her away to an Eastern college, never expecting that she would return. When she did, nine years later, she was a doctor — the first female doctor in the region. She set up her practice in town and restored the house she had inherited, where the murders had taken place — a small, charming clapboard farmhouse that sits on the eastern edge of town. Six hundred and forty acres of farmland stretch east from the house and barn. With the lease money from those acres, she was able to maintain a clinic and a nurse, and to keep her practice going even when her patients could not always pay for her services. She never married, but for a time she had a lover, a college professor and swim coach whose job did not permit him to leave the university. She had always understood that he would move to Pluto once he retired. But instead he married a girl much younger than himself and moved to Southern California, where he could have a year-round outdoor swimming pool.

Murdo Harp was the name of the brother of the suicide banker, tie was the son of the town’s surveyor and the father of my friend. Neve is now an octogenarian like me; she and I take daily walks to keep our joints oiled. Neve Harp was married three times, but has returned to her maiden name and the house she inherited from her father. She is a tall woman, somewhat stooped for lack of calcium in her diet, although on my advice she now ingests plenty. Every day, no matter what the weather (up to blizzard conditions), we take our two- or three-mile walk around the perimeter of Pluto.

“We orbit like an ancient couple of moons,” she said to me one day.

“If there were people in Pluto, they could set their clocks by us,” I answered. “Or worship us.”

We laughed to think of ourselves as moon goddesses.

Most of the yards and lots are empty. For years, there has been no money in the town coffers for the streets, and the majority have been unimproved or left to gravel. Only the main street is paved with asphalt now, but the rough surfaces are fine with us. They give more purchase. Breaking a hip is our gravest dread — once you are immobile at our age, that is the end.

Our conversations slide through time, and we dwell often on setting straight the town record. I think we’ve sifted through every town occurrence by now, but perhaps when it comes to our own stories there is something left to know. Neve surprised me one day.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you why Murdo’s brother, my uncle Octave, tried to run away to Brazil,” she told me, as though the scandal had just occurred. “We should write the whole thing up for the historical newsletter.”

I asked Neve to wait until we had finished our walk and sat down at the café, so that I could take notes, but she was so excited by the story beating its wings inside her — for some reason so alive and insistent that morning — that she had to talk as we made our way along. Her white hair swirled in wisps from its clip. Her features seemed to have sharpened. Neve has always been angular and imposing. I’ve been her foil. Her best audience. The one who absorbs the overflow of her excitements and pains.

“As you remember,” Neve said, “Octave drowned himself when the river was at its lowest, in only two feet of water. He basically had to throw himself upon a puddle and breathe it in. It was thought that only a woman could have caused a man to inflict such a gruesome death upon himself, but it was not love. He did not die for love.” Neve jabbed a finger at me, as though I’d been the one who kept the myth of Octave’s passion alive. We walked meditatively on for about a hundred yards. Then she began again. “Do you remember stamp collections? How important those were? The rage?”

I said that I did remember. People still collect stamps, I told her.

“But not like they did then, not like Octave,” she said. “My uncle had a stamp collection that he kept in the bank’s main vault. One of this town’s best-kept secrets is exactly how much money that collection was worth. When the bank was robbed in ‘34, the robbers forced their way into the vault. They grabbed what cash there was and completely ignored the fifty-nine albums and twenty-two specially constructed display boxes framed in ebony. That stamp collection was worth many times what the robbers got. It was worth almost as much money as was in the entire bank, in fact.”

“What happened to it?” I was intrigued, as I hadn’t known any of this.

Neve gave me a sly sideways look.

“I kept it when the bank changed hands. I like looking at the stamps, you see — they’re better than television. I’ve decided to sell the whole thing, and that’s why I’m telling the story now. The collection is in my front room. Stacked on a table. You’ve seen the albums, but you’ve never commented. You’ve never looked inside them. If you had, you would have been enchanted, like me, with the delicacy, the detail, and the endless variety. You would have wanted to know more about the stamps themselves, and the need to know and understand their histories would have taken hold of you, as it did my uncle and as it has me, though thankfully to a much lesser degree. Of course, you have your own interests.”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank God for those.”

I would be typing out and editing Neve’s story for the next month.

As we passed the church, we saw the priest there on his monthly visit. The poor man waved at us when we called out a greeting. No one had remembered, so he was cutting the grass. His parish was four or six combined now.

“They treat the good ones like simple beasts,” Neve said. Then she shrugged and we pressed on. “My uncle’s specialty, for all stamp collectors begin at some point to lean in a certain direction, was what you might call the dark side of stamp collecting.

I looked at Neve, whose excitements tend to take a shady turn, and thought that she had inherited her uncle’s twist of mind along with his collection.

“After he had acquired the Holy Grails of philately — British Guiana’s one-cent magenta, and the one-cent Z Grill — as well as the merely intriguing — for instance, Sweden’s 1855 three-cent issue, which is orange instead of blue-green, and many stamps of the Thurn und Taxis postal system and superb specimens of the highly prized Mulready cover — my uncle’s melancholia drew him specifically to what are called ‘errors.’ I think Sweden’s three-cent began it all.”

“Of course,” I said, “even I know about the upside-down airplane stamp.”

“The twenty-four-cent carmine-rose-and-blue invert. The Jenny. Yes!” She seemed delighted. “He began to collect errors in color, like the Swedish stamp, very tricky, then overprints, imperforate errors, value missings, omitted vignettes, and freaks. He has one entire album devoted to the seventeen-year-old boy Frank Baptist, who ran off stamps on an old handpress for the Confederate government.”

Neve charged across a gravelly patch of road, and I hastened to stay within earshot. Stopping to catch her breath, she leaned on a tree and told me that, about six years before he absconded with the bank’s money, Octave Harp had gone into disasters — that is, stamps and covers, or envelopes, that had survived the dreadful occurrences that test or destroy us. These pieces of mail, water-stained, tattered, even bloodied, marked by experience, took their value from the gravity of their condition. Such damage was part of their allure.

By then, we had arrived at the café, and I was glad to sit down and take a few notes on Neve’s revelations. I borrowed some paper and a pen from the owner, and we ordered our coffee and sandwiches. I always have a Denver sandwich and Neve orders a BLT without the bacon. She is a strict vegetarian, the only one in Pluto. We sipped our coffee.

“I have a book,” Neve said, “on philately, in which it says that stamp collecting offers refuge to the confused and gives new vigor to fallen spirits. I think Octave was hoping he would find something of the sort. But my father told me that the more he dwelt on the disasters the worse he felt. He would brighten whenever he obtained something valuable for his collection, though. He was in touch with people all over the globe — it was quite remarkable. I’ve got files and files of his correspondence with stamp dealers. He would spend years tracking down a surviving stamp or cover that had been through a particular disaster. Wars, of course, from the American Revolution to the Crimean War and the First World War. Soldiers frequently carry letters on their person, and one doesn’t like to think how those letters ended up in the hands of collectors. But Octave preferred natural disasters and, to a lesser extent, man-made accidents.” Neve tapped the side of her cup. “He would have been fascinated by the Hindenburg, and certainly there would have been a stamp or two involved, somewhere. And our modern disasters, too, of course.”

I knew what she was thinking of, suddenly — those countless fluttering, strangely cheerful papers drifting through the sky in New York... I went cold with dismay at the thought that many of those bits of paper were perhaps now in the hands of dealers who were selling them all over the world to people like Octave. Neve and I think very much alike, and I saw that she was about to sugar her coffee — a sign of distress. She has a bit of a blood-sugar problem.

“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll be awake all night.”

“I know.” She did it anyway, then set the glass cannister back on the table. “Isn’t it strange, though, how time mutes the horror of events, how they cease to affect us in the same way? But I began to tell you all of this in order to explain why Octave left for Brazil.”

“With so much money. Now I’m starting to imagine he was on the trail of a stamp.”

“You’re exactly right,” Neve said. “My father told me what Octave was looking for. As I said, he was fascinated with natural disasters, and in his collection he had a letter that had survived the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883, a Dutch postmark placed upon a letter written just before and carried off on a steamer. He had a letter from the sack of mail frozen onto the back of a New Hampshire mail carrier who died in the East Coast blizzard of 1888. An authenticated letter from the Titanic’s seagoing post office, too, but then there must have been quite a lot of mail recovered for some reason, as he refers to other pieces. But he was not as interested in sea disasters. No, the prize he was after was a letter from the year 79 AD.”

I hadn’t known there was mail service then, but Neve assured me that mail was extremely old, and that it was Herodotus whose words appeared in the motto “Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night,” etc., more than three hundred years before the date she’d just referred to — the year Mt. Vesuvius blew up and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. “As you may know,” she went on, “the site was looted and picked through by curiosity seekers for a century and a half after its rediscovery before anything was done about preservation. By then, quite a number of recovered objects had found their way into the hands of collectors. A letter that may have been meant for Pliny the Younger, from the Elder, apparently surfaced for a tantalizing moment in Paris, but by the time Octave could contact the dealer the prize had been stolen. The dealer tracked it, however, through a shadowy resale into the hands of a Portuguese rubber baron’s wife, who was living in Brazil, a woman with obsessions similar to Octave’s — though she was not a stamp collector. She was interested in all things Pompeian — had her walls painted in exact replicas of Pompeii frescoes, and so on.”

“Imagine that. In Brazil.”

“No stranger than a small-town North Dakota banker amassing a world-class collection of stamps. Octave was, of course, a bachelor. And he lived very modestly too. Still, he didn’t have enough money to come near to purchasing the Pliny letter. He tried to leave the country with the bank’s money and his stamp collection, but the stamps held him back. I think the customs officials became involved in questions regarding the collection — whether it should be allowed to leave the country, and so on. The Frank Baptist stamps were an interesting side note to American history, for instance. Murdo caught up with him a few days later, and Octave had had a breakdown and was paralyzed in some hotel room. He was terrified that his collection would be confiscated. When he returned to Pluto, he began drinking heavily, and from then on he was a wreck.”

“And the Pompeii letter — what became of it?”

“There was a letter from the Brazilian lady, who still hoped to sell the piece to Octave, a wild letter full of cross-outs and stained with tears.”

“A disaster letter?”

“Yes, I suppose you could say so. Her three-year-old son had somehow got hold of the Pompeii missive and reduced it to dust. So in a way it was a letter from a woman that broke Octave’s heart.”

There was nothing more to say, and we were both in a thoughtful mood by then. Our sandwiches were before us and we ate them.

Neve and I spend our evenings quietly, indoors, reading or watching television, listening to music, eating our meager suppers alone. As I have been long accustomed to my own company, I find my time from dusk to midnight wonderful. I am not lonely. I know I haven’t long to enjoy the luxuries of privacy and silence, and I cherish my familiar surroundings. Neve, however, misses her two children and her grandchildren. She spends many evenings on the telephone, although they live in Fargo and she sees them often. Both Neve and I find it strange that we are old, and we are amazed at how quickly our lives passed — Neve with her marriages and I with my medical practice. We are even surprised when we catch sight of ourselves sometimes. I am fortunate in old age to have a good companion like Neve, though I have lately suspected that if she had the chance to leave Pluto she would do it.

That night, she had an episode of black moodiness, brought on by the sugar in her coffee, though I did not say so. She was still caught up in the telling of Octave’s story, and she had also made an odd discovery.

Flanked by two bright reading lamps, I was quietly absorbing a rather too sweet novel sent by a book club that I belong to when the telephone rang. Speaking breathlessly, Neve told me that she had been looking through albums all evening with a magnifying glass. She had also been sifting through Octave’s papers and letters. She had found something that distressed her: In a file that she had never before opened was a set of eight or nine letters, all addressed to the same person, with canceled stamps, the paper distorted as though it had got wet, the writing smudged, each stamp differing from the others by some slight degree — a minor flaw in the cancellation mark, a slight rip. She had examined them in some puzzlement and noticed that one bore a fifty-cent violet Benjamin Franklin issued two years after the cancellation mark, which was dated just before the sinking of the Titanic.

“I am finding it very hard to admit the obvious,” she said, “because I had formed such a sympathetic opinion of my uncle. But I believe he must have been experimenting with forged disaster mail, and that what I found was no less than evidence. He was offering his fake letter to a dealer in London. There were attempts and rejections of certification letters, too.” She sounded furious, as though he had tried to sell her the item himself.

I tried to talk Neve down, but when she gets into a mood like this all of her rages and sorrows come back to her and it seems she must berate the world or mourn each one. From what she could tell, all the other articles in Octave’s collection were authentic, so after a while she calmed herself. She even laughed a bit, wondering if Octave’s forgery would hold up if included in the context of an otherwise brilliant collection.

“It could improve the price,” she said.

As soon as possible, I put the phone down, and my insipid novel as well. Neve’s moods are catching. I have a notion I will soon be alone in Pluto. I try to shake off a sudden miasma of turbulent dread, but before I know it I have walked into my bedroom and am opening the chest at the foot of my bed and I am looking through my family’s clothes — all else was destroyed or taken away, but the undertaker washed and kept these (kindly, I think) and he gave them to me when I moved into this house. I find the somber envelope marked “Jorghansen’s Funeral Parlor” and slip from it the valentine, within its own envelope, that must have been hidden in a pocket. It may or may not be stained with blood, or rust, but it is most certainly a hideous thing, all schmaltz and paper lace. I note for the first time that the envelope bears a five-cent commemorative stamp of the Huguenot monument in Florida.

Sometimes I wonder if the sounds of fear and anguish, the thunder of the shotgun, is hidden from me somewhere in the most obscure corner of my brain. I might have died of dehydration, as I wasn’t found for three days, but I don’t remember that either, not at all, and have never been abnormally afraid of thirst or obsessed with food or water. No, my childhood was very happy and I had everything — a swing, a puppy, doting parents. Only good things happened to me. I was chosen Queen of the Prom. I never underwent a shock at the sudden revelation of my origins, for I was told the story early on and came to accept who I was. We even suspected that the actual killer might still be living somewhere in our area, invisible, remorseful. For we’d find small, carefully folded bills of cash hidden outdoors in places where my aunt or 1 would be certain to find them — beneath a flowerpot, in my tree house, in the hollow handles of my bicycle — and we’d always hold the wadded squares up arid say, “He’s been here again.” But, truly, I am hard pressed to name more than the predictable sadnesses that pass through one’s life. It is as though the freak of my survival charged my disposition with gratitude. Or as if my family absorbed all the misfortune that might have come my way. I have lived an ordinary and a satisfying life, and I have been privileged to be of service to people. There is no one I mourn to the point of madness and nothing I would really do over again.

So why, when I stroke my sister’s valentine against the side of my face, and why, when I touch the folded linen of her vest, and when I reach for my brothers’ overalls and the apron my mother died in that day, and bundle these things to my stomach together with my father’s ancient, laundered, hay-smelling clothes, why, when I gather my family into my arms, do I catch my breath at the wild upsurge, as if a wind had lifted me, a black wing of air? And why, when that happens, do I fly toward some blurred and ineradicable set of features that seems to rush away from me as stars do? At blinding speeds, never stopping?

When Pluto is empty at last and this house is reclaimed by earth, when the war memorial is toppled and the bank/café stripped for its brass and granite, when all that remains of our town is a collection of historical newsletters bound in volumes donated to the regional collections at the University of North Dakota, what then? What shall I have said? How shall I have depicted the truth?

The valentine tells me that the boy’s name should not have been scratched from the war memorial, that he was not the killer after all. For my sister loved him in return, or she would not have carried his message upon her person. And if he had had her love he probably fled out of grief and despair, not remorse or fear of prosecution. But if it was not the boy, who was it? My father? But no, he was felled from behind. There is no one to accuse. Somewhere in this town or out in the world, then, the being has existed who stalked the boys hiding in the barn and destroyed them in the hay, who saw the beauty of my sister and my mother and shot them dead. And to what profit? For nothing was taken. Nothing gained. To what end the mysterious waste?

An extremely touchy case came my way about twenty years ago, and I have submerged the knowledge of its truth. I have never wanted to think of it. But now, as with Neve, my story knocks with insistence, and I remember my patient. He was a hired man who’d lived his life on a stock farm that abutted the farthest edges of our land. Warren Wolde was a taciturn crank, who nevertheless had a way with animals. He held a number of peculiar beliefs, I am told, regarding the United States government. On these topics, his opinion was avoided. Certain things were never mentioned around him — Congress being one, and particular amendments to the Constitution. Even if one stuck to safe subjects, he looked at people in a penetrating way that they found disquieting. But Warren Wolde was in no condition to disquiet me when I came onto the farm to treat him. Two weeks before, the farm’s expensive blooded bull had hooked and then trampled him, concentrating most of the damage on one leg. He’d refused to see a doctor, and now a feverish infection had set in and the wound was necrotic. He was very strong, and fought being moved to a hospital so violently that his employers had decided to call me instead to see if I could save his leg.

I could, and did, though the means were painful and awful and it meant twice-daily visits, which my schedule could ill afford. At each change of the dressing and debridement, I tried to dose Wolde with morphine, but he resisted. He did not trust me yet and feared that if he lost consciousness he’d wake without his leg. Gradually, I managed to heal the wound and also to quiet him. When I first came to treat him, he’d reacted to the sight of me with a horror unprecedented in my medical experience. It was a fear mixed with panic that had only gradually dulled to a silent wariness. As his leg healed, he opened to my visits, and by the time he was hobbling on crutches he seemed to anticipate my presence with an eager pleasure so tender and pathetic that it startled everyone around him. He’d shuck off his forbidding and strange persona just for me, they said, and sink back into an immobilizing fury once I’d left. He never healed quite enough to take on all of his old tasks, but he lasted pretty well at his job for another three years. He died naturally, in his sleep one night, of a thrown blood clot. To my surprise, I was contacted several weeks later by a lawyer.

The man said that his client Warren Wolde had left a package for me, which I asked him to send in the mail. When the package arrived, addressed in an awkward script that certainly could have been Wolde’s, I opened the box immediately. Inside were hundreds upon hundreds of wadded bills of assorted denominations, and of course I recognized their folded pattern as identical to the bills that had turned up for me all through my childhood. I could perhaps believe that the money gifts and the legacy were only marks of sympathy for the tragic star of my past and, later, gratitude for what I’d done. I might be inclined to think that, were it not for the first few times I had come to treat Wolde, when he reared from me in a horror that seemed so personal. There had been something of a recalled nightmare in his face, I’d thought it even then, and I was not touched later on by the remarkable change in his character. On the contrary, it chilled me to sickness.

Those of you who have faithfully subscribed to this newsletter know that our dwindling subscription list has made it necessary to reduce the length of our articles. So I must end here. But it appears, anyway, that since only the society’s treasurer, Neve Harp, and I have convened to make any decisions at all regarding the preservation and upkeep of our little collection, and as only the two of us are left to contribute more material to this record, and as we have nothing left to say, our membership is now closed. We declare our society defunct. I shall, at least, keep walking the perimeter of Pluto until my footsteps wear my orbit into the earth. My last act as the president of Pluto’s historical society is this: I would like to declare a town holiday to commemorate the year I saved the life of my family’s murderer. The wind will blow. The devils rise. All who celebrate it shall be ghosts. And there will be nothing but eternal dancing, dust on dust, everywhere you look.

Oh my, too apocalyptic, I think as I leave my house to walk over to Neve’s to help her cope with her sleepless night. She will soon move to Fargo. She’ll have the money to do it. Dust on dust! There are very few towns where old women can go out at night and enjoy the breeze, so there is that about Pluto. I take my cane to feel the way, for the air is so black I think already I am invisible.