The Plague of Doves

The Reptile Garden

IN THE FALL of 1972, my parents drove me to college. Everything I needed was packed in a brand-new royal blue aluminum trunk — a crazy-quilt afghan my mother had crocheted for my bed, a hundred 4-B’s dollars’ worth of brand-new clothes, my Berlitz Self-Teacher, the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (a paperback copy from Judge Coutts), a framed photograph, a beaded leather tobacco pouch that Mooshum had owned since I could remember, and which he casually handed to me, the way old men give presents, and from my father a stack of self-addressed envelopes each containing a new dollar bill. He had special stamps on each envelope that he wanted postmarked — some on particular days.

The other freshmen were moving into their dormitory rooms with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment. Dylan albums and acoustic guitars of golden varnished wood. Home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine. Janis posters. Bowie posters. Brightly splashed print sheets, hacky-sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs, dread invaded me. In spite of my determination to go to Paris, I had actually dreaded leaving home even to go as far as Grand Forks, and in the end my parents did not want me to, either. But I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too miserable to cry and I do not remember our final embraces, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car. They waved to me, and that moment is a clear, still picture. I can call it up as if it was a photograph.

My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face, and my father’s face, were naked with love. It wasn’t something that we talked about — love — and I was terrified of its expression from the lips of my parents. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. Their love blazed from them. And then they left. I think now that everything that was concentrated in that one look — their care in raising me, their patient lessons in every subject they knew to teach, their wincing efforts to give me freedoms, their example of fortitude in work — allowed me to survive myself.

The trunk was quickly emptied, my room was barely filled. I had framed a picture of Mooshum dressed up in his traditional clothes. He had a war club in one hand, but he was smiling in a friendly way, his dentures a startling snow-white. His headdress, a roach with two eagle feathers, bobbed on ballpoint-pen springs attached to fishing swivels. His head was cocked at a jaunty angle. A heart-shaped mirror in the middle of his forehead was supposed to snare the hearts of ladies in the crowd. I had a picture of my great-uncle, too, a modest black-and-white photo in which he held his violin. Books to my chest, I curled up beneath the afghan and looked first at Mooshum, then at Shamengwa, and then out the window. I think I realized right then that this place was where I’d spend most of my first semester.

The white girls I knew listened to Joni Mitchell, grew their hair long, smoked impatiently, frowned into their poetry notebooks. The other girls — Dakota, Chippewa, and mixed-blood like me — were less obvious on campus. The Indian women I knew were shy and very studious, although a couple of them swaggered around furious in ribbon shirts with AIM-looking boyfriends. I didn’t really fit in with anybody. We were middle-class BIA Indians, and I wanted to go to Paris. I missed my parents and my uncles and was afraid that Mooshum would die while I was gone.

My roommate was a stocky blond girl from Wishek who was so dead set on becoming a nurse that she practiced bringing me things — a cup of water or, when I had a headache, aspirin. I let her take my blood pressure and temperature, but would not let her practice on me with a shot needle. I spent most of my time in the library. I hid out there and read in the poetry section. My favorites were all darkly inspired, from Rimbaud to Plath. It was the era of romantic self-destruction. I was especially interested in those who died young, went crazy, disappeared, and went to Paris. Only one survivor of edgeless experience interested me, and she became my muse, my model, my everything. Anas Nin.

I was lost in soul-to-soul contact. I checked her out of the library, over and over, but when summer came I needed her, worse than ever. I had to bring her back with me to keep at my side while I worked at the 4-B’s, while I hung out the family laundry, while I rode Geraldine’s old pinto with Joseph. Anas. I bought all of her diaries — the boxed set. A huge investment. Hard to explain — she was so artistically driven, demure and yet so bold, and those swimming eyes! I made it through the summer. By the time I came back in the fall to live off-campus in a beautiful old half-wrecked farmhouse, I was soaked in the oils of my own manufactured delirium.

Like Anas, I reviewed every thought, all visual trivia became momentous, my faintest desire a raving hunger. I kept Anas with me at all times, though the difference in our lives had become a strain. Anas had had servants to feed her and clean up after her. Even her debauched lovers picked her clothing off the floor; her dinner parties were full of social dangers and alarms, but afterward, she didn’t have to do the dishes. All the same, I, too, kept careful and replete diaries. Each notebook had a title taken from a diary entry by Anas. That fall’s diary was called “Sprouting in the Void.”

As Anas would have done, I wrote long letters to Joseph. He wrote short ones back. Corwin drove me to school and I read aloud from her diary all the way. He only liked it when she had sex — otherwise he said she was “way up in her head.” Corwin visited from time to time. Our grade school romance was a joke between us, and his theft of my uncle’s violin forgiven after the funeral. He was a dealer, and supplied my friends.

I’d moved in with a household of local poets, hippies, and everyone was dirty. I tried to be, too, but my standards of cleanliness kept me from truly entering into the spirit of the times. I had learned from my mother to keep my surroundings in order, my dishes washed, my towels laundered. The sagging clapboard house where we lived had one bathroom. Periodically, as nobody else ever did, I broke down and cleaned. It made me hate my friends to do this, and resent them as I watched the filth build up afterward, but I couldn’t help it. My fastidiousness always overwhelmed my fury.

Late that fall, past midnight, I had one of my bathroom-cleaning fits. I got a bucket, a scrub brush, and a box of something harsh-smelling called Soilax. I ripped an old towel in four. I wet the bathtub down, the toilet and the sink, and then shook the Soilax evenly across every surface. I looked around for a moment and remembered the putty knife I’d stashed in the basement closet. I fetched it, and a plastic bag, and then I began to scrape away the waxlike brown patches of grease, hair, soap, scum, the petrified ropes of toothpaste, the shit, the common dirt.

The cleaning took a couple of hours and the light over me seemed harsh once I quit, because I’d emptied the fixture of dead flies. But when the light poured down out of its clean globe, a few lines of poetry occurred to me.

My brain is like a fixture deep in dead flies.

How I long for my thoughts to shine clear!

Disperse your crumpled wings, college students and professors of UND, Let your bodies blow like dust across the prairies!

I jotted those lines in the notebook, which I always carried in the hip pocket of my jeans. “Sprouting in the Void” was almost filled. I wanted to take a hot bath to remove the disinfectant stink, but what I’d done in patches just made the tub look dirtier, and wrong, like I’d disturbed an ecosystem. So I showered very quickly, then went downstairs, where there was as usual an ongoing party. This one was a welcome-home party for a fellow poet who’d walked back across the Canadian border that day and was going underground, as he kept saying, loudly. He was also going to shower in my clean bathroom. I deserved to drink wine. I remember that it was cheap and very pink and that halfway through a glass of it Corwin took a piece of paper from a plain white envelope and tore off a few small squares, which I put in my mouth.

She tried everything, Anas; she would have tried this! Spanish dancer, I cried to Corwin — he was my third or fourth cousin. She was in love with her cousin. Eduardo! I said to Corwin, and kissed him. This all came back to me much later. For because of the wine, I was not aware that I had taken blotter acid, even after all of its effects were upon me — the hideous malformations of my friends’ faces, the walls and corridors of sound, the whispered instructions from objects, a panicked fear in which I became speechless and could not communicate at all. I locked myself into my room, which I soon realized was a garden for local herpetofauna and some exotics like the deadly hooded cobra, all of which passed underneath the mop board and occasionally slid out of the light fixtures. I was in my room for two days, sleepless, watching red-sided garter snakes, chorus frogs, an occasional Great Plains toad. I passed in and out of terror, unaware of who I was, unremembering of how I’d come to be in the state I was in. My reclusiveness was so habitual and the household so chaotic that no one really noticed my absence.

On the third day, only one eastern tiger salamander appeared, Abystoma tigrinum. It was comforting, an old friend. I began to sense a reliable connection between one moment and the next, and to feel with some security that I inhabited one body and one consciousness. The terror lessened to a milder dread. I ate and drank. On the fourth day, I slept. I wept steadily the fifth day and sixth. And so gradually I became again the person I had known as myself. But I was not the same. I had found out what a slim rail I walked. I had lost my unifier of sensations, lost mind, lost confidence in my own control over my sanity. I’d frightened myself and it was all the more a comfort to return to the diaries. Anas was so deeply aware of her inner states. She was descriptive of the effects of the world upon her — the time of day, the sky, the weather, all affected her moods. I began to shake as I read some of her entries, so filled with detail. I needed someone to pay close attention to the world I had nearly left behind.

“Everything. The house bewitches me. The lamps are lighted. The fantastic shadows cast by the colored lights on the lacquered walls…”

That was her bedroom in September 1929.

No reptiles for Anas. My own dread kept returning. It was as though in those awful days I’d switched inner connections and now the fear seemed wired into me. Panic states. Temporary shocks — if I were even slightly startled, I could not stop shaking. Frightful but momentary breaks with reality. Daydreams so vivid they made me sick. I managed to function. Because I was so quiet anyway, I hid these dislocations of mind. Only, I had determined that I did not somehow belong with the careless well of the world anymore. I belonged with…Anas. On campus, I watched the well-fed, sane, secure, shining-haired and leather-belted ribbons of students pass me by. I would never be one of them! Instead, as I could not dance — what was Spanish dancing anyway? — and as I could not yet go to Paris, I decided that I must live and work in a mental hospital.

I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position just for one term. I was hired as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a small room in a staff dormitory.

Warren

MY ROOM WAS small, the walls a deep pink. In my diary I wrote: I shall cover them with scarves. I had a single bed with an oriental print spread. The lush landscape had pagodas, small winding streams, bent willows. This, I liked. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. Blue! My secondary muse — the color blue. I took the refrigerator off the table, and made myself a desk. I put everything away, my long skirts and the hand-knitted turquoise sweater I wore constantly. I’d met none of the other aides yet. There was someone in the next room. The walls were thin and I could hear the other person moving about quietly, rustling the clothes in her closet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at six A.M. So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, the heavy white rayon dress with deep pockets, the panty hose, the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought at JC Penney.

As always, I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. The sky was a pre-dawn indigo. I put on a long, black coat I’d bought at the Goodwill, a coat with curly fur of some sort, like dog fur, on the collar and cuffs. It was lined with satin, and maybe wool blanketing, too, for it was heavy as a shield. The air prickled in my nose, my skin tightened, and an intense subzero pain stabbed my forehead.

I walked across the frozen lawn to the ward and sat down in the lighted office. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L. because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a baggy tan cardigan along with her uniform, and a nurse’s cap was pinned into her fluffy pink-blond hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a waxed-paper bag.

“Want some?” Her voice was dull. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she’d had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. They all knew one another, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.

“What am I supposed to do? Can you give me something to do?” I asked in a too bright, nervous voice.

“Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”

“Except Warren,” said the nurse who was going off duty. “Warren’s always up.”

I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room floored with pink and black linoleum squares. The walls were a strange lavender-gray, perhaps meant to be soothing. The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric blue sky that turned to normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their striped cotton robes, began wandering down another corridor that led into the big room from the left. Everyone looked the same at first, men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups and said to me, pointing, “Go with Warren there, and make sure he takes it.”

So I went with Warren, the night owl, an elderly — no, really old—man with long arms and the rope-muscled and leathery body of a farmer who has worked so hard he will now live forever — or certainly past the reach of his mind. His tan was now permanent, burnt into the lower half of his face and hands. There was a V of leather at his neck from a lifetime of open shirt collars. His legs and stomach and chest and upper arms would be deadly pale. He was already dressed neatly — he always dressed and shaved himself. He was wearing clean brown pants and a frayed but ironed plaid shirt and he was starting to walk. He popped the pills down and didn’t miss a step. He walked and walked. He was from Pluto and probably related to Marn Wolde, but she’d never mentioned him. I watched Warren a lot that first day because I couldn’t believe he’d keep it up, but he didn’t stop for more than a breath, filling up on food quickly at the designated times, then strolling up and down the corridors, crisscrossing the common room, in and out of every bedroom. To everyone he met, he nodded and said, “I’ll slaughter them all.” The patients answered, “Shut up.” The staff didn’t seem to hear.

The first day’s schedule became routine. I woke early to record my dreams and sensations, then I dressed, putting a pen and small notebook in my pocket, plus a tiny book I’d sent away for — a miniature French dictionary made of blue plastic. I’d not given up. I noted everything, jotted quickly in a stall on bathroom breaks. At breakfast time I walked down through the steam tunnels to the dining room. My job as an escort was to see that no one hid in the tunnels or got lost. I ate with the patients, put my tray in line and waited to see what landed on it. Farina, cold toast, a pat of butter, a carton of milk, juice if I was early enough, and coffee. There was always coffee, endless, black acid in sterilized and stained Melmac cups. I ate what they gave me, no matter what, ravenous and forgetful. I did the same at lunch. Mashed turnips. Macaroni and meat sauce. Extra bread, extra butter. I began to think of food all day. Food occupied my thoughts. The food began to take up too much of my diary. There was nothing new to say about it in English, so I began to describe the food in French. Soon, there was nothing new to say about it in either language.

I was assigned to an open ward. The patients could sign out if they wanted to walk the ice-blasted grounds. As long as they were not gone past curfew they could go anywhere. There was also a lot of sitting. It was supposed to be part of my job to listen to people, draw them out, provide a conversational backdrop of reality, tell them when they were having fantasies.

Warren talked of the war sometimes, but one of the nurses told me that he wasn’t a veteran. “I was reviewing the troops. They marched by and turned their eyes upon me as they passed. I turned to General Eisenhower and I said, ‘Mentally, you’re not a very good president.’ His aide turned and looked at me. He was in civilian clothes…” And so on. His monologues always ended with “I’ll slaughter them all.” Always the same. I wanted to edit his mental loop, instead I walked with him. He would try to give me money — dollar bills folded fine in a peculiar way. We took a few turns around the halls, always at the same time. I knew everyone’s routine. I knew each person’s delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

Lucille, in the patients’ coffee room where snacks were fixed, ate cornstarch from a box by the spoonful.

“We must put that away,” I told her. My voice was changing, growing singsong, indulgent and coaxing, like the other staff. I couldn’t stand the sound of myself.

“I ate this when I was pregnant,” said Lucille. “Did you know I was artificially inseminated nine times?”

“Please, Lucille, give me the spoon.”

“I put all nine of the kids up for adoption, one after the other, but they didn’t like it. Know what they did?”

“They didn’t blow spiders under your door. You just imagined that. So don’t say it, and give me the spoon.”

“They blew spiders under my door.”

“Hey!”

I snatched the spoon and box away. One quick grab and they were both mine.

“Nobody blew spiders under your door.”

“My children did,” Lucille said stubbornly. “My children hated me.”

Warren came in. He had been looking more disorganized, unshaved, his shirt buttoned wrong, his pants unzipped. His hair stuck to all sides in clumps. But for about five minutes, we held a perfectly normal conversation. Then he mentioned General Eisenhower and was off. I left, carrying the box of cornstarch.

Nonette

MRS. L. WAS admitting a new patient, a young woman sitting with her back to me. I paused in the door of the office. There was something about the woman — I felt it immediately. A heat. She was wearing a black dress. Her eyes were angry blue and her lips very red. Her skin was pasty and shiny, as though she had a fever. Her blond hair, maybe dyed hair, was greasy and dull. She swiveled in the chair and smiled. She was about my age. Each of her teeth was separated from the next by a thin space, which gave her a predatory look. I handed the cornstarch box to Mrs. L., who put it absently on the windowsill.

“This is Nonette,” she said.

“Is that French?” I asked. That was it. She looked French.

The new patient didn’t answer but looked at me steadily, her smile becoming a false leer.

Mrs. L. pursed her lips and filled in blank spots on the forms. “Nonette can sleep in twenty. Here’s the linen key. Why don’t you help her settle in?”

“Fetch my things along,” Nonette ordered.

“Evelina’s not a bellhop,” said Mrs. L.

“That’s all right.” I lugged one of Nonette’s suitcases down the corridor. She smiled in an underhanded way and dropped the other suitcase once we were out of Mrs. L.’s sight. She waited while I carried it to her room, and watched as I took her sheets, a pillowcase, a heavy blanket, and a thin spread of cotton waffle-weave from the linen closet. Her room was one of the nicer ones, with only two roommates. It had built-in wooden furniture, not flimsy tin dressers, and the bed was solid. It even had all four casters on the legs.

“Fuck this dump,” said Nonette.

“It’s not bad.”

“You’re a bitch.”

“You’re a bidet.”

In a Salvation Army store I had acquired a 1924 edition of a French dictionary called Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustr. I’d gotten to the B’s. The page with the word bidet also had beautiful tiny engraved pictures of a biberon, a biche, a bicyclette, and a bidon.

Nonette’s mouth twisted open in scorn. I left. The next day Nonette was extremely friendly to me. When I walked onto the ward, she immediately grabbed my hand as though we’d interrupted some wonderful conversation the day before, and she tugged me toward the glassed-in porch, which was freezing cold but where patients went to talk privately. I sat down beside Nonette in an aluminum lawn chair. I was wearing a sweater. She had on a thin cotton shirt, button-down style, a man’s shirt with a necktie and men’s chino pants. Her shoes were feminine kitten heels. Her hair was slicked back with water or Vitalis. She was an odd mixture of elements — she looked depressed but, it could not be denied, also chic. Today she wore black eyeliner and her face was prettier, more harmonious in the subdued light.

She didn’t smoke. “It’s a stinking habit,” she said when I lit up. I was smoking the ones with low tar and nicotine because I was smoking too much there, constantly, like everyone else, and my chest ached.

“I should quit.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to talk to someone my age, not those jerks, shrinks, whatever. You’re not bad-looking either. That helps. I wanted to talk about what’s bothering me. I came to get well, didn’t I? So I want to talk about how really, truly, sick I am. I’ve talked about it, I know I have, but I haven’t really told it. Or if I have, then nothing happened anyway. So that’s why I want to talk about it.”

She paused for a moment and leaned toward me. When she did her whole face sharpened, her eyebrows flowed back into her temples, her mouth deepened.

“If I could just be born over,” she said, “I’d be born neutral. Woman or man, that’s not what I mean. I wouldn’t have a sex drive. I wouldn’t care about it, need it or anything. It’s just a problem, things that you do, which you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, something like that, living with us for a summer.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Not in stupid France,” she answered. “Anyway, he comes in without knocking and kneels by my bed. He uncovers me and he starts giving it to me with his mouth. And I’m like, at first I don’t know what, ashamed of it. I could buy a hook for my door, though; I could tell on him. I don’t, though, because I get so I want it. He strips himself naked. He teaches me how to jerk him off. And then he does it to me again.

“I’m a little girl, right, I don’t even wash very well. Next time he brings along a washcloth and cleans me first. We have a ritual. Where’s my mother and father? They sleep at the other end of the hall, down the stairs, with the fan going in their room. And my cousin is a fucking Boy Scout! Was he going for a fucking merit badge? Anyway, he goes home. Things happen. I think I already feel different, I am different. There is a smell on me, sex, that no one else in my schoolroom has. I look at the older boys. I know what’s coming. I go searching for it.

“Look at you…” She laughed suddenly, drawing away. “You’re, like, fascinated…”

She stared out the windows onto the snowy grounds. “I’m not French,” she said gently. “I’m messed up. I’m in a state hospital. I think I want a sex-change operation. I want to be a man so I won’t have to put up with this shit.”

“I’m not giving you shit.”

Her mouth gaped mockingly. “Oh, look at you, trying to be tough. You’re not tough. You’re like, a little college girl, right? Who the hell cares. I’m from the university, too, I have a Ph.D. Pretty Hot Dick. I am a man, posing as a woman. You want proof?” Then her face closed in, bored. “I’m just kidding. Get the fuck away from me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “You’re really beautiful.”

She wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t look at me now.

“You’re an Indian or something, aren’t you,” she mumbled. “That’s pretty cool.”

I went back into the common room and played gin rummy with Warren, who couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t think he was taking all of his medication, but if he had discovered a way to hide it he was pretty slick. We watched him every morning. He seemed to swallow. His mouth was empty.

A policeman was standing in the office the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. L. He’d just brought Warren back. After we finished playing cards, Warren had marched outside, through fields, down a narrow road that ran west, and twenty miles later was turned in as he crawled into a farmyard. Warren had fallen and bloodied the side of his head. He was sleeping now, sedated, and it was not until late afternoon that he rose, came out to sit in the lounge, one side of his head swollen dark and bandaged. I sat down next to him.

“I hear you had a bad day.” These words popped from my mouth. Yet I was curious. Perhaps it was cruel to be so curious. I asked about the voices he heard — if they were hard on him.

He straightened, shrugged a little. He was wearing a different, almost-new yellow shirt. He ran a hand up his face gently, exploring with his fingers. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his little folded-up dollar bills. He tried to give it to me.

“No,” I said, curling his dry fingers around the money.

“Please.” His old eyes begged, moist and red. “I did it because they told me…,” but he choked on what he might say and his voice was a crow’s croak. He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. And then I saw, just around the edges of his face, in the balled musculature and the set of his eyes and jaw, that he was inside a waking dream. He raised his arms. He recoiled. He sat down in a chair and began taking apart some invisible thing in his lap. Then he went statue-still and lifted his head. Gazed off to the side in a fugue of stillness, listening.

The Kiss

NONETTE AND I were sitting on the frigid sunporch, and this time she was also smoking.

“I’m only doing this disgusting thing so that I won’t be disgusted by the fact that you’re doing it,” she said.

I shrugged and dragged hard. She was belligerent in a low-key way that nobody took too seriously. And she had told that story about being raped by her cousin, the Eagle Scout, to every nurse, aide, doctor, and other patient available. It was just a conversation opener. Here, of course, it was not supposed to matter whether or not the story was true because the important thing was her need to tell it. I was now trained to think that. Nonette wore a man’s black suit, a gravedigger’s suit, a Charlie Chaplin bowler. All too big and comically masculine. She took my cigarette from my hands and crushed it out. Then she suddenly reached out and held my face in the cup of her palm. She leaned toward me and kissed me. There was nothing upsetting about it, at first, it was no different than the other times I’d kissed someone for the first time. There was the same tentative heat, the same curiosity. Only she was supposed to be crazy, I was supposed to be not crazy, and we were women. Or maybe Nonette was just troubled, I was less troubled, and she claimed she was a man. She pretended she was a man. Or she pretended that she was pretending.

She drew back into her chair, settled, crooked one leg up, and hugged her knee. She stared at me, assessing my reaction. I was suddenly and completely charged with an electrifying embarrassment. I burned and burned, losing control. I forced myself to rise, and even so I stumbled, awkward and big, to the door of the sunporch and the entrance to the ward. She was still watching, now smiling.

The truth is, the fact is, I didn’t know at the time women could kiss women in that way anywhere but in Paris. I didn’t think it could happen, or had never heard of it happening, in North Dakota. I was staggered with tender surprise.

Later on, I was sent to check on Nonette. She had gone to her bed, pulled the covers down, and slid underneath with all of her clothing on. I could see her heavy shoes sticking out the bottom. The sight of her boot soles filled me with pity and joy.

THERE WAS NOTHING in the many stories of reversal and romance among my aunts and uncles to guide me here. A kiss from another girl set me outside the narrative. None of the family stories could touch me. I was in Anas’s story now. A dangerous love that could destroy. At the same time, I was so scared of what the kiss might actually lead to that I couldn’t think of anything to do but eat. I stocked my little room with food and did not stop eating long enough to think. Boxes of crackers lined the wall. Fruit yogurt in the cold space between the window and the storm glass. Cans of soda. Fruit pies and peanuts, bags of apples. I talked on the phone in the hallway for hours, smoking, tracking down my housemates, friends, even Corwin, who was distant with me. I didn’t really care. I kept him on the phone as long as possible because, after hanging up, there was nowhere to go but back into my room, where the food waited. As long as I was eating I could concentrate on what I was writing or reading. My eye traveled over the pages, my hand from bag to mouth. For the hours until the hour I could fall asleep, this worked. I didn’t have to figure out what I was doing, what Nonette was doing, why I couldn’t think of her and why I couldn’t stop thinking of her.

AFTER ESCORTING A patient to the beauty parlor one late morning, I am returning alone through the steam tunnels underground when she is there. She is walking toward me with no escort.

“I have a pass.” Nonette grins, stopping when we’re face-to-face.

We’re standing close and there’s no one else in the tunnel, lit by low bulbs, whitewashed and warm, branching off into small closets and locked chambers full of brooms and mops and cleaning solvents. Her face is clear and bright, her hair a rumpled gold in the odd light; her eyes are calm and full with no makeup. She is beautiful as someone in a foreign movie, in a book, a catalogue of strange, expensive clothes. There is green in her eyes today, her eyes are sea glass. I can almost taste her mouth, it’s that close again, pink, fresh with toothpaste. She is wearing jeans, a white sweatshirt, sneakers, and gym socks. I am wearing my cheap white uniform of scratching false material with tucks and a front zipper. She puts her fingers on the tongue of the zipper at my throat. She laughs.

“Got a slip on?”

I take her hand around the wrist, my thumb at her pulse.

“Stop, stop,” she pretends, but her voice is soft. I follow her around a corner, then a sharp turn, through a door, and we are right in the middle of the pipes, some wrapped with powdery bandages of asbestos, some smooth, boiling copper conduits. My cap snags. I let it fall. We walk into the nest of pipes and duck low, underneath the biggest, walk down the cast stone steps to the other side, a kind of landing, completely closed in. Behind us there is a wall of rough brick and flagstone that smells of dirt, of fields in summer with the sun beating down just after a heavy rain. The heat brings out the smell.

“Let’s sit down,” she says. “I’d like to get you stoned but I don’t have anything.”

I’m still holding her wrist. There is barely room to stand. The pipes, running parallel, of different lengths, graze the tops of our heads.

We sit down together. I’m shaking but she’s very calm. Anyway, it isn’t the way I thought it would be. After the first few moments, there is nothing frightening at all about kissing her or touching her. It is familiar, entirely familiar, much more so than if I were touching a boy I’d never touched before. The only thing is I keep shaking, trembling, because our bodies are the same, and when I touch her I know what she is feeling just as she knows when touching me, so it seems both normal and unbearable. We don’t take our clothes off, do anything, just touch each other lightly on our arms, our throats, our hands, and kiss. Her whole face is burning, and soft, like flower petals.

She says, “That’s enough.” I should go back now and she will follow. Any longer, and they’ll miss us. As I walk back down the corridors of whitewashed stone, through the five doors, back onto the ward, I begin to imagine how things really are. I invent her story. My thoughts take off. Nonette came here in obvious need, and I was here for her. She was here for me. I came here not knowing that I would meet the one I’d always needed. A week, maybe three, and she will be all right. I’ll leave with her.

“Nonette said you asked for a patient visit.” Mrs. L. sits behind her desk, a stack of forms beneath her spread hands.

“Yes,” I say, though I didn’t ask. But I’m smiling, slowly blooming at the idea. Nonette’s idea.

“We like to encourage our aides to work with the patients during off-duty hours, and I don’t see anything wrong with it, as long as you know that she presented here with some real problems.”

“I know that. I’ve talked to her about them.”

“Good.”

Mrs. L. waits, watching me a little too carefully. I am not supposed to know a whole lot about each patient’s personal history, not more than the patient wants me to know.

“Look,” I say, “she told me about her cousin forcing himself on her. I know she came here out of control, and I still don’t know exactly what precipitated it. I don’t know what she’s dealing with at home, at school, or if she’s going back there. The thing is, I really like Nonette. I’m not doing this because I feel sorry for her.”

Mrs. L. bites her lip. “Your motives are good, I know that. But you’ve got to know, to understand, she’s on lithium and we’re adjusting her dosage. She’s depressive, and then she has her manic spells.”

“We’re just going to make a batch of cookies.”

Mrs. L. smiles at me approvingly, and signs the pass.

There is a small kitchen in the basement of the staff dormitory, just one room with a stove and some cupboards, a fridge, an old wooden table painted white, and six vinyl chairs. We make our favorite cookies. Both of us like molasses cookies, not baked hard in the middle. We make three batches and bring them upstairs, to my room. The cookies are still warm as we eat them, crumb by crumb, sitting on my bed with the cookies in our fingers. We drink cold milk. Later, we take our clothes off. It isn’t strange at all, the covers pulled back, the willows on my bedspread bending over the streams and the curved Chinese bridges. She has small breasts, pointed, the nipples round and rough, slightly chapped because she doesn’t wear a bra beneath her shirts.

I hold her hips and she sits over me. She is older than me by two years and knows so much more. How to come sitting up. She spreads her legs and shows me, with a clinical cool, then bends over me while she is coming and begins to laugh. We begin to laugh at everything I’ve never done, and then we do it. She shows me how to start off light and slow, barely brushing each other, so when we come it will happen again, and again, and it will be endless between us. Just before nine o’clock I walk Nonette back to the ward, a bag of cookies in one hand.

“Do you think about, you know…” I finally ask her, at the door.

“Do I think about what?”

Nonette looks at me, her face bland and empty, smiling. She looks more and more like a girl in a ski commercial. Healthy. When she came that afternoon, she made me look into her eyes, deep with pleasured shock. Now her eyes are scary cheerleader eyes.

“Do I think about what?” she says again.

I look down at my feet in boots. About what is going to happen to us? I am dressed in jeans, a coat and sweater, like a normal person, like her. I don’t answer. It is a night so cold and dark the snow makes squeaking noises as it settles in drifts along the big, square yard. All night, the trees crack. You can hear them, the tall, black pines. I stand there as Nonette walks into the hospital, as the glass and steel doors shut behind her with the movie-ending sound of metal catching, holding fast. The locks are automatic, but, still, I try them once she disappears into the bright corridor.

“I’m going home next week,” she says one morning. “My parents said okay.”

Her parents? Why haven’t I ever seen them? A sudden burst of energy pulses from the center of my chest, grabbing all along my nerves. I clap my hands, fast, making sounds to divert the awful feeling, and then I wring them in the air, shedding the pain like drops of water.

Nonette looks at me and shakes her head, smiling. “Are you all right?”

I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “Have they been down to visit?”

“Sure. You work days. They drive down for dinner, then we visit in the early evening.”

“Next week, next week.”

My face stretches in a stupid smile and she twinkles back, into my eyes. Super cute! Popular! She’s not okay, I think. She’s crazier than I am if she can deny this. She must be. I tear my gaze away and feel my chest blaze. My ribs glow, hot, the bars of a grill, sending warm streaks washing to my feet. My thoughts spin a series of wild if questions. If she wasn’t crazy, if I was, if this was not out of the ordinary, if it couldn’t be helped, if I were wrong, if people could see, if this thing with her was a new thing, the first of many, if she left here, if it meant nothing, if she didn’t care at all about me. I step away from her. She has a lovely face, so gentle, a kind and pretty face. An American face. She is wearing a blue sweater, a plaid skirt, knee-high stockings, ultra-normal Midwest catalogue clothes.

“Come and see me?” My voice is miserable.

“Sure! I will!”

My throat half shuts and I gulp at air. I struggle to get a good, deep breath. The air hurts, flowing deep. I’m smoking way too much. She doesn’t mean it, of course she doesn’t, not now, not ever. I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. I can hardly breathe for wanting her so terribly. I walk away with my hands shaking in the scratchy white cloth of my pockets. I keep going and without punching out I walk back down the corridors of the hospital, out the doors, across the snowy central lawn and straight to my room.

Nonette’s Bed

I CALL IN sick the next morning, and the next morning after that. Two days go by. I can’t make it to the telephone. I can barely force myself to get up and walk to the bathroom. At some point, I tack a note to my door. I forget what I’ve written. Once I’m in bed again a kind of black-hole gravity holds me there, or maybe it is fear. All I know is that the air is painful. Acid flows back into my brain. My thoughts are all flashbacks. I see moving creatures in the Chinese landscape of the bedspread and I throw it in the corner of the room. And there’s pain, gray curtains I can’t push aside. I breathe pain in, out, and the stuff sticks inside of me like tar and nicotine from cigarettes, making each breath just a little more difficult. A week goes by and then Mrs. L. comes to the door and calls, “Can I come in? Can you answer?” I try. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. It is such a peculiar feeling that I start to laugh. But there is no sound to my laugh. I go to sleep again, sleep and sleep. And the next time I awaken Mrs. L. is in the room, sitting at the side of my bed, and she is using the voice she uses with the others.

“We’re going to move you,” she says. “We’ve called your mother.”

Which is how I end up in Nonette’s bed after all.

I am sitting on the cracked green plastic sofa in the patients’ lounge, wearing my nurse’s shoes, only now with no uniform, just baggy jeans and a droopy brown sweater. I have talked to my mother on the phone and tried to persuade her not to worry about me, that I only need a rest, that I am all right and will be back in school when the next quarter starts. I have signed myself in, I’m nineteen, and I can do this. I have told my mother that I’ll use this voluntary commitment as a rest period — but the fact is, I am afraid. I fear losing my observer, the self that tells me what to do. My consciousness is fragile ground, shaky as forming ice. Every morning, when I open my eyes and experience my first thought, I am flooded with relief. The I is still here. If it goes, there will be only gravity. There were body magnets underneath the bed in my little pink nurse’s aide room. There are magnets beneath the bed here, too, but they have a comforting power since it was Nonette’s bed and something of the lost happy calm of her skin, her hair, the length of her pressed against me, resides in the bed along with the drag and pain.

Warren enters the patients’ lounge. He sees me sitting on the sofa and he walks over, in his careful and dignified way, and he stands before me. He is wearing a rust-colored jacket and gray woolen slacks. He has dressed in his best clothes today. Maybe it is Sunday. He is wearing a striped tie of rich, burgundy, figured silk, and a shirt with turned-back French cuffs. Instead of cuff links, I see that he has used two safety pins.

“You should have cuff links,” I mutter.

“I’ll slaughter them all,” he says.

“Shut up,” I answer.

I LIE THERE days, and more days and days. I do not get out of bed. I do not read Anas Nin — she cannot possibly help me now. I am past all that and, anyway, she helped get me into trouble by providing the treacherous paradigm of a life I was always too backwards, or provincial, or Catholic, or reservation-or family-bound to absorb and pull off. I no longer want adventure. The thought of Paris is a burden. I’ll never see the back of Notre-Dame or visit the bird market or eat a croissant. The coffee I drink will always be transparent. Which is all right, as I am sick of endless coffee here. No, I’d better figure out where I am in this life. So I lie there trying to work it out in my mind.

I try to start with the beginning — my family. When Joseph comes to visit me I decide that we should be more honest with each other, resume the depth of our relationship, and so I start by telling him about my drug experience and the days of watching reptiles.

“What species?” he asks. He is studying to be a biologist.

“Well, the usual. But I also saw cobras.”

“That surprises me.”

“They were so real, too.”

“I wonder what part of the brain harbors such acute hallucinatory details, I mean, of something you’ve never seen in real life?”

“The reptile brain, asshole.”

“I didn’t mean to be insensitive,” he says after a pause. “I took drugs too.”

“What?”

“Marihootiberry. It didn’t do much.”

“Probably because it was oregano.”

“I got A’s in botany,” he reminds me.

“You got A’s in everything. You’re not helping my depression. Look around you, it sucks, contrary to what the fans of suicidal poets think. Why don’t you go discover some kind of cure?”

Joseph looks at me thoughtfully, then turns his attention to the people around us in the lounge. There is Lucille, glaring at linoleum tile, disheveled, and Warren, pacing, and others so dull and gray, slumped in torpor. Seeing the ward through his eyes, I am all of a sudden very disturbed. I’ve grown used to being part of this.

“You’re not one of the crazies,” he says then, half-choking, a little desperate. I can tell now that it is dawning on him something might really be wrong. His sympathy wrecks me. Joseph quietly takes my hand, which is even worse. For your brother to hold your hand. This is like some deathbed experience. I shake his hand away but pat his wrist. He sits with me for a long time and we don’t talk and that is peaceful. After a while he gets choked up again and says that he will go into drug research. I whack him on the arm as hard as I can, and he smiles at me in relief.

MY MOTHER AND father come down every weekend to see me. All I do when they visit is cry in sympathy for their worry over me, or fall asleep, and after they go home I miss them — my father who left the bank knowing that he didn’t have the stomach to turn down loans or foreclose like old Murdo. My father who like his uncle Octave collected only stamps. He went away to the war — came back for love — left money for love — my father the schoolteacher hero.

And there is my mother, who loves Mooshum and keeps him going by taking away the bottle and walking him around the yard or down the road every day. I realize that I can only think of her in relation to other persons, and I am pained all over again at what seeing me in this hospital must do to her. I try to think of one thing that is all about Clemence, like my father with his stamps, Joseph’s salamanders, Mooshum telling stories, but I can’t think of anything.

I do think of how I have grown up in the certainty of my parents’ love, and how that is a rare thing and how, given that they love me, my breakdown is my own fault and shameful. I think of how history works itself out in the living. The Buckendorfs, the other Wildstrands, the Peace family, all of these people whose backgrounds tangled in the hanging.

I think of all the men who hanged Corwin’s great-uncle Cuthbert, Asiginak, and Holy Track. I see Wildstrand’s strained whipsaw body, and Gostlin walk off slapping his hat on his thigh. Now that some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, there is no unraveling the rope.

I think of Billy Peace, whose meek and shattered-looking members included at least one Buckendorf, a Mantle also. One or another of the kindred would materialize sometimes beside a person in the grocery store and seemed lost in wonder at the aisles of plentiful food. Some adherents blended back in with the other town and reservation people as they took modest little jobs. Billy’s radio hour was taken by another voice. The little tracts we used to find in the Pluto or Hoopdance phone booths, or tucked in wayside rests, were more and more rare, then tattered, just souvenirs of the existence of Billy Peace, perhaps on another plane, those gone too.

Light falls through the wire-glass windows in a gentle swell. Mooshum told me how the old buffalo hunters looked beneath the robe of destruction that blanketed the earth. In the extremity of their hunger they saw the frail crust of white commerce lifting, saw the green grass underneath the burnt wheat, saw the buffalo thick as lice again, saw the great herds moving, flattening that rich grass beneath their hooves. Looking up, they saw the sky darkening with birds that covered it so that you could not see from one end to another. They flew low, a thunder. Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

I’m just a nothing, half-crazy, half-drugged, half-Chippewa. I think of Mooshum and Shamengwa sitting long into the afternoon. In the bed where Nonette curled — so warm, so golden — I see the beauty of women holding out their Latin missals and walking through the wheat in white dresses, praying away the doves in an ancient, foreign, magisterial tongue. And Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf, for whom my passion should have clued me, and Corwin Peace, who also had a hand in this, I think of them.

I might go back and visit Sister Mary Anita. It might be a good thing to do. To speak to that monstrous, gentle face, to tell her that I’ve fallen from the church but that I still have visions, sometimes, of the mad swirl of her habit as she made adroit backhand catches and threw out a black-shod foot for balance. How the black wool snapped out in the air and then eddied back down around her ankles as she took a skipping hop and blazed the ball back to the catcher.

The Concert

ONE DAY, CORWIN Peace comes to visit me.

I am surprised, but not embarrassed. He’s learned where I am from my aunt, and is feeling bad about my desperate phone calls. He remembers the acid he fed me, and how I locked myself into my room for days after I took it. He says he decided that he should look me up. So one day as I am slowly crushing one cigarette after another into a sand-filled coffee can — there are six or seven cans in the patients’ lounge, always full of butts — in walks Corwin. He is dressed in a long, black sheriff ’s riding duster, but he wears a strange orange woolen hunting cap with a low brim over his eyes. He has on high-top tennis shoes, bellbottom jeans, a ripped T-shirt. Under the dramatic duster, he is carrying his new violin.

“Sit down.” I gesture with a newly lighted cigarette. I try to look bored, but actually I am excited. Corwin sits down in a plastic armchair and rests the violin case on his lap. His face is long and beautiful, his Peace eyes black and haunted. He has a short scraggle of unmowed beard. His ponytail flows down under his cap and snakes down his back. Corwin has always had lush brown lashes and those straight-across dramatic eyebrows. He can look at you steadily from under those minky brows, like his mother. He has some of what his uncle must have had to attract so many followers — that odd magnetism. When he smiles, his crooked teeth look very white. He doesn’t smoke.

“So,” he says.

“So,” I say.

We nod for a while like two sages on a hill. Then he opens the case and picks up his fiddle. As he tunes it, making such unfamiliar noise, the patients come out of their rooms or are attracted from down the corridor. The nurses venture from their station and stand, arms folded, chewing gum. Their mouths stop moving when he starts playing, and some of the patients sit down, right where they are, a couple of them on the floor, as if the music has cut through the big room like a scythe. After that first run of notes, the music gathers. Corwin plays a slow and pretty tune that makes people’s eyes unfocus. Lucille’s mouth forms a big O and she huddles into herself. Warren stands rooted, stiff and tall. Others sway, they look like they might weep, but that changes quickly as Corwin picks up tempo and plucks out a lively jig that has a sense of humor in the phrasing. At this point, Warren leaves his wall and begins to walk around and around the room, faster and faster. The music ticks along in a jerky way, a Red River jig. Then something monstrous happens. All sounds merge for a moment in the belly of the violin and fill the room with distress. My throat fills. I jump up. Alarm strikes through us. Warren stops walking and backs up flat against the wall. But Corwin draws some note out of the chaos in his hands, and then draws it further up and up, further, until it is unbearable, and at that very point where it might become a shriek, the note changes key a fraction and breaks into the most lucid sweetness.

Warren slides down the wall, his hand over his heart like he is taking the pledge. His head slumps down onto his chest. The rest of us sit back down, too. Calm rains upon us and a strange peace fills our stomachs and slows our hearts. The playing goes on in the most penetrating, lovely, endless way. I don’t know how long it lasts. I don’t know when or if it ever really ends. Warren has fallen over. A nurse plods over to check his pulse. The playing of the violin is the only thing in the world and in that music there is dark assurance. The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful. I am small. I am whole. Nothing matters. Things are startling and immense. When the music is just reverberations, I stand up. The nurse is checking her watch and frowning at it first, then down at Warren, then at her watch again. I stand next to Corwin as he carefully replaces his violin in its case and snaps the latches down. I look at my cousin and he looks at me — under those eyebrows, he gives his wicked, shy grin and points his lips in a kiss, toward the door.

“I can’t leave here,” I say.

And I walk out of that place.

WHEN I LEFT the hospital with Corwin, I took my purse and my diary and nothing else. I left Anas — the entire boxed set — annotated. In the margins where she described tall buildings—phallic? And where she noted the cast of light on a Paris afternoon—impressionistic? Where she loved a woman, question marks, exclamation points, checks, and stars. I didn’t know if I could actually bear leaving the safety of the hospital, but I just kept going until we reached Corwin’s car. I’d lost a lot of weight and hardly exercised, so I was dizzy and had to ask Corwin to stop the car once so I could puke. Corwin was living with my aunt and Judge Coutts, and he said that the two of them had changed his life and given him self-confidence. When he first moved in, he hadn’t entirely stopped using or supplying (of course the two of them didn’t know this), but after I went to the mental hospital he meditated on this form of commerce and ended up laying it down for good. He was straight now, he said, which gave me an opening.

“Well, I’m not. I’m a lesbian,” I told him.

He said I couldn’t be. I didn’t dress like one.

“Like you’d know,” I said.

He says he did know. He’d been around. “They dress like me, aaaay.”

We drove along quietly for a while.

“I’m really sorry I gave you that acid, man,” he said. “Did it, you know, change your head around?”

“You mean did it make me a lesbian?”

He nodded.

“I don’t think so.”

We drove some more. We’d known each other stoned, sick, drunk. We’d beaten each other up in Catholic school, so silence between us was comfortable, even a relief. I looked out the cracked car window — the world was beautiful all along the road. Some of the fields were great mirrors of melted water. Golden light blazed on the slick surface. I started feeling better. Sitting in a car with the boy whose name I had written a million times on my body, and besides that, in blood, and telling him about Nonette and having him take it pretty much in stride took some of the dark glamour from my feelings.

“Do you actually know any lesbians?” I asked.

“Not to talk to,” he said. Then, a moment later, “Or any I could set you up with, if that’s what you want.”

A heated flush rose along my collarbone.

“Hey,” Corwin said after a while, “you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy.”

I didn’t answer, but I felt better thinking I did not have to rush out and do anything about being a lesbian. I could just exist with it and get used to it for as long as I wanted. Nobody could tell from looking at me. I looked basically the same, though frail. And I looked sad. I knew because my mother said my sadness made her cry. But sitting in the car knowing I looked sad made me feel self-consciously sad, which isn’t really sadness at all.

As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear spring stubble, and the thin smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off at our house, I sat with Mooshum outside, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. After a while, I thought I’d be all right. Something about those cans — maybe the galvanizing — always made the water taste good.

As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us and off to the west orange gold. A strange, unsettling radiance crept up the sides of the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched until the light began to recede. The air turned fresh and blue. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and Mama came to the door.

“Come in here, you two,” she said, her voice gentle.

Walking on Air

A FEW DAYS later, I rang the bell at St. Joseph’s convent. About two feet up a dog had scratched to get in many times, scoring it white. I waited, rang again, and heard a faint tink-tonk sound deep inside. There was a firm step, and then Mary Anita herself pulled the door open. She no longer wore the strict black habit, but regular clothes. Nunnish clothes, a baggy cream sweater set and a long blue A-line skirt. Soft tie shoes instead of elegant black nun boots. Her hair surprised me, a foresty brown with gray streaks and swirls, vigorous and beautiful, though she had cut it short. She peered steadily at me. Her eyes had weakened, perhaps, and she blinked behind round glasses, then took them off as she opened the door.

“Evelina Harp!”

Her huge face lighted, but her eyes were still. She gestured me inside and so I entered, wiping my feet carefully on the rough mat. The walls were a calming tan color and the place smelled clean, like there were no old or extra things in it. I followed her into a small receiving room, which contained a couch, an easy chair, a box of Kleenex balanced on the chair’s arm. On the wall, there was an arrangement of dried flowers in a red willow basket. A crucifix hung over the dark television. She told me that she was happy to see me and asked me to sit down. She was much smaller now — the weight of her jaw had pulled her face down and changed the angle of her neck so she hunched and peered up from underneath her delicate brows, giving her look a penetrating gravity.

We fell into an awkward silence, and then she asked me how I was.

“Not so good,” I said.

There was another silence, longer now, and I wished that I hadn’t come.

“What is wrong?” Her gaze was tender and lingered on me. She was very happy that I’d visited, I could see, and now she was worried about me, one of her endless flock. I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth, so I said something else.

“I’ve been thinking about becoming a nun!”

“Oh!” She clapped her milk-white hands. Her skin was pure and clear, translucent almost. A frightening joy shone out of her, then faded.

“It would be extraordinary if you had a vocation.” Her voice was hesitant.

“I’m really thinking about it.”

“Truly?” She folded her hands like the wings of birds. We both looked at her hands and I thought of the Holy Spirit, the dove settling to sleep, silent and immaculate.

“I think not,” she said suddenly, raising her eyes to mine. “It’s just that I don’t see you in the convent,” she continued, gently. “Have you had some sort of special experience you’d like to share with me?”

I smiled in dumb surprise and had really no idea what was going to pop out of my mouth. “I was in a mental hospital.”

She looked at me sharply when I said that, but when I smiled, she laughed, that tinkly musical laugh that surprised people. “Yes, yes…. Were you cured?”

“I guess so.” I paused, less awkward now. “Maybe you’re right about the convent. The problem is, I don’t believe in God anymore.”

Her eyes narrowed under the silky brows. Her gaze, though quiet and neutral, unsettled me.

“Sometimes I don’t either,” she said. “It’s hardest when you don’t believe.”

“I imagined that you, I mean of all people…”

“No,” she said, “not a firm faith.”

“So the reason you became a nun”—my voice was low, I felt I might be pressing her too far now, but I wanted to know—“was it because you’re a Buckendorf? Because a Buckendorf hung Corwin’s great-uncle?”

She concealed her reaction behind a lifted hand, and took some time to answer.

“To live my life atoning for another person’s sin?” She said at last, her voice scratchy and faint. “I wouldn’t have had the strength. But then again, the hanging undoubtedly had something to do with my decision, growing up and finding out. Knowing one could be capable.”

“One could be?”

“Anyone, perhaps. My father said that his grandfather was very kind, the kindest one of all. And yet he always knew he’d been one of the lynching party. My father was never able to put him there, in his thoughts. A couple of times he said he spoke of it. He spoke of your grandfather.”

“Mooshum?”

I leaned forward and waited, but she hesitated.

“I’m not sure…but you asked. You want to know.” Her lucid eyes combed me over. “All right, dear, I’ll tell you. I believe your grandfather used to drink in those days. Your Mooshum told Eugene Wildstrand that he and the others were at the farmhouse. Mooshum told how they had found that poor family.”

I couldn’t look at her suddenly. I could only see Mooshum. A ragged flush rose from deep inside of me, a flood of pure distress. “He must have been stinking drunk to tell that,” I said.

Nowhere in Mooshum’s telling of the events did he make himself responsible. He never said that he had been the one who betrayed the others, yet instantly I knew it was true. Here was why the others would not speak to him in the wagon. Here was the reason he was cut down before he died.

Although I knew Mary Anita spoke the truth, I could not help arguing, and my voice rose. “They put a rope around his neck! He almost died. They tried to hang him, too.”

Sister Mary Anita’s hands twisted in agitation. “Yes, my dear. Wildstrand cut him down at the last moment, yes. From what I heard, though, they never meant to hang him all the way. They wanted to terrify him, to intimidate him. A false hanging will do that.”

Sister Mary Anita touched the bottom of her face lightly with her knuckles, then gazed over my head, at the crucifix I thought. She was looking at the basket of dried flowers — black-eyed Susans, the little brown thumbs of prairie coneflowers, rusty Indian paint, cattails — all recently gathered from the ditches and pastures.

“The boy made that basket,” said Mary Anita.

I rose, stepped across the room, and examined the basket — the wands, brittle and ancient, were more widely spaced than the best baskets, and a bit loose, the weaving not tight but irregular; it was a basket that a boy might make. Sister Mary Anita scraped out of the room, her feet uncertain on the floor now, and while she was gone I sat down, bent over, and held my head in my hands. Mooshum. When she came back, she had a brown paper bag, folded over on top. She didn’t sit down and when I stood up to take the bag in my arms, I saw that she was tired and wanted me to leave. She remembered at the door.

“I’ll pray for your vocation,” she said. “And your sanity. too.” She brightened and made a small joke. “They are not mutually exclusive.”

I walked back down the hill and entered our house. Joseph and I still had our tiny alcove bedrooms — though his was full of all of his things now, plus Mama’s sewing. Mooshum still slept in the little pantry off the kitchen. I went to my room, sat down on the bed, opened the paper bag, and peered inside. There was a pair of laceless boots, tongues dragging, leather dark and cracked with age. I took the boots out of the bag and held them in my arms. If I lifted one out and turned it over to look at the bottom, I knew I would see the nailed-on cross.

When I’d walked into the house, I had awakened Mooshum and now I heard him making his unsteady old man’s way down the hall to my room. Nobody else was home.

“Want to play cards?” he said at my door.

I turned around and held the boots out, one gripped in each hand. Mooshum looked at me strangely, arrested by my attitude. He pushed his fingers through his scraggly hair, touched his sparse unshaven bristles, white against his skin, but of course he didn’t recognize Holy Track’s boots.

“Evey?”

I shook the boots at him. He cocked his head to the side, opened his long fingers, and took the boots when I shoved them toward him.

“Turn them over,” I said.

He did and as he stared at the soles he bent slightly forward, as if they had gotten heavy. He turned away from me in silence and made his way back down the hall to his couch, which he fell into with the boots still in his hands. I thought that I’d maybe killed him. But he was frowning at the wall. I sat down next to him on the lumpy cushions. He put the boots carefully between us.

After a while, he spoke.

“I passed out cold, so I never knew when they cut me down. I lay there I don’t know how long. When I came to, I looked up and there was these damn boots with the damn crosses on, walking, the boy was still walking, on air.”

“They let him dangle there, choking to death, and watched him.”

Mooshum shrugged and put his hands to his eyes.

A dizziness boiled up in me. I jumped to my feet.

“You’re the only one left,” I said.

“Tawpway,” said Mooshum, complainingly, “and now you killed me some, too. I am sick to look on these old boots and think of Holy Track.”

“You’re the one who told!”

He rifled his pockets, took out his grubby, balled-up handkerchief, and tried to give it to me. I pushed it back.

“I did sober up for a long time, though, after that, some.”

We looked down at the splayed boots.

After a while Mooshum picked up the boots and said he wanted me to drive him someplace. So I got the keys and helped him out of the house and into the car.

“Where am I going?”

“To the tree.”

I knew where the tree was. Everybody knew where the tree was. The tree still grew on Marn’s land, where Billy Peace’s kindred used to stay. People had stopped going there for a while, but come back now that the kindred had disappeared. The tree took up the very northwest corner of the land, and it was always full of birds. Mooshum and I drove silently over the miles, then parked the car on a tractor turnout. When we slammed the car doors, a thousand birds startled up at the same instant. The sound reverberated like a shot bow. They flew like arrows and disappeared, sucked into the air.

We walked over dusty winter-flattened grass into the shadow of the tree. Alone in the field, catching light from each direction, the tree had grown its branches out like the graceful arms of a candelabra. New prayer flags hung down — red, green, blue, white. The sun was flaring low, gold on the branches, and the finest of new leaves was showing.

Mooshum knotted the laces, handed the boots to me. I threw them up. It took three times to catch them on a branch.

“This is sentiment instead of justice,” I said to Mooshum.

The truth is, all the way there I’d thought about saying just this thing.

Mooshum nodded, peering into the film of green on the black twigs, blinking, “Awee, my girl. The doves are still up there.”

I stared up and didn’t have anything to say about the doves, but I hated the gentle swaying of those boots.

All Souls’ Day

SO AFTER ALL, Mooshum saw in the skies of North Dakota an endless number of doves cluttering the air and filling heaven with an eternity of low cries. He imagined that the blanket of doves had merely lifted into the stratosphere and not been snuffed out here on earth. By this flurry of feathers, he was connected to the great French writer whose paperback I picked up again after abandoning Anas Nin. I read it so often that I sometimes thought of Judge Coutts as the judge-penitent, who bore my mother’s name, and waited at a bar in Amsterdam for someone like me. I didn’t know what I was going to do now. Albert Camus had once worked in a weather bureau, which made me trust his observations of the sky.

It was a warm Halloween night, and I had come home from school to help celebrate Mooshum’s favorite holiday. To get ready for the trick-or-treaters, I drizzled warm corn syrup onto popcorn, larded my hands, and packed popcorn into balls until we had about a hundred or more stacked in a big steel bowl. We had backup — two vast bags of sticky peanut butter kisses. Our house was first on the road and everyone from out in the bush came into town on Halloween nights. Mooshum glared sadly at the treats. He didn’t like peanut butter and the popcorn balls would be a problem, as he had never adjusted to his dentures.

“I could not bite the liver out of anyone with these dull choppers,” Mooshum said.

I pulled out a bag of pink peppermint pillows. He plucked one out, set it on his tongue, and closed his eyes. The little wisps of his hair fluttered in the breeze from the door.

“I miss my brother,” said Mooshum, fingering his mangled ear. “I even miss how he shot me.”

“What?”

“Oh yai,” he said, “this ear, didn’t you know? It was him.”

Mooshum told me that the fall after he and Junesse returned to the reservation he followed his younger brother out hunting. Somewhere in the woods Mooshum had hidden the bear’s skin that ordinarily draped the family couch. Pulling the skin over himself, Mooshum managed a convincing ambush, rising suddenly from a patch of wild raspberry pickers and flinging himself forward in a mighty charge. Shamengwa fled as Mooshum pursued, fled with a loaded gun, but turned and shot with an awful cry as he tripped and fell.

“That bullet took my ear,” Mooshum said, chopping the side of his hand at his head. “Clipped me good.”

My mother sat down with us, and stirred sugar into a cup of tea.

“My brother pissed himself all the way down his legs that time. Did you ever know that?” Mooshum said.

“No!”

They started snuffling behind their hands. “Shame on you, Daddy,” said Mama. “You’re the one who peed himself.” They suddenly fell silent. Mooshum rocked back on his chair’s rear legs. He’d shrunk so that his soft, old green clothes were like bags, and his body inside was just lashed-together sticks.

Mama finished her tea, got up, and threw a couple of big hunks of dough on the cutting board. She started kneading, thumping them hard and shoving the heels of her hands in, a practiced movement I’d seen a thousand times. She was setting the dough to rise before going out with my father. They were attending some church-sponsored event that was supposed to be an alternative to the devil’s inspiration, trick-or-treating. Father Cassidy still worked on the family, though more by habit than with any real hope.

Mooshum chewed and spat; his new coffee can was a red Folger’s.

“They still won’t give me a stamp!” He hissed behind Mama’s back.

“Give me the letter,” I said. “I’ll mail it.”

Mama was leaving, a spiderwebby lace scarf at the collar of her neat navy blue coat. My father wore a starched green shirt and a plaid jacket. His face was tired and resigned.

“He’d rather of stuck here with us,” Mooshum said as they went out the door.

“He needs some relief,” I said.

My father’s class that year was dominated by two big unstable Vallient boys, who were uncontrollable. Most of my father’s days were filled with conflict. He said that he couldn’t take teaching anymore and had decided to sell his stamp collections and retire. Of course, we thought it was just talk, but he was conducting an auction by mail. Letters with the crests of stamp dealers appeared in the post office box.

After they left, Mooshum and I sat beside the door. Mama had wrapped each popcorn ball in waxed paper and twisted the ends shut. I opened one and began to eat it. There was an excited knock and the first wave of trick-or-treaters hit. We got the usual assortment of bums and pirates, some sorry-looking astronauts, a few vampires out of Dark Shadows, ghosts in old sheets, nondescript monsters, and bedraggled princesses with cardboard crowns. A lot of the older kids were motley werewolves or rugaroo with real fur stuck on their faces and wrists.

“This ain’t no fun yet,” said Mooshum.

For the next ones who came, I hid around the back of the door while Mooshum sat in darkness with the bowl of popcorn balls in his lap and a flashlight held under his chin. The kids had to approach and pluck the treat from the bowl, but only the toddlers were anywhere scared enough for Mooshum. A couple of older kids even laughed. He tried moaning some, rolling his eyes to the whites.

“They are hardened!” he said when they left.

“It’s not easy to scare kids these days with all they see.” I attempted to comfort him, but he was downcast. We tried the same thing with the next bunch, but not until he bit into a popcorn ball as one little boy approached, and his dentures stuck, and he took the ball out and held it toward the kid with the teeth in it, did we get a real satisfying shriek.

After that, when a child approached, I turned the flashlight on Mooshum and he bit into the popcorn ball, leaving his teeth in the gluey syrup. The kids had to reach underneath the hand and the popcorn ball with the teeth in it. We kept it up until one mom, who was carrying her two-year-old in a piece of white sheet, said, “You’re unsanitary, old man!” That hurt Mooshum’s feelings. He put his dentures back in sulkily and gave out peanut butter kisses with a stingy fist to the next three groups. There was a short hiatus, and I ate a kiss, which tasted faintly of peanut butter, more of glue. Mooshum’s dentures were so loose now that he clacked and spat.

I finished handing out the treats, shut the door, and turned back with the bowl of candy. Mooshum was gone.

“Don’t look yet!” he cried from the kitchen.

I walked straight back to see what he was up to, and nearly dropped over. He was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts made of tissue-thin cotton, and he was stretching a big wet hunk of Mama’s fresh, soft, new-risen bread dough over his head. He’d plopped it there and now it oozed horribly down his face, his neck, over his shoulders. His ears stuck out of the dripping mask. Strings of dough hung around his arms and he’d taken more bread dough and slapped it on his chest and stomach and thighs. His eyes peered out of the white goo, red and avid as a woodpecker’s. He’d filled his mouth with ketchup. When he grinned, it leaked from his toothless mouth and down his chin. He saw my face, whirled, and ran out the back door. There was a clamor of voices yelling trick or treat. I dropped the bowl and chased him out the back door, but he’d already disappeared. I was creeping around the front when I saw him rise from the yew bush, the flashlight trained on himself from underneath. He shrieked — a barely human, shocking squeal. He tottered toward the kids and I knew when he grinned the ketchup grin, because the five boys yelled in fright and broke ranks. Three bolted and sprang off quick as jackrabbits. One dashed a little way before he tripped. The last one picked up a rock and winged it.

The rock hit Mooshum square in the center of his forehead. He fell full length, the flashlight skidding out of his fist, just as my parents drove up and jumped out of the car. I picked up the flashlight and trained it on Mooshum as Dad turned him over. Mama fell to her knees. Mooshum’s eyes were wide-open, staring, and his forehead was bleeding all down his nose and cheeks. Mama put her arms around Mooshum’s shoulders and shook him, trying to make his eyes focus. I knelt beside him and tried to take his pulse, but I can hardly find my own pulse so I couldn’t tell if he was dead or not. I put my ear to his chest.

“Let’s get him to the hospital,” said Dad.

Mooshum woke and trained his eyes with great affection on my mother. “A good one, that.”

Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep. He snored once. Mom said, “What’s he covered with?” I answered, “Bread dough.” We waited for the next snore. There wasn’t one. Dad bent over Mooshum, pinched his nose shut, tipped his head back and opened his jaw with his thumb. He blew a long breath into Mooshum. Ketchup bubbled and leaked down Mooshum’s neck.

“Did his chest move?” Dad wiped the ketchup off his mouth. He didn’t even ask about the ketchup.

“Yeah.”

He bent over and blew four more times into Mooshum. Then Mooshum stirred and coughed himself back to consciousness.

We decided to load him into the car, and in the relief of the moment we seemed to carry Mooshum effortlessly. I sat in the backseat with his head in my arms, and as we sped toward the hospital I felt his breath go out, and not come in, but then start up, like a sputtering outboard.

In the emergency room, he caused a stir. The nurses called everyone else over to look at him in his bread dough until Dad got mad, said, “Quit gawking. You’re supposed to be professionals!” and shut the curtain around us. The doctor on call made it to the emergency room in five minutes. He was a young doctor, doing his government payback with the IHS, and he stepped around the curtain still shrugging on his white coat. The nurses must not have told him about the ketchup and the bread dough, but the doctor did pretty well. His mouth shook but he withheld laughter. Mooshum frowned in the bread dough mask, the ketchup drooling out the corners of his mouth, down his neck. Mama touched his hands tenderly and lightly as she folded them onto his chest. As we stood there looking at Mooshum, it seemed that his face slowly changed, relaxing into contemplation; contentment at the corners of his mouth. Dad gasped and wiped his face. The nurses were out there again, listening to us. We stood there for an endless amount of time, in a buzzing suspension.

“He looks happy,” said Mama. “He looks like he’s coming back.”

Mooshum started breathing steadily.

“I’m going to die now,” he sighed.

“No you’re not, Daddy.”

“Yes, I am. I want my lovergirl to visit me. Here in the hospital. Call Neve! It is my final request!”

“They’re not even going to keep you here, Daddy. They’re letting us take you home.”

“No, baby girl, I am gone.” He appeared to pass out, and Mama shook him, but just then Father Cassidy bounded lightly between the curtains. He had a spark in his eye and the good book in his hands. Mama would not step aside, so the priest had to crane to look into Mooshum’s face.

“Am I still in time?” he asked loudly. “One of the nurses sent word.”

Mooshum frowned and opened his eyes.

“There is time! How fortunate!” Father Cassidy muttered a fervent prayer. He had the Holy Oils along in a little kit. He began to fussily arrange them on the stainless steel bedside table. Mooshum gave a groan of irritation and sat up.

“If you won’t let me die in peace, then I’ll live, though I do not want to. You won’t get me this time, Hop Along, I’ll extend my life!”

Mooshum swung his legs over the side of the table and stood shakily. Dad and Mama held him from either side. He drooled a last bit of ketchup. “I have been told in the Indian heaven we live with the buffalo. I am content with that. Anyway, you have already spoken for me in the church. I couldn’t have wished for a better send-off.”

“I’ve apologized for that dozens of times,” said Father Cassidy. He began with hurt dignity to pack away his vials of oil and to primly refold the starched white napkins that came in his kit.

Mama helped Mooshum into Dad’s topcoat. He seemed stronger by the minute. He was still shedding dough, in dried flakes now. Father Cassidy noticed and asked what happened.

“He put dough on himself,” I said.

Father Cassidy shook his head and snapped the top of his handy leather case. He was still talking cozily to the nurses when we left. A year later, he quit the priesthood, went home, grew a beard, and became an entrepreneur. He sold Montana beef, shipped it to Japan and all over the world. We’d see him on billboards and in his TV commercials. His distinctive skipping bound, his calflike and happy energy, became a trademark for the beef industry and made him very rich.

BEFORE I WENT back to school that weekend, Corwin came to my house and picked me up. We got into his car and drove out to a deserted place far off in the middle of a flat field where we could see lights coming from a distance. We climbed into the backseat with the windows half open — it was an unusually warm November night — and we kissed. Strange, intimate, brotherly. Then hurting each other, greedy with heat. We pulled our clothes away but suddenly stopped, confused, overwhelmed by a shy aversion. We sat there holding hands until we dozed off. The light lifted and the edges of the earth showed streaks of fire. The sun would rise soon. I studied Corwin in the soft gray light. His face looked swollen and bruised — we were all cramped and stiff from sleeping bent together. Maybe he’d been crying, secretly. He stroked my face, tucked my hair behind my ears, then put his other hand between my legs.

“Hey, Evey?” Corwin’s teeth flashed. “You and me are supposed to marry. We’re supposed to love unto death, until death do us part.” His face was serious and exciting with the light creeping in a blaze up his throat and mouth. His eyes were masked in a slash of shadow.

“We’ll go to Paris,” he said. “We’ll visit Joseph at the U and take a plane from there. Paris, just like you always wanted. We’ll fuck in the street, fuck in the cathedral, fuck in the fucking coffee shops, you know?”

“Which cathedral?” I asked.

“The most beautiful one,” said Corwin, “the one with the best statues.”

“All right,” I said. “Which coffee shop?”

“An all-night one with very tall booths. It could happen.”

“How about the street? Which street?”

“All streets. We’ll take a map.”

I had studied the map on the endpapers of my book — an astonishing maze.

“We’d better get there soon,” said Corwin. “They’re probably building new streets in Paris right this minute.”

“What if I don’t want to, being a lesbian?”

Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.

“So you think it might be permanent?”

Driving slowly home, we passed an old man shambling along, coat flapping, hair streaming. It was Mooshum. We stopped the car just ahead, then turned around on the empty highway and cruised up beside him. He continued to stumble eagerly forward, so I jumped out and pulled him over to the car.

“Hey, get in!”

He looked at me, distracted.

“Oh, it’s Evey.”

“Get in the car, Mooshum, where are you going?”

“Visiting around.”

He let me put him in the car and, once he was in, he said in a grand voice, “Take me to lovey!”

“Okay.” I looked at Corwin wearily. He was staring straight ahead. “It’s my aunt, Neve. He wants to go and see her.”

“Why not?” said Corwin, shifting gears with a gesture of resignation.

As we were driving to Pluto, I realized that by now my mother was probably talking to the tribal police. She would be frantic over Mooshum. So as soon as Aunt Neve answered the door — wearing a bathrobe, no makeup, hair matted flat — I told her that I needed to use her telephone. Mooshum and Corwin sat down on Aunt Neve’s springy golden couch and waited while she left the room to brew some coffee. Mooshum flapped his hands at Corwin and hissed at him to leave. I turned away from them with the phone and put my hand over one ear.

“Mama? I’ve got Mooshum and we’re at Aunt Neve’s.”

Mama said a few explosive things, but was mostly relieved. She said something to Dad, then said, “Here, your dad needs to talk to you.”

“Evey? Are you at—”

“Aunt Harp’s.”

“Oh!”

His voice was strained, tense, more excited than I’d ever heard. “Look,” he said, “is there any way you can take a look at her mail?”

“What?”

My father told me that Mooshum raided his stamp collection when Mama refused to send one of his letters, and he glued several valuable, extremely valuable (my father’s voice shook a little), stamps on an envelope he sneaked into the mail two days before. I opened my mouth to say that I’d mailed the letter for Mooshum, but thought better of it.

“I got a little upset last night,” said Dad. “This morning he decided to take off…”

Just then the doorbell rang.

“Will you get that, dear?” Aunt Neve called from the bedroom, her voice a melodious trill. I was pretty sure that when she came out she would look perfectly groomed.

I set the phone down and answered the door. It was the postman with a postage-due letter among the other mail. I paid the postage with coins from my pocket and tucked the letter into my bra. I closed the door, set the rest of the mail on the neat little side table, and picked up the telephone.

“Well, I’ve got it. The letter has a one-cent stamp on it, blue, Benjamin Franklin.”

I could hear my father struggling with some emotion on the other end.

“It’s called the Z Grill. Honey, if you get that stamp back here safely, I promise I’ll send you to Paris.”

I put the phone down. My father never called me, or anyone, honey. And this was the second time that morning I had been promised a trip to Paris. I stared at Mooshum. His hair was a clean silver, swept into a neat tail. His teeth were back in, a white slash in his rumpled face. He was perfectly shaved. His clothes were spotless, shoes polished. He had his handkerchief out to touch the drip off the end of his nose.

Mooshum gave me a significant look that I understood to mean get out of here, so I grabbed Corwin’s hand. We sneaked quickly out, back to the car, and immediately peeled out back onto the road. Once we were driving, we tried again to talk, but nothing came out right. I put my hand on Corwin’s leg, but he just let it sit there and we both fell silent. It was awkward and my arm began to ache with the strain.

“We better start saving for our tickets,” he said before I got out of the car. We were parked in the road outside of my house.

I kissed him, and left. When I looked out the window of the house about ten minutes later, the car was still there. The next time I looked, it was gone.

Aunt Neve kept Mooshum at her house that night. Just as I was about to head back to school the next morning, she pulled up in her yellow Buick. I watched from the doorway as Mooshum extricated himself from the passenger’s side and walked around the front of the car, quick like a young man, brushing his hand across the hood and staring hawklike through the windshield at Aunt Neve. As Aunt Neve drove away, he stood waving slowly. The Buick disappeared, but he didn’t move. He kept his hand in the air until he shrank and became old again. When he finally turned and shuffled toward the house, I walked down the steps and took his arm.

“Awee!” His face was full of emotion as we climbed the steps. “At last, my girl. If only Father Hop Along was here. I almost wish it. At last, I have something to confess.”

I WAS NAMED for Louis Riel’s first love, a girl he met soon after his release from Beauport Asylum, near Quebec in 1878. He had been locked up there for treatment after suffering an attack of uncontrollable laughter during Holy Mass. Riel’s Evelina was blond, tall, humble, and a lover of sweet flowers. It was Mooshum who actually suggested to Mama that she name me for this lost love of Riel’s, and he was always proud that she had taken his suggestion.

FOR MONTHS, ALL winter, in fact, my father held a grudge toward Mooshum for nearly sabotaging his retirement by stealing not only the Z Grill, but a three-cent Swedish stamp issued in 1855 and colored orange instead of blue. That one was returned for insufficient postage. At least Mooshum had used a return address, I observed, looking at the envelope over Christmas break.

“Don’t joke. This is our family’s future,” said my father.

Mooshum had used a harmless paste of flour mixed with spit to stick it onto the envelope. The stamp did not even bear a killer or cancellation, because the postman in Pluto hadn’t known quite how to handle the mistake, except to ask at the door for postage. Dad had gently soaked both stamps off the envelopes and put them back on their album pages. He showed me all of his favorite stamps. Until he agreed to a price by mail, he planned to put the whole collection in a safe-deposit box that was not in his sister’s bank.

In late March, driving to Fargo with the collection, my father hit a patch of black ice and spun off the road, rolling the family car to the edge of a beet field. It was a sudden and deceptive freeze. He was alone, and unconscious, so the stamp albums were left behind. Since the windows were shattered entirely from the frames, much of what was in the car flew out as the car rolled, popping open the doors. The albums were left somewhere in a cold drenching rain that began soon after he came to consciousness at St. John’s Hospital. He asked for his stamps at once, but of course the last thing the doctors were interested in was a stamp collection.

After we got to the hospital and made certain that Dad was all right, Joseph and I went looking for the stamps. We found the albums about a hundred feet from where the car had come to rest. The leather-bound books were splayed open, warped, and ruined. We picked stamps off cattails and peeled stamps from wet clods of mud. When we brought what we’d found to his hospital bed, Dad looked sick. He pretended to fall asleep. Our mother said, “He is in despair.” We hadn’t known the stamps could really be that valuable.

It was weeks before Dad was strong enough to go home. Most of the stamps we found were so fragile that once dried, when he tried to handle them, they disintegrated into a minute confetti. I saw him try to reconstruct the Benjamin Franklin Z Grill stamp myself. I’d found that stamp in the beet field attached to a rotting root. Perhaps the chemicals in the fertilized soil had attacked the paper. It was no use. When he lifted the stamp with a tweezers, it fell into a little heap of incredibly precious dust, which he caught as it sifted down.

My father took a deep breath, then looked at me.

A moment passed. He asked me to come with him to the back door and watch half a million dollars vanish.

Ready? he said.

And we stood together in the sun as he blew across the palm of his hand.

Road in the Sky

ON THE DAY that Aunt Geraldine finally married Judge Coutts, with all of us in attendance, there was a herringbone trail of clouds running east to west that resembled a dusty road. I noticed it before anybody else spoke of it, I think, and pointed it out to the judge. I’ll walk that road with Geraldine, he said at once. Tears came into his eyes.

They were not married in the Catholic church (a disappointment to Geraldine and my mother). Besides his lingering outrage at Shamengwa’s botched eulogy, my mother said that Judge Coutts was unwilling to confess and be absolved of his sins. He told Hop Along that he could not regret having sex out of wedlock and refused to be sorry, although he said the priest could feel free to absolve him anyway. Father Cassidy said he would not solemnize their vows under such conditions. So they were married by the tribal judge who preceded Judge Coutts, on a gentle swell of earth overlooking a field of half-grown hay in which the sage and alfalfa and buffalo grass stood heavy — Mooshum’s old allotment land.

They said their vows and were pronounced husband and wife. Judge Coutts kissed Geraldine and people hugged all around. We could see from the judge’s face that he felt immediate relief, as if he were a man coming out of surgery, still half-anesthetized, but understanding that survival was now assured.

Our respective families had become accustomed to having within the ranks an unwed couple living in sin. Aunt Geraldine seemed surprisingly willing to accept her role as the family scandal, and Judge Coutts had always been afraid that she liked the part, in fact, too well to relinquish it. Now he kept looking at the sky, clutching Geraldine’s hand and pointing upward.

Now I don’t have to walk that old dusty road alone, I heard him say, in what I guess was a slightly dizzy, maudlin fit. She touched his face with her handkerchief and said, Buck up, Judge. Tears were streaming from his eyes and he didn’t know it. His mother was still alive enough to be there — a tiny, gnarled lump of a lady in a silver wheelchair.

“Listen,” she said, beckoning him close. “Stop crying. You can’t have people thinking you’re soft.”

But she was smiling, everyone was smiling, there was a giddy air of resolution. Approval arched over them like a rainbow of balloons. Corwin played for us of course — he was the only entertainment. When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t know what would happen to me, bad or good, or whether I could bear it either way. But Corwin’s playing of a wordless tune my uncle had taught him brightened the air. As I walked away I kept on hearing that music.