"The Plague of Doves" | Lives caught in a web of tragedy

"The Plague of Doves"

by Louise Erdrich

Harper, 314 pp., $25.95

It is 1896, and the people who live on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota take their Catholicism very seriously. But something is terribly wrong. The dove that descended when Jesus was baptized has become hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of doves that are ravaging their crops. Their weight even crushes the flimsy Indian dwellings. It is a plague worthy of Exodus, but these people can't imagine what they have done to deserve such a calamity. All they can do is persevere in the futile struggle to save some of the grain for which the birds are so ravenous.

In "The Plague of Doves," Louise Erdrich revisits the harsh and many-storied land that has figured so prominently in her novels and short stories, a place where early would-be settlers face the most hostile conditions imaginable: "The wind drove the snow in horizontal sheets, slapped out their fire, sucked the tent into its nothingness, confused and battered them until they stumbled uncertainly this way and that." A few million hungry doves seems a mild trial in comparison.

But those natural terrors are only the backdrop to Erdrich's absorbing, sometimes horrifying story. It is human beings in their madness, fear and vengeance that create the real horror. When four Indians come upon a white family that has been slaughtered, they have no idea who committed the crime or why, but they know that as Indians they will themselves be suspects — that they will, in fact, be convicted without trial and executed without appeal. "The devil has this place," one says. "They will hang us for sure," says another. With an irony that the devil himself might have devised, their efforts to conceal their having been there only help convince the white vigilantes that the four Indians did indeed commit the murders. Three of the four are lynched. For reasons that become clear much later, the fourth, a young man named Mooshum, is spared.

His life, at least, is spared, but nothing can release him from the strangling effect of the experience that reaches down the decades. And there is another survivor as well. Whoever murdered the family left the youngest child, a baby girl, alive in her crib. Her life will be entangled in those lynching ropes no less than Mooshum's is.

Erdrich tells her story, or rather her skein of tightly interwoven stories, in flashbacks and in the voices of various characters, as each strand, like the ropes with which the three innocent Indians were hanged, loops back on itself. It is as if in the grim psychological landscape these people inhabit, the past remains utterly present. The blood that flowed in the mass murder and its aftermath remains as fresh as the blood that flows in living veins, Indian and white alike. As a local judge puts it much later, "Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood."