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16. The Reptile Garden
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plague of Doves, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Ancestry, History, and Interconnection
Punishment vs. Justice
Land, Ownership, and Dispossession
Passion vs. Love
Faith, Music, and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
On Halloween, which is Mooshum’s favorite holiday, Evelina comes home from school. As the two sit eating candy, Mooshum tells the real story of how he lost his ear. One time, when Mooshum and Shamengwa were young, Mooshum disguised himself as a bear to prank his brother. In a panic, Shamengwa shot at Mooshum, taking off a part of his ear.
As a child, Evelina loved her grandfather’s stories because of their drama and black-and-white moral lessons. But as she gets older, she is learning that the truth is less intense and more nuanced; after all, Mooshum lost his ear not to an evil White trader but because of a silly prank he played on his own little brother.
Themes
Mooshum is eager to scare the trick-or-treaters who visit the house, and he realizes that if he bites into a gummy candy, his dentures will get stuck in it. Thrilled at the reaction this image gets, Mooshum ups the ante, stretching Clemence’s bread dough over his head and squirting some ketchup on his mouth to look like blood. When he smiles the “ketchup smile,” the trick-or-treaters shriek. In their fear, one throws a rock at Mooshum, and it hits him on the forehead.
Tellingly, Mooshum now repeats almost the same exact pattern that lost him his ear, trying to scare the trick-or-treaters and getting himself injured the process. But if Mooshum’s wound here demonstrates that people often fail to learn from history, it also suggests that Mooshum refuses to be hardened by the past, remaining playful even if he knows sometimes such openness has consequences.
Themes
Evelina and her parents take Mooshum to the hospital. At first, it seems like he might not make it, but gradually he regains consciousness and strength. Mooshum insists that he is going to die, and that in his final moments, he wants to visit with Neve Harp. Clemence just rolls her eyes. Then Father Cassidy arrives in the hospital room. Not wanting to deal with the annoying priest, Mooshum hustles out of bed. When Cassidy offers to pray for Mooshum, Mooshum refuses. “I have been told in the Indian heaven we live with the buffalo,” Mooshum announces. “Anyway, you have already spoken for me in the church.”
Mooshum’s flirtatious, prankster spirit now emerges as a true life-giving force, as his desire to see Neve and mock Father Cassidy allows him to recover despite the severity of his injury. Mooshum’s description of Indian heaven—“we live with the buffalo” there—once more asserts his political objection to Cassidy’s brand of Catholicism, reminding the priest that Catholic settlers nearly exterminated the treasured buffalo species even as they claimed to be a force for good.
Themes
Before Evelina goes back to school, Corwin takes her for a ride in his car. They kiss, and it is “strange, intimate, brotherly.” Corwin wants to marry Evelina (or “Evey,” as he calls her), and he imagines going to Paris with her, having sex in the cathedrals and coffee shops. But Evelina insists she is still a lesbian.
Even though Corwin now perfectly lives up to Evelina’s Anaïs Nin-inspired fantasies, Evelina is starting to outgrow this Eurocentric view of romance and passion.
Themes
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As Corwin drives Evelina home, Mooshum stumbles up to their car. He insists that they take him to see “lovey” (Neve Harp), and Evelina agrees. As soon as they get to Neve’s house, Evelina calls Clemence, having correctly predicted that Clemence is worried about her father’s whereabouts. Evelina’s father gets on the phone, anxiously asking his daughter if she can check Neve’s mail. Evelina’s father then explains that Mooshum, unable to get a stamp from Clemence to mail his letter to Neve, took an extremely valuable stamp from the collection Evelina’s dad inherited from his uncle Octave Harp.
Mooshum’s pursuit of Neve might seem silly, but it is also his way of insisting on his own independence and continued vitality (much like Shamengwa’s grooming allowed him to demonstrate just how “undefeatable” he and other indigenous men could be). Octave Harp, uncle to both Neve and Evelina’s father, is one of the “deathless romantic” figures Evelina pictured in her youth, as he is known to have drowned himself over a love affair gone sour.
Themes
Evelina finds the stamp, and her father promises that if she can return the stamp to him, he will send her to Paris. Then Evelina and Corwin leave, realizing that Mooshum wants to be alone with Neve. On the way home, Evelina kisses Corwin. Before she gets out of the car, Corwin tells Evelina that “we better start saving for our tickets.”
Early in her romance with Corwin, Evelina stood firm that there were always “episodes of reversals” in great love stories, as one person’s feelings waxed while another’s waned. Now, Corwin seems to share this belief, insisting that he and Evelina will fall in love in Paris, despite her newfound queer desire.
Themes
Mooshum returns home the next day, having spent the night with Neve (“if only Father Hop Along were here,” he laments. “At last, I have something to confess”). Evelina reflects that she was named after Louis Riel’s wife, a name Mooshum had suggested.
By linking Mooshum’s (implied) sexual encounter with Neve to the fact that she is named after Riel’s wife, Evelina once more asserts that love and passion are a way of asserting autonomy in the face of settler-colonial oppression.
Themes
Evelina’s father retrieves the stamp from Neve’s house. But a few months later, while Evelina’s dad is on the way to sell his stamps in Fargo, he hits a patch of black ice and gets into a car wreck. The album is damaged, and for the first time, Evelina and Clemence realize that it really was worth millions of dollars. Though Evelina and her dad do their best to repair the stamps, they crumble in the wind. Finally, with Evelina at his side, her father blows the stamp towards the wind, watching half a million dollars vanish in the sky.
The stamp collection, occasionally alluded to throughout the earlier sections of the novel, will come to the fore as the story draws to a close. Stamp collections are quite literally about assigning value to history (in this case, monetarily). But in blowing these stamps into the wind (a gesture that to some extent visually recalls doves swirling in the sky), Evelina and her father make peace with the fact that if history is sometimes a thing to be kept, it must also sometimes be released.
Themes
