Doves Symbol Analysis

Our family has maintained something of an historical reputation for deathless romantic encounters. Even my father, a sedate-looking science teacher, was swept through the Second World War by one promising glance from my mother. […] My father’s second cousin John kidnapped his own wife and used the ransom to keep his mistress in Fargo. Despondent over a woman, my father’s uncle, Octave Harp, managed to drown himself in two feet of water. And so on. […] These tales of extravagant encounter contrasted with the modesty of the subsequent marriages and occupations of my relatives. We are a tribe of office workers, bank tellers, book readers, and bureaucrats. […] Yet this current of drama holds together the generations, I think, and my brother and I listened to Mooshum not only from suspense but for instructions on how to behave when our moment of recognition, or perhaps our romantic trial, should arrive.

The story could have been true, for, as I have said, there really was a Mustache Maude Black with a husband named Ott. Only sometimes Maude was the one to claim Mooshum as her son in the story and sometimes she went on to claim she’d had an affair with Chief Gall. And sometimes Ott Black plugged the man in the gut. But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with facts. Saint Joseph’s Church was named for the carpenter who believed his wife, reared a son not his own, and is revered as the patron saint of our bold and passionate people, the Metis. Those doves were surely the passenger pigeons of legend and truth, whose numbers were such that nobody thought they could possibly ever be wiped from the earth.

Asiginak and Cuthbert suddenly burst out singing. They began high—Cuthbert’s voice a wild falsetto that cut the air. Asiginak joined him and Holy Track felt almost good, hearing the strength and power of their voices. And the words in the old language.

These white men are nothing

What they do cannot harm me

I will see the face of mystery

[…] The boy was too light for death to give him an easy time of it. He slowly choked as he kicked air and spun. He heard it when Cuthbert, then his uncle, stopped singing and gurgling. Behind his shut eyes, he was seized by black fear, until he heard his mother say, Open your eyes, and he stared into the dusty blue. Then it was better. The little wisps of clouds, way up high, had resolved into wings and they swept across the sky now, faster and faster.

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.

[…] Sometimes doves seem to hover in this room. At night, when I can’t sleep, I hear the flutter of their wings.

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.

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