Free The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich

into the yard. Bathed in brilliant light, her face went blank as a sheet of paper, as the sky, featureless as all things which enter heaven.

Holy Track
    ALTHOUGH SHE TREATED me with neutral interest from then on and did not punish me, I was grieved by Sister Mary Anita’s disregard. I wrote letters, tore them up, and at last, as there was no other course of action, I collected facts, and I studied Sister Mary Anita. In a fit of longing, I retrieved papers she had written on and thrown away. Her sloping hand was absolutely uniform. You could put her capital letters one on the other, hold the pages up to the light, and see no variation in the size or ornamentation. Yet her handwriting wasn’t strictly Palmer script, but very much her own invention.
    One startling day I learned that she was allergic to chocolate and broke out in hives. The red welts across her face gave her a warrior’s intensity. She never scratched, but they must have tormented her. Even so, sometimes she could not resist chocolate and was known to take a piece of candy or cake at a wedding, saying, “Darn the consequences!” even though for a nun “darn” was considered a swear.
    Unlike the other nuns who taught at the school, and came from a mother house in Kentucky, Sister Mary Anita had grown up near the reservation, on a farm between Hoopdance and Pluto. She told this to us in the middle of our history class. None of the other children thought that unusual, but I perceived it as some sign. At home, I spoke of her constantly, and one day my mother gave me a long look.
    “Sister Mary Anita this, Sister Mary Anita that. You sure talk about Sister Mary Anita a lot. What’s her full name anyway?”
    I turned aside but muttered, “Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf.” I stole a look back at my mother, but she raised her eyebrows and glanced at my father. He gave no sign that he found the name of significance, but continued to paste stamps into his stamp album. He had inherited these polished leather albums and was adding slowly to some arcane arrangement which had originally been assembled by Uncle Octave, the one who had died tragically, for love. When attending to his albums, my father’s absorption was so complete that he was unreachable. Mooshum was sitting at the table playing rummy with Joseph. He caught the name though, and said, “Buckendorf!” He tried to keep on playing, but Joseph jogged his arm to make him quit. My mother went outside to hang the wet laundry on the line, in spite of the storm brewing. I’d caught the same note in Mooshum’s voice as my brother had, and checked again on my father, who was examining through a magnifying glass some stamp he held up with a tweezers. Our father drew a rapt breath and smiled as though the frail scrap of paper held a mystic secret. I moved to the end of the table and asked, “What about the name?”
    “What name?” Mooshum knew that he had us hooked.
    “You know, my teacher, Sister Mary Anita Buckendorf.”
    “Oh yai! The Buckendorfs!” His mouth twisted as he said it.
    “She’s a nun!”
    Mooshum packed his jaw and nodded at his spittoon. Joseph made a retching noise but went outside carrying the snoose can—a red Sanborn coffee can with the man in a yellow robe walking across it sipping coffee. We always emptied the can onto the roots of Mama’s struggling blue Colorado spruce—eventually, it surrendered to the killing juice, turned black, and dried up.
    “You know why she’s a nun, after all, my girl,” said Mooshum, while Joseph was outside. “Not too many people have the privilege of seeing right before their eyes there is no justice here on eart.” He said “eart,” he hardly ever used a th .
    Mooshum put his hands down before him and pushed the airtwice. He pushed the air like he was stuffing it into a box. “She saw it. No justice.”
    “Yeah?”
    Joseph came back in and we waited, but Mooshum suddenly turned his back on us and rummaged in his shirt pocket. We could