Similarly, the stories, truths and voices gathered in this novel vie for the attention of the reader. The temptation is to try and connect them, to make a large sense of them. There are connections: taking place across the span of approximately a century, the stories in this book all take place in Pluto, North Dakota and its surrounding reservation. The narrator in one will be a character in another, while others are related across time by blood. Yet, connections between stories are often hard to glimpse. History and events impact folks in often oblique if not opaque ways. History may be about connecting story lines and establishing patterns. But, as the novel suggests, history is a text hard to read: it's always a half-told tale being retold.
Evelina Harp tells the pivotal story of the novel: the unjust lynching of four Native Americans, including a boy, after a "white" farm family is found gruesomely murdered. Evelina doesn't so much tell it, as recount her beloved grandfather's telling of it. She is drawn to it by her beloved Grandfather's prominent role in it.
Evelina is fascinated by the tale. She has a youthful desire to figure out the adult world and it's mysteries. Without being quite conscious of it, she is looking for justice or explanation for the horrific deed. That can't be found in the story, so Evelina is compelled to find it in the unfolding of time. She becomes "obsessed with lineage," eager to draw lines clearly connecting evildoers in the past to evildoers in the present, to victims in the present. She is hoping to draw lines that will distance her loved ones from responsibility for past evils and which will point to some kind of retribution in the present. To do so, she attempts to trace out charts with lines connecting the perpetrators and victims of injustice in the past to herself and the folks who surround her in the present. She writes in pencil, but nevertheless ends up finding the task "so complicated that [she]erased parts...until [she] wore right through the paper," and discovers she "could not erase the questions underneath, and Mooshum was no help."
This tale of racial hatred is knocked from the cross of the reader's attention by an older tale that might be seen to speak to the possibilities of brotherhood. However, told by the stoic-loving Judge Antone Coutts, it is offered more as a mild caution against all human effort to make a claim and impose order on nature. Like Evelina, Coutt's tale is his grandfathers, culled from a journal in which this ancestor chronicled his part in a land-stakes company's doomed attempt to settle the area around Pluto in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In summary, Antone lumps this 'early,' white effort to settle the town of Pluto with "all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth."
In Antone's tale the 'white' men, ancestors of many folks now living in Pluto, are saved time and time again by their native American trackers, likewise ancestors of many of these same Plutonians. However, it is never clear that brotherhood comes about between the parties as much as a temporary and thoughtless tolerance compelled by necessity. Moreover, whatever brotherhood is brought about comes to the fore only in the face of what would seem a rather capricious and hostile natural world.
Of course, given the mixed blood of most of the town/novel's present day inhabitants, one might question the function or utility of tales expressing the possibilities of racial harmony. As an older and wiser Evelina remarks, "some of us have mixed in the spring of our existence both guilt and victim, [and] there is no unraveling the rope." Indeed, as Antone remarks, "We can't seem to keep our hands off one antoher...and every attempt to foil our lusts through laws and religious dictums seems bound instead to incite transgressions." His second story, following directly on his grandfather's tale, is a more recent and convoluted one demonstrating the truth of this.
It involves Eugene Wildstrand, a banker and descendant of one of the white lynchers. Bored in his marriage and engaged in an affair with a local Native American woman, Wildstrand fake 'kidnaps' his own wife in conjunction with his girlfriend's brother, Billy Peace. Billy's sister, Maggie, is pregnant with Wildstrand's child, and Wildstrand hopes to provide her with the means, via the ransom money, to raise their child while preserving his marriage and status. He fears of he gives up the latter, Maggie will no longer love him. A pretty clever argument: if I leave my wife, it will ruin my status, my earning power, and my girlfriend will no longer love me.
Wildstrand's kidnapping plan goes awry. Wildstrand ends up in jail, separated and estranged from both his wife and girlfriend. Billy escapes justice by joining the army and shipping to Korea. However, young and green, his time in Korea during the war drives him over the bend and he ends up finding solace in millenial types of religious ideas.. When he eventually returns to Pluto, he takes up with Marne Wolde and begins a cultish religious commune on her families land.
Wildstrand and Maggie's baby, Corwin, grows up a troubled youth. Antone describes him as a "a bad thing waiting for a worse to happen. A mistake, but one that we kept trying to salvage because he was so young." Corwin is also the love of Evelina's life and comes in and rescues her when she ends up resident at a mental hospital she started at as a volunteer.
Evelina ends up there kind of mysteriously. One can trace out the factual cause and effect that leads her there. Seeking self-definition as a college student, taking as her template Anais Nin, Evelina fashions herself a poet with a special interest in "those who died young, went crazy disappeared,and went to Paris." Finding that her ordinary college surroundings in North Dakota jar with this emerging self-conception, Evelina seeks out greater drama, the most desperate situation near at hand, and applies for an aide's position at a nearby mental hospital. Once there, she falls in love with a female patient, and when the relationship inevitably founders, suffers a deep depression. Mentally mired, she ends up entering herself as a patient in the very hospital she volunteered at.
However, on another level, the depression, the seeking out of the mental hospital, seems related to her infatuation with her grandfather's story and it's seemingly inexplicable evil. Evelina adores her grandfather and in her reading of his story, she identifies with him as a heroic victim. However, she begins to learn and suspect things about his story that trouble and contradict her identification with and adoration of him. In fact, while his is a story of injustice, and while their are villains and victims, Mooshum is hardly an entirely innocent victim. Disappointed and confused by what she learns about her past, she attempts to forget, to flee it, by engaging in a process of self-definition that proves destructive. When that self-definition as a French poet proves unable to provide a plausible alternative self, she is lost, without a self to present, and she ends up with the living dead at the mental hospital.
However, she can't truly bury or escape from her grandfather, from his and her story. Deep down, some part of her continually seeks out the truth of her Grandfather's story. Something seemingly drives her unwittingly to it. The mental hospital she ends up in contains that truth in the person of patient Warren Wolde. As the reader finds out at the end of the book, a great deal of evidence ties Wolde to the murder of the farm family for which the Native American men are unjustly lynched. However, the town is never able to put Wolde with the murders. For most of his life, he has lived semi-anonymously on his family farm with his brother (Marne Wolde's father). To the extent he's known at all, he's seen as kind of a crazy, marginal old man who goes about muttering and staring balefully. In retrospect, it is hard to see why nobody never connected him with the act, but his revelation as the likely perpetrator of the murders came as a surprise to this reader. Like the townspeople, I fixed him in my mind as one thing. I drew a line, fixed a mental boundary around him. Earlier, I quoted Antone when he laments "all desperate enterprises that involve boundaries we place upon the earth." Similarly, the novel cautions against the mental equivalent: holding too tight to our conceptions of what is. Reality is protean, dooming all attempts to know it, to fix it as simply this or simply that. It is opposed to the idea of truth.
Blinded by her pre-conceptions, Evelina never does identify Warren as the source of the evil initiating the evil events of her grandfather's story. Yet, one might argue that in her obsessive desire to find an explanation for the tragedy of her grandfather's story, to find the truth of it so as to clearly redeem his role, she has literally gravitated toward that truth. Yet, far from accomplishing any good for her, this half-conscious obsession to fix her past, leaves her mired in a mental hospital, and in a deep and paralyzing funk.
It is Corwin Peace brings her out of it, literally, when he comes for a visit, plays her and her fellow ward-mates a tune that stuns them, and in Orpheus fashion leads Evelina out the door of the hospital and back to the world of the living. However, while his tune frees Evelina, it brings Warren Wolde's painful memories that induce a fatal heart attack. In a fashion, Corwin's music delivers the little bit of justice that occurs in the novel.
In the various tales that make up this story of Pluto, Erdrich presents music in varied ways. In sum, for Erdrich, music has supernatural power by virtue of it's capacity to connect listeners to memories and emotion. Capable of providing joy and solace, it can also delivers pain and emotional tumult, depending on the reality of the listener's past. In the novel, it intervenes in God-like fashion, as an instrument of justice, saving some, damning others.
In the earliest story chronologically, the music is that of Henri and Lafayette Peace, the Native American guides who ended up saving the land-founding party of which his grandfather was part. The Peace brothers play their violin around the increasingly desperate campfires of the doomed party, mostly offering respite and relaxation. After a particularly dangerous storm, upon waking the next day, they play "a jig of stirring joy...sining a song loud and wailing wild as the blizzard," and "something in the song" delivers a "startling awareness...a sudden, fierce, black happiness."
Henry and Lafayette's violin ends up in Mooshum's brother Shamengwa's hands with none of its powers diminished. Of Shamengwa's music, Coutt's claims:
"The inside became the outside when Shamengwa played...the music was feeling inteslf. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paer over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, to. Things we'd lived though and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprising pleasures."
The violin and it's song come to Shamengwa in a mystical and circuitous fashion. Shamengwa
Corwin comes to possess Shamengwa's music in a similarly roundabout fashion. Originally, Corwin steals Shamengwa's violin without a real clear plan of what he will do with it. As the resident black sheep, everyone on the reservation knows he's stolen it and waits for him to tip his hand in some way.
Like Evelina who unconsciously gravitates to the one true evil that initiates her grandfathers story, Corwin too seems to come to what he's looking for, to his answer, in an unconscious fashion. He steals his salvation, not even realizing it is his salvation. Instead, he sees it as a possible quick source of cash, and eventually he runs off to a mall in Fargo in hopes of selling it to a music lover. However, he's not quite sure how to go about doing this once he gets to the mall. Eventually, he ends up sitting outside a food court at the mall, and after creating a short, attention-getting shriek on the violin, he theatrically pretend plays the instrument. In a book filled with stunning images, a mute Corwin, miming expression in a shopping mall in the hopes of easy money, ranks among the most memorable.
His case is brought before Judge Coutts who considers throwing the book at him but decides on mercy of sorts, sentencing him to music lessons with Shamengwa.
Corwin proves an able learner, and, in the climactic scene, he plays for Evelina and her fellow residents at the mental hospital. Corwin has mastered Shamengwa's sound as described by Coutts above. Corwin's playing brings the room to a standstill, bringing patients out of their rooms and nurses from their station; the room is being visited by a supernatural force. "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." At first,
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...Alarm strikes through us...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.
When I read that passage, I can't help feeling that music is represented and acting as a supernatural force. By it's very being, it's capacity for wrath, chaos and sweetness and peace, the music compels those exposed to it to a judgement of themselves. She claims, "The music understands, and it will be there whether we stay in pain or gain our sanity, which is also painful."
Corwin's song in the hospital induces a fatal heart attack in Warren. It seemingly gives Evelina the power to walk out of the hospital with Corwin shortly after he finishes the number. Thus, it delivers evil to death and brings life to Evelina who is in the midst of a living death. It acts as and is a product of justice. Reflecting on the lynching, Mooshum maintains, "there is no justice here on eart [sic]." Judge Coutts persists in seeking it out, although he is inclined to agree with Burton who said "he who goes to law holds a wolf by the ear." Still, that is his profession. However, his conception of justice envisions it occuring by increments, and, in his capacity as a judge, he delivers justice by indirection via the roads of imagination and mercy.
