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19. The Veil
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
Having sex with C. was athletic, Coutts reflects, especially because she was slightly bigger than him. To hide their affair, Coutts got a job at the Pluto cemetery, hoping to have a believable cover story to explain why he was gone so much of the time. Coutts’s boss there knows the history of each family in the cemetery: when they came to Pluto and when they died, what land they left behind. At 17, Coutts begins measuring graves and digging them out. And though initially his work at the cemetery is meant to be a summer job, Coutts feels so attached to C. that he cannot bear to leave her and go to college.
Structurally, it is important to note the weight of adding a major new character so close to the end of the narrative. Indeed, by introducing the mysterious “C.” to the story now, The Plague of Doves zooms out, reframing the narratives at its center as merely a few of the many stories worth telling in Pluto. It is also worth catching the way Coutts describes his work at the graveyard (measuring and marking off plots), which has clear parallels with the surveying work Joseph Coutts did on that long-ago town-site trip.
Themes
Five years pass, and Coutts is content. One day in June, when the flowers are especially brilliant, Coutts’s aging mother insists that Coutts needs to find a wife—and that her son needs to stop messing around with C. Coutts pushes back, reminding his mother that when he was a little boy, C. made a series of worrisome (potentially cancerous) lumps on his head disappear, as if by “magical cure.”
It now becomes clear that C. is significantly older than Coutts, as she was a licensed doctor when he was still a young boy. Coutts’s loyalty to C. seems to stem in part from Coutts’s feeling that he owes C. something for curing him. Even in romantic relationships, it seems, this future judge believes in balance and justice.
Themes
Soon, though, C. is the one to end things, telling Coutts that she has decided to get married: “it’s the only way I can break this off.” Coutts insists their age gap will cease to matter, but C. disagrees. Instead, she marries Ted Bursap, a local contractor who is five years younger than her. To deal with his grief, Coutts takes refuge in his father’s law library and the works of the Stoic philosophers (including the Meditations).
Coutts has often balked at his neighbors’ obsession with property ownership and subdivision, so C.’s decision to marry a contractor—who specializes in profiting off of land—is especially hurtful to Coutts. In seeking refuge in the very texts that meant so much to his father and grandfather (including Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations), Coutts is implicitly also finding solace in family history.
Themes
For a year after C.’s wedding, Coutts avoids her. But one day, Coutts can stand it no longer, and he walks over to C.’s house. C. is waiting for Coutts on her back porch—which, she reveals, she has been doing every day for a year, in the hopes that Coutts might stop by. Ted is out of the house, so C. and Coutts have sex. This encounter feels both more intense and more tender than any of the lovers’ previous rendezvous. From then on, Coutts goes to visit C. often. Ted never finds out.
Though Evelina is completely unaware of the past romance between Coutts and C., C.’s behavior here—waiting on her front steps in the hopes that Coutts will pass by—appears to be something straight out of Evelina’s childhood fantasies of romance, yet one more example of “deathless romance” in the novel.
Themes
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Ted is responsible for all of the ugly new construction in Pluto; he tears down old houses or churches and replaces them with cheap, “fake-bricked” apartments. Sometimes, Coutts fantasizes about how fun it would be to bury Ted in his cemetery. Coutts also thinks about what he wants on his own gravestone: a simple phrase, “the universe is transformation.”
While Ted tries to create cheap, unnatural, permanence (with his concrete and “fake-bricked” walls), Coutts instead believes in organic change, as signaled by his belief that the “universe is transformation.” In other words, while Ted wants to control the future, Coutts seems to want to turn himself over to it.
Themes
Just as she had done in the early stages of their affair, C. often makes Coutts sandwiches after they have sex. As Coutts eats, he and C. talk about everything except their future, as C. refuses to divorce Ted. Still, Coutts feels mostly satisfied, though the cemetery has taught him “what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.” Years pass, and C.’s hair turns gray, her clothes loosening. Only her bones stay sharp.
Earlier in the novel (but later chronologically), Geraldine reflected that all of history happens in “the heat of things,” as people make snap decisions that have long-lasting impacts. But here, Coutts sees that even a lack of decision-making can make create history. Indeed, just by not acting to change his complicated, “unsatisfying” situation with C., Coutts is turning a passing moment of pain into a legacy that passes through time.
Themes
One day, Coutts walks home to see his mother crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Though she recovers, Coutts knows she needs more consistent care, so he moves his mother to a nursing home and puts the family home on the market to pay for it. Unfortunately, since very few wealthy people are moving to Pluto, the only person who makes an offer on Coutts’s beautiful old home is Ted. Coutts hates the idea of selling to Ted, but he can’t afford his mother’s care otherwise.
Over and over again, the novel has suggested that the most essential human drives are a longing for family and a desire for (and pride in) land ownership. But here, as Coutts is forced to choose between his beloved house and caring for his beloved mother, he instinctively defaults to family, knowing without hesitation that his mother is his priority.
Themes
For a moment, as Coutts listens to the bees that have taken up residence in the house’s walls, he fantasizes about living in this house with C. Then, in a flash, Coutts realizes something: “I had wasted my life on a woman.” Determined to change his fate, Coutts tells the real estate agent to sell the house to Ted.
The parallels between Judge Coutts’s pain over C. and Joseph Coutts’s pain over Dorea Swivel suggest that history repeats itself, even in the most surprising, intimate ways. Coutts’s decision to change his own fate—even if he loathes the steps he has to take to get there—reflects his belief in the Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius.
Themes
The week Ted is scheduled to begin tearing down the house, Coutts obsessively pictures what Ted is doing to his family’s home, as if the demolition were happening to him. “I could feel myself chopped into, gutted, chipped out,” Coutts reflects, “reduced to bones and beams.” Finally, when he can take it no longer, Coutts walks to C.’s house. When he arrives, C. is loading her new dishwasher. As C. puts coffee mugs in the machine, Coutts asks her to leave Ted, to run away with him instead.
In this touching passage, Coutts makes explicit what his ancestor—almost dying on that town-site trip—seemed to intuitively know: that a person’s property can feel indistinguishable from his sense of self, as if there was no difference between biological “bones” and architectural “beams.” The mundanity of C.’s chores clearly contrast with the weight of Coutts’s announcement, demonstrating once again that history-making events are always determined by seemingly small moments.
Themes
C. walks Coutts over to his house, which Ted is in the process of tearing down. While C. shouts at Ted to quit trampling on the flowers, Ted starts to bulldoze the back walls of the house. And then the bees come out, stinging Ted almost to death. As Ted lies there, convulsing, Coutts reaches out and tastes some of the honey that the claw machine has unearthed. Seeing Coutts do something so “cold-blooded” allows C. to end their affair for good. Though Ted survives the first bee attack, he is killed by a single sting a year later. The lot that Coutts’s house once stood on now lies empty, as Ted dies before he can develop it.
This event, which strains credulity in its surreal coincidences, introduces yet one more idea of justice to the novel: poetic justice. Even though Ted has done nothing wrong to Coutts personally (and in fact it is Coutts who is betraying Ted), readers feel satisfied by the fate that befalls Ted, as his ugly determination to tear down old buildings is ultimately the thing that causes his demise.
Themes
Coutts passes the bar exam and decides to practice “Indian law”; he moves away and helps various tribes in cases relating to land or religion. Eventually, Coutts comes back, returning not to Pluto but to the reservation. One day, Coutts is standing on the empty lot where his house used to be when C. drives by. She looks surprisingly old now, and though Coutts wants to talk, she hurries away. When Coutts closes his eyes, he pictures the house that used to be here, its leaky burners and oak front doors. The bees that lived in the wall are now in the graveyard, “filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.”
Like Evelina, Coutts has both settler-colonial and indigenous ancestry coursing through his veins. But in distancing himself from C. (whose own White, racialized prejudice will soon come to the fore), Coutts also finds comfort in aligning himself more with the Ojibwe side of his family line. The bees, transforming the graveyard from a site of death to a site of pleasure and vitality, then offer yet another example of “poetic justice,” as the destruction Ted wrought on Coutts’s house now turns into something creative and healing. And touchingly, these new underground honeycombs also prove Coutts’s deeply held belief that “the universe is transformation.”
Themes
Years later, Geraldine casually mentions to Coutts that C. is known for refusing to treat Indians. At first, Coutts can’t believe it—after all, hadn’t C. treated him when he was a boy? But Geraldine is clear: if C. made an “exception” for Coutts, there are still many stories about her refusing service to people on the reservation. This, Coutts thinks, is “why Cordelia loved me and why she could not abide that she loved me.. […] Why to this day she lives alone.”
Thus far, Coutts’s ill-fated romance with C. has seemed to be isolated from the town’s history of pain and prejudice. But now, Geraldine’s comment makes it clear that the prejudice so evident in Pluto’s past lives on in its present. And tellingly, in finally calling C. by her full name (Cordelia) instead of just her first initial, Coutts seems to let go of any desire to protect his old flame’s privacy, instead trying to reimagine his story with C. through the lens of her prejudice.
Themes
