Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  I did not look up.

  When I didn’t answer, he stepped to the door quickly, all of a sudden, and walked out.

  My head snapped up. I looked directly into the face of June.

  Soundless as air she had unwound herself from all the others and stood in the doorway, waiting and watching for what she felt in the air. She didn’t know what she felt. I put the needle down.

  “Come here,” I said.

  She came, walking as in a dream, and I held her in my lap for the first and only time. I held her and I stroked her hair and hummed in her ear.

  She pretended to sleep, breathing evenly and pure. I stroked the beads around her neck. Then sleep took her for real. The strain went out of her. The breath came deep.

  She sagged like an empty sack. I held her until my legs went numb under her weight, until the lamp wick smoked, until the’ board creaked again and it was Nmtor, come home.

  I had fallen asleep in the chair. I don’t-know how long he’d stood there, staring at me with the child in my arms. I saw that he become had gone through the wringer. He was red-eyed, gaunt, and he was drunk.

  When I opened my eyes he began to reach into his pockets with both hands.

  He pulled out bills, coins, and crumpled dollars. He laid them in the mending. He took the money from his hatband. He emptied his shoes. He had a small roll in his sock. He had a bill clipped to his belt.

  “C’mere now,” he said. The money was a rumpled, winking pile. I never moved. He bent over and took June from my arms.

  He laid her in the small space of bed where she belonged, and then he came back to the kitchen for me.

  I didn’t ask him where he got all that money.

  I went down beneath his hands and lay quiet. I rolled with his current like a stone in the lake. He fell on me like a wave. But like a wave he washed away, leaving no sign he’d been there. I was smooth as before. I slept hard, and when I woke he was gone.

  All day with the children, I felt a low grief I couldn’t name yet.

  Something inside me had shrunk and hardened in the deep. One thing more. He had not left behind even a trace of coin. When I went out to the kitchen, I saw that the table was bare. He might not have even come home. It so discouraged me I could not go out this time and drag him back. I was so deeply sunk that I was not surprised when the girl came to me, anxious and still. I was not surprised that she would speak to me.

  I was peeling potatoes in the same chair we sat in the night before.

  But she’d slept through that, of course, and would not remember.

  “I want to live with Eli,” she said in a voice clear as the voice she used giving directions to be hung. “I’m going to Eli’s house.”

  “Go ahead, then,” I said.

  I kept peeling the potato. One long spiral and it’s finished. I never even looked when she walked out the door, and only later in the season, when everything was bare and the rain slashed down without the mercy to turn to clean snow, did I reach my hand deep in the lard can where I kept my spools, scraps, and papers of pins. I knew before I even touched them. Her beads in a black heap.

  I don’t pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don’t get me down.

  I don’t pray, but sometimes I do touch the beads.

  It has become a secret. I never look at them, just let my fingers roam to them when no one is in the house. It’s a rare tirriewhen I do this.

  I touch them, and every time I do I think of small stones.

  At the bottom of the lake, rolled aimless by the waves, I think of them polished. To many people it would be a kindness. But I see no kindness in how the waves are grinding them smaller and smaller until they finally disappear.

  MIN

  LULUS BOYS r a ra Jr (1957) On the last day that Lulu Lainartine spent as Henry’s widow, her boys were outside drinking beers and shooting plastic jugs. Her deceased husband’s brother, Beverly, was sitting across from her at the kitchen table. Having a name some people thought of as feminine had turned Beverly Lamartine to building up his imiscles in his youth, and they still bulged, hard as ingots in some places, now lost in others. His plush belly strained open the bottom buttons of his black shirt, and Lulu saw his warm skin peeking through. She also saw how the tattoos he and Henry had acquired on their arms, and which Lulu had always admired, were now deep black and so fuzzy around the edges that she could hardly tell what they were.

  Beverly saw her looking at the old tattoos and pushed his sleeves up over his biceps. “Get an eyeful.” He grinned. As of old, he stretched his arms across the table, and she gazed at the balm figures commemorating the two brothers’ drunken travels outside her life.

  There was a doll, a skull with a knife stuck in it, an eagle, a swallow, and Beverly’s name, rank, and serial number. Looking at the arm made Lulu remember her husband’s tattoos. Henry’s arms had been imprinted with a banner bearing some other woman’s name, a rose with a bleeding thorn, two lizards, and like his brother’s, with his name, rank, and serial number.

  Sometimes Lulu could not help it. She thought of everything so hard that her mind felt warped and sodden as a door that swells up in spring.

  It would not close properly to keep the troublesome thoughts out.

  Right now she thought of those two lizards on either one of Henry’s arms. She imagined them clenching together when he put his arms around her. Then she thought of them coupling the same way she and Henry did.

  She thought of this while looking at Beverly’s ]one swallow, a bird with outstretched wings deep as ink and bleeding into his flesh. She remembered Beverly’s trick: the wings were carefully tattooed on certain muscles, so that when he flexed his arm the bird almost seemed to hover in a dive or swoop.

  Lulu hadn’t seen her husband’s brother since the funeral in 1950, with the casket closed because of how badly Henry had suffered in the car wreck. Drunk, he had started driving the old Northern Pacific tracks and either fallen asleep or passed out, his car straddling the rails. As he’d left the bar that night everyone who had been there remembered his words.

  “She comes barreling through, you’ll never see me again.”

  At first they had thought he was talking about Lulu. But even at the time they knew she didn’t lose her temper over drinking. It was the train Henry had been talking about. They realized that later when the news came and his casket was sealed.

  Beverly Lamartine had shown up from the Twin Cities one—mom hour before his brother’s service was held. He had brought along the trophy flag-a black swastika on torn red cloth-that he had captured to revenge the oldest Lamartine, a quiet boy, hardly spoken of now, who was killed early on while still in boot camp.

  When the men from the veteran’s post had lowered Henry’s casket into the grave on ropes, there was a U.S. flag draped across it already.

  Beverly had shaken out the trophy flag. He’d let it go in the air, and the wind seemed to suck it down, the black arms of the insignia whirling like a spider.

  Watching it, Lulu had gone faint. The sudden spokes of the black wheel flashed before her eyes and she’d toppled dizzily, then stumbled over the edge of the grave.

  The men were still lowering Henry on ropes. Lulu plunged heavily down with the trophy flag, and the ropes burned out of the pallbearers’ hands. The box hit bottom. People screamed and there was a great deal of commotion, during which Beverly jumped down to revive Lulu. All together, the pallbearers tugged and hoisted her out. The black garments seemed to make her even denser than she was. Her round face and chubby hands were a pale dough color, cold and wet with shock. For hours afterward she trembled, uttered senseless vowels, ‘jumped at sounds and touches. Some people, assuming that she had jumped in the grave to be buried along with Henry, thought much better of her for a while.

  But most of her life Lulu had been known as a flirt. And that was putting it mildly. Tongues less kind had more i
ndicting things to say.

  For instance, besides the fact of Lulu Lamartine’s first husband, why did each of the boys currently shooting milk jugs out front of Henry’s house look so different? There were eight of them. Some of them even had her maiden name. The three oldest were Nanapushes. The next oldest were Morrisseys who took the name Lamartine, and then there were more assorted younger Lamartines who didn’t look like one another, either.

  Red _—ago hair and blond abounded; there was some brown. The black hair on the seven-year-old at least matched his mother’s. This boy was named Henry junior, and he had been born approximately nine months after Henry Senior’s death.

  Give or take a week, Beverly thought, looking from Henry Junior out the window back to the woman across the table. Beverly was quite certain that he, and not his brother, was the father of that boy. In fact, Beverly had come back to the reservation with a hidden purpose.

  Beverly Lamartine wanted to claim Henry junior and take him home.

  In the Twin Cities there were great relocation opportunities for Indians with a certain amount of natural stick-to-itiveness and pride.

  That’s how Beverly saw it. He was darker than most, but his parents had always called themselves French or Black Irish and considered those who thought of themselves as Indians quite backward. They had put the need to get ahead in Beverly. He worked devilishly hard.

  Door to door, he’d sold children’s after-school home workbooks for the past eighteen years. The wonder of it was that he had sold any workbook sets at all, for he was not an educated man and if the customers had, as they might naturally do, considered him an example of his product’s efficiency they might not have entrusted their own children to those pages of sums and reading exercises. But they did buy the workbook sets regularly, for Bev’s ploy was to use his humble appearance and faulty grammar to ease into conversation with his hardworking get-ahead customers. They looked forward to seeing the higher qualities, which they could not afford, inculcated in their own children. Beverly’s territory was a small-town world of earnest dreamers. Part of Bev’s pitch, and the one that usually sold the books, was to show the wife or husband a wallet-sized school photo of his son.

  That was Henry junior. The back of the photo was A “To Uncle Bev,” but the customer never saw that, because the precious relic was encased in a cardboard-backed sheet of clear plastic. This covering preserved it from thousands of mill-toughened thumbs in the working-class sections of Minneapolis and small towns within its one-hundred-mile radius. Every year or so Beverly wrote to Lulu, requesting another picture. It was sent to him in perfect goodwill.

  With every picture Beverly grew more familiar with his son and more inspired in the invention of tales he embroidered, day after day, on front porches that were to him the innocent stages for his routine.

  His son played baseball in a sparkling-white uniform stained across the knees with grass. He pitched no-hitters every few weeks. Teachers loved the boy for getting so far ahead of the other students on his own initiative. They sent him on to various higher grades, and he was invited to the parties of children in the wealthy suburb of Edina.

  Henry junior cleared the hurdles of class and intellect with an case astonishing to Beverly, who noted to his wistful customers how swiftly the young surpass the older generation.

  “Give them wings!” he would urge, flipping softly through the cheap pulp-flecked pages. The sound of the ruffled paper was like the panic of fledglings before they learn how to glide. People usually bought, and only later, when they found themselves rolling up a work-skills book to slaughter a fly or scribbling phone numbers down on the back of Math Enrichment, would they realize that their children had absolutely no interest in taking the world by storm through self-enlightenment.

  Some days, after many hours of stories, the son became so real in Bev’s mind that when he came home to the apartment, he half expected the boy to pounce on him before he put his key in the door. But when the lock turned his son vanished, for Elsa would be there, and she was not particularly interested in children, real or not. She was a typist who changed jobs incessantly. Groomed—Mod with exquisite tawdriness, she’d fashioned for Bev the image of a modern woman living the ideal career life. Her salary only fluctuated by pennies from firm to firm, but her importance and value as a knower-of-ropes swelled. She believed herself indispensable, but she heartlessly left employers hanging in their times of worst need to go on to something better.

  Beverly adored her.

  She was a natural blond with birdlike legs and, true, no chin, but great blue snapping eyes. She smoked exotically, rolling smoke off her tongue, and often told Bev that two weeks from now he might not be seeing her again. Then she would soften toward him. The possibilities she gave up to be with him impressed Bev so much, every time, that it ceased to bother him that Elsa only showed him off to her family in Saint Cloud at the height of summer, when they admired his perfect tan.

  The boy, though, who was everywhere in his life and yet nowhere, fit less easily into Bev’s fantasy of how he lived. The boy made him ache in hidden, surprising places sometimes at night when he lay next to Elsa, his knuckles resting lightly against her emphatic spine. That was the limit of touching she would tolerate in slumber. She even took her sleeping breath with a certain rigid meanness, holding it stubbornly and releasing it with small explosive sighs. Bev hardly noticed, though, for beside her his mind raced through the ceilings and walls.

  One night he saw himself traveling. He was driving his sober green car westward, past the boundaries of his salesman’s territory, then over the state line and on across to the casual and lonely fields, the rich, dry violet hills of the reservation. Then he was home where his son really lived. Wu came to, the door. He habitually blotted away her face and body, so that in his thoughts she was a doll of flour sacking with a curly black mop on her head. She was simply glad that he had come at last to take the son she had such trouble providing for off her hands.

  She was glad–add Henry junior would be wafted into a new and better metropolitan existence.

  This scenario became so real through the quiet hours he lay beside Elsa that Bev even convinced himself that his wife would take to Henry junior, in spite of the way she shuddered at children in the streets and whispered

  “Monkeys!” And then, by the time the next workday was half over, he’d arranged for a vacation and made an appointment to have a once-over done on his car.

  Of course, Lulu was not made of flour sacking and yarn. Beverly had realized that in the immediacy of her arms. She grabbed him for a hug when he got out of his car, and, tired by the long trip, his head whirled for a moment in a haze of yellow spots.

  When she released him, the boys sauntered up, poker-faced and mildly suspicious, to stand in a group around him and await their introductions. There seemed to be so many that at first he was speechless. Each of them was Henry junior in a different daydream, at a different age, and so alike were their flat expressions he couldn’t even pick out the one whose picture sold the record number of home workbooks in the Upper Midwestern Regional Division.

  Henry junior, of course, was perfectly recognizable after Lulu introduced him. After all, he did look exactly like the picture in Bev’s wallet. He put his hand out and shook manfully like his older brothers, which pleased Bev, although he had trouble containing a moment of confusion at the utter indifference in the boy’s eyes. He had to remember the boy was meeting him for the first time. In a child’s world strange grownups are indistinguishable as trees in a forest.

  Even the writing on the back of those photographs was probably, now that he thought of it, Lulu’s.

  They went away, started shooting their guns, and then Bev was left with the unexpected problem of the mother of his son, the woman He would just as soon forget. During a moment of adjustment, however, he decided to go through whatever set of ma nip80 MEN–ado W WON Ulations were necessary. He wanted to handle the situation in the ideal, firm, but diplomatic manner. An
d then, after he’d recovered from the strength of her hug, he had absolutely no doubt that things would go on according to his plan.

  “My my my,” he said to Lulu now. She was buttering a piece of bread soft as the plump undersides of her arms. “Lot of water under the dam.”

  She agreed, taking alert nips of her perfectly covered slice. She had sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar over it, carefully distributing the grains. That was how she was. Even with eight boys her house was neat as a pin. The candy bowl on the table sat precisely on its doily. All her furniture was brushed and straightened. Her coffee table held a neat stack of Fate and True Adventure magazines. On her walls she’d hung matching framed portraits of poodles, kittens, and an elaborate embroidered portrait of Chief Joseph. Her windowsills were decorated with pincushions in the shapes of plump little hats and shoes.

  “I make these.” She cupped a tiny blue sequined pump in her hand.

  “You have a girl friend? I’ll give it to you. Here.”

  She pushed the little shoe across the table. It skittered over the edge, fell into his lap, and Beverly retrieved it quickly, for he saw that her hand was following. He set the blue slipper between them without addressing her implicit question on his status-girl friend, married, or just looking around. He was intent on bringing up the subject of Henry junior.

  “Remember that time . he started. Then he didn’t know what he was going to say. What did come out surprised him.

  “You and me and Henry were playing cards before you got married and the boys were sleeping?”

  He could have kicked himself for having blurted that out. Even after all these years he couldn’t touch on the memory without running a hand across his face or whistling tunelessly to drive it from his mind. It didn’t seem to have bothered her all these years though. She picked up the story smoothly and went on.

  “Oh, you men,” she laughed chidingly. Her face was so little like Beverly’s flour sacking doll he wondered how he had stood imagining her that way all these years. Her mouth was small, mobile, like a puckering flower, and her teeth were unusually tiny and white. He remembered having the urge to lick their smoothness once. But now she was talking.