Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  We sparked each other. We met behind the dance house and kissed. I knew I wanted more of that sweet taste on her mouth. I got selfish. We were flowing easily toward each other’s arms.

  Then Marie appeared, and here is what I do not understand: how instantly the course of your life can be changed.

  I only know that I went up the convent hill intending to sell geese and came down the hill with the geese still on my arm.

  Beside me walked a young girl with a mouth on her like a flophouse, although she was innocent. She grudged me to hold her hand. And yet I would not drop the hand and let her walk alone.

  Her taste was bitter. I craved the difference after all those years of easy sweetness. But I still had a taste for candy. I could never have enough of both, and that was my problem and the reason that long past the branch in my life I continued to think of Lulu.

  Not that I had much time to think once married years set in. I liked each of our babies, but sometimes I was juggling them from both arms and losing hold. Both Marie and I lost hold. In one year, two died, a boy and a girl baby. There was a long spell of quiet, awful quiet, before the babies showed up everywhere again. They were all over in the house once they started. In the bottoms of cupboards, in the dresser, in trundles. Lift a blanket and a bundle would howl beneath it. I lost track of which were ours and which Marie had taken in. It had helped her to take them in after our two others were gone.

  This went on. The youngest slept between us, in the bed of our bliss, so I was crawling over them to make more of them. It seemed like there was no end.

  Sometimes I escaped. I had to have relief. I went drinking and caught holy hell from Marie. After a few years the babies started walking around, but that only meant they needed shoes for their feet.

  I gave in. I put my nose against the wheel. I kept it there for many years and barely looked up to realize the world was going by, full of wonders and creatures, while I was getting old bating hay for white farmers.

  So much time went by in that flash it surprises me yet. What they call a lot of water under the bridge. Maybe it was rapids, a swirl that carried me so swift that I could not look to either side but had to keep my eyes trained on what was coming. Seventeen years of married life and come-and-go children.

  And then it was like the river pooled.

  Maybe I took my eyes off the current too quick. Maybe the fast movement of time had made me dizzy. I was shocked. I remember the day it happened. I was sitting on the steps, wiring a pot of Marie’s that had broken, when everything went still. The children stopped shouting.

  Marie stopped scolding. The babies slept.

  The cows chewed. The dogs stretched full out in the heat. Nothing moved. Not a leaf or a bell or a human. No sound. It was like the air itself had caved in.

  In that stillness, I lifted my head and looked around.

  now What I saw was time passing, each minute collecting behind me before I had squeezed from it any life. It went so fast, is what I’m saying, that I myself sat still in the center of it. Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

  It was happening already.

  I put my hand to my face. There was less of me. Less muscle, less hair, less of a hard jaw, less of what used to go on below.

  Fewer offers. It was 1952, and I had done what was expected fathered babies, served as chairman of the tribe. That was the extent of it.

  Don’t let the last fool you, either. Getting into the big-time local politics was all low pay and no thanks. I never even ran for the office. Someone put my name down on the ballots, and the night I accepted the job I became somebody less, almost instantly. I grew gray hairs in my sleep. The next morning they were hanging in the comb teeth.

  Less and less, until I was sitting on my steps in 1952 thinking I should hang on to whatever I still had.

  That is the state of mind I was in when I began to think of Lulu.

  The truth is I had never gotten over her. I thought back to how swiftly we had been moving toward each other’s soft embrace before everything got tangled and swept me on past. In my mind’s eye I saw her arms stretched out in longing while I shrank into the blue distance of marriage. Although it had happened with no effort on my part, to ever get back I’d have to swim against the movement of time.

  I shook my head to clear it. The children started to shout.

  Marie scolded, the babies blubbered, the cow stamped, and the dogs complained. The moment of stillness was over; it was brief, but the fact is when I got up from the front steps I was changed.

  I put the fixed pot on the table, took my hat off the hook, went out and drove my pickup into town. My brain was sending me the kind of low ache that used to signal a lengthy drunk, and yet that was not what I felt like doing.

  house, Anyway, once I got to town and stopped by the tribal offices, a drunk was out of the question. An emergency was happening.

  And here is where events loop around and tangle again.

  It is July. The sun is a fierce white ball. Two big semis from the Polar Bear Refrigerated Trucking Company are pulled up in the yard of the agency offices, and what do you think they’re loaded with? Butter.

  That’s right. Seventeen tons of surplus butter on the hottest day in ‘52. That is what it takes to get me together with Lulu.

  Coincidence. I am standing there wrangling with the drivers, who want to dump the butter, when Lulu drives by. I see her, riding slow and smooth on the luxury springs of her Nash Ambassador Custom.

  “Hey Wu,” I shout, waving her into the bare, hot yard.

  “Could you spare a couple hours?”

  She rolls down her window and says perhaps. She is high and distant ever since the days of our youth. I’m not thinking, I swear, of anything but delivering the butter. And yet when she alights I cannot help notice an interesting feature of her dress. She turns sideways.

  I see how it is buttoned all the way down the back. The buttons are small, square, plump, like the mints they serve next to the cashbox in a fancy restaurant.

  I have been to the nation’s capital. I have learned there that spitting tobacco is frowned on. To cure myself of chewing I’ve took to rolling my own. So I have the makings in my pocket, and I quick roll one up to distract myself from wondering if those buttons hurt her where she sits.

  “Your car’s air-cooled?” I ask. She says it is. Then I make a request, polite and natural, for her to help me deliver these fifty ,ypound boxes of surplus butter, which will surely melt and run if they are left off in the heat.

  She sighs. She looks annoyed. The hair is frizzled behind her L mom neck. To her, Nector Kashpaw is a nuisance. She sees nothing of their youth. He’s gone dull. Stiff. Hard to believe, she thinks, how he once cut the rug! Even his eyebrows have a little gray in them now.

  Hard to believe the girls once followed him around!

  But he is, after all, in need of her air conditioning, so what the heck?

  I read this in the shrug she gives me.

  “Load them in,” she says.

  So the car is loaded up, I slip in the passenger’s side, and we begin delivering the butter. There is no set way we do it, since this is an unexpected shipment. She pulls into a yard and I drag out a box, or two, if they’ve got a place for it. Between deliveries we do not speak.

  Each time we drive into the agency yard to reload, less butter is in the seems. People have heard about it and come to pick up the boxes themselves. It seems surprising, but all of that tonnage is going fast, too fast, because there still hasn’t been a word exchanged between Lulu and myself in the car. The afternoon is heated up to its worst, where it will stay several hours. The car is soft inside, deep cushioned and cool. I hate getting out when we drive into the yards.

  Lulu smiles and talks to the people who come out of their houses. As soon as we are alone, though, she clams up and hums some tune she heard on the radio. I try to get through h
several times.

  “I’m sorry about Henry,” I say. Her husband was killed on the droad tracks. I never had a chance to say I was sorry.

  “He was a good man.” That is all the answer I get.

  “How are your boys?” I ask later. I know she has a lot of them, but you would never guess it. She seems so young.

  “Fine. ” In desperation, I say she has a border of petunias that is the envy of many far-flung neighbors. Marie has often mentioned it.

  “My petunias,” she tells me in a flat voice, “are none of your business.”

  I am shut up for a time, then. I understand that this is useless.

  Whatever I am doing it is not what she wants. And the truth is, I do not know what I want from it either. Perhaps ‘just a mention that I, Nector Kashpaw, middle-aged butter mover, was the young hard-muscled man who thrilled and sparked her so long ago.

  As it turns out, however, I receive so much more. Not because of anything I do or say. It’s more mysterious than that.

  We are driving back to the agency after the last load, with just two boxes left in the backseat, my box and hers. Since the petunias, she has not even hummed to herself So I am more than surprised, when, in a sudden burst, she says how nice it would be to drive up to the lookout and take in the view.

  Now I’m the shy one.

  “I’ve got to get home,” I say, “with this butter.”

  But she simply takes the turn up the hill. Her skin is glowing, as if she were brightly golden beneath the brown. Her hair is dry and electric. I heard her tell somebody, where we stopped, that she didn’t have time to curl it. The permanent fuzz shorts out here and there above her forehead. On some women this might look strange, but on Lulu it seems stylish, like her tiny crystal earrings and the French rouge on her cheeks.

  I do not compare her with Marie. I would not do that. But the way I ache for Lulu, suddenly, is terrible and sad.

  “I don’t think we should,” I say to her when we stop. The shadows are stretching, smooth and blue, out of the trees.

  “Should what?”

  Turning to me, her mouth a tight gleaming triangle, her cheekbones high and pointed, her chin a little cup, her eyes lit, she watches.

  “Sit here,” I say, “alone like this.”

  “For heaven sake she says,

  “I’m not going to bite. I just wanted to look at the view.”

  M

  wood Then she does just that. She settles back. She puts her arm out the window. The air is mild. She looks down on the spread of trees and sloughs. Then she shuts her eyes.

  “It’s a damn pretty place,” she says. Her voice is blurred and contented. She does not seem angry with me anymore, and because of this, I can ask her what I didn’t know I wanted to ask all along. It surprises me by falling off my lips.

  “Will you forgive me?”

  She doesn’t answer right away, which is fine, because I have to get used to the fact that I said it.

  “Maybe,” she says at last, “but I’m not the same girl.”

  I’m about to say she hasn’t changed, and then I realize how much she has changed. She has gotten smarter than I am by a long shot, to understand she is different.

  “I’m different now, too,” I am able to admit.

  She looks at me, and then something wonderful happens to her face.

  It opens, as if a flower bloomed all at once or the moon rode out from behind a cloud. She is smiling.

  “So your butter’s going to melt,” she says, then she is laughing outright. She reaches into the backseat and grabs a block. It is wrapped in waxed paper, squashed and soft, but still fresh. She smears some on my face. I’m so surprised that I just sit there for a moment, feeling stupid. Then I wive the butter off my cheek. I take the block from her-andA put it’on the dash. When we grab each other and kiss there is butter on our hands. It wears off as we touch, then undo, each other’s clothes. All those buttons! I make her turn around so I won’t rip any off, then I carefully unbsten them.

  “You’re different,” she agrees now, “better.”

  I do not want her to say anything else. I tell her to lay quiet. Be still. I get the backrest down with levers. I know how to do this because I thought of it, offhand, as we were driving. I did not plan what happened, though. How could I have planned? How could I have known that I would take the butter from the dash? I home, rub a handful along her collarbone, then circle her breasts, then let it slide down between them and over the rough little tips. I rub the butter in a circle on her stomach.

  “You look pretty like that,” I say. “All greased up.”

  She laughs, laying there, and touches the place I should put more. I do. Then she guides me forward into her body with her hands.

  Midnight found me in my pickup, that night in July. I was surprised, worn out, more than a little frightened of what we’d done, and I felt so good. I felt loose limbed and strong in the dark breeze, roaring home, the cold air sucking the sweat through my clothes and my veins full of warm, sweet water.

  As I turned down our road I saw the lamp, still glowing. That meant Marie was probably sitting up to make sure I slept out in the shack if I was drunk.

  I walked in, letting the screen whine softly shut behind me.

  “Hello,” I whispered, hoping to get on into the next dark room and hide myself in bed. She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading an old catalog. She did not look up from the pictures.

  “Hungry?”

  “No,” I said.

  Already she knew, from my walk or the sound of my voice, that I had not been drinking. She flipped some pages.

  “Look at this washer,” she said. I bent close to study it. She said I smelled like a churn. I told her about the seventeen tons of melting butter and how I’d been hauling it since first thing that afternoon.

  “Swam in it too,” she said, glancing at my clothes. “Where’s ours?”

  “What?”

  “Our butter.”

  I’d forgotten it in Lulu’s car. My tongue was stuck. I was speechless to realize my sudden guilt.

  IL

  “You forgot.

  She slammed down the catalog and doused the lamp.

  I had a job as night watchman at a trailer-hitch plant. Five times a week I went and sat in the ‘anitor’s office. Half the night I pushed a broom or meddled with odd repairs. The other half I drowsed, wrote my chairman’s reports, made occasional rounds.

  On the sixth night of the week I left home, as usual, but as soon as I got to the road Lulu Lamartine lived on I turned. I hid the truck in a cove of brush. Then I walked up the road to her house in the dark.

  On that sixth night it was as though I left my body at the still wheel of the pickup and inhabited another more youthful one. I moved, witching water. I was full of sinkholes, shot with rapids.

  Climbing in her bedroom window, I rose. I was a flood that strained bridges. Uncontainable. I rushed into Lulu, and the miracle was she could hold me. She could contain me without giving way. Or she could run with me, unfolding in sheets and snaky waves.

  I could twist like a rope. I could disappear beneath the surface.

  I could run to a halt and Lulu would have been there every moment, just her, and no babies to be careful of tangled somewhere in the covers.

  And so this continued five years.

  How I managed two lives was a feat of drastic proportions.

  Most of the time I was moving in a dim fog of pure tiredness. I never got one full morning of sleep those years, because there were babies holed up everywhere set to let loose their squawls at the very moment I started to doze. Oh yes, Marie kept taking in babies right along. Like the butter, there was a surplus of babies on the reservation, and we seemed to get unexpected shipments from time to time.

  I got nervous, and no wonder, with demands weighing me down. And as for Lulu, what started off carefree and irregular became a clockwork precision of timing. I had to get there prompt on night number six, leave just before da
wn broke, give and take all the pleasure I could muster myself to stand in between. The more I saw of Lulu the more I realized she was not from the secret land of the Nash Ambassador, but real, a woman like Marie, with a long list of things she needed done or said to please her.

  I had to run down the lists of both of them, Lulu and Marie.

  I had much trouble to keep what they each wanted, when, straight.

  In that time, one thing that happened was that Lulu gave birth.

  It was when she was carrying the child I began to realize this woman was not only earthly, she had a mind like a wedge of iron.

  For instance, she never did admit that she was carrying.

  “I’m putting on the hog.” She clicked her tongue, patting her belly, which was high and round while the rest of her stayed FDIC slim.

  One night, holding Lulu very close, I felt the baby jump. She said nothing, only smiled. Her white teeth glared in the dark. She snapped at me in play like an animal. In that way she frightened me from asking if the baby was mine. I was jealous of Lulu, and she knew this for a fact. I was jealous because I could not control her or count on her whereabouts. I knew what a lively, sweet fleshed figure she cut.

  And yet I couldn’t ask her to be true, since I wasn’t. I was two timing Lulu in being married to Marie, and vice versa of course.

  Lulu held me tight by that string while she spun off on her own.” Who she saw, what she did, I have no way to ever know. But I do think the boy looked like a Kashpaw.

  Every so often I would try to stop time again by finding a still place and sitting there. But the moment I was getting the feel of quietness, leaning up a tree, parked in the truck, sitting with the cows, or just smoking on a rock, so many details of love and politics would flood me.

  It would be like I had dried my mind out only to receive the fresh dousing of, say, more tribal news.

  Chippewa politics was thorns in my jeans. I never asked for the chairmanship, or for that matter, anything, and yet I was in the thick and boil of policy. I went to Washington about it. I talked to the governor. I had to fight like a weasel, but I was fighting with one paw tied behind my back because of wrangling over buying a washer for Marie.