Love Medicine Read online

  Everything else was dull tan-the dry ditches, the dying crops, the buildings of farms and towns. Rain would come just in time that year.

  Driving north, I could see the earth lifting. The wind was hot and smelled of tar and the moving dust.

  At the end of the big farms and the blowing fields was the reservation.

  I always knew it was coming a long way off. Even in the distance you sense hills from t heir opposites-pits, dried sloughs, ditches of cattails, potholes. And then the water. There would be water in the hills when there wasn’t any on the plains, because the hollows saved it, collected runoff from the low slopes, and the dense trees held it, too.

  I thought of water in the roots of trees, brown and bark smelling, cold.

  A

  The highway narrowed off and tangled, then turned to gravel with ruts, holes, and tall blue alfalfa bunching in the ditches.

  Small hills reared up. Dogs leaped from nowhere and ran themselves out fiercely. The dust hung thick.

  My mother lives ‘just on the very edge of the reservation with her new husband, B’ornson, who owns a solid wheat farm. She’s lived there about a year. I grew up with her in an aqua-and-silver trailer, set next to the old house on the land my great-grandparents were allotted when the government decided to turn Indians into farmers.

  The policy of allotment was a joke. As I was driving toward the land, looking around, I saw as usual how much of the reservation was sold to whites and lost forever. just three miles, and I was driving down the rutted dirt road, home.

  The main house, where all of my aunts and uncles grew up, is one big square room with a cooking shack tacked onto it. The house is a light peeling lavender now, the color of a pale petunia, but it was never painted while I lived there. My mother had it painted for Grandma as an anniversary present one year. Soon after the paint job the two old ones moved into town where things were livelier and they didn’t have to drive so far to church. Luckily, as it happened, the color suited my Aunt Aurelia, because she moved into the house and has taken care of it since.

  Driving up to the house I saw that her brown car and my mother’s creamy yellow one were parked in the yard. I got out.

  They were indoors, baking. I heard their voices from the steps and smelled the rich and browning pie crusts But when I walked into the dim, warm kitchen they hardly acknowledged me, they were so involved in their talk.

  “She sure was good-looking,” Aurelia argued, hands buried in a dishpan of potato salad.

  “Some people use spoons to mix.” My mother held out a heavy tin one from the drawer and screwed her lips up like a coin

  _”A

  purse to kiss me. She lit hey eyes and widened them. “I was only saying she had seen a few hard times, and there was bruises… .”

  “Wasn’t either. You never saw her. ” Aurelia was plump, a “looker.”

  She waved my mother’s spoon off with a caked hand.

  “In fact, did anybody see her? Nobody saw her. Nobody knows for sure what happened, so who’s to squawk about bruises and so on … nobody saw her.”

  “Well I heard,” said Mama,

  “I heard she was with a man and he dumped her off.”

  I sat down, dipped a slice of apple in the bowl of sugar cinnamon topping, and ate it. They were talking about June.

  “Heard nothing,” Aurelia snapped. “Don’t trust nothing you don’t see with your own eyes. June was all packed up and ready to come home.

  They found her bags when they busted in her room.

  She walked out there because”-Aurelia foundered, then her voice strengthened-“what did she have to come home to after all? Nothing!”

  “Nothing?” said Mama piercingly. “Nothing to come home to?” She gave me a short glance full of meaning. I had, after all, come home, even if husband less childless, driving a fall-apart car. I looked away from her. She puffed her cheeks out in concentration, patting and crimping the edges of the pies. They were beautiful pies-rhubarb, wild Juneberry, apple, and gooseberry, all fruits preserved by Grandma Kashpaw or my mother or Aurelia.

  “I suppose you washed your hands before you put t hem in that salad,”

  she said to Aurelia.

  Aurelia squeezed her face into crescents of patient exasperation.

  “Now Zelda,” she said, “your girl’s going to think you still treat me like your baby sister.”

  “Well you are aren’t you? Can’t change that.”

  “I’m back,” I said.

  They looked at me as if I had, at that very moment, walked in the door.

  “Albertine’ s home,” observed Aurelia. “My hands are full or I’d hug you.”

  “Here,” said Mama, setting down a jar of pickles near me.

  “Aren’t you dressed nice. Did you get your top in Fargo? Was the drive good?”

  I said yes.

  “Dice these pickles up.” She handed me a bowl and knife.

  “June went after Gordie like he didn’t have no choice,” my mother decided now. “She could at least have kept him happy once she got him in her clutch! It’s just clear how Gordie loved her, only now he takes it out in liquor. He’s always over at Eli’s house trying to get Ell to join him for a toot. You know, after the way June treated him, I don’t know why Gordie didn’t ‘just let her go to ruin.”

  “Well, she couldn’t get much more ruined than dead,” Aurelia said.

  The odd thing about the two-Mama with her careful permanent and rough gray face, Aurelia with her flat blue-black ponytail, high rounded cheeks, tight jeans, and frilled rodeo shirts-was the differ enter they acted the more alike they showed themselves. They clung to their rock-bottom opinions. They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

  Mama gave up discussing June after Aurelia’s observation and began on me.

  “Have you met any marriageable boys in Fargo yet?” Her flat gray thumbs pursued each other around and around in circles, leaving perfect squeezed scallops. By marriageable I knew she meant Catholic. I shook my head no.

  “At this rate I’ll be too old and stiff to take care of my own grandchildren,” Mama said. Then she smiled and shrugged her shoulders lightly. “My girl’s choosy like me,” she said. “Can’t be too choosy.”

  .… . . ……… Aurelia snorted, but contained her remark, which probably would have referred to Mama’s first husband.

  “Albertine’s got time,” Aurelia answered for me. “What’s her rush?

  Believe me”-she addressed me now with mock serious vigor-“marriage is not the answer to it all. I tried it enough myself ” “I’m not interested anyway,” I let them know. “I’ve got other things to do.”

  “Oh my,” said Mama, “are you going to be a career girl?”

  She froze with her hands in the air, seemingly paralyzed by the idea.

  “You were a career girl,” I accused her. I handed her the pickles, all diced into little cubes. Mama had kept books for the priests and nuns up at Sacred Heart since I could remember. She ignored me, however, and began to poke wheels of fork marks in the tops of the pies. Aurelia mixed. I watched my mother’s hands precisely stabbing.

  After a while we heard the car from the main road as it slowed for the turn. It would be June’s son, King, his wife, Lynette, and King junior.

  They drove up to the front steps in their brand-new sports car.

  King junior was bundled in the front seat and both Grandma and Grandpa Kashpaw were stuffed, incredibly, into the tiny backseat.

  “There’s that white girl.” Mama peeked out the window.

  “Oh, for gosh sakes.” Aurelia gave her heady snort again, and this time did not hold her tongue. “What about your Swedish boy?”

  all

  “Learnt my lesson,” Mama wiped firmly around the edges of L Aurelia’s dishpan. “Never marry a Swedish is my rule.”

  L, F Grandma Kashpaw’s rolled-down nylons and b
rown support shoes appeared first, then her head in its iron-gray pageboy. Last of all the entire rest of her squeezed through the door, swathed in acres of tiny black sprigged flowers. When I was very young, she always seemed the same size to me as the rock cairns comm em I 0 orating Indian defeats around here. But every time I saw her now I realized that she wasn’t so large, it was just that her figure was weathered and massive as a statue roughed out in rock. She never changed much, at least not so much as Grandpa. Since I’d left home, gone to school, he’d turned into an old man. Age had come upon him suddenly, like a storm in fall, shaking yellow leaves down overnight, and now his winter, deep and quiet, was on him. As Grandma shook out her dress and pulled bundles through the back window, Grandpa sat quietly in the car. He hadn’t noticed that it had stopped. “Why don’t you tell him it stopped,” Grandma called to Lynette, Lynette was changing King junior’s diaper in the front seat.

  She generally used paper diapers with stick-‘em tabs at her home in the Cities, but since she’d been here my mother had shamed her into using washable cloth diapers and sharp pins. The baby wiggled and fought her hands.

  “You hear?” King, already out of the car and nervously examining his tires, stuck his head back in the driver’s side window and barked at Lynette. “She was calling you. My father’s mother. She just told you to do something.”

  Lynette’s face, stained and swollen, bloomed over the wheel.

  She was a dirty blond, with little patches of hair that were bleached and torn. “Yes I heard,” she hissed through the safety pins in her teeth. “You tell him.”

  jerking the baby up, ankles pinned in the forks of her fingers, she repositioned the triangle of cloth under his bottom.

  “Grandma told you to tell him. ” King leaned farther in. He had his mother’s long slim legs, and I remembered all at once, seeing him bend all the way into the car, June bending that way too. Me behind her.

  She had pushed a rowboat off the gravel beach of some lake we’d all gone to visit together. I had jumped into the rowboat with her. She had one son at the time and didn’t think that she would ever have another child.

  So she spoiled me and told me everything, believing I did not understand. She told me things you’d only tell another woman, full grown, and I had adored her wildly for these adult confidences, for her wreaths of blue smoke, for the figure she cut. I had adored her into telling me everything she needed to tell, and it was true, I hadn’t understood the words at the time. But she hadn’t counted on my memory.

  Those words stayed with me.

  And even now, King was saying something to Lynette that had such an odd dreaming ring to it I almost heard it spoken out in June’s voice.

  June had said,

  “He used the flat of his hand. He hit me good.”

  And now I heard her son say, flat of my hand … but good …”

  Lynette rolled out the door, shedding cloth and pins, packing the bare-bottomed child on her hip, and I couldn’t tell what had happened.

  Grandpa hadn’t noticed, whatever it was. He turned to the open door and stared at his house.

  “This reminds me of something,” he said.

  “Well, it should. It’s your house!” Mama barreled out the door, grabbed both of his hands, and pulled him out of the little backseat.

  “You have your granddaughter here, Daddy!” Zelda shrieked carefully into Grandpa’s face. “Zelda’s daughter. She came all the way up here to visit from school.”

  “Zelda … born September fourteenth, nineteen forty one …

  “No, Daddy. This here is my daughter, Albertine. Your granddaughter. ” I took his hand.

  Dates, numbers, figures stuck with Grandpa since he strayed, and not the tiring collection of his spawn, proliferating beyond those numbers into nowhere. He took my hand and went along, trusting me whoever I was.

  Whenever he came out to the home place now, Grandpa had to get reacquainted with the yard of stunted oaks, marigold beds, the rusted car that had been his children’s playhouse and mine, the few hills of potatoes and stalks of rhubarb that Aurelia still grew. She worked nights, managing a bar called the So Long, and couldn’t keep the place as nicely as Grandpa always had.

  Walking him slowly across the lawn, I sidestepped prickers. The hollyhocks were choked with pigweed, and the stones that lined the driveway, always painted white or blue, were flaking back to gray. So was the flat boulder under the clothesline-once my favorite cool place to sit doing nothing while the clothes dried, hiding me.

  This land had been allotted to Grandpa’s mother, old Rushes Bear, who had married the original Kashpaw. When allotments were handed out all of her eighteen children except the youngest-twins, Nector and Eli-had been old enough to register for their own. But because there was no room for them in the North Dakota wheat lands most were deeded less-desirable parcels far off, in Montana, and had to move there or sell. The older children left, but the twin brothers still lived on opposite ends of Rushes Bear’s land.

  She had let the government put Nector in school, but hidden Eli, the one she couldn’t part with, in the root cellar dug beneath herflOOL In that way she gained a son on either side of the line.

  Nector came home from boarding school knowing white reading and writing, while Eli knew the woods. Now, these many years later, hard to tell why or how, my Great-uncle Eli was still sharp, while Grandpa’s mind had left us, gone wary and wild. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

  I wanted him to tell me about things that happened before my time, things I’d been too young to understand. The politics for instance.

  What had gone on? He’d been an astute political dealer, people said, horse-trading with the government for bits and shreds. Somehow he’d gotten a school built, a factory too, and he’d kept the land from losing its special Indian status under that policy called termination. I wanted to know it all. I kept asking questions as we walked along, as if he’d take the hook by miracle and blurt the memory out right there.

  “Remember how you testified . ? What was it like … the old schools … Washington …

  Elusive, pregnant with history, his thoughts finned off and vanished.

  The same color as water. Grandpa shook his head, remembering dates with no events to go with them, names without faces, things that happened out of place and time. Or at least it seemed that way to me.

  Grandma and, the others were always hushing up the wild things he said or talking loudly over them.

  Maybe they were bored with his craziness, and then again maybe his mind blurted secrets from the past. If the last was true, sometimes I thought I understood.

  Perhaps his loss of memory was a protection from the past, absolving him of whatever had happened. He had lived hard in his time. But he smiled into the air and lived calmly now, with’ It or desolation. When he thought of June, for instance, she was a young girl who fed him black plums. That was the way she would always be for him. His great-grandson, King junior, was happy because he hadn’t yet acquired a memory, while perhaps Grandpa’s happiness was in losing his.

  We walked back down the driveway, along the flaking rocks. “He likes that busted lawn chair,” Grandma hollered now, leaning out the door.

  “Set him there awhile.”

  “Want me to get you a plate from the kitchen?” I asked Grandpa.

  “Some bread and butter?”

  But he was looking at the collapsed heap anxiously and did not answer.

  I pulled the frayed, woven plastic and aluminum into the shape of a chair, he settled into it, and I left him counting something under his breath. Clouds. Trees. All the blades of grass.

  I went inside. Grandma was unlocking her expensive canned ham. She patted it before putting it in the oven and closed the door carefully.

  “She’s not used to buying this much meat, “Zelda said. “Remember
we used to trade for it?”

  “Or slaughter our own.” Aurelia blew a round gray cloud of Winston smoke across the table.

  “Pew,” said Zelda. “Put the top on the butter.” She flapped her hand in front of her nose. “You know, Mama, I bet this makes you wish it was like it used to be. All us kids in the kitchen again. ” “Oh, I never had no trouble with kids,” Grandma wiped each finger on a dishrag. “Except for once in a while.”

  “Except for when?” asked Aurelia.

  “Well now …” Grandma lowered herself onto a long-legged stool, waving Zelda’s more substantial chair away. Grandma liked to balance on that stool like an oracle on her tripod. “There was that time someone tried to hang their little cousin,” she declared, and then stopped short.

  The two aunts gave her quick, unbelieving looks. Then they were both uneasily silent, neither of them willing to take up the slack and tell the story I knew was about June. I’d heard Aurelia and my mother laughing and accusing each other of the hanging in times past, when it had been only a family story and not the private trigger of special guilts. They looked at me, wondering if I knew about the hanging, but neither would open her lips to ask.

  So I said I’d heard June herself tell it.

  “That’s right,” Aurelia jumped in. “June told it herself. If she minded being hung, well she never let on!”

  “If she minded! You were playing cowboys.

  “Ha,” Zelda said You and Gordie had her up on a box, the rope looped over a branch, tied on her neck, very accurate. If she minded! I had to rescue her myself!”

  “Oh, I know,” Aurelia admitted. “But we saw it in the movies.

  Kids imitate them, you know. We got notorious after that, me and Gordie. Remember Zelda? How you came screaming in the house for Mama?”

  “Mama! Mama!” Grandma yodeled an imitation of her daughter.

  “They’re hanging June!”

  “You came running out there, Mama!” Zelda was swept into the story.