Love Medicine Read online

  Neither Bev nor Gerry came back for a long time. Bev had liked the idea of Gerry going along with him, but got more than bnxz ; dp+ +;-.

  A ” in’detenrlon, aa to’W111,;’, day I think that Bev turned him in. I wasn’t too worried over that, however, since no white man has made a j’all that could hold the son of Old Man Pillager.

  That’s one father’s name I gave away now, free. But of course Pillager was not sitting in the council room that night. And if he’d known about the fire, he would have scorched Kashpaw’s hands with it.

  How do I know? How can I say it was Kashpaw who lit my house?

  I can say so because of what I saw in his eyes when I looked deeply through him, after I told him about my marriage on the street like he was just any passing acquaintance. My house was burning in his eyes, and I was trapped there, alone, on fire with my own fire. The red-eyed moths had come out of the trees where they hid themselves, looking exactly like dead leaves.

  Drawn by the bright flames, they’d come helplessly to burn.

  That fated night the boys, all except for the youngest, Lyman, were off in town hanging at the outskirts of a large jackpot bingo.

  I left Lyman home just for a moment and went down across the road to Florentine’s house to trade some commodity rice she had extra and would give me in exchange for cigarettes and powdered eggs. We had a cup of coffee while I was there. We talked of this and that. It was the chance they were watching my house to take.

  When she poured the second cup I saw the flames shooting out of the black liquid as it streamed from the pot. I got up and left without saying good-bye. To this day she tells how Lamartine saw her house was burning in the pour of her coffee.

  She doesn’t know I saw it first in Kashpaw’s eyes.

  She doesn’t know what I saw when I got in eyeshot of my yard.

  Smoke had unrolled from the windows and wrapped itself into a giant tube that fled straight toward heaven in that cloudless, windless dusk.

  I threw rice in the air like a hundred weddings and took to my heels.

  Already voices had stopped behind me, shouting on the road. I ran in a beeline wasting no breath, no time. I’d left Lyman sleeping in that house with the radio going in his ear.

  I ran straight in the door.

  Of course I choked. I got down on my hands and knees, crawling like a toddler baby in and out the rooms under burdensome heat. Smoke. The roof was ‘just about to cave and Lyman wasn’t nowhere to be found. Yet a mother’s heart was certain that her son was in the house. I stopped underneath my table to get my bearings, and then I knew. Sometimes he would go inside my private closet and lay against my clothes and shoes.

  He liked the dark of it, I guess. The woman smells of cloth and perfumes.

  Sometimes after I’d come home he would be sleeping on my closet floor.

  I crawled in there. He was nuzzled in my nightgowns, overcome. I guess I heaved him out the bedroom window and fell after him into the hollyhocks. The tribal fire trucks were all broken down at the time.

  That was their plan.

  And so, after all of us were safe, there was nothing to do but stand and watch it burn.

  How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud. I’ll get past the ragged leaves that dead burn of my youth looked into. I’ll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

  After the house burnt to blackened sticks they came around. My people.

  “Lamartine,” they said. “Poor Lulu. Come stay with us, Will you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going to live right here.”

  And I did live on the very spot where the house had stood. For two months we camped there in a shack made out of bent sheets of tin siding, busted boards, burnt wood. We hauled water in cans. The summer was dry and hot. In the hulks of our busted down cars my boys slept comfortably and well. People brought us food and beer. The Sisters gave us clothes. But we lived there like a pack of wild animals, and after a while it became a disgrace even to those who did not know the meaning of disgrace. The tribe finally built a cracker box government house for us.

  They put it on a strip of land rightfully repurchased from a white farmer. That land was better than Henry’s, even, with a view overlooking town. From there I could see everything.

  I accepted their restitution.

  Time went fleetingly by until every one of my boys was a grownup man.

  Some did me grief, though I was proud of them. Gerry was one. In and out of prison, yet inspiring the Indian people, that was his life.

  Like myself he could not hold his wildness in.

  The other one who went wild on me was unexpected. That was Henry junior. All his life he did things right, and then the war showed him right was wrong. Something broke in him. His mind gave way. He was past all touch when he returned. I would catch his gaze sometimes and think I recognized it from somewhere.

  One day I knew. He had the same dead wide stare as the man in my playhouse. It did not surprise me so much, then, to hear the words on Lyman’s mouth the day he hitchhiked from the river.

  “It was an accident,” Lyman said, coming in the door. He looked half gone himself. I threw an afghan on his shoulders.

  “Don’t say nothing.” I led him over to a chair. He sat in shock.

  “The car went in,” he said. “Out of control.” There was a false note in his voice, and I knew he had planned to say this. I also knew that no accident would have taken Henry junior’s life, not after he had the fortune to get through a war and a prison camp alive.

  But like the time they came to tell me the news of Henry Senior, I said nothing. I knew what people needed to believe.

  For a while after Henry junior died, Lyman was affected. He had always been carefree, a lover of nice things and ironed clothes like myself, with the golden touch for money from his father. He got morose. He could not snap out of it but slowly improved his outlook by working. He became a contractor, hired on his brothers, and in that way supported us all.

  And so we stuck together on that strip of land that was once sun beat and bare of trees. Wives and children, in-laws, cousins, all collected there in trailers and more old car hulks. Box elder trees and oak scrub were planted and grew up. We even had a gooseberry patch. It became a regular nest of Lamartines. I’d had my first daughter, my last child, when I was almost fifty years old.

  Bonita’s father was a Mexican who followed the sugar beet harvests.

  That’s why her name was a little different. Our life went on. We saw the factory go up and then fall as it was meant to.

  Nobody cared whose land it stood on anymore. Even the biggest problems got long lost in time, careful time, that undid us all, like Kashpaw’s hands with their flowered lies.

  When I was over sixty-five and losing my sight, I had strings pulled to get a little two-room at the Senior Citizens. For years I’d just had the junk other people pawned off on me. Bouquets of plastic flowers that looked like they’d faded over graves, dishes of stained green plastic, clothes that went two for a quarter in the Bundles. I threw it all out and started over fresh. My apartment -had painted block walls.

  I bought pictures of trees, dancers, wolves, and John Kennedy. I bought the classic called Plunge of the Brave, which everyone had whether they liked Kashpaw and wanted to venerate his youth, or did not like him and therefore made fun of his naked leap.

  My boys went in together and bought me furniture. A match law ing set.

  And then, after my new plush rocker was set in the middle of the room, after they brought in my radio and straightened the place around, after my boys toasted me with beers and left for the Lamartine homesite once more, I sat there. I felt the liquid golden last days of my oats.

  And that is where the second half of this story starts.<
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  I had nothing to do with the fact that Nector Kashpaw went foolish.

  He had brains and heart to spare but never had to use them for himself He never fought. So when his senses started slipping he just let them dribble out. At least that’s the way I look at it, knowing him as I did.

  I kept my grudge, although hard feelings were not as a rule my policy.

  But he’d done the worst that anyone had ever done to me.

  I could do without my hair, without my house. My pride was what he pricked. Perhaps my grudge against Nector reached the size it did because I never spread the bad feeling around. Nobody would have guessed.

  I knew he was at the Senior Citizens, but I hadn’t yet seen him or his wife, Marie, on the morning I went walking those halls. As it turned out I just about ran into him. My vision was so bad I only saw dim shapes or holes of space, and when I walked past the candy machine I thought that he was attached to it. But the less I saw the more I had developed my other senses, so I felt what I knew were a man’s eyes upon me before I could tell where he was.

  I turned toward the gaze and saw the shape I knew was Kashpaw, even though the outline of him was vague, cracked and shifting.

  “Hello Nector,” I said.

  And now I heard h;s breath. He said no word.

  “It’s me. Lulu,” I told him. “Have I changed so much?”

  He repeated my name flatly as he would have said doorknob.

  Then he turned to the candy machine and gave it a hard shove. I heard, the little paper packages in the slots whisk back and rustle.

  A strange complicated hesitation swept over me. Part of me wanted to walk away. People had told me that he was changed, but I guess I had not believed it. Now it was one way or the other.

  He was here. As much as I wanted to leave I also wanted to stay and put my arms around him, simply, in the broad daylight of our old age.

  He shoved the tin box again then struck it with the flat of his hand.

  The way he gulped he could have been crying.

  “Sometimes they just take your money,” I said.

  “Peanut butter cups. ” He turned from the machine’s lit face. “I wanted a pack of them peanut butter cups,” he said. And I realized that bit of candy was all he had in his mind. I was less than a chair or an old shoe to NeCtOr.

  Wasn’t that just like him? People said Nector Kashpaw had changed, but the truth was he’d just become more like himself than ever. I left him mourning at the window of the glowing machine, staring at the array in a child’s billow of frustration. It was too soon to tell what I felt for him. I suppose I felt sorry for what a greedy thing he’d been all along, and how it showed now.

  But I didn’t go back and give him a quarter. I still cared enough about him not to do that.

  Now as I said, his wife, Marie, also lived in the home. It might seem odd I never spoke of her yet, but really it’s not. I never wanted to admit the existence of wives, you see, and they were just as anxious not to realize about Lulu I.Amartine. If we could have snapped our fingers to get rid of each other we would have done that. But since we couldn’t, we did the next best and ignored. That’s not to say I didn’t notice her. She was big and slightly hunched with bad legs. On hot days I guess it hurt her very much to move.

  Marie was always good at taking care of things, and once she got to Senior Citizens she started right in with organizing pinochle nights.

  Sometimes I played cards with a magnifying glass and sometimes I ‘just played by feel and what I could hear. My ears had seemed to grow ]like radar. That was how I heard my name come up in conversation under bids on the far side of the room.

  “Standing by the candy machine with Lulu the other day.

  I heard a voice tell another. Who? I had a feeling it was Marie.

  And sure enough I heard another voice I recognized as hers an’He’s like a child now. He’s just got to have his candy come swer. I I what might.”

  I understood it was the nature of his disease Marie was talking about, and not the times Kashpaw came in my window. But it might as well have been that. The way it hit me she was correct.

  He always did have to have his candy come what might and whether Lulu or Marie was damaged by his taking it. All that mattered was his greed.

  And the odd thing was, I loved him for it.

  We were two of a kind. There is no getting around that. We took our pleasure without asking or thinking further than a touch. We were so deeply sunk in the land of our greed it took the court action of the tribe and a house on fire to pull us out.

  Hearing her voice I tried imagining what Marie must have thought. He came each week in the middle of the night. She must have known he wasn’t out taking walks to see the beauty of the dark heaven. I wondered. Of course, there was no way I could ask her. It was probably too late, after the fact and all, to get to know her. I thought of joining one of the entertainment or health committees she was on, but my nerve failed. And, besides, I was suffering worse from the eyesight every day, almost as how.-, if the longer I sat quiet in the Senior Citizens, reflecting on the human heart, the more inward turned my vision, until I was almost blind to the outside world.

  Was it the blindness itself, so black it matched his lifelong greed?

  Was it the true remaining desire of my wants? Or was what happened just plain stupidity?

  One day I was cutting back rhubarb in the courtyard when he came up behind me with a stick in his hand. I knew, as if by instinct, it was one of those dandelion diggers, forked like his tongue.

  “Don’t bother me,” I said, walking back in the building. He followed. I had a load in the laundry room to check. He stepped into the room behind me, and then he shut the door. I turned to him, silent.

  “Lulu, call the dogs off,” he said.

  After all the grudge, the pity, I could not help but take him in

  “Down boys,” I whispered. “Leave Nector be.”

  my arms. I He held me tightly, and we began to kiss. But things being what they were, what with him knocking off my wig and Lipsha Morrissey popping in unexpectedly to ask what was going on, nothing really went too far after that first surprising embrace. As soon as I got free I walked out of there leaving my laundry sitting in the tumblers.

  Dreamstuff. It was all I needed at this time.

  Once I gave the tribal council hell about their mortal illusions.

  And yet here I was making my one big mistake in life over again for the sake of illusion. What I felt for Nector was just elusive dreams but no less powerful for being false. He had no true memory or mind.

  I should have known that.

  I was down in Grand Forks, surviving my operation, when Nector Kashpaw died. I saw no ghostly green light, heard no voice.

  Nothing unusual happened to inform me of his passing. Lyman told me about it the day after, when he came down to take me back to Senior Citizens. In a strange way I took the news calmly, but I was grateful the pads of cotton were taped over my eyes. I was glad not to show all I felt, and yet Lyman must have noticed something.

  “He was your boyfriend once, wasn’t he?” Lyman asked after my long silence. His voice was hesitating, almost sad. I pictured Lyman about ten years old. He was chubbier then and kept his dimes in an old Nesbits pop bottle.

  “Where did you hear about me and Kashpaw?”

  “Around. ” “I was always a hot topic,” I said.

  I could feel that he didn’t smile. He was never quite the same after Henry.

  “You know what?” he sighed after a while. “I don’t really want to know.”

  Of course, he did know that Kashpaw was his father. What he really meant was there was nothing to be done about it anymore.

  I felt the loss. I wanted to hold my son in my lap and let him cry.

  Even blind, a mother knows when her boy is holding in a painful silence.

  But we got packed and never said another word all the way home. The new expensive car, the first one he’d bought since the c
onvertible, was cool and tight inside as a cave. It hadn’t struck me, going down to the hospital, but on the way back I was sad at the thought that we would soon arrive at a place, break our silence, and leave the soft deep bucket seats.

  “Let’s go driving around someday,” I said when he let me into my apartment.

  But he didn’t answer. He just said he had to go.

  Nothing ever hurt me like the day Lyman walked into my trailer with mud in his hair. The worst thing was, every time I think back, that Henry junior died by drowning. I could not get it from my head. Old Man Pillager told me, when we were on the closest terms, how drowning was the worst death for a Chippewa to experience. By all accounts, the drowned weren’t allowed into the next life but forced to wander forever, broken shoed, cold, sore, and ragged. There was no place for the drowned in heaven or anywhere on earth. That is what I never found it easy to forget, and that is also the reason I broke custom very often and spoke Henry junior’s name, out loud, on my tongue.

  I wanted him to know, if he heard, that he still had a home.

  Nector Kashpaw did not die by drowning, but he wandered for a while.

  Blind in my room I mourned Nector, although I knew we had really parted long ago, on the night my dogs tore the meat scraps out of his hands and then started in on him. I heard their brute cries following him over the next hill, out of my life. I screamed so hard inside, laughing at the cartoon picture of him running, that I had to stuff the corner of the pillow between my teeth. But after that night I thought he couldn’t truly hurt me, even with his death.

  It surprised me, after all, how much I felt.

  There were so many things I never cried for. I knew if I started now I would have to waste all the rest of my last years. Besides that there weren’t tears in me. I was incapable. The operation had my eyes so dried out. I was going to get someone to put the drops in, for Lyman said he couldn’t. I wasn’t ever supposed to stoop down, scream, or jig again because the stitching in my eye might slip.