Love Medicine Page 24

  That is why, after the funeral, when Nector came back from the other side to visit me, I kept still.

  It was an odd time to remember doctor’s orders, but I’d never been in quite the situation. Naturally I couldn’t see him, but I woke up the minute he whispered my name. It was how he’d sometimes come to me in the old days, making his way through the window so soundlessly he’d be underneath my covers just as I woke up, and then I’d turn … And he was there like so long ago. I remembered the doctor’s advice to keep still. I felt the long weight of Nector, cold with the chill of early morning, and I smelled the lilac bath soap on his hands.

  All through my room the moths had hit their eyes. I felt their soft presences and the breeze of their fanning wings, tufted feelers, and the night passed in his arms, and the darkness did not lift.

  New worlds, I thought, beyond this. Things of which I’d never heard.

  Yet, when morning had apparently come, life went on even more usual than usual. I had put in my request for an aide at the desk but they didn’t have enough aides for all who needed them.

  That’s why Marie volunteered to take care of me. She knocked that morning. I let her in.

  Things are new even at the age when we are supposed to have seen everything. We sat down for coffee and listened to the early morning music hour on the radio. I thought her voice was like music in itself, ripe and quiet. I had gotten so good at listening I appreciated just the sound of it. I gave her a pillow I’d made out of those foam rubber petals they sell in kits.

  “This is real nice,” she said. “I never learned how to do this kind of thing.”

  “You were always too busy taking children in,” I told her.

  Then there was something I had to get off my chest.

  “I appreciate you coming here to help me get my vision,” I said.

  “But the truth is I have no regrets.”

  “That’s all right.” She was almost impersonal in her kindness.

  Her voice had lightened. “There’s a pattern of three lines in the wood.”

  I didn’t understand, so she put it another way.

  “Somebody had to put the tears into your eyes.”

  We fell to hearing the music again.

  She did not mention Nector’s funeral. We did not talk about Nector.

  He was already there. Too much might start the flood gates flowing and our moment would be lost. It was enough

  “Just to sit there without words. We mourned him the same way together. That was the point. It was enough. For the first time I saw exactly how another woman felt, and it gave me deep comfort, surprising. It gave me the knowledge that whatever had happened the night before, and in the past, would finally be over once my bandages came off.

  She got my eye drops from the table. I tipped my head back and felt her gently peel the tape from my cheeks. She wiped my eyes with a warm washcloth. I blinked. The light was cloudy but I could already see.

  She swayed down like a dim mountain, huge and blurred, the way a mother must look to her just born child.

  CROSSING THE WATER r .J a S (1984) 1.

  HOWARD KASHPAW He watched the women in their blue nightgowns with the jars on their heads. They went around and around the bathroom in rows.

  Sometimes they disappeared behind the cabinets, the toilet tank, Or tub, but always they came out in single file again. They never stumbled.

  They never had to steady their jars. Their calm tread calmed him. Below the cracked tiles they walked in seamless gowns.

  Now and then, outside, his father kicked the table.

  “He’s busted out again. I’m sunk.”

  A note that sounded childish even to the child was in the voice.

  Spoons, bowls, ashtrays, and bottles clinked together. That was not so bad. The bad part was his big voice ripping out, then getting childish.

  His mother screamed.

  “What about us? What about us?”

  -mom She said his father could only think about himself. She screamed until the women on the wall trembled. King junior’s nightmare was to see their jars crack or their arms fall off while she screamed.

  But this did not happen. The miracle was that they stayed put together, flowing forward, moving around him in a circle.

  In school, they called him Howard. It happened like this: The first grade teacher had said to his mother,

  “Your boy is very bright, Mrs. Kashpaw. Did you teach him how to read?”

  “I don’t know how he learned it,” his mother had said. “Unless from thatfV program.”

  King Junior watched everything, but Sesame Street was what taught him.

  He read the backs of cereal boxes, labels on cans, the titles in her love magazines. He was ahead of the other children in kindergarten, and so they put him in the first grade.

  “King Howard Kashpaw, junior,” said his new teacher.

  “Which of those names would you like to be called?”

  He had never thought about it.

  “Howard,” he was surprised to hear himself answer. It was that simple.

  After that he was Howard at school.

  They were cutting out red paper hearts one afternoon. Hearts to tack up on the bulletin boards. The teacher had a black Magic Marker. One by one the children went up to his desk and used his Magic Marker to write their name s in the center of their hearts.

  The sharp-smelling ink soaked into the paper. PERMANENT, it said on the marker’s label. “That means forever,” said the teacher when Howard asked. “It won’t erase.”

  “Good,” said Howard.

  He sat down and watched the teacher tape his heart on the wall. The wall was green. Placed against the wall, oddly, the heart seemed to pulse. In and out. He stared at the heart with his name firmly inside of it, and suddenly something moved inside of him. He felt a ‘olt of strangeness. For a moment he was heavy, full of meaning.

  Howard was sitting there. Howard was both familiar and different.

  Howard was living in this body like a house.

  Howard Kashpaw.

  At home, the blue women continued to circle. A neighbor had come by and hit the door with a broom handle. Their voices went down after that.

  “What should we do? What should we do?”

  they said. He thought the police might come to get his father again.

  It had happened once before in the middle of a normal day. They had come to the door and snapped the circles on big King’s wrists. Now he heard his father and mother go into the next room, then they were’ quiet. He leaned back against the porcelain tank. He could sleep now; whatever she screamed about was over.

  LIPS HA MORRISSEY King Kashpaw was advising me: 14 There’s no way you’re gonna lose the M. P Shit. Turn yourself in! I know them bastards don’t let up on you, man. I was in the Marines. ” “You been a lot of places,” Lynette told her husband roughly.

  “Stillwater Pen?”

  “Fuck that for now. I was in Nam.”

  “He never got off the West Coast.” Lynette leaned back to me with a bleery confiding look. Not that she’d been drinking She seemed punch-addled or half asleep. “We listen to him anyway,” she winked.

  “How he does blab on.”

  King glared at the little green-and-yellow-checkered mat in the middle of the table, but he didn’t take up the challenge. In the past couple of years his face had pouched up and swelled. He was a wreck of a good-time boy now, with a soft belly in his T-shirt and eyes usually squeezed shut against the harsh light.

  “Them bastards ‘just won’t let up on you,” he repeated.

  He was drinking cans of 7-Up. There was about a case of empties scattered all around the apartment. I had never seen him drinking pop before.

  “Go bite,” Lynette told him. “I wouldn’t let those MPs get a hold of me. ” She shook her head in my direction. She’d frizzed her hair out in a solid-red halo. “What made you sign with the dumb-shit army anyway?” she asked.

  “I had a feeling my mother w
ould have wanted me to,” I said.

  They got uncomfortable quiet and gave each other a quick glance.

  That’s when I knew they both knew the secret of who my mother was.

  They had both known all along. There was too many who had known. Too many for me to hate them one by one. So I just smiled, although my stomach was a churning washer full of dimes.

  I was King’s half brother, see, a bastard son of June’s.

  The old lady who told me this fact was the one who put the spell on Grandpa Kashpaw in his youth. Some said she caused him, later, to lose his senses. It was Lulu Lamartine-the jab wa witch whose foundation garments was a nightmare cage for little birds.

  I’d had a lowdown opinion of Lulu, like most, but I’ll respect her from now on because her motives was correct in telling me.

  She made an effort. She told me about June in a simple way that let me know that grownup business was meant.

  After she told me I tried, I really did try, to take it all in my grain of thought. But here, as you’ll see in the eventual telling, I met with a failure of the heart. In the end that was the overbearing reason I joined up.

  So to go on with the story, I was walking in the hall of the Senior Citizens one day when Lulu opened her door and leaned out beckoning. She had red lacquer on her hooks, bangle jewelry all up her arms, and her head was like a closet of crows. A ragring wig.

  “Come on in here,” she said. “Young man we got something to talk about.”

  “I don’t think so, Mrs. Lamartine.

  I was quite careful. To tell the truth I was afraid of her. She scared people after the bandages came off her eyes, because she seemed to know everybody else’s business. No one understood that like I did.

  For you see, having what they call the near-divine healing touch, I know that such things are purely possible. If she had some kind of power, I wasn’t one to doubt.

  That time the Defender girl was less than two months pregnant Lulu knew about it just from touching her hand.

  When Old Man Bunachi got a mistaken thousand-dollar credit from the government in his social security check, she asked him for a tiding-over loan. He had been keeping it a secret.

  What about Germaine? She told Germaine to quit hoarding commodity flour and give it away because there was worms in it.

  How do you figure?

  Insight. It was as though Lulu knew by looking at you what was the true bare-bone elements of your life. It wasn’t like that before she had the operation on her eyes, but once the bandages come off she saw.

  She saw too clear for comfort.

  Only Grandma Kashpaw wasn’t one trifle out of current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu was thick as thieves now.

  That too was odd. If you’ll just picture them together knowing everybody’s life, as if they had hot lines to everybody’s private thoughts, you’ll know why people started rushing past their doors.

  They feared one of them would reach out, grab them into their room, and tell them all the secrets they tried to hide from themselves.

  Which is of course just what happened to Lipsha Morrissey.

  Lulu grabbed me.

  She might be soft and sweet as marshmallows, but in her biceps there was tension steel. She had run her nails beneath my collar, and I was whisked in before I could draw breath to yell.

  Clapped right down in her plastic armchair and scared to move for starting a fateful apartment-wide avalanche of sharp-edged ashtrays and painted poodles, I breathed a sigh. Caught but good, I thought. I wasn’t really scared so much as irritated to be treated so abrupt. I was sure I knew all my secrets, see, and hadn’t anything to hide.

  But I was wrong. As soon as she’d said,

  “I talked this over with your mother long ago,” I knew she was going to tell me something on which I’d shut the door.

  And when she said,

  “Not your stepmother, not Marie, but your mother in the flesh …” my worst thought was confirmed.

  “I don’t want to hear,” I told Lulu flat out. “My real, mother’s Grandma Kashpaw. That’s how I consider her, and why not?

  Seeing as my blood mother wanted to tie a rock around my neck and throw me in the slough.”

  “that’s what you always been told,” said Lulu calmly.

  “Been told?”

  Sure enough, I was hooked then. I took her bait.

  “What do you mean?”

  So she up and spilled the beans.

  “You’re nineteen years old now? That makes it twenty years ago this happened. My son Gerry-you know him, in Illinois doing time now-was just out of high school. One day he came home and told he how he’d got his eye set on this beautiful woman,

  “She’s got a beautiful shape,” he said. “She has class.” He didn’t say that she was also very bold, or that she was already married, or even that she had a child. He didn’t tell me those facts! He just said,

  “Mom I think I’ll marry her.” He presented me with it. The only drawback was she was what you’d call an older woman.

  More experienced. But who cares past a certain point anyhows?

  People talked, but those two went together and fell in love. Well, the inevitable happened pretty soon. That pretty woman started wearing a big wide tent dress. My boy left. Then I don’t know what happened between them, because, not long after, a little baby was placed in your Grandma Kashpaw’s arms. The woman went back to her husband, Gordie Kashpaw. As you know, they did not live very happily ever after.

  Neither did my Gerry. In fact, it looks like you had the best life of them all.”

  I couldn’t take it in.

  “You went and made this up for laughs,” I said. “I ain’t June Kashpaw’s son.”

  “Her father was a Morrissey,” said Lulu, “figure that.”

  So I figured. My head felt put on strange. A buzzing sound was starting in the room.

  I looked at her, and all of a sudden here was the next odd thing: I saw that Lulu Lamartine and Lipsha Morrissey had the same nose. Hers was little, semi-squashed in, straight and flat. Mine was a bigger, flatter version of hers down to the squashed-in tip. It was like seeing something in a mirror that’s not your face.

  - “I’m scared to death of you,” I said. “Old witch, you tell me lies!”

  “You spoilt child, ” she said. “Who else would you want to hear it from? They all know. Grandma Kashpaw, she’s afraid to tell you because she loves you like a son. It frightens her to think you might run off.

  June’s dead. My son Gerry’s in the clink. Gordie’s drying out, but he wouldn’t tell you anyhow. They all know it though, all of them Kashpaws. What the heck is it anyway? Do you like being the only one that’s ignorant?”

  “No,” I said.

  She softened. Her hard little black eyes toned down and misted.

  That black crow feather duster on her head seemed to fold its wings and settle.

  “I got a letter,” she said, then she smiled. “Your dad Gerry’s –-odd been so good they’re going to transfer him back to the state pen.

  There ain’t a prison that can hold the son of Old Man Pillager, a Nanapush man. You should be proud that you’re one.

  “I’m the only one that had nothing to lose by telling you all this,” she went on after a short pause. “It’s simple. I either gain a grandson or lose a young man who didn’t like me in the first place.”

  I sat there in total quiet. She had caught me but good.

  “Well,” she said after a while, “which is it?”

  Consideration got me no place the next day and a half I thought at first I would pretend like nothing happened, and just go about my business.

  But as I walked here and there on the reservation, swept the bingo hall, cleaned up pop-tops in the playground, I could not help but dwell on the subject of myself. Lipsha Morrissey, who’d learned so much in his short life. Who had lost and regained the touch. Lipsha Morrissey who was now on the verge of knowing who he was.

  I was
confused.

  Had my mother tried to sling me in the marsh? I went back to Lulu and asked.

  “No,” she said. “June was ‘just real upset about the whole thing.

  Your Grandma Kashpaw took you on because the truth is she had a fond spot for June, just like she’s got one for you.

  Besides that, Gordie couldn’t handle another man’s son. They’re all jealous of Gerry Nanapush on this reservation.”

  I was still confused.

  Had June mentioned me at all in the time I was growing up?

  “Yes,” said Lulu. “She watched you from a distance, and hoped you would forgive her some day. She wondered why you turned out odd.”

  “I turned out odd?”

  “Well I never thought you was odd,” she said. “Just troubled.

  You never knew who you were. That’s one reason why I told you.

  I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you.”

  Again I sat there in total silence.

  “Well,” she said, “make or break?”

  I didn’t know. I was still trying to compass it all out. It was the tax ingest problem my brain had ever had to work with. I know that Grandma Kashpaw tried to give me help. She used up her cans of commodity beef to keep my strength up. She fought Old Lady Blue at the mission bundle sales to acquire a Stetson practically new except for a burnt hole through the crown. One night she said that she didn’t trust the banks no more and showed me where she’d stuck her money. She had it all tied up in a little pink hankie and stuck amid her underskirts.

  “I’m an old woman,” she said. “What do I need with this?”

  Maybe I was mis constructing but the more I thought about the way she looked at me when she said that, the more I felt like Grandma was offering me something. Bus fare, maybe, the chance to get away from here in my confusion. Whatever it was she really meant, I finally did the wicked act you might have already been expecting.

  I stole into Grandma Kashpaw’s apartment and sneaked the hankie full of money from her drawer.

  As my hand was feeling for that hankie, I heard her breathing in the dark bed, pretending to be asleep. I was doing what she was afraid of and running away. More than anything I wanted to say I’d get back as soon as I could, reassure her somehow, but I couldn’t. My throat choked up.