Love Medicine Page 4

  “Them Michifs ask like that,” Eli said. “You got to ask a real old Cree like me for the right words.”

  “Tell ‘em Uncle Eli,” Lynette said with a quick burst of drunken enthusiasm. “They’ve got to learn their own heritage!

  When you go it will all be gone!”

  “What you saying there, woman. Hey!” King shouted, filling the kitchen with the jagged tear of his voice. “When you talk to my relatives have a little respect. ” He put his arms up and shoved at her breasts.

  “You bet your life, Uncle Eli,” he said more quietly, leaning back on the table. “You’re the greatest hunter. But I’m the World’s Greatest Fisherman.”

  “No you ain’t,” Eli said. His voice was effortless and happy- “I caught a fourteen-inch trout.”

  King looked at him carefully, focusing with difficulty. “You’re the greatest then,” he admitted. “Here.”

  He reached over and plucked away Eli’s greasy olive-drab hat.

  Eli’s head was brown, shiny through the white crew-cut stubble.

  want King took off his blue hat and pushed it down on Eli’s head.

  The hat slipped over Eli’s eyes.

  “It’s too big for him!” Lynette screamed in a tiny outraged voice.

  King adjusted the hat’s plastic tab.

  “I gave you that hat, King! That’s your best hat!” Her voice rose sharply in its trill. “You don’t give that hat away!”

  Ell sat calmly underneath the hat. It fit him perfectly. He seemed oblivious to King’s sacrifice and just sat, his old cap perched on his knee, turning the can around and around in his hand without drinking.

  King swayed to his feet, clutched the stuffed plastic backrest of the chair. His voice was ripped and swollen. “Uncle Ell.” He bent over the old man. “Uncle Ell, you’re my uncle.”

  “Damn right,” Eli agreed.

  “I always thought so much of you, my uncle!” cried King in a loud, unhappy wall.

  “Damn right,” said Eli. He turned to Gordie. “He’s drunk on his behind. I got to agree with him.”

  “I think the fuckin’ world of you, Uncle!”

  “Damn right. I’m an old man,” Eli said in a flat, soft voice.

  King suddenly put his hands up around his ears and stumbled out the door.

  “Fresh air be good for him,” said Gordie, relieved. “Say there, Albertine. You ever hear this one joke about the Indian, the Frenchman, and the Norwegian in the French Revolution?”

  “Issat a Norwegian joke?” Lynette asked. “Hey. I’m full blooded Norwegian. I don’t know nothing about my family, but I know I’m full-blooded Norwegian.”

  “No, it’s not about the Norwegians really,” Gordie went on.

  “So anyway …”

  Nevertheless she followed King out the door.

  At JO” “There were these three. An Indian. A Frenchman. A Norwegian.

  They were all in the French Revolution. And they were all set for the guillotine, right? But when they put the Indian in there the blade ‘just came halfway down and got stuck.”

  “Fuckin’ bitch! Gimme the keys!” King screamed ‘just outside the door.

  Gordie paused a moment. There was silence. He continued the joke.

  “So they said it was the judgment of God. You can go, they said to the Indian. So the Indian got up and went. Then it was the Frenchman’s turn. They put his neck in the vise and were all set to execute him!

  But it happened the same. The blade stuck.”

  “Fuckin’bitch! Fuckin’bitch!” King shrieked again.

  The car door slammed. Gordie’s eyes darted to the door, back to me with questions.

  “Should we go out?” I said.

  But he continued the story. “And so the Frenchman went off and he was saved. But when it came to the Norwegian, see, the Norwegian looks up at the uillotine and says: “You guys are sure dumb. If you put a little grease on it that thing would work fine!” “Bitch! Bitch! I’ll kill you! Girrime the keys!” We heard a quick shattering sound, glass breaking, and left Eli sitting at the table.

  Lynette was locked in the Firebird, crouched on the passen’de. King screamed at her and threw his whole body against her side of the car, thudded on the hood with hollow booms, banged his way across the roof, ripped at antennae and side-view mirrors with his fists, kicked into the broken sockets of headlights. Finally he ripped a mirror off the driver’s side and began to beat the car rhythmically, gasping. But though He swung the mirror time after time into the windshield and side windows he couldn’t smash them.

  “King, baby!” Gordie jumped off the steps and hugged King to the ground with the solid drop of his weight. “It’s her car. You’re June’s boy, King. Don’t cry.” For as they lay there, welded in—Mom shock, King’s face was grinding deep into the cinders and his shoulders shook with heavy sobs. He screamed up through dirt at his father.

  “It’s awful to be dead. Oh my God, she’s so cold.”

  They were up on their feet suddenly. King twisted out of Gordie’s arms and balanced in a wrestler’s stance. “It’s your fault and you wanna take the car,” he said wildly. He sprang at his -father but Gordie stepped back, bracing himself, and once again he folded King violently into his arms, and again King sobbed and sagged against his father.

  Gordic lowered him back into the cinders. While they were clenched, Lynette slipped from the car and ran into the house. I followed her.

  She rushed through the kitchen, checked the baby, and then she came back.

  “Sit down,” I said. I had taken a chair beside Eli.

  “Uh, uh.”

  She walked over to Eli. She couldn’t be still.

  “You got troubles out there,” he stated.

  “Yeah,” she said. “His mom gave him the money!” She sneaked a cigarette from Eli’s pack, giving him a coy smirk in return. “Because she wanted him to have responsibility. He never had responsibility.

  She wanted him to take care of his’ family

  Eli nodded and pushed the whole pack toward her when she stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. She lit another.

  “You know he really must love his uncle,” she cried in a small, hard voice. She plumped down next to Eli and steadily smiled at the blue hat. “That fishing hat. It’s his number-one hat. I got that patch for him. King. They think the world of him down in the Cities.

  Everybody knows him. They know him by that hat. It’s his number one.

  You better never take it off.”

  Eli took the hat off and turned it around in his hands. He squinted at the patch and read it aloud. Then he nodded, as if it had finally dawned on him what she was talking about, and he turned it back around.

  “Let me wear it for a while,” Lynette cajoled. Then she took it.

  L Put it on her head and adjusted the brim. “There it is.”

  Uncle Eli took his old cap off his knee and put it on his head.

  “This one fits me,” he said.

  In the next room King junior began to cry

  “Oh, my baby!” Lynette shrieked as if he were in danger and darted out. I heard her murmuring King’s name when the father and the son walked back inside. King sat down at the table and put his head in his folded arms, breathing hoarsely. Gordie got the keys from Lynette and told Eli they were going home now.

  “He’s okay,” Gordie said, nodding at King. “Just as long as you let him alone.”

  So they drove off on that clear blue night. I put a blanket around Lynette’s shoulders, and she sank onto the couch. I walked out, past King. He was still breathing hopelessly into his crossed arms. I walked down to where I knew Lipsha was, at the bottom of the hill below the house. Sure enough, he was sitting there, back against a log from the woodpile. He passed me a bottle of sweet ros;, I drank. I tipped the bottle, looked up at the sky, and nearly fell over, in amazement and too much beer, at the drenching beauty.

  Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lip
sha’s arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crushing green wheat. We chewed the sweet kernels and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it.

  Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a Pttern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it.

  As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall.

  And all the world’s wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in space. She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls.

  Her long legs lifting and failing. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grownup women were supposed to smell.

  Her amusement at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.

  I had to close my eyes after a while. The mix of beer and rose made my head whirl. The lights, shooting high, made the ground rock underneath me. I waved away the bottle when Lipsha touched my hand with the cold end of it.

  “Don’t want no more?”

  “Later on,” I said. “Keep talking.”

  Lipsha’s voice was a steady bridge over a deep black space of sickness I was crossing. If I ‘just kept listening I knew I’d get past all right.

  He was talking about King. His voice was slurred and dreamy.

  “I’ll admit that,” he said,

  “I’m scared of his mind. You can’t never predict when he’ll turn. Once, a long time ago, we went out hunting gophers. I let him get behind me. You know what he did? He hid in the bushes and took a potshot.”

  “Lucky. ” “That’s right. I steer clear of King. I never turn my back on him, either. ” “Don’t be scared of him,” I said. I was managing to keep a slim hold on the conversation. I could do this as long as I only moved my lips and not the rest of me.

  Sure. King never took a potshot at you.”

  “He’s scared underneath.”

  “Of what?” said Lipsha.

  But I really didn’t know. “Those vets,” I said, “are really nuts.”

  “He’s no vet,” Lipsha began. But then blackness swung too hard, tipping me. For a while I heard nothing, saw nothing, and did not even dare move my lips to speak. That didn’t matter.

  Lipsha went on talking.

  “Energy,” he said, “electromagnetic waves. It’s because of the temperature, the difference sets them off. ” He was talking about the northern lights. Although he never did well in school, Lipsha knew surprising things. He read books about computers and volcanoes and the life cycles of salamanders. Sometimes he used words I had to ask him the meaning of, and other times he didn’t make even the simplest sense.

  I loved him for being both ways. A wash of love swept me over the sickness. I sat up.

  “I am going to talk to you about something particular … …I began. My voice was serious, all of a sudden, and it scared him.

  He moved away from me, suspicious. I was going to tell him what I’d heard from hanging at the edge of the aunts’ conversations. I was going to tell him that his mother was June. Since so many others knew, it was only right that he should, too.

  “Your mother . I began.

  “I can never forgive what she done to a little child,” he said.

  “They had to rescue me out of her grip.

  I tried again.

  “I want to talk about your mother ….. Lipsha nodded, cutting me off. “I consider Grandma Kashpaw my mother, even though she just took me In I ike any old stray.”

  “She didn’t do that,” I said. “She wanted you.”

  “No,” said Lipsha. “Albertine, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Now I was the one who felt ignorant, confused.

  “As for my mother,” be went on, “even if she came back right now, this minute, and got down on her knees and said

  “Son, I am sorry for what I done to you,” I would not relent on her.

  I didn’t know how to rescue my intentions and go on. I thought for a while, or tried to, but sitting up and talking had been too much.

  “What if your mother never meant to?” I lay down again, lowering myself carefully into the wheat. The dew was condensing. I was cold, damp, and sick. “What if it was just a kind of mistake?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t no mistake,” said Lipsha firmly. “She would have drowned me.”

  Laying still, confused by my sickness and his certainty, I almost believed him. I thought he would hate June if he knew, and anyway it was too late. I justified my silence. I didn’t tell him.

  “What about your father?” I asked instead. “Do you wish you knew him?”

  Lipsha was quiet, considering, before he answered.

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Then I was falling, and he was talking again. I hung on and listened.

  “Did you ever dream you flew through the air?” he asked. “Did you ever dream you landed on a planet or star?

  “I dreamed I flew up there once,” he said, going on. “It was all lighted up. Man, it was beautiful! I landed on the moon, but once I stood there at last, I didn’t dare take a breath.”

  I moved closer. He had a light nylon jacket. He took it off and laid it over me. I was suddenly comfortable” very comfortable, and warm.

  “No,” he said. “No, I was scared to breathe.”

  I woke up. I had fallen asleep in the arms of Lipsha’s jacket, in the cold wet wheat under the flashing sky. I heard the clanging sound of struck metal, pots tumbling in the house. Gordie was gone. Eli was gone. “Come on,” I said, jumping straight up at the noise. “They’re fighting.” I ran up the hill, Lipsha pounding behind me. I stumbled straight into the lighted kitchen and saw at once that King was trying to drown Lynette. He was pushing her face in the sink of cold dishwater. Holding her by the nape and the ears.

  Her arms were whirling, knocking spoons and knives and bowls out of the drainer. She struggled powerJ fully, but he had her. I grabbed a block of birch out of the woodbox and hit King on the back of the neck. The wood bounced out of my fists. He pushed her lower, and her throat caught and gurgled.

  I grabbed his shoulders. I expected that Lipsha was behind me.

  King hardly noticed my weight. He pushed her lower. So I had no choice then. I jumped on his back and bit his ear. My teeth met and blood filled my mouth. He reeled backward, bucking me off, and I flew across the room, hit the refrigerator solidly, and got back on my feet.

  His hands were cocked in boxer’s fists. He was deciding who to hit first, I thought, me or Lipsha. I glanced around. I was alone. I stared back at King, scared for the first time. Then the fear left and I was mad, just mad, at Lipsha, at King, at Lynette, at June…. I looked past King and I saw what they had done.

  All the pies were smashed. Torn open. Black juice bleeding through the crusts. Bits of jagged shells were stuck to the wall and some were turned completely upside down. Chunks of rhubarb were scraped across the floor. Meringue dripped from the towels.

  “The pies!” I shrieked. “You goddamn sonofabitch, you broke the pies!”

  His eyes widened. When he glanced around at the destruction, Lynette scuttled under the table. He took in what he could, and then his fists lowered and a look at least resembling shame, confusion, swept over his face, and he rushed past me. He stepped down flat on his fisherman hat as he ran, and after he was gone I picked it up.

  I went into the next room and stuffed the hat under King Junior’s mattress. Then I sat for a long time, listening to his light breathing.

  He was always a good baby, or more likely a wise soul.

  He slept through everything he could possibly sleep through.

  Lynette had turned the lights out in the kitchen as she left the hou
se, and now I heard her outside the window begging King to take her away in the car.

  “Let’s go off before they all get back,” she said. “It’s them. You always get so crazy when you’re home. We’ll get the baby. We’ll go off. We’ll go back to the Cities, go home.”

  And then she cried out once, but clearly it was a cry like pleasure.

  I thought I heard their bodies creak together, or perhaps it was just the wood steps beneath them, the old worn boards bearing their weight.

  They got into the car soon after that. Doors slammed. But they traveled just a few yards and then stopped. The horn blared softly.

  Isuppose they knocked against it in passion. The heater roared on from time to time. It was a cold, spare dawn.

  Sometime that hour I got up, leaving the baby, and went into the kitchen. I spooned the fillings back into the crusts, married slabs of dough, smoothed over edges of crusts with a wetted finger, fit crimps to crimps and even fluff to fluff on top of berries or pudding. I worked carefully for over an hour. But once they smash there is no way to put them right.

  SAINT MARIE r G a Sr (1934)

  MARIE LAZAR RE

  So when I went there, I knew the dark fish must rise. Plumes of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard. There was no use in trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.

  Because I don’t have that much Indian blood. And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me. And I’d be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells, which they would have to stoop down off their high horse to kiss.

  I was ignorant. I was near age fourteen. The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. And it was just that-the pure and wideness of my ignorance-that got me A up the hill to Sacred Heart Convent and brought me back down alive.

  For maybe Jesus did not take my bait, but them Sisters tried to cram me right down whole.

  You ever see a walleye strike so bad the lure is practically out its back end before you reel it in? That is what they done with me. I don’t like to make that low comparison, but I have seen a walleye do that once. And it’s the same attempt as Sister Leopolda made to get me in her clutch.