Love Medicine Read online

  “I’ve had better.”

  I know that isn’t true, that I was just now the first, and I can even hear the, shake in her voice, but that makes no difference.

  She scares me. I scramble away from her, holding the geese in front.

  Although she is just a little girl knocked down in the dirt, she sits up, smooth as you please, fixes the black skirt over her knees, rearranges the pillowcase tied around her hand.

  We are unsheltered by bushes. Anyone could have seen us.

  I glance around. On the hill, the windows dark in the whitewashed brick seem to harbor a thousand holy eyes widening and narrowing.

  How could I? It is then I panic, mouth hanging open, all but certain.

  They saw! I can hardly believe what I have done.

  Marie is watching me. She sees me swing blind to the white face of the convent. She knows exactly what is going through my mind.

  “I hope they saw it,” she says in the crow’s rasp.

  I shut my mouth, then open it, then shut my mouth again.

  Who is this girl? I feel my breath failing like a stupid fish in the airless space around her. I lose control.

  “I never did!” I shout, breaking my voice. I whirl to her. She is looking at the geese I hold in front to hide my shame. I speak wildly.

  A

  “A -all from.

  “You made me! You forced me!”

  “I made you!” She laughs and shakes her hand, letting the pillowcase drop clear so that I can see the ugly wound.

  “I didn’t make you do anything,” she says.

  Her hand looks bad, cut and swollen, and it has not been washed.

  Even afraid as I am, I cannot help but feel how bad her hand must hurt and throb. Thinking this causes a small pain to shoot through my own hand. The girl’s hand must have hurt when I threw her on the ground, and yet she didn’t cry out. Her head, too. I have to wonder what is under the bandage. Did the nuns catch her and beat her when she tried to steal their linen?

  The dead birds feel impossibly heavy. I untie them from my wrists and let them fall in the dirt. I sit down beside her.

  “You can take these birds home. You can roast them,” I say

  “I am giving them to you.”

  J Her mouth twists. She tosses her head and looks away.

  I’m not ashamed, but there are some times this happens: alone in the woods, checking the trap line I find a wounded animal that hasn’t died well, or, worse, it’s still living, so that I have to put it out of its misery. Sometimes it’s just a big bird I only winged. When I do what I have to do, my throat swells closed sometimes. I touch the suffering bodies like they were killed saints I should handle with gentle reverence.

  This is how I take Marie’s hand. This is how I hold her wounded hand in my hand.

  She never looks at me. I don’t think she dares let me see her face.

  We sit alone. The sun falls down the side of the world and the hill goes dark. Her hand grows thick and fevered, heavy in my own, and I don’t want her, but I want her, and I cannot let go.

  bob..-, THE BEADS r a S (1948)

  MARIE KASHPAW

  I didn’t want June Morrissey when they first brought her to my house.

  But I ended up keeping her the way I would later end up keeping her son, Lipsha, when they brought him up the steps. I didn’t want her because I had so many mouths I couldn’t feed. I didn’t want her because I had to pile the children in a cot at night. One of the babies slept in a drawer to the dresser. I didn’t want June.

  Sometimes we had nothing to eat but grease on bread. But then the two drunk ones told me how the girl had survived-by eating pine sap in the woods. Her mother was my sister, Lucille. She died alone with the girl out in the bush.

  “We don’t know how the girl done it,” said the old drunk woman who I didn’t claim as my mother anymore.

  “Lucille was coughing blood,” offered the Morrissey, the whining no-good who had not church-married my sister.

  –OEM

  “You dog,” I said. “Where were you when she died?”

  “He was working in the potato fields,” the old drunk one wheedled.

  Her eyes had squeezed back into her face. Her nose had spread and her cheeks were shot with black veins.

  “He was rolling in his own filth more like it,” I said.

  They were standing on my steps because I would not ask them onto my washed floor,

  “I can’t take in another wild cat,” I said. Maybe it scared me, the feeling I might have for this one. I knew how it was to lose a child that got too special. I’d lost a boy. I had also lost a girl who would have almost been the age this poor stray was.

  Those Lazarres just stood there, yawning and picking their gray teeth, with the girl between them most likely drunk too. Not older than nine years. She could hardly stand upright. I looked at her.

  What I saw was starved bones, a shank of black strings, a piece of rag on her I wouldn’t have used to wipe a pig. There were beads around her neck. Black beads on a silver chain.

  “What’s that, a rosary on her neck?”

  They started laughing, seesawing against the rail, whooping when they tried to tell the joke out.

  “It was them bug eyes,” said the old one, “them ignoret bush Crees who found her and couldn’t figure out how she was raised, except the spirits.”

  “They slung them beads around her neck.”

  “To protect themselves.”

  “Get out of here”-I grabbed the girl-“before I sic the dogs on you.

  “Too good,” the old drunk flapped, “too damn good to wipe your own crap.” ‘t you. Storing money in your jar. What about ap, am your mother!

  Ignatius!” she shrieked. That was the name of my father.

  The Morrissey had enough sense to be dragging her down the steps.

  L–– mom

  “Prince!” I veiled. “Dukie! Rex!”

  The dogs came bounding up. The two went stumbling off, holding each other’s sagging weighted arms, and that was all I had to see of those Lazarres for a long time.

  So I took the girl. I kept her. It wasn’t long before I would want to hold her against me tighter than any of the others. She was like me, and she was not like me. Sometimes I thought she was more like Eli. The woods were in June, after all, just like in him, and maybe more. She had sucked on pine sap and grazed grass and nipped buds like a deer.

  the on y Lazarre I had any use for was Lucille, so from the first I tried to find my sister’s looks in the girl. I took her down behind the shack, where we kept the washtub in the summer.” lugging a kettle of boiling water and a can of fuel. I put the kerosene in her hair, wiped the nits out with a rag and comb. I knew how much the fuel on her scalp must have burned. But she never moved, just kept her eyes screwed shut and plainly endured. That was the only likeness I saw to Lucille.

  Otherwise, as I scrubbed the pitiful scraps of her and wiped ointment over the sores, I saw nothing, no feature that belonged to either one, Lazarre or Morrissey, and I was glad. It was as if she really was the child of what the old people called Manitous, invisible ones who live in the woods. I could tell, even as I washed, that the Devil had no business with June. There was no mark on her. When the sores healed she would be perfect. As I clipped her hair away from her face I even saw that she might be pretty looking. Really not like Lucille, I thought, or anyone else I was related to. It was no wonder, but this made me like the girl still better.

  She was dark, but even so her looks started to gleam and shine once I had her eating like a human. I cut down a dress of Zelda’s, a pair of Gordle’s pants, a blouse I had owned myself. The one thing she kept on wearing was the beads. Trying to explain to her L how they were holy beads, not mere regular jewelry, did no good. She just backed away and clutched them in her fist. She wore them constant, even though the others teased her and jerked them lightly from behind when I was not looking. There was no Devil in her. If there was I would have seen. She hardly s
poke two words to anyone and never fought back when Aurelia pinched her arm or Gordie sneaked a bun off her plate.

  That is why, as things went on, I found myself talking for her.

  “Gordie,” I’d say, “stop. She hates you to pull her hair.”

  It was as though I took over and became the voice that wouldn’t come from her lips but could be seen, very plain, in the wide up slanted black eyes. At first, because I liked her so, I thought I knew what she was thinking, but as it turned out I did not know what went through her mind at all.

  They used to like playing in the woods, and I liked them to play there, too. They could run and scream all day, as loud as they wanted.

  I liked the house to myself, afternoons. The babies fell asleep, and Nector worked off in the fields for someone else.

  Then I could think. I didn’t have to sit still to think; all I needed was the quiet. I worked hard but I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. I was churning and thinking that day. With each stroke of my dasher I progressed in thinking what to make of Nector. I had plans, and there was no use him trying to get out of them. I’d known from the beginning I had married a man with brains. But the brains wouldn’t matter unless I kept him from the bottle. He would pour them down the drain, where his liquor went, unless I stopped the holes, wore him out, dragged him back each time he drank, and tied him to the bed with strong ropes.

  I had decided I was going to make him into something big on this reservation. I didn’t know what, not yet; I only knew when he got there they would not whisper “dirty Lazarre” when I walked down from church.

  They would wish they were the woman I was. Marie Kashpaw. I thought of my mother, strip of old blanket for her belt, and I dashed so hard the cream stuck to the wood.

  I heard yells, Zelda’s high, strained voice, the note she used when something she could tell on had happened. She flopped in the door.

  “What’s it now?” I asked, expecting Gordie had put a burr in her hair.

  “It’s June,” she gasped. “Mama, they’re hanging June out in the woods!”

  I jumped. It was like a string snapped me from my chair. I ran out like a mad thing, over the field, right on Zelda’s heels. When I got to the place, I saw Gordle was standing there with one end of the rope that was looped high around a branch. The other end was tied in a loose loop around June’s neck.

  “You got to tighten it,” I heard June say clearly, “before you hoist me up.”

  I rushed forward. I flung off the noose. I grabbed Gordie’s ear and I rapped his hind end. For good measure I grabbed Aurelia and licked her good, too. When I’d ‘finished I threw them down and stood staring at them, panting and furious.

  “Do you know what you almost did?” I screamed.

  “She wanted us to hang her,” Gordie said. “We were playing.

  She stole the horse.”

  “She told us to,” Aurelia said. “She said where to put the rope.

  Their lies maddened me.

  “I’ll show you where to put the rope,” I yelled. I was going to knot it and use it again on them, when I heard a dry little sound, a tearless weeping sound, from June, and I turned.

  She was standing upright, tall and bone-thin and hopeless, with the rosary wrapped around her hand as it is wrapped around the hands of the dead.

  “You ruined it.” Her eyes blinked at me, dry, as she choked it out.

  “I stole their horse. So I was supposed to be hanged.”

  I gaped at her.

  OIL.

  “Child,” I said, “you don’t know how to play. It’s a game, but if they hang you they would hang you for real.”

  She put her head down. I could almost have sworn she knew what was real and what was not real, and that I’d still ruined it.

  “You damn old bitch.” I heard, unbelievably, those words muttered under her breath.

  “What?”

  “You damn old bitch,” she said, aloud, again.

  I grabbed the back of her shirt and yanked her flying across the field.

  She was light as a leaf. I tossed her in the house. Then I grabbed the jaw and packed a handful of soap flakes in her mouth. None of my children ever called me a bad name before.

  She spat and bubbled.

  “Damn old chicken!” she gasped again. Looking at her face, strained and wild, sick and greening on the soap, I had to wonder if she knew what she was saying. Was her mind shot? The other children were gaping at the door, satisfied with horror, thrilled with her punishment.

  “Chores!” I said. They vanished )in a whirl of clothes and flying hair.

  Then I set June down in front of me and closely watched her.

  Brave as me, that was June. The soap flakes surely gagged her.

  But she spat them carefully into the dishcloth I put in her hands.

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “Look at me,” I said.

  I turned her head toward me and looked in her sorrowful black eyes. I looked a long time, as if I was falling down a hill. She blinked gravely and returned my stare. There was a sadness I couldn’t touch there. It was a hurt place, it was deep, it was with her all the time like a broke rib that stabbed when she breathed. I took her hand.

  “June Morrissey,” I said, “your mama was my sister.”

  She looked at me, still not speaking.

  “Your mama died,” I said.

  There was a flicker of a lash.

  “You can be my girl and live here.”

  She spoke to me, finally, with no expression. “I don’t care.”

  Maybe she cared and maybe she did not. She stayed shut.

  Nector had no time for any of them then, not him with his slim wages and his chips at the pool hall and home-brewed wine. If I wasn’t feeding children I was chasing Nector down. I knew all the back rooms.

  I’d take money from his hand that was lighting on the bar. I’d leave him nothing. He’d have to come home and beg when he needed more. So I didn’t have much time for any one of the children about then, and I was glad, that summer, when Eli came around.

  Spring and summer, when the furs were thin, we’d see more of Eli around home. He lived in a mud-chink bachelor shack on the other end of the land. He was a nothing-and-nowhere person, not a husband match for any woman, but I had to like him. Eli drank but he never lost his head. He rarely spoke. Sometimes we sat in a room all evening, hardly talking, although he spoke easy with the children. I’d overhear. He had a soft hushed voice, like he was stalking something very near. He showed them how to carve, how to listen for the proper birdcall, how to whistle on their own fingers like a flute. He taught June.

  Or she taught him. They went into the woods with their snares and never came home empty-handed. They went to the sloughs to shoot mud hens and brought home a bag of the tiny, black, greasy birds. Nector was rarely home then. He worked late or sneaked to gamble. We’d roast the birds and make a high pile of their twig bones in the middle of the table. Eli would sing his songs. Wild unholy songs. Cree songs that made you lonely.

  Hunting songs used to attract deer or women. He wasn’t shy when he sang them. I had to keep to my mending.

  I was seeing how the girl spoke more often once he started coming. She’d picked an old scrap of billed hat from a dump and wore it just like him, soft and squashed in on her hair. I began to understand what she was doing as time went on. It was a mother she couldn’t trust after what had happened in the woods. But Eli was different. He could chew pine sap too.

  The old hens were starting to cackle.

  Seven senses. Seven senses for scandal was what they had in those days.

  They came around to my door -just to pass the time away. I let them in for brewed coffee. They were the ones I knew the smell of, who made novenas and holy days and nosed up to the priests. They were eager to sniff what was happening in my house.

  “Where’s Nector?” Old Lady Blue, innocent as day, wonders.

  She thinks she saw him passed out around back
of the agency pump house.

  But certainly that could not be him!

  “Does Eli, your brother-in-law, live here now instead?” Sly and shriveled old bean pod!

  “How about that girl,” says old, fat La Rue “Do you trust him alone with her all the time like that? I see them coming out of the woods, down the road. What do they got in their bag?”

  I just laugh, don’t let them get a wedge in. Then I turn the table on them, because they don’t know how many goods I have collected in town.

  “How’s your son? Too bad he crossed the border. I heard he had to go.

  Are you taking in his newborn?”

  “I tell you for your own good. Your man goes to Lamartine’s house with a bagged bottle, Mrs. Blue.”

  “How’s your heart? It’s a shame your daughter left you.”

  I didn’t like to be the one to remind these old cows of their own bad lives. But I had to protect my plans. There was just a temporary hitch in them-Nector having a last fling.

  One night and then another night he didn’t come home. The second night Eli sang late until the children hung asleep in their d chairs. They had to be carried off and fit together on the rollaway, neat puzzles of arms and legs. When they were all arranged we went back in the kitchen.

  This was usually the time Eli walked back to his place.

  But instead of taking leave, he sat down at the table again and rolled a stub of tobacco from his pouch.

  It was nothing. I sewed a long rip. A longer seam. It was nothing.

  But I felt his eyes resting upon me and I couldn’t took up at him.

  The cloth turned in my hands. The lamp burned. I thought of lake-shore pebbles, naked as eyes and smooth, and I thought of his lean hands, and I did not dare move. Something dark and wavering, fringed like a flower’s mouth, was collecting in the room between us. I felt him standing up. I felt the rustle of his soft, stained clothes. He stepped once. The board creaked. I went helpless at the sound, and my hands locked.

  “Marie?” he asked, very quiet.