Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  We had been in one body then, yet she was a stranger, We were not as close now, yet perhaps I knew her better.

  Her black hair swung calmly with each step. She looked so young.

  “I might go up there someday,” she said, “up the hill.”

  “And stay with them?”

  “Yes.

  That did not surprise me. Yet I felt a sinking surge, a regret, a feeling like I should clutch her by the shoulders, although it plagued me that she couldn’t make up her mind. “Don’t make any hasty decision about your life,” I said.

  “I should get a job like Gordie did!”

  “No! You shouldn’t!”

  I was on the verge of saying how I needed her, at the house, but I didn’t say it. After all, I thought, she should be free to go.

  As we came through the woods to the field, I heard Nector’s shotgun.

  The boys were hunting ducks at the slough. The house looked quiet. I could see Aurella moping in the yard with Eugene and Patsy, the little ones I left in her care. No doubt she wanted to be hunting with the boys and June.

  “Go on after them,” I said, as we walked in the yard. Aurelia got up and ran. She did not have to be convinced. She liked a boy down the road, a friend of Gordie’s. She never had trouble making up her mind.

  Zelda went in the house before me, to change to her over halls

  I stood in the yard. Nector was not home. I picked up the baby I was keeping for a young girl across the road, because he cried when he saw me. I looked over at the door.

  Zelda was standing there, shadowy, behind the screen.

  “Hurry up and change,” I said. The cow was bawling.

  But she didn’t move when I told her to move. She said nothing. It gripped me in the throat that there was something wrong.

  As if he would protect us, I kept the baby in my arms. I walked up the steps and stood on the other side of the screen. She looked at me, steady, and then I pulled the handle toward me.

  “Here, Mama,” she said, handing me the letter.

  I stood in the kitchen, with the letter in my hand, not moving.

  “Go on,” I said, “change.”

  So she went. I opened the paper and I read.

  Dear Marie, Can’t see going on with this when every day I’m going down even worse. Sure I loved you once, but all this time I am seeing Lulu also. Now she pressured me and the day has come L must get up and go. I apologize. I found true love with her. I don’t have a choice.

  But that doesn’t mean Nector Kashpaw will ever forget his own.

  I folded the paper back up and put it in my dress pocket.

  Zelda stepped back into the room.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked her.

  Under the sugar ‘ar.

  She pointed at the table and then we both looked, as if the table would tell us what to do next. I concentrated very hard on what I saw.

  The box of spoons. The butter plate. The can of salt.

  Somehow these things looked more full of special meaning than the sugar jar. It was just smooth clear glass, decent and familiar in the sunlight, half full. I looked back at Zelda. We gazed at each other.

  Her eyes were wide, staring, but I wasn’t sure if she had read the letter or just been scared by the oddness of a piece of paper with my name on it, sitting on that table. I couldn’t tell.

  Listen to that cow,” I said. I felt my heart bang hard. My throat shut. I wouldn’t have been able to say another word.

  Zelda listened. She turned slowly, put her hands in her pockets, and walked outside. I went into the other room with the baby and sat on the bed. The paper crackled in my pocket. I needed the quiet. I could hear Patsy humming outside the window. She was safe. The cow went still. The rest of them were occupied. I could think.

  O

  now What should I think first? It seemed like it didn’t matter.

  So I didn’t know what to think, because of course I knew it mattered, and yet there was nothing to think about. I remembered how Mary Bonne, who lived in town, found her husband in their own bed with a La Chien woman. She went back in her kitchen, took a knife off the wall, and even thought to sharpen the blade on her stone before she went back and cut them. She only gave them a few cuts, but there was blood. I thought the sight of Lamartine’s blood would do me good. I saw her face, painted up and bold, and I thought I would cut it right off her neck.

  Yet really, I wasn’t angry. I didn’t even feel like I was inside my body. For I fed the child until it was full and slept, a dead weight I could in my arms, and I never noticed. I was wondering how raise the children without their father. I thought of Eli, how he had gone quieter and hardly came out of the woods anymore. He would not come around. He never thought of women. He was like a shy animal himself when he got trapped in a house.

  Then I said right out loud in that bedroom,

  “He’s a man!”

  But that didn’t make any sense. It meant nothing. That all men were like Nector wasn’t true. I thought of Henry Lamartme.

  Before he was killed on the tracks, he surely knew that his wife went with anybody in the bushes. When she had the boys, all colors of humans, he could tell they were not his. He took care of them. I understood Henry, and I felt for him as I sat. I knew why he had parked his Dodge square on the tracks and let the train bear down. I He must have loved her. But I wouldn’t park myself on the tracks for Nector.

  “I’d see him in hell first,” I said to the room. I realized the child was very heavy and put him on the bed. My arms ached.

  My throat was tight and dry. I saw that Patsy had come in the door and thrown herself on the bed, limp and exhausted as a doll made of rags.

  She was sleeping too. The afternoon was getting on, and I was still sitting there without having thought what I should do next.

  “I should peel the potatoes,” I told myself No doubt they would bring in a duck at least.

  So I went in the kitchen and sat down with a bowl of potatoes.

  I had peeled enough potatoes in my life so far to feed every man, woman, child of the Chippewas. Still I had more of them to go.

  It was calming to remove the rough skin, the eye sprouts, and get down to the smooth whiteness. I ate a raw slice. I would eat a raw potato like some people ate an apple. Zelda helped me cook at night.

  She would fry up the potatoes. After I peeled enough of them I went to the door and called her.

  And then, when she never answered, I knew that she was gone. I knew that she read the letter. She had gone after Nector.

  It wasn’t hard to figure. What else would she do?

  I went back in the house and sat down with the potatoes, and I cursed the girl for doing what she did. I should have done it. I should have gone to Lamartine’s and dragged him out of her bed and beat him hard with a stick. And after I beat him and he was lying on the floor, I should have turned around and made the Lamartine miserable.

  Yet in time, as I calmed down, I knew I’d thought better of going there for a reason. A good reason. The letter said that he loved her.

  I began peeling more potatoes, I don’t know what for, but now I’d struck the comfortless heart I could not ignore. He loved the Lamartine, which was different from all the other things he did that caused me shame and disconvenienced my life. Him loving her, him finding true love with her, was what drove me to peel all the potatoes in that house.

  I heard Aurelia, June, and the boys coming in the yard, fighting over whose turn it was to clean the birds. I guess they all cleaned their goose. I heard them behind the barn for a while. I put some potatoes on to boil. My hands hurt, full of acids, blistered by the knife. I was like a person in a dream, but my oldest boy never noticed.

  Gordle came in with a tough goose.

  “It should have flew higher than that,” he said. “I got it on the wing.

  He looked around at the dish pans and the washtubs of peeled potatoes.

  Three empty gunnysacks were laying on the floor, crumpled
like drawers a man had stepped out of in haste.

  “Why’d you do that?” he said.

  I only looked at him. I shrugged. He shrugged. He was Nector’s son. I thought to myself, he wouldn’t go after Nector and bring him home. I was sure Gordie wouldn’t do that, even though, like with Zelda, there was a time we had been in the same body. He wouldn’t go, even though I had nursed him. We were closer when I carried him, when we never knew each other, I thought now. I did not trust him.

  “It’s too hot in here for more fire,” I said. “Make one outside and roast your birds. I’m washing my floor.”

  “At night?” he said, The sun was going down very fast.

  “You heard me.”

  He went out and made a fire in the backyard where we had an old field stone range made to cook on in the summer. They all stayed out there. I fed Patsy a mashed potato. I fed her milk. I let the baby play and roll across theflOOL I sat and watched them while I decided how I would wash the flOOL I looked at my linoleum carefully, all the worn spots and cracks, all the places where the tin stripping had to be hammered flat. It was one of my prides to keep that floor shined up.

  Under the gray swirls and spots and leaves of the pattern, I knew there was tarpaper and bare wood that could splinter a baby’s feet. I knew, because I bought and paid for and put down that linoleum myself. It was a good solid covering, but under it the boards creaked.

  V,j There wasn’t any use in thinking. I put the baby to sleep. I filled the tin bucket with hot water and spirits. I hauled the potatoes out of my way. Then I took up my brush. Outside they were talking.

  They had a fire. They could stay there. I never went down on my knees to God or anyone, so maybe washing my floor was an excuse to kneel that night. I felt better, that’s all I know, as I scrubbed off the tarnished wax and dirt. I felt better as I recognized myself in the woman who kept her floor clean even when left by her husband.

  I had been on a high horse. Now I was kneeling. I was washing the floor in my good purple dress. I never did laugh at myself in any situation, but I had to laugh now. I thought of cutting up a shroud.

  The nun was clever. She knew where my weakness had been.

  But I was not going under, even if he left me. I could leave off my fear of ever being a Lazarre. I could leave off my fear, even of losing Nector, since he was gone and I was able to scrub down the floor.

  I took my wax. I started polishing a little at a time.

  Love had turned my head away from what was going on between my husband and Lamartine. There was something still left that Nector could hurt me with, and now I hurt for love and not because the old hens would squawk.

  They would say Marie Kashpaw was down in the dirt. They would say how her husband had left her for dirt. They would say I got all that was coming, head so proud. But I would not care if Marie Kashpaw had to wear an old shroud. I would not care if Lulu I.Amartine ended up the wife of the chairman of the Chippewa Tribe. I’d still be Marie.

  Marie. Star of the Sea! I’d shine when they stripped off the wax!

  I had to laugh. I heard the dogs. I had waxed myself up to the table.

  I knew that I was hearing Nector and Zelda come home, walking in the yard. I wrung my rag out. I had waxed myself in. I __mow thought of the letter in my pocket. Then I thought very suddenly of what this Marie who was interested in holding on to Nector should do.

  I took the letter. I did what I never would expect of myself. I lifted the sugar ‘ar to put the letter back. Then I thought. I put the sugar down and picked up the can of salt. This was much more something I would predict of Marie.

  I folded the letter up, exactly as it had been found, and I put it beneath the salt can. I did this for a reason. I would never talk about this letter but instead let him wonder. Sometimes he’d look at me, I’d smile, and he’d think to himself salt or sugar? But he would never be sure.

  I sat down in a chair. I put my legs in another chair, off the floor, and I waited for him to walk up the steps. When he did, I let him come.

  Step by step. I let him listen to hear if I was inside.

  I let him open the door. Only when we saw each other did I stop him.

  “I just put the wax down,” I said. “You have to wait.”

  He stood there looking at me over that long, shiny space. It rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us. And it deepened.

  I saw that he was about to take the first step, and I let him, but halfway into the room his eyes went dark. He was afraid of how deep this was going to become. So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him.

  I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in.

  burn.A BRIDGE S a S (1973) It was the harsh spring that everybody thought would never end.

  All the way down to Fargo on the jackrabbit bus Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, passenger breath as though she could encompass the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air them, by replacing her own scent with theirs. She didn’t close her eyes to nap even once during travel, because this was the first time she’d traveled anywhere alone. She was fifteen years old, and she was running away from home. When the sky deepened, casting bleak purple shadows along the snow ditches, she went even tenser than when she’d first walked up the ridged stairs of the vehicle.

  She watched carefully as the dark covered all. The yard lights of farms, like warning beacons upon the sea or wide-flung constellations of stars, blinked on, deceptively close.

  The bus came upon the city and the lights grew denser, reflecting up into the cloud cover, a transparent orange-pink that floated over the winking points of signs and low black buildings.

  The streets looked slick, deep green, from the windows of the bus.

  The driver made a small rasping sound into the microphone and announced theiTarrival at the Fargo terminal.

  Stepping into the bus station, the crowd of people in the hitched, plastic seats looked to Albertine like one big knot, a linked and doubled chain of coats, scarves, black-and-gray Herbst shopping bags, broad pale cheeks and noses. She wasn’t sure what to do next. A chair was open. Beside it a standing ashtray bristled with butts, crushed soft-drink cups, flattened straws. Albertine sat down in the chair and stared at the clock. She frowned as though she were impatient for the next bus, but that was just a precaution. How long would they let her sit? This was as far as she had money to go. The compressed bundle of her jeans and underwear, tied in a thick sweater, felt reassuring as a baby against her stomach, and she clutched it close.

  Lights of all colors, vaguely darkened and skewed in the thick glass doors, zipped up and down the sides of buildings. She glanced all around and back to the clock again. Minutes passed.

  Slow fright took her as she sat in the chair; she would have to go out soon. How many hours did she have left? the clock said eight. She sat stiffly, counting the moments, waiting for something to tell her what to do.

  Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she’d had were useless.

  She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat.

  Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies’ room.

  Fearing thieves, she took the bundle into the stall and held it awkwardly on her lap. Afterward, she washed her face, combed and redid the tin barrette that held her long hair off her forehead, then sat in the lobby She let her eyes close. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward. Her body seemed to shrink and contract as in childish fever dreams when she lost all sense of the actual proportion of things and knew herself as bitterly small, She had come here for some reason, but couldn’t remember what that was.

  As it happened, then, because she didn’t have anything particular in mind, the man seemed just what she needed when he appeared.


  He needed her worse, but she didn’t know that. He stood for an instant against the doors, long enough for Albertine to notice that iL his cropped hair was black, his skin was pale brown, thick and rough.

  He wore a dull green army jacket. She caught a good look at his profile, the blunt chin, big nose, harsh brow.

  He was handsome, good-looking at least, and could have been an Indian.

  He even could have been a Chippewa. He walked out into the street.

  She started after him. Partly because she didn’t know what she was looking for, partly because he was a soldier like her father, and partly because he could have been an Indian, she followed.

  It seemed to her that he had cleared a path of safety through the door into the street. But when she stepped outside he had disappeared.

  She faltered, then told herself to keep walking toward the boldest lights.

  Northern Pacific Avenue was the central thoroughfare of the dingy feel-good roll of Indian bars, western-wear stores, pawn shops, and Christian Revival Missions that Fargo was trying to eradicate. The strip had diminished under the town’s urban renewal project: asphalt plains and swooping concrete interchanges shouldered the remaining bars into an intricate huddle, Ah-nod ILMN= lit for action at this hour.

  The giant cartoon outline of a cat, eyes fringed in -pink neon, winked and switched its glittering tail. Farther down the street a cowgirl tall as a building tossed her lariat in slow heart-shaped loops. Beneath her glowing heels men slouched, passing bags crimped back for bottlenecks.

  The night was cold. Albertine stepped into the recessed door stoop of a small shop. Its window displayed secondhand toasters.

  The other side of the street was livelier. She saw two Indian men, hair failing in cowlicks over their faces, dragging a limp, dazed woman between them. An alley swallowed them. Another woman in a tiger-skin skirt and long boots posed briefly in a doorway. A short round oriental man sprang out of nowhere, gesturing emphatically to someone who wasn’t there. He went up the stairs of a doorway labeled Rooms.

  That was the doorway Albertine decided she would try for a place to sleep, when things quieted down. For now she was content to watch, shifting from foot to foot, arms crossed over her bundle.