Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  He touched his cold cheeks. The skin felt rubbery and dead, Finally the turnoff came and he went down to the lake where his house was.

  Somehow he gained the stairs and door then crawled across the carpet to the phone. He even looked the number up in the book.

  “Royce there?” he asked the woman’s voice. She put her husband on without a word.

  “You still drinking?” said Royce.

  “Could you bring me some quarts? Three, four, last me out.

  I’ll pay you when I get my check.”

  “I don’t make house calls or give no credit.”

  “Cousin … you know I work.”

  There was a pause.

  “All right then. Credit’s one dollar on the bottle, and house call’s two.”

  Gordie babbled his thanks. The phone clicked. Knowing it would come, Gordie felt much stronger, clearer in the brain. He knew he would sleep once he got the wine. He noticed he’d IPP, landed underneath the table, that he’d brought the phone down.

  He lay back restfully. It was a good place to stay.

  A lot of time went by, hours or days, and the quarts were gone.

  Mote wine appeared. One quart helped and the next didn’t.

  Nothing happened. He’d gone too far. He found himself sitting at the kitchen table in a litter of dried bread, dishes he must have eaten something from, bottles and stubbed cigarettes. Either the sun was rising or the sun was going down, and although he did not feel that he could wait to find out which it was, he knew he had no choice. He was trapped there with himself He didn’t know how long since he had slept.

  Gordie’s house was simple and very small. It was a rectangle divided in half The kitchen and the living room were in one half and the bedroom and the bathroom were in the other. A family of eight had lived here once, but that was long ago in the old days before government housing.

  Gordie bought the place after June left. He’d fixed it up with shag carpeting, linoleum tile, paint and Sheetrock and new combination windows looking out on the lake. He had always wanted to live by a lake, and now he did. All the time he had been living there he both missed June and was relieved to be without her. Now he couldn’t believe that she would not return. He had been together with her all his life.

  There was nothing she did not know about him. When they ran away from everybody and got married across the border in South Dakota, it was just a formality for the records. They already knew each other better than most people who were married a lifetime.

  They knew the good things, but they knew how to hurt each other, too.

  “I was a bastard, but so were you,” he insisted to the room.

  “We were even.”

  The sun was setting, he decided. The air was darker. The waves rustled and the twigs scraped together outside.

  bank, I love you, little cousin!” he said loudly. “June!” Her name burst from him. He wanted to take it back as soon as he said it.

  Never, never, ever call the dead by their names, Grandma said.

  They might answer. Gordie knew this. Now he felt very uneasy.

  Worse than before.

  The sounds from the lake and trees bothered him, so he itched on the television. He turned the volume up as loud as possible. There was a program on with sirens and shooting. He kept that channel.

  Still he could not forget that he’d called June.

  He felt as though a bad thing was pushing against the walls from ‘de.

  The windows quivered. He stood in the middle of the outsi room, unsteady, listening to everything too closely. He turned on the lights.

  He locked each window and door. Still he heard things. The waves rustled against each other like a woman’s stockinged legs.

  Acorns dropping on the roof clicked like heels.

  There was a low murmur in the breeze.

  An old vacuum cleaner was plugged in the corner. He switched that on and the vibrations scrambled the sounds in the air. That was better.

  Along with the television and the buzz of the lights, the vacuum cleaner was a definite help. He thought of other noises he might produce indoors. He remembered about the radio in the bedroom and lurched through the doorway to turn that on too. Full blast, a satisfying loud music poured from it, adding to the din. He went into the bathroom and turned on his electric shaver. There were no curtains in the bathroom, and something made him look at the window.

  Her face. June’s face was there. Wild and pale with a bloody mouth.

  She raised her hand, thin bones, and scratched sadly on the glass.

  When he ran from the bathroom she got angry and began to pound. The glass shattered. He heard it falling like music to the. bathroom floor.

  Everything was on, even the oven. He stood in the humming light of the refrigerator, believing the cold radiance would protect him.

  Nothing could stop her though.

  There was nothing he could do, and then he did the wrong thing.

  He plugged the toaster into the wall.

  There was a loud crack. Darkness. A ball of red light fell in his hands. Everything went utterly silent, and she squeezed through the window in that instant.

  Now she was in the bedroom pulling the sheets off the bed and arranging her perfume bottles. She was coming for him. He lurched for the door.

  His car key Where was it? Pants pocket. He slipped through the door and fell down the stairs somehow pitching onto the hood of the Malibu parked below. He scrambled in, locked up tight, then roared the ignition. He switched the head lamps on and swung blindly from the yard, moving fast, hitting the potholes and bottoming out until he met the gravel road.

  At first he was so relieved to escape that he forgot how sick he was.

  He drove competently for a while, and then the surge of fear that had gotten him from the house wore off and he slumped forward, half sightless, on the wheel. A car approached, white light that blinded.

  He pulled over to catch his senses. His mind lit in warped hope on another bottle. He’d get to town. Another bottle would straighten him out. The road was five miles of bending curves and the night was moonless, but he would make it. He dropped his head a few moments and slept to gain his strength.

  He came to when the light roared by, dazzling him with noise and its closeness. He’d turned his own lights off, and the car had swerved to avoid him. Blackness closed over the other car’s red taillights, and Gordie started driving. He drove with slowness and utter drunken care, craning close to the windshield, one eye shut so that the road would not branch into two before him. Gaining confidence, he rolled down his window and gathered speed. He knew the road to town by heart. The gravel clattered the wheel wells and the wind blew cold, sweet in his mouth, eager and watery. He felt better. So much better. The turn came so quickly he almost missed it. But he spun the wheel and swerved, catching himself halfway across the concrete road.

  burns, _MA just there, as he concentrated on controlling the speed of the turn, he hit the deer. It floated into the shadow of his head beams

  The lamps blazed stark upon it. A sudden ghost, it vanished.

  Gordie felt the jolt somewhat after he actually must have hit it, because, when he finally stopped the car, he had to walk back perhaps twenty yards before he found it sprawled oddly on its belly, legs splayed.

  He stood over the carcass, nudged it here and there with his foot.

  Someone would trade it for a bottle, even if it was a tough old doe.

  It was surprising, Gordie thought, to find one like this, barren from the looks of her, unless her fawn was hidden in the ditch. He looked around, saw nothing, but then the brush was tall, the air black as ink.

  Bending slowly, he gripped the delicate fetlocks and pulled her down the road.

  When he reached the car, he dropped the deer and -fumbled with his pocket. He found the only key he had was the square headed one for the ignition. He tried to open the trunk, but the key did not fit. The trunk unlocked only with the rounded key he’d left at home
.

  “Damn their hides,” he shouted. Everything worked against him. He could not remember when this had started to happen.

  Probably from the first, always and ever afterward, things had worked against him. He leaned over the slope of the trunk then turned onto his back. He was shaking hard all over, and his jaw had locked shut.

  The sky was an impenetrable liquid, starless and grim. He had never really understood before but now, because two keys were made to open his one car, he saw clearly that the setup of life was rigged and he was trapped.

  He was shaking dead sick, locked out of his car trunk, with a doe bleeding slowly at his feet.

  “I’ll throw her in the back then,” he said, before confusion smashed down. The seat was vinyl. It was important that he get a bottle, several bottles, to stop the rattling. Once the shaking got a A good start on him nothing would help. It would whip him back and forth in its jaws like a dog breaks the spine of a gopher.

  He opened the rear door and then, holding the deer under the front legs and cradled with its back against him, ducked into the backseat and pulled her through. She fit nicely, legs curled as if to run, still slightly warm. Gordie opened the opposite door and climbed out.

  Then he walked around the front and sat down in the driver’s seat. He started the car and moved onto the highway.

  It was harder now to see the road. The night had grown darker or the shaking had obscured his vision. Or maybe the deer had knocked out a headlight. Clearly, he was sure of it, there was less light. He tried to accommodate the shaking. To keep it under control he took deep shuddering breaths that seemed to temporarily loosen its hold, but then it would be back, fiercely jolting him from side to side in his seat, so that the wheel twisted in his hands. He drove with impossible slowness now, hardly able to keep his course. A mile passed slowly.

  Perhaps another. Then he came to the big settlement of the Fortiers.

  Their yard blazed with light. He drove a few yards past their gate, and then something made him even more uncomfortable than the shaking.

  He sensed someone behind him and glanced in the rearview mirror.

  What he saw made him stamp the brake in panic and shock.

  The deer was up. She’d only been stunned.

  Ears pricked, gravely alert, she gazed into the rearview and met Gordie’s eyes.

  Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a raffling thicket of bones. She saw how he’d woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he’d jammed this relief on his brow.

  Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black.

  He did not understand what he was going to do. He bent, out of her gaze, and groped beneath the front seat for the tire iron, a flat-edged crowbar thick as a child’s wrist.

  Then he raised it. As he turned he brought smashing down between her eyes. She sagged back into the seat again. Gordie began to drive.

  This time, when the shaking started, there was no limit to the depth.

  It was in the bones, then the marrow of the bones. It ran all through him. His head snapped back. He stopped the car. The crowbar was in his lap in case she came to life again. He held it, fusing his hands to the iron to keep them still.

  He sat there in the front seat, holding tight to the bar, shaking violently all around it. He heard loud voices. The windshield cracked into a spider’s nest. The dash fell open and the radio shrieked. The crowbar fell, silencing that too.

  The shaking stopped, a sudden lull that surprised him.

  In that clear moment it came to his attention that he’d Just killed June.

  She was in the backseat, sprawled, her short skirt hiked up over her hips. The sheer white panties glowed. Her hair was tossed in a dead black swirl. What had he done this time? Had he used the bar? It was in his hands.

  “Get rid of the evidence,” He said, but his fingers locked shut around the iron, as if frozen to it. He would never be able to open his hands again. He was cracking, giving way. Control was caving like weathered ground. The blood roared in his ears. He could not see where he was falling, but he knew, at length, that he’d landed in an area of terrible vastness where nothing was familiar.

  Sister Mary Martin de Porres played the clarinet and sometimes, when she was troubled or sleep was elusive, wrote her own music. Tonight she woke, staring, from an odd dream. For a long moment she vaguely believed she was at home in Lincoln. She had been drawing a cool bath for herself, filling the clawed tub, stirring the water with her hands.

  The water smelled sharp, of indestructible metals. The cicadas buzzed outside, and the pods were blackening on the catalpas. She thought that once she—add stripped herself and crawled into the tub, she would change, she would be able to breathe under water. But she woke first.

  She turned on her side, found she was in her room at Sacred Heart, and reached for her eyeglasses. Her clock said one. She watched the glowing minute hand glide forward and knew, without even attempting to close her eyes again, that it was another of “her nights,” as the others put it on those days when she was unusually out of sorts.

  “Sister Mary Martin’s had one of her nights again.”

  Her nights were enjoyable while she was having them, which was part of the problem. Once she woke in a certain mood and thought of the clarinet, sleep seemed dull, unnecessary even, although she knew for a fact that she was not a person who could go sleepless without becoming irritable. She rolled out of bed.

  She was a short, limber, hardworking woman, who looked much younger than she was, that is, she looked thirtyish instead of forty-two, Most of the others, people noticed, looked younger than their true ages, also.

  “It’s no darn use anyway,” she mumbled, slipping on her old green robe.

  Already she felt excited about rising alone, seeing no one. Her own youthfulness surprised her on nights like this. Her legs felt springy and lean, her body taut like a girl’s. She raised her arms over her head, stretched hard, and brought them down.

  Then she eased through her door. It was the one at the end of the halls, the quietest room of all. She walked soundlessly along the tiles, down the stairs, through another corridor, and back around the chapel into a small sitting room impossibly cluttered with afghans and pillows.

  She turned on the floor lamp and pulled her instrument case from beneath the sofa. Kneeling with it, she lifted the pieces from the crushed and molded velvet and fit them together. She took a small, lined music notebook from a shelf of books. A sharpened pencil was already attached to the spine with a string.

  Last of all, before she sat down, she draped an enormous bee yellow afghan around her shoulders. Then she settled herself, hooked her cold feet in the bottom of the knit blanket, wet the reed, and began to play.

  Sometimes it put her to sleep in half an hour. Other times she hit on a tune and scribbled, wherever it took her, until dawn.

  The sitting room was newly attached to the main convent and insulated heavily, so her music disturbed no one. On warm nights she even opened windows and let the noises drift in, clear in the dry air, from the town below. They were wild noises hoarse wails, reeling fiddle music, rumble of unmufflered motors, and squeals of panicked acceleration.

  Then after three or four in the morning a kind of dazed blue silence fell, and there was nothing but her own music and the black crickets in the wall.

  Tonight, perhaps because of her dream, which was both familiar and something she did not understand, the music was both faintly menacing and full of wonder. It took her in circles of memories. A shape rose in her mind, a tree that was fully branched like the main candelabrum on the altar of the Blessed Virgin. It had been her favorite tree to climb on as a child, but at night she had feared the rasp of its branches.

  She stopped, particularly struck by a chance phrase, and played it over with slight variations until it seemed too lovely to discard.

  Then she wrote
it down. She worked in silence for a while after, seeing something that might become a pattern, approaching and retreating from the strength of her own design.

  An hour or perhaps two hours passed. The air was still. Sister Mary Martin heard nothing but the music, even when she stopped playing to write down the notes. A slim gravel path led around the back of the convent, but perhaps, she thought later, the man had walked through the wet grass, for she did not hear him approaching and only realized his presence at the window when the sill raffled. He’d tried to knock, but had fallen instead against the frame. Mary Martin froze in her chair and laid the clarinet across her lap.

  “Who’s there?” she said firmly. There was no answer. She was annoyed, first to have her night invaded and then with herself for not having drawn the blinds, because the sky was black and she could not see even the shadow of the prowler’s shape while she herself was perfectly exposed, as on a stage.

  “What do you want?” There was still no answer, and her heart sped, although the windows were screened and secure. She could always rouse the others if she had to. But she was consistently the one called upon to lift heavy boxes and jump start the commuity’s car. Probably it would be up to her to scare off this intruder m herself, even if the others came downstairs.

  She reached up and switched the lamp off. The room went utterly dark.

  Now she heard his breath rasp, his shudder lightly ring the screen. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw the blunt outline of him, hang-dog, slumped hard against the window.

  “What do you want?” she repeated, rising from the chair. She began to lower the clarinet to the carpet, then held it. If he came through the screen slieCOL11d poke him with the playing end. She walked over to the dense shadow of the bookshelf, near the window and against the wall, where she thought it would be impossible for him to see her.

  A breeze blew through the screen and she smelled the sour reek of him.

  Drunk. Probably half conscious.

  But now he roused himself with a sudden ‘erk and spoke.